MODERN AMERICAN WRITERS 
 
 OUR POETS 
 
 FEfOR. 
 
 A-sIoy 
 
 ENJTES
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY
 
 Our Poets of Today 
 
 BY 
 HOWARD WILLARD COOK 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY 
 1918
 
 PS 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1918, 
 
 BY 
 MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
 
 TO 
 MY MOTHER 
 
 AND 
 J. W. P.
 
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
 
 To our American poets, to the publishers and editors of the 
 various periodicals and books from whose pages the quotations 
 in this work are taken, I wish to give my sincere thanks for their 
 interest and co-operation in making this book possible. 
 
 To the following publishers I am obliged for the privilege of 
 using selections which appear, under their copyright, and from 
 which I have quoted in full or in part: 
 
 The Macmillan Company: The Chinese Nightingale, The 
 Congo and Other Poems and General Booth Enters Heaven by 
 Vachel Lindsay, Love Songs by Sara Teasdale, The Road to Cas- 
 laly by Alice Brown, The New Poetry and Anthology by Harriet 
 Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson, Songs and Satires, Spoon 
 River Anthology and Toward the Gulf by Edgar Lee Masters, 
 The Man Against the Sky and Merlin by Edwin Arlington Rob 
 inson, Poems by Percy MacKaye and Tendencies in Modern 
 American Poetry by Am> Lowell. 
 
 Messrs. Henry Holt and Company: Chicago Poems by Carl 
 Sandburg, These Times by Louis Untermeyer, A Boy's Will, 
 North of Boston and Mountain Interval by Robert Frost, The 
 Old Road to Paradise by Margaret Widdener, My Ireland by 
 Francis Carlin, and Outcasts in Beulah Land by Roy Helton. 
 
 Messrs. G. P. Putnam's Sons: The Shadow of Mtna by Louis 
 V., Ledoux, Sea Dogs and Men at Arms, by Jesse E. Middleton, 
 Helen of Troy by Sara Teasdale, and In Flanders' Fields by John 
 MacCrae. 
 
 Messrs. John Lane Company: Mid-American Chants by 
 Sherwood Anderson, Gardens Overseas and Other Poems by 
 Thomas Walsh, Carmina by T. A. Daly, Sea and Bay by Charles 
 Wharton Stork, The Sailor Wht Has Sailed, A Wand and Strings 
 and The House That Was by Benjamin R. C. Low. 
 
 The Stratford Press: The Poets of the Future by Henry T. 
 Schnittkind.
 
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
 
 Messrs. George H. Doran Company: Main Street and Other 
 Poems and Trees and Other Poems by Joyce Kilmer, The Silver 
 Trumpet by Josephine Amelia Burr, A Banjo at Armageddon by 
 Berton Braley, Sonnets of Sorrow and Triumph by Ella Wheeler 
 Wilcox, and Songs for a Little House by Christopher Morley. 
 
 The Four Seas Company: The Jig of Forslin by Conrad 
 Aiken, and Nocturne of Remembered Spring by Conrad Aiken. 
 
 The Century Company: Wraiths and Realities by Cale Young 
 Rice. 
 
 Messrs. Dodd, Mead and Company: The Masque of Poets by 
 J. O'Brien. 
 
 Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons: American Poetry by Percy 
 H. Boynton, and Poems by Alan Seeger. 
 
 Messrs. Frederick A. Stokes: Grenstone Poems by Witter 
 Bynner. 
 
 Messrs. Small, Maynard and Company: Anthology of 
 Magazine Verse by William Stanley Braithwaite. 
 
 Messrs. Barse and Hopkins: The Spell of the Yukon, The 
 Ballads of a Cheechako, and Rhymes of a Red Cross Man by 
 Robert W. Service. 
 
 Messrs. Moffat, Yard and Company: City Ways and Com 
 pany Streets by Private Charles Divine, and Wings and Other 
 War Rhymes by Anthony Euwer. 
 
 Mr. Mitchell Kennerley: Spectra by Emanuel Morgan and 
 Anne Knish. 
 
 Messrs. Doubleday, Page and Company: The Man With the 
 Hoe by Edwin Markham. 
 
 Alfred A. Knopf: Airs and Ballads by John McClure. Ezra 
 Pound: His Metric and Poetry. 
 
 Mr. John Hall Wheelock: The Human Fantasy, Love and 
 Liberation, and The Beloved Adventure. 
 
 Mr. Donald Evans: Sonnets from the Patagonian. 
 
 The Little Review: She Goes to Pisa, Dreams in War Times, 
 Depression Before Spring and Patterns.
 
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
 
 The Boston Transcript, The New York Sun, The New York 
 Times, Poetry, A Magazine of Verse, Smart Set, and Reedy's 
 Mirror. 
 
 Marshall Jones Company: New York and Other Verses by 
 Frederic K. Mortimer Clapp. 
 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co.: Irradiations Sand and Spray by 
 John Gould Fletcher. 
 
 William Lyon Phelps, Annie L. Laney and Richard Hunt. 
 
 Good Housekeeping: To One in Heaven by Charles Hanson 
 Towne. 
 
 Harper's Magazine: The Bather by Amy Lowell. 
 
 The Newarker, The Nation, and the New York Tribune. 
 
 New York Times Book Review, The Bellman, The Bookman 
 and Poetry. 
 
 Harper Brothers: The Mirthful Lyre by Arthur Guiterman. 
 
 John G. Neihardt: A Song of Hugh Glass. 
 
 Louis Vernon Ledoux: Yzdra. 
 
 George Edward Woodberry: The Flight and Other Poems. 
 
 Wilmrath Publishing Company: The Shadow-Eater by Benja 
 min De Casseres.
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 It has been said that we are passing through a 
 renaissance of poetry. No longer does the cartoonist 
 of the popular comic or timely satire picture the long 
 haired individual with his ream of spring verse be 
 neath his arm, a moth-eaten object for the pity of 
 sane beings. He's as obsolete as the Dodo, save per 
 haps in the sacred and, thank God, limited circles of 
 Greenwich Village, Island of Manhattan. 
 
 Today the poet has come into his own. He receives 
 a fair price for his lines and has forced the publisher 
 out of his traditional rut with gasps of amazement 
 that a book of verse could be listed as a best seller. 
 
 From both artistic and commercial standpoints con 
 temporary American poetry has achieved much. Sara 
 Teasdale phrases it, "Contemporary American poetry 
 has proved that this chaotic, various, intensely young, 
 masculine country of ours is producing the best poetry 
 that is being written in English today. I think that 
 this has been true for only a few years but I believe 
 it is true at this time and will continue to be so." 
 It is about such men and women, practical purveyors 
 of a necessary food, that this book is written. 
 
 These days, instead of going abroad for many 
 things, we look for them within our own borders. 
 With Sara Teasdale, I agree that America today is 
 producing some of as fine poetry as has been inspired 
 by the World War.
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 Many critics have attributed to the war the so- 
 called poetry market. Certain it is that Rupert Brooke 
 was largely responsible for the awakened interest in 
 poetry in America. As a nation, not as individuals, 
 our poetic sense had been lying temporarily dormant. 
 This may have been due to our highly developed com 
 mercial pulse. 
 
 If a poem were the right size to fill a certain space 
 in a magazine, the editor paid a few dollars for it. 
 Today there are magazines devoted exclusively to the 
 publication of these once-upon-a-time "fillers," a 
 boomerang that must be full sweet to the poet. 
 
 One of the greatest poets in the English language 
 had to be "found" in England. I refer to Walt Whit 
 man. He was never properly published nor generally 
 read in his own day by his own countrymen. Yet he 
 has immortalized democracy, and it is his spirit that 
 has found rebirth in many of our best poets of today. 
 To them he says: 
 
 "O to make the most jubilant poem ! 
 
 Even to set off these, and merge with these, the carols 
 of death. 
 
 O full of music ! full of manhood, womanhood and in 
 fancy ! 
 
 Full of common employments ! full of grain and trees. 
 
 O for the voices of animals ! O for the swiftness and 
 balance of fishes! 
 
 O for the dropping of raindrops in a poem! 
 
 O for the sunshine, and motion of waves in a poem."
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 We have been slow in recognizing our own liter 
 ary genius. No nation ever has had a sweeter, finer, 
 nobler singer of a national song, than America in Walt 
 Whitman. 
 
 But it is not of our poets of yesterday that I have 
 written. My purpose in this book is simply to present 
 our American poets of today, to tell something of 
 their lives, their writings, what they have done, and 
 what they bid fair to do. To them we must look for 
 the reaction of our times. Not long ago I heard Ar 
 thur Hunt Chute of the late First Canadian Con 
 tingent say of our present day poets, "They are fight 
 ing with us and for us." 
 
 I have endeavored to dispute here the statement 
 that poets are for "highbrows" they are not. Poets 
 must rise from the people, be of the crowds, their 
 songs must be the song of the mother who rocks her 
 little one in her arms, of the clerk at his desk, of the 
 student who sits alone into the morning hours, and 
 of the soldiers in the trenches fighting for the soul of 
 the world. They are our own people. Their writings 
 mirror our good and our bad, our understanding and 
 our misunderstanding, our ideals, and our belief in a 
 God whose creed is love. 
 
 HOWARD WILLARD COOK.
 
 BY 
 
 PERCY MACKAYE 
 
 This book makes its entrance with a new age. 
 
 Youth is in the air youth, the flower and seed and 
 sustenance of poetry. 
 
 At this moment, though the world war is expiring 
 on the verges of physical winter, spiritually peace 
 sweeps towards us tidal with colossal spring, thawing 
 with the break-up of old congealed forms, fluid with 
 warm, fresh currents, fecund with plastic life. 
 
 The armistice of the nations is glorious and terrible 
 with spring. 
 
 What shall be the bourgeoning tomorrow? 
 
 Outwardly, the works collected in this volume are 
 not of that tomorrow ; yet inwardly they may in some 
 measure forecast its substance and spirit. 
 
 Here is a reality achieved, culled from that recent 
 past which we call today. So it will be read and as 
 sayed. But here also is something latent, unachieved 
 SL potentiality of today which is the new age in 
 embryo. 
 
 Happily for embryos, they are not yet clothed in 
 the fashions; and for potentialities there are no pig 
 eonholes. So, leaving to the critic and scholar their
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 useful tasks of assaying and classifying these poems, 
 I have accepted the invitation of the Editor to make 
 my own comment not on the poems themselves (for 
 I have been shown of this volume only the list of the 
 poets whose work is here represented), but on cer 
 tain potential aspects of American poetry which seem 
 to me important to its renascence in the tomorrow al 
 ready upon us. 
 
 I feel the more free to do so because this list of 
 poets is a list largely of old friends, many of them 
 intimate friends; and it is to them, gathered here 
 round the Editor's hospitable board, more than to 
 stranger readers in the visiting gallery, that I should 
 like to submit a few queries and suggestions which 
 may possibly appeal to them as craftsmen and fellow 
 workers. 
 
 And first, as workers, I wonder if we are wholly 
 a wart what hermits we are, and what too little of fel 
 lowship enters into our lives as poets and into these 
 contributions of ours to a time (despite its world 
 war) the most cooperative the earth has ever known 
 an age that, as never before, cries out for fellow 
 ship of imagination to enlarge and reconstruct the 
 basic architecture of society itself. 
 
 In so choral an age, shall the poets still be solitary 
 pipers? In this majestic era of socialization, shall 
 we alone continue to represent the anarchic order of 
 an era of individualism? 
 
 Or if, like some insects, poets be hopelessly cellular 
 by instinct, must we gather honey only as the hermit-
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 wasps? May we not, like the bees, decree and build 
 our "stately pleasure-domes"? 
 
 Here, as editor-host, Mr. Cook may assemble us 
 in type : but to attain what common end, to build what 
 national or international structure of imagination, do 
 these collected excerpts of our work contribute? How 
 are they related to one another, and to our time ? 
 
 Once a year, as President of the Poetry Society, Mr. 
 Wheeler may assemble us in person for the pleasure 
 and inspiration of brief reunions; but what definite, 
 creative processes of art tend to unite and focus the 
 work of our Poetry Society members in a common up 
 building of imaginative life for America? 
 
 Let us answer frankly, and seek some solution to 
 our answer. 
 
 Unity, harmony, focus : these great essentials of art 
 are lacking to our national poetry. They are, how 
 ever, no longer wholly lacking to our national life. 
 The war has immensely stimulated their growth, and 
 in that growth of our community life lies, I think, 
 the greatest hope for our poetry. 
 
 Focus, above all: for focus leads directly to unity 
 and harmony. 
 
 Through what definite, creative processes, then, may 
 the work of our poets be focused? 
 
 I venture an answer based on the growing per 
 sonal experience of a decade: through the definite, 
 creative processes of community poetry the focaliz 
 ing craftsmanship of community drama, a craft po 
 tentially vast in its variety.
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 But I hear the quick retort of a poet friend : "My 
 dear MacKaye, stick to your subject. You are writ 
 ing introductory remarks to a book on 'Our Poets 
 of Today' not our dramatists, nor our community 
 architects. I, for one, am simply a poet, and I prefer 
 to stick to my last. That, I assure you, has its own 
 infinite variety. As to entering the lists of community 
 uplift please excuse me." 
 
 P. M.: Please excuse me. I express myself very 
 blunderingly. 
 
 Amiens: Frankly, you do. For all that, I gather 
 your meaning. You want to inveigle me from my 
 own clear task and metier the writing of verse 
 into a vague maelstrom of fanfaring trumpets, be 
 wildering lights, chaos of costumes, enigmatical actors, 
 untangoing dancers, all helplessly entangled in fres 
 cos of civic reform; pageantry, in short 
 
 P. M.: An apt picture of a popular conception of 
 pageantry and some pageants. 
 
 Amicus: Well, you should know. You write pa 
 geants yourself, do you not? 
 
 P. M.: No; I have designed some works involving 
 pageantry. Masques, I call them, for want of a bet 
 ter name. Community drama is perhaps a clearer 
 designation for the genus. But, of course, commun 
 ity drama is not written any more than architecture is 
 written. It is designed; and the design may (and, I 
 think, should) involve words all splendid forms of 
 spoken, sung and chanted poetry amongst other ele 
 ments. The primum mobile is imagination.
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Amicus: All that may be; but let us stick to our 
 p's and q's in right sequence: Poetry before Quiddity! 
 How else shall chaos be classified? Poetry belongs 
 to literature, and literature belongs to libraries not 
 to theatres. 
 
 P. M.: Libraries must have card catalogues; ergo, 
 the human soul must be segmented alphabetically. 
 Or, to illustrate further: In New York City stand 
 two statues of actors : one of Edwin Booth, the other 
 of Shakespeare. Query : Shall Shakespeare be card- 
 catalogued under A (Actors), or under S (Stat 
 ues) ? 
 
 Arnica: Under P (Poets), of course. 
 
 P. M.: And not under D (Dramatists) ? 
 
 Amicus: Well, certainly not under CD (Commun 
 ity Dramatists). No; I agree with Yeats, that "to 
 articulate sweet sounds together" is the true task of 
 the poet, difficult and sufficient for all who properly 
 go by that name. 
 
 P. M.: I am happy to hear you quote the excellent 
 poet, who is the luckiest of all our poets of today in 
 having a community theatre of his own sort, where 
 he personally has been able to train the actors "to 
 articulate sweet sounds together," and to cooperate 
 on occasion with the excellent designer of masques, 
 Gordon Craig. 
 
 Those words of his were also quoted by me in an 
 address on "The Worker in Poetry," delivered in 
 1910, before the National Institute and Academy of 
 Arts and Letters, and it will, I think, bear directly on
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 our discussion to set down here these excerpts from 
 my address at that time: 
 
 "Roughly to define it, I mean by poetry the per 
 ennial stuff of the racial imagination. Poets are 
 moulders of that stuff in useful forms. And by use 
 ful forms I mean forms serviceable to the happiness 
 of the race. 
 
 "Under such a definition, the great discoverers of 
 the world in science, art, engineering, medicine, re 
 ligion, agriculture, what you will may be called great 
 poets; and such they are, for they are constructive 
 imaginers, or inventors, who serve the race by their 
 work. But a special class of these has usually claimed 
 the name of poet; to wit, writers of verse. Obvi 
 ously that special class is our subject, but not to 
 limit this class by any misleading distinction between 
 verse and prose I shall mean by a poet : an inventor 
 of useful images in the emotional cadences of speech. 
 In brief, a singer of imagination. Among such, of 
 course, singers in verse are dominant. 
 
 "By the nature of his work, the poet seeks to stir 
 the elemental in man the racial imagination. This 
 all artists seek, more or less, to do. But the singer 
 must accomplish this by means of the uttered word. 
 It is not sufficient it is not even essential that his 
 poem be written. To fulfil its object it must be 
 spoken or sung. It is as reasonable to expect an archi 
 tect to be content with a specification of his building, 
 or a painter with a photogravure of his painting, as 
 a poet with the printed page of his poem. The ca-
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 dences, the harmonies, the seizure by the imagination 
 upon consonants and vowels, sounds which subtly 
 evoke the human associations of centuries these are 
 addressed to the ears, not to the eyes, of his audience. 
 Originally his audience was not a person, but a peo 
 ple. Homer sang to all Hellas not from the printed 
 page, but from the mouths of minstrels. Thus the 
 very craftsmanship of the poet is based upon two as 
 sumptions, which are seldom granted to him today: 
 the sung, or chanted, word; a plural convened audi 
 ence. 
 
 "It is not surprising, therefore, that his power with 
 the people has waned. The inspiration of the ancient 
 bards has never passed from the earth. It is peren 
 nial in the poet's heart. But it can never pass effec 
 tively into the hearts of the people through their eyes 
 from the pages of printed volumes or of magazines. 
 No; a partial renascence of those older conditions of 
 poetry is needed for the work of the poet. Is such a 
 renascence feasible? Is it probable? 
 
 "Not to evoke the millennium or the golden age, I 
 think the worker in poetry may find true encourage 
 ment in the promise of the present and the present 
 here in America. Foremost there exists for him one 
 vocation whose object like his own is to evoke the 
 racial imagination by the uttered word. There exists 
 the drama. To the drama the noblest poets of the 
 past have turned for livelihood and the fruition of 
 their labor. At the Globe Theatre in London, Shake 
 speare earned both daily bread and immortality;
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Sophocles both at the theatre in Athens. Today in 
 America the theatre itself but half aware is being 
 stirred by mighty forces of rebirth, and the drama is 
 awakening to fresh and splendid horizons. For the 
 poet, then, in verse or prose, the craftsmanship of the 
 dramatist already offers an actual vocation. 
 
 "Besides this, a revived form of democratic drama 
 outside the theatre is rapidly developing new oppor 
 tunities for the singer. The pageant has come to 
 stay. Participated in by the people, from town to 
 town, the civic pageant is being welcomed as a con 
 structive form of expression for our national and 
 local holidays. For this Memorial Day, Fourth of 
 July, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, 
 Christmas, Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays, pre 
 sent magnificent opportunities for the noblest imag 
 inings of poets and artists. In particular these fes 
 tivals give promise of vocation to the poet as such 
 in the revival and growth of the masque, the ballad 
 md the choral song" 
 
 During the eight years which have passed since 
 those words were spoken, personal experience has 
 deepened a strong conviction then to a sense of cer 
 tainty now. For in numerous productions of my 
 masques in different parts of America productions 
 witnessed by an approximate total of a million spec 
 tators, and enacted by some fifteen thousand partici 
 pants the popular zest for forms of community 
 poetry, the quick comprehension of broad, symbolic 
 concepts, the eager enthusiasm and discipline of ex-
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 pression through rhythmic speech and song, through 
 light and choral movement these have presented in 
 spiring proofs that a communal expression of poetry, 
 comparable to the noblest of any age, awaits only the 
 focalized initiative of our poets these very poets of 
 our today represented in this volume to release 
 their own deepest powers and interpret America fun 
 damentally to itself and the world. 
 
 In this I would not be understood as implying that 
 such communal forms of poetic expression would nec 
 essarily bear any close resemblance to my own designs 
 here referred to, nor would I be construed as urging 
 that poets in dedicating their gifts to the creation of 
 community art should yoke their individual insights 
 and methods in art to any superimposed organization 
 of a bureaucratic regime. Such implications have no 
 part in what I see potential in this volume. 
 
 What I see here potential is simply an extension, 
 toward a focal centre, of those distinct individual 
 gifts of our poets now isolated and uncorrelated. That 
 focal centre I see as the Drama, because only the 
 drama focuses and synthesizes all forms of poetry in 
 its largest meaning as art, and only community drama 
 completely fuses that art with democracy, which in 
 creasingly is our life in common. 
 
 Today, the roulette-table which is our theatre cre 
 ates, of course, no demand for the dramatic crafts 
 manship of poets. The theatre does not call the poets. 
 Well, then ; let the poets call the theatre, and re-create 
 it for themselves, as artist-spokesmen of the people.
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 For, after all, the community theatre of our new 
 age if its art is to be commensurate with the age 
 can be invoked only by our poets, and by the best of 
 our poets. Despite the appeal of motion pictures (an 
 appeal two-thirds economic), and of theatre-art pro 
 ductions purely visual, the drama of expression can 
 never be divorced from speech, nor dramatic speech 
 from rhythmic utterance which is the realm of the 
 poets' supremacy. 
 
 The content of this book, then, though it will gen 
 erally be classed as literature for libraries and read 
 ers, is for me a lyric sign and assurance of a new lit 
 erature for audiences, for whom these lyrists are even 
 now potential dramatists of a new theatre. 
 
 Least of all among these, perhaps, Miss Lowell 
 would admit such an implication for herself, espe 
 cially in a "community" capacity. Yet I am temerari 
 ous enough to detect in the vivid and mordant etch 
 ings of her art, in the swift flashing and darkling of 
 dramatic images silhouetted on the mind of the soli 
 tary reader, most of all, in the abundance of jettying 
 life-force which irradiates her word-sounds with color- 
 beams to detect, behind these, a maker of masques, 
 in kind all her own, that might well conjure strange, 
 alluring patterns for audiences, convened from a com 
 munity not too numerical to be annoying. 
 
 And when may not Masters, with some unprece 
 dented theatre technique, chisel new lives of his en 
 tombed or Frost convene the lonely folk of his back- 
 country regions in strange, touching festivals that
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 call for fresh incarnations of the trade-worn actor? 
 
 Many, perhaps most, of the poets here represented 
 by lyric works have expressed themselves in forms 
 dramatic. Some of these, while yet unpublished, I 
 have at times been privileged to hear read aloud by 
 their authors to intimate gatherings of friends. In 
 such personal readings aloud, and the exchange of 
 ideas in conversation which naturally follows upon 
 them, the potentiality of the poets and their works is 
 far better revealed than in perusing their published 
 volumes. So as that potentiality is my subject 
 though the dramatic works of many otners are doubt 
 less as varied and significant, I can only mention here 
 from direct knowledge those whom I have been so 
 lucky as to hear read their plays in manuscript, still 
 fresh from the creative impulses of their minds. 
 
 The blithe-deep genius of Witter Bynner has lately 
 sung its soul in a play of today and tomorrow, and 
 soon, where he has betaken him to the Greek Theatre 
 at Berkeley, California, it will be strange if we are not 
 to hear of happy collaborations there with the scenic 
 fantasy of Sam Hume. 
 
 William Vaughn Moody, the beauty of whose 
 masques, unstaged in his lifetime, still awaits the sym 
 pathetic producer; Robinson, whose prose plays of 
 caustic soul-portraiture call for the advent of a rep 
 ertory theatre of ideas ; Torrence, who has dramatized 
 the lyric heart of the negro race and in conjunction 
 with Robert Edmond Jones and Emilie Hapgood, as 
 producers has already accomplished a native pioneer-
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 ing as important for America as Synge's for Ireland; 
 Josephine Peabody, whose "Wolf of Gubbio" deserves 
 as fine recognition as her Stratford prize, "The 
 Piper" ; Olive Dargan, author of a noble repertory of 
 plays in verse and prose, all too little known as yet 
 for the deep surging of a social imagination certain 
 ere long to be acclaimed through such works as her 
 prose play, "The Shepherd"; Louis Ledoux, gracious 
 and lyric-serene even in the swift passion of his "Yz- 
 dra" ; listening, as I have, to the dramas of these poet 
 friends, read aloud by quiet firesides, the fecundity 
 and varied scope of American poetry has held for me 
 more than the rich promise of a drama to be attained ; 
 it is already though unfocused and scant-recognized 
 an assured achievement. 
 
 All these poets have written significant drama of 
 today; yet perhaps only one among them is deliber 
 ately, and with life-long conviction, singing his foot 
 path way toward that people's common of art, which 
 shall focus our life and drama of tomorrow. Indi 
 vidual as his peculiar utterance is in song, Vachel 
 Lindsay is a maker of communal poetry. Though I 
 have never heard a poem of his in usual dramatic dia 
 logue, I have never heard one of his that is undra- 
 matic; and his most recent experiments with Miss 
 Eleanor Dougherty, in coordinating his chanted 
 poetry with the dance, are, I think, immensely sig 
 nificant in promise for the future collaboration of poets 
 and dancers in the drama. Some related experiments 
 I have tested, for some time past, in my own work,
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 particularly in "Caliban," as performed at the Har 
 vard Stadium. 
 
 Though he may himself only half realize it, Lindsay 
 has set out for the goal of a new theatre, and I would 
 wager with him that if ever, on his footpath way, he 
 falls in step with the spirit of Bobby Jones, the vil 
 lage common where they arrive arm in arm will blos 
 som suddenly with such native bloom of rhythmic 
 sound and color as only the hearts of such lyric spir 
 its of America can conceive. 
 
 Here, then, Mr. Editor, I submit to your courtesy 
 these informal queries and forecastings. Perhaps they 
 may serve to suggest that poets and dramatists (out 
 side of the catalogues) are not really different species 
 of Man; that their art has one deep source in com 
 mon the well springs of community life. 
 
 The Players, New York, 
 17 November, 1918.
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I PAGE 
 
 Amy Lowell . . . . - ........ i 
 
 CHAPTER n 
 Sara Teasdale 12 
 
 CHAPTER in 
 Witter Bynner 19 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 Robert Frost 30 
 
 Edwin Arlington Robinson 34 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 Percy MacKaye 41 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 Edgar Lee Masters 49 
 
 CHAPTER VH 
 
 Vachel Lindsay 56 
 
 CHAPTER vrn 
 
 Henry van Dyke 65 
 
 Edwin Markham 68 
 
 Cole Young Rice 73 
 
 Conrad Aiken 80 
 
 CHAPTER DC 
 
 Robert Service 83 
 
 John McCrae 88 
 
 Jesse Edgar Middleton 90
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER X PAGE 
 
 Joyce Kilmer 94 
 
 Alan Seeger 99 
 
 Charles Divine 103 
 
 John McClure .no 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 Charles Wharton Stork 1 16 
 
 George Sterling 119 
 
 Louis Untermeyer 121 
 
 John Gould Fletcher 122 
 
 John Hall Wheelock 125 
 
 CHAPTER XH 
 
 Carl Sandburg 129 
 
 Frederick Mortimer Clapp 135 
 
 Donald Evans 136 
 
 Ezra Pound 139 
 
 Benjamin De Casseres 142 
 
 Roy Helton 143 
 
 CHAPTER xm 
 
 Katherine Lee Bates 146 
 
 Harriet Monroe 149 
 
 Jessie B. Rittenhouse 150 
 
 Sarah Cleghorn 153 
 
 Alice Brown 158 
 
 Anna Hempstead Branch 160 
 
 Josephine Preston Peabody . ' 161 
 
 Olive Tilford Dargan .162
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER XIV PAGE 
 
 Christopher Morley 164 
 
 Edgar Guest 167 
 
 Berton Braley 172 
 
 Thomas A. Daly 173 
 
 Anthony Euwer 177 
 
 Charles Hanson Towne 178 
 
 John Curtis Underwood 180 
 
 Ella Wheeler Wilcox . . 181 
 
 Arthur Guiterman 184 
 
 CHAPTER xv 
 
 Margaret Widdemer . . ' . 186 
 
 Eunice Tietjens 188 
 
 Clement Wood 189 
 
 Hermann Hagedorn 190 
 
 Francis Carlin . . 191 
 
 Ridgely Torrence 193 
 
 Harry Kemp 194 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 William Stanley Braitkivaite 197 
 
 Thomas Walsh 198 
 
 Wittard Wattles 199 
 
 Bliss Carman 201 
 
 Sherwood Anderson 202 
 
 CHAPTER XVH 
 
 Florence Earle Coates 204 
 
 Amelia Josephine Burr 206
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 Edna St. Vincent Millay 207 
 
 Lizette Woodsworth Reese 209 
 
 Benjamin R. C. Low 210 
 
 Harold Cook 212 
 
 CHAPTER xvm 
 
 Louis V. Ledoux 214 
 
 John G. Neihardt 215 
 
 George Edward Woodberry 216
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 Amy Lowell 
 
 Many attempts have been made to define poetry for 
 the layman. Some have sought to set it down as fig 
 ures of speech or metric measures; others, a vague 
 groping among soft sounding words for spiritual ex 
 pressions reserved for a selected few. 
 
 In a contest of the Poetry Society (New York) a 
 prize was awarded for the best definition of poetry to 
 Annie L. Laney, who describes it: 
 
 The magic light that springs 
 From the deep soul of things 
 When, called by their true names, 
 Their essence is set free; 
 The word, illuminate, 
 Showing the soul's estate, 
 Baring the hearts of men ; 
 Poetry! 
 
 Henry T. Schnittkind says : 
 
 "Our human minds are like so many imperfect and 
 distorted mirrors in which the one is reflected in a 
 million apparently irreconcilable variations. Now and
 
 2 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 then, however, the mist lifts for the fraction of a sec 
 ond before a small part of the mirror of our minds, 
 and a poem is born. Then we realize that the color 
 of the dying leaf is one and the same with the tint of 
 the setting sun, that the rippling laughter of a child 
 is not only akin to, but is the ripple of the fountain. 
 The soft syllable of a mother's lullaby and the notes 
 that fall like blossoms from the flute-player's lips are 
 but different cadences of the self-same voice of God. 
 The reason why an apt figure of speech thrills us so 
 strangely is because the poet, by means of this figure 
 of speech, stretches an invisible thread of gold between 
 our hearts and the heart of God. Every poem that 
 does this, however imperfectly, is to me a true poem 
 and a great poet." 
 
 In the author's school days he was taught that 
 poetry was truth, beauty, and music and facing these 
 various requirements comes Amy Lowell with a brand 
 of poetry that has caused more comment of attack and 
 defense, praising and condemning criticism, than that 
 meted out to any American poet of recent years. 
 
 Amy Lowell is regarded as the chief American 
 propagandist of our so called vers libre. It was with 
 the publication of her first book, "A Dome of Many 
 Coloured Glass," that there was born the forerunner 
 of our free verse poems, and from which many mad 
 dening verse makers were to fashion even madder 
 verses. When this first free verse poem was written 
 "Imagism" was an unheard of word and vers libre 
 had yet to become a factor of dispute for the orthodox 
 and the new school of poets. 
 
 And one of the most important figures in our poetry
 
 making of today is Miss Lowell, with her two-fold 
 vocation of poet and critic. While she has willingly 
 or otherwise obtained for herself a super-radical sort 
 of reputation, her work fulfills the fundamentals or 
 ideals laid down for poetry in its true sense. She has 
 given New England and the remainder of our coun 
 try a succession of jolts but "it is (to quote from Miss 
 Lowell herself) an interesting commentary on the easy 
 scorn with which non-New Englanders regard New 
 England that two of the six poets (whom she dis 
 cusses as the most significant of the day) should be of 
 the very bone and sinew of New England." These 
 two are Frost and Robinson. The third, whom Miss 
 Lowell modestly refrains from mentioning, is herself. 
 
 Amy Lowell was born in Brookline, Mass., on Feb 
 ruary 9, 1874, and was educated in the private schools 
 of her native state. 
 
 No biographical presentation of her would be com 
 plete without including the statement that her geneo- 
 logical tree presents the names of James Russell 
 Lowell, the poet, who was a cousin of Miss Lowell's 
 grandfather, Professor Percival Lowell, a writer of 
 note, and President Lawrence Lowell of Harvard 
 University. 
 
 Although at the age of thirteen years Miss Lowell 
 displayed some ability at verse making, she spent most 
 of her time in out-of-door sports, caring for the ani 
 mals upon her father's great flower-covered estates 
 and reading from the large collection of books that 
 filled the family library. Richard Hunt in a biographi 
 cal resume of Miss Lowell expresses this childhood 
 influence of gardens and flowers upon her as follows:
 
 4 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 "There have been many kinds of nature poets, but 
 none exactly like Miss Lowell. She is the poet of that 
 nature which is the product of landscape gardening 
 and architecture. As we go through her pages we find 
 ourselves in old secluded gardens where fountains play 
 into cool basins, paths wind among statues and flow 
 ering shrubbery, and marble steps lead to shady gar 
 den seats. Her poems are sweet-scented with nar 
 cissus." 
 
 Is it not this flower-love which we see in full fruit 
 in that most colorful and remarkable poem called 
 "Patterns" ? 
 
 I walk down the garden paths, 
 
 And all the daffodils 
 
 Are blowing, and the bright blue squills. 
 
 I walk down the patterned garden paths 
 
 In my stiff, brocaded gown. 
 
 With my powdered hair and jewelled fan, 
 
 I too am a rare 
 
 Pattern. As I wander down 
 
 The garden paths. 
 
 My dress is richly figured, 
 
 And the train 
 
 Makes a pink and silver stain 
 
 On the gravel, and the thrift 
 
 Of the borders. 
 
 Just a plate of current fashion, 
 
 Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes. 
 
 Not a softness anywhere about me, 
 
 Only a whale-bone and brocade. 
 
 The daffodils and squills 
 
 Flutter in the breeze
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 5 
 
 As they please. 
 
 And I weep; 
 
 For the lime tree is in blossom 
 
 And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom. 
 
 Underneath my stiffened gown 
 
 Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble 
 
 basin, 
 
 A basin in the midst of hedges grown 
 So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding, 
 But she guesses he is near, 
 
 I would be the pink and silver as I ran along 
 
 the paths, 
 
 And he would stumble after, 
 Bewildered by my laughter. 
 I should see the sun flashing from his sword hilt 
 
 and the buckles on his shoes. 
 I would choose 
 
 To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths. 
 A bright and laughing maze for my heavy booted 
 
 lover, 
 
 Till he caught me in the shade, 
 And the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body 
 
 as he clasped me, 
 Aching, melting, unafraid. 
 
 Underneath the fallen blossoms 
 
 In my bosom, 
 
 Is a letter I have hid. 
 
 It was brought to me this morning by a rider from 
 
 the Duke. 
 "Madam, we regret to inform you that Lord 
 
 Hartwell 
 Died in action Thursday sen'night."
 
 6 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 As I read it in the white, morning sunlight, 
 The letters squirmed like snakes. 
 "Any answer, Madam?" said my footman. 
 "No," I told him. 
 
 In Summer and in Winter I shall walk 
 
 Up and down 
 
 The patterned garden paths 
 
 In my stiff, brocaded gown. 
 
 The squills and daffodils 
 
 Will give place to . pillared roses, and to asters, 
 
 and to snow. 
 I shall go 
 Up and down, 
 In my gown. 
 Gorgeously arrayed, 
 Boned and stayed. 
 And the softness of my body will be guarded 
 
 from embrace 
 
 By each button, hook, and lace. 
 For the man who should loose me is dead, 
 Fighting with the Duke in Flanders, 
 In a pattern called a war. 
 Christ! What are the patterns for? 
 
 (The Little Review) 
 
 Miss Lowell lived abroad for many years upon the 
 completion of her school life, but it was not until 
 1902, upon her return to the family homestead in 
 Brookline, that she began to seriously study the tech 
 nique of poetry. Then followed eight years of prep 
 aration, described by Mr. Hunt as "a solitary and 
 faithful apprenticeship, reading the masters, learning 
 the technique of poetry, and developing her genius by
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 7 
 
 constant exercise. It was a discouraging struggle, for 
 she was her only critic, but to this fact is undoubtedly 
 due much of her individuality and excellence." 
 
 Miss Lowell's first published poem appeared in The 
 Atlantic Monthly, and in 1912, "A Dome of Many- 
 Coloured Glass" was issued. "Sword Blades and 
 Poppy Seed" followed in the spring of 1913, and here 
 was demonstrated the natural growth of the tendencies 
 shown in the first volume for free verse, together with 
 sonnets, pictorial pieces and lyrics ; long narratives, bits 
 of imagery and our earliest specimens of "polyphonic 
 prose." 
 
 Critical essays came with the publication of "Six 
 French Poets," an authoritative volume and one of the 
 finest pieces of writing that we have on French poetry. 
 
 "Men, Women and Ghosts" followed in 1916, de 
 veloping more strongly but with the same fineness and 
 sureness of the master poet, polyphonic prose. The 
 fifth book to come from Miss Lowell's pen, "Ten 
 dencies in Modern American Poetry," is an expression 
 of her ideas in separating the wheat from the chaff in 
 our modern American poetry. This was published in 
 October, 1917. "Can Grande's. Castle," impressively 
 beautiful, was published early in the fall of 1918. 
 
 Amy Lowell writes with a vigorous hand, simple 
 in style, but with potent meaning. In the following 
 lines from "A Bather" something may be judged of 
 her ability as a chooser of words, of a talent for ap 
 peal to the senses in poetry that has few equals : 
 
 Thick dappled by circles of sunshine and fluttering shade, 
 Your bright, naked body advances, blown over by leaves,
 
 8 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Half -quenched in their various green, just a point of 
 
 you showing, 
 A knee or a thigh, sudden glimpsed, then at once 
 
 blotted into 
 
 The filmy and flickering forest, to start out again 
 Triumphant in smooth, supple roundness, edged sharp 
 
 as white ivory, 
 Cool, perfect, with rose rarely tinting your lips and 
 
 your breasts, 
 Swelling out from the green in the opulent curves of 
 
 ripe fruit, 
 And hidden, like fruit, by the swift intermittence of 
 
 leaves. 
 So, clinging to branches and moss, you advance on the 
 
 ledges 
 
 Of rock which hang over the stream, with the wood- 
 smells about you, 
 The pungence of strawberry plants and of gum-oozing 
 
 spruces, 
 While below runs the water impatient, impatient to 
 
 take you, 
 To splash you, to run down your sides, to sing you 
 
 of deepness, 
 Of pools brown and golden, with brown-and-gold flags 
 
 on their borders. 
 Of blue, lingering skies floating solemnly over your 
 
 beauty, 
 
 Of undulant waters a-sway in the effort to hold you, 
 To keep you submerged and quiescent while over you 
 
 glories * 
 The summer. 
 
 Oread, Dryad, or Naiad, or just 
 Woman, clad only in youth and in gallant perfection, 
 Standing up in a great burst of sunshine, you dazzle 
 
 my eyes
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 9 
 
 Like a snow-star, a moon, your effulgence burns up in 
 
 a halo, 
 
 For you are the chalice which holds all the races of men, 
 You slip into the pool and the water folds over your 
 
 shoulder, 
 And over the tree-tops the clouds slowly follow your 
 
 swimming, 
 And the scent of the woods is sweet on this hot summer 
 
 morning. 
 
 (Harpers Magazine) 
 
 There is a line of years between "Patterns" and 
 "Dreams in War Time" published in The Little Re 
 view, and in this latter is shown the war's reaction 
 upon Miss Lowell's writing be they reactions of good 
 or evil growth : 
 
 I. 
 
 I wandered through a house of many rooms. 
 It grew darker and darker, 
 Until, at last, I could only find my way 
 By passing my fingers along the wall. 
 Suddenly my hand shot through an open window, 
 And the thorn of a rose I could not see 
 Pricked it so sharply 
 That I cried aloud. 
 
 II. 
 
 I dug a grave under an oak tree. 
 
 With infinite care, I stamped my spade 
 
 Into the heavy grass. 
 
 The sod sucked it, 
 
 And I drew it out with effort, 
 
 Watching the steel run liquid in the moonlight 
 
 As it came clear.
 
 io OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 I stooped, and dug, and never turned, 
 
 For behind me, 
 
 On the dried leaves, 
 
 My own face lay like a white pebble, 
 
 Waiting. 
 
 But while Miss Lowell has achieved much herself 
 in the war of vers libre, there has grown up in her 
 trail in that great wave of pseudo vers libre, such imi 
 tators as these misnomered poets, samples of whose 
 work appeared in the same number of The Little Re 
 view as Miss Lowell's own "Dreams in War Times." 
 
 DEPRESSION BEFORE SPRING 
 
 The cock crows 
 But no queen rises. 
 
 The hair of my blonde 
 Is dazzling, 
 
 As the spittle of cows, 
 Threading the wind. 
 
 Ho! Ho! 
 
 But ki-ki-ri-ki 
 Brings no rou-cou, 
 No rou-cou-cou. 
 
 But no queen comes 
 In slipper green. 
 
 SHE GOES TO PISA 
 
 Sh has rounded her shoulders 
 To the curve of his arm 
 And walked with him slowly.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY II 
 
 She has walked with him 
 Slowly ; 
 
 Granite procession, 
 White gesture of stars. 
 
 It is for these things that writers of free verse must 
 blush! 
 
 In England Miss Lowell also had gained a large 
 audience and a 48-page pamphlet by Miss Winifred 
 Bryher, published in London, pays tribute to her as 
 "an explorer . . . offering of her own vision to un 
 observant eyes the breaking of innumerable barriers." 
 
 This English critic in commenting upon Miss 
 Lowell's artistic progress says : "Development is ever 
 of essential interest to me, but it is seldom growth in 
 a writer's mind, outlook, can be traced in such detail 
 and astounding measure, as in Miss Lowell's books. 
 . . . But though the fibres are visible from which 
 imagism is to blossom, definite touch of it is absent, 
 or hovers a line or two, fearful of alighting. This 
 was in 1912. In 1914 the first 'Antholgie des 
 Imagistes' was printed, in which Miss Lowell is poorly 
 represented by a single cadence, as idiomatic of her 
 speech as anything she has written, and the earliest 
 poem (according to accessible dates) of that region, 
 so instinct with dreamed reality it is more vivid than 
 an actual world, Miss Lowell's own province, in which 
 we are admitted to the daily company of loveliness, 
 through the magic of her phrase. 'With Sword Blades 
 and Poppy Seed,' published two months later, we are 
 in the full maturity of imagist expression."
 
 CHAPTER II 
 Sara Teasdale 
 
 For the first time in its history, Columbia Univer 
 sity, in the spring of 1918, awarded a prize of $500 
 for a book of poetry, to Sara Teasdale, for her volume 
 of "Love Songs" published in the fall of 1917 poems 
 of true lyric quality that have won for their creator 
 such a high place among American poets. 
 
 Altho one of the younger of our American writers, 
 and almost the direct antithesis in poetry style from 
 Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale is a favorite throughout 
 the United States, and a number of her poems have 
 been translated into French, Spanish, Danish, and 
 other languages. 
 
 The beauty that charms at the very start the lover 
 of exquisite verse is found in the opening stanzas of 
 "Barter" which begins Miss Teasdale's "Love Songs" : 
 
 Life has loveliness to sell 
 All beautiful and splendid things, 
 
 Blue waves whitened on a cliff, 
 Soaring fire that sways and sings, 
 
 And children's faces looking up 
 
 Holding wonder like a cup. 
 
 Life has loveliness to sell, 
 Music like a curve of gold, 
 
 12
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 13 
 
 Scent of pine trees in the rain, 
 
 Eyes that love you, arms that hold, 
 And for your spirit's still delight, 
 Holy thoughts that star the night. 
 
 Sara Teasdale was born in St. Louis, August 8, 
 1884, and was educated in private schools in her home 
 city. In 1903 she was graduated from Hosmer Hall 
 and soon after left her St. Louis home for Southern 
 Europe and Egypt. Greece and Italy furnished in 
 spiration for many of her earlier poems. In 1907 
 her first book, "Sonnets to Duse," was published. On 
 its appearance a copy fell into the hands of Arthur 
 Symons, the famous English critic and poet, who 
 praised the unconscious technique of her writing. Her 
 first poem to achieve wide recognition was a mono 
 logue, done in blank verse, "Guinevere," which ap 
 peared in Reedy's Mirror. Other monologues in the 
 same style followed, each offering a fresh aspect of 
 some famous woman in history or art, including 
 "Beatrice" and "Helen of Troy." The latter, after 
 being published in Scribner's Magazine, became the 
 title of her second volume of poems, published by G. P. 
 Putnam's Sons in 1911. 
 
 To Miss Teasdale's second journey abroad we are 
 indebted for such songs as "Off Capri" and "Night 
 Song at Amalfi" : 
 
 I asked the heaven of stars 
 What I should give my love 
 
 It answered me with siknce, 
 Silence above.
 
 14 
 
 I asked the darkened sea 
 Down where the fishers go 
 
 It answered me with silence, 
 Silence below. 
 
 There is something akin in the work of Sara Teas- 
 dale and the "Grenstone Poems" of Witter Bynner, 
 and it is of interest to read Mr. Bynner's own picture 
 of his contemporary which he makes the subject of a 
 poem: 
 
 O there were lights and laughter 
 
 And the motions to and fro 
 Of people as they enter 
 
 And people as they go. . . . 
 
 O there were many voices 
 
 Vying at the feast, 
 But mostly I remember 
 
 Yours who spoke the least. 
 
 Sara Teasdale's belief in our own American poetry 
 is well founded. 
 
 "A fairly wide acquaintance with the contemporary 
 poetry of England," she says, "makes me sure that 
 we are nearer than they are to producing great work. 
 Aside from Masefield, we have men with stronger 
 vision and more original method than they. 
 
 "As to my own work, I feel that the best of it is 
 done in brief, exceedingly simple poems. I try to say 
 what moves me I never care to surprise my reader; 
 and I avoid, not from malice aforethought, but sim 
 ply because I dislike them, all words that are not met 
 with in common speech, and all inversions of word or
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 15 
 
 phrases. My poems aren't written, in the literal sense 
 of that word. They sometimes never meet pen and 
 paper until they have been complete for days in my 
 mind. Perhaps this habit of composition is partly 
 responsible for the fact that I never use intricate 
 stanzas it would be too hard to compose them in 
 my usual way. For me one of the greatest joys of 
 poetry is to know it by heart perhaps that is why 
 the simple song-like poems appeal to me most they 
 are the easiest to learn. And so I should place Chris 
 tine Rossetti above her brother, as a poet, and perhaps 
 also above the more opulent Mrs. Browning." 
 
 Sara Teasdale is a resident of New York City. She 
 was married in December, 1914, in St. Louis to Mr. 
 E. B. Filsinger, an authority on international trade, 
 on which subject he has written a number of books. 
 
 Aside from the love lyrics contained in Miss Teas- 
 dale's prize winning volume, it also includes a group 
 of poems, "Songs Out of Sorrow," which were voted 
 to be the best read at the meeting of the Poetry Society 
 of America during the year 1916-17. As a proof of 
 a poet's ability to write a popular selling book witness 
 "Love Songs." This was a volume that met with in 
 stant popularity as well as artistic success. It was 
 printed in several editions, the second edition becoming 
 necessary before the book was three weeks off the 
 press. 
 
 "Rivers to the Sea," "Helen of Troy" and "Love 
 Songs" come nearest to meeting our best standards for 
 perfect poetry. Here are the cadences of pure lyric 
 and the simple language that this poet chooses so ably 
 to express herself.
 
 16 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Here is a poet who expresses the extremes of human 
 emotion in poems that are simple and short. Many of 
 them have only eight lines, but the quality of person 
 ality is strong and rich in music with a combination 
 of tenderness and spontaneity. 
 
 William Marion Reedy finds "Rivers to the Sea" 
 the best book of pure lyrics that has appeared in Eng 
 lish since A. H. Housman's "A Shropshire Lad." 
 
 The Boston Transcript declares that Sara Teasdale 
 sings about love better than any other contemporary 
 American poet, and William Stanley Braithwaite in 
 the Year Book of American Poetry for 1915 avows 
 that there is in Miss Teasdale's art the purest song 
 quality in American poetry. 
 
 In "Love Songs," says The New York Times, "Sara 
 Teasdale's best and most characteristic work is pre 
 sented. Her lyrics will far outlast this period and 
 become part of that legacy of pure song which one 
 age leaves to another." 
 
 Perhaps no living American poet has had so many 
 poems set to music as has Sara Teasdale, whose sing 
 ing words and singing lines abound in these excerpts 
 from her "Love Songs": 
 
 THE LOOK 
 
 Strephon kissed me in the spring, 
 
 Robin in the fall, 
 But Colin only looked at me, 
 
 And never kissed at all. 
 
 Strephon's kiss was lost in jest, 
 Robin's lost in play,
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY. 17 
 
 But the kiss in Colin's eyes 
 Haunts me night and day. 
 
 SPRING NIGHT 
 
 The park is filled with night and fog, 
 The veils are drawn about the world, 
 
 The drowsy lights along the paths 
 Are dim and pearled. 
 
 I AM NOT YOURS 
 
 I am not yours, not lost in you 
 
 Not lost, although I long to be 
 Lost as a candle lit at noon, 
 
 Lost as a snowflake in the sea. 
 
 MOODS 
 
 I am the still rain falling, 
 Too tired for singing mirth 
 
 Oh, be the green fields calling, 
 Oh, be for me the earth ! 
 
 THE ROSE AND THE BEE 
 
 If I were a bee and you were a rose, 
 
 Would you let me in when the gray wind blows ? 
 Would you hold your petals wide apart, 
 Would you let me in to find your heart, 
 If I were a rose? . . . 
 
 As for the war songs which our American poets 
 have made from World War inspirations, Sara Teas- 
 dale's "Sons" is of stirring beauty: 
 
 Men in brown with marching feet, 
 
 Like a great machine moved down the street,
 
 i8 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 And the shrieking of a fife 
 Led that river of young life, 
 Soldiers bearing kits and guns, 
 Mothers' sons mothers' sons. 
 
 Out of the crowd a woman pressed 
 Forward a little from the rest. 
 "That's him," she said, "the third one there, 
 The third one, with the light brown hair !" 
 She caught my arm and then she swayed 
 And whispered I suppose she prayed. 
 And still they pass with kits and guns, 
 Mothers' sons.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 Witter Bynner 
 
 When The New World was published some years 
 ago, people who followed the poetry mart found in 
 its author, Witter Bynner, a new voice of remarkable 
 strength and astonishing clearness in contemporary 
 American poetry. And this poem of progressive 
 thought was but the forerunner of meritorious things 
 to come. 
 
 There has been nothing static about Witter Byn- 
 ner's work. His poetry has grown with the years and 
 is not yet in fullest fruit. 
 
 Witter Bynner stands to the fore of our American 
 contemporary poets by reason of the work he has 
 done, the good things he will accomplish, and the 
 impetus he has given to American poetry by means 
 of his lectures throughout the country and his en 
 couragement to fledgling poets. 
 
 Witter Bynner was born in Brooklyn, New York, 
 in 1 88 1. He received his early education in Massa 
 chusetts at the schools in Brookline. He was editor 
 of the school paper, The Sagamore, and in 1902 took 
 his degree at Harvard, where he had been one of the 
 editors of The Advocate. 
 
 The editor's desk of McClure's Magazine next 
 claimed his attention, where he stayed until 1906, when 
 
 19
 
 20 OUR POETS OF TODAY, 
 
 he became literary advisor to Small, Maynard & Com 
 pany, retiring to the artists' colony at Cornish, N. H., 
 to engage in the business of poetry writing. 
 
 In 1907 "An Ode to Harvard and Other Poems" 
 was published, followed by "Kit," a one-act play, two 
 years afterward. 
 
 "An Immigrant," the Phi Beta Kappa poem of 
 1911, was his work a radical piece of writing which 
 startled his academic audience by his ardent plea for 
 equal suffrage. This was the beginning of his public 
 stand for suffrage, upon which he has spoken and 
 campaigned ever since. 
 
 With "Tiger," Witter Bynner was classed as a 
 radical, something of an outlaw, in fact, until Amy 
 Lowell's polyphonic prose descended in our midst, and 
 form rather than theme became the object of poetical 
 dispute. "Tiger" was acted in Philadelphia, but barred 
 in other cities, and is one of the most striking 
 one-act plays to be written by an American playwright. 
 It has been translated into French, and was much 
 commented upon in London, where the London Book 
 man said of it: "We doubt if so much of actual life 
 and of appalling significance were ever packed into 
 such small compass before." 
 
 While it will thus be seen that the writings of Wit 
 ter Bynner have often found voice in play form, it is 
 to his long and unusual love poem, "The New World," 
 upon which he spent six years, and his "Grenstone 
 Poems" that we must look for the genius of a poet 
 who so strongly lives up to the best traditions handed 
 down by Whitman. 
 
 It is particularly by virtue of his "Grenstone Poems"
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 21 
 
 that Witter Bynner has marked himself upon the best 
 that so far we may hand down to the next generation. 
 Here is a lyrical quality that is superb, democracy's 
 spirit and love of free things that embodies our high 
 est ideals and establishes new values of their own. 
 And here is a poet who can write with equal beauty in 
 the customary and accepted forms, and who also is 
 able to break into new ways and new forms in a 
 fashion that the following selections from "Grenstone 
 Poems" show : 
 
 POPLARS 
 
 Poplars against a mountain 
 
 Seem frequently to me 
 To be little-windowed cities 
 
 And sun-waves on the sea. 
 
 Perhaps dead men remember 
 
 Those beckonings of fire, 
 Waves that have often crumbled 
 
 And windows of desire. . . . 
 
 Another year and some one, 
 
 Standing where I now stand, 
 Shall watch my tree rekindle, 
 
 From ancient sea and land 
 
 The beckoning of an ocean, 
 
 The beckoning of a town, 
 Till the sun's behind the mountain 
 
 And the wind dies down. 
 
 THE CIRCUS 
 
 . . . . Whose vast and rusted deeps were unmoving but 
 for the slow, blue, diagonal line of twilight, as clear
 
 22 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 as the blue, diagonal shirt across the flesh of the 
 
 fellow in the hanging rings. . . . 
 And from the edge of the canyon a blue- jay darted and 
 
 poised and chirped, as undaunted as the Mexican 
 
 boy darting and uttering his small, hoarse phrases 
 
 over the edge of death. . . . 
 That rim 
 Where the sky at night is tipped upside down and silence 
 
 is brought to your feet, 
 The silence containing China and Syria and Egypt and 
 
 all their architecture and swift motions and their 
 
 pyramids and unremembered speech 
 And a river that pours unheard. 
 
 "Grenstone Poems" was judged by the Columbia 
 University as one of the two best books of poetry pub 
 lished during 1917. A significant poem of the col 
 lection is the one from which the volume takes its 
 name, "Grenstone" : 
 
 "Is there such a place as Grenstone?" 
 
 Celia, hear them ask! 
 Tell me, shall we share it with them ? 
 
 Shall we let them breathe and bask 
 
 On the windy, sunny pasture, 
 Where the hill-top turns its face 
 
 Toward the valley of the mountain, 
 Our beloved place? 
 
 Shall we show them through our churchyard, 
 
 With its crumbling wall 
 Set between the dead and living? 
 
 Shall our willowed waterfall,
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 23 
 
 Huckleberries, pines and bluebirds, 
 Be a secret we shall share? . . . 
 
 If they make but little of it, 
 Celia, shall we care? 
 
 "Grenstone Poems" form by their sequence a more 
 or less definite narrative. A young poet, dejected, goes 
 to the country town of Grenstone, where after a time 
 he meets Celia through whom not only life becomes 
 rich for him, but death also. Taken as a whole, the 
 book is a lyric transcript of the finding and unfolding 
 of that happiness to which the poet has given a dif 
 ferent kind of expression in the philosophic narrative 
 of 'The New World." 
 
 Bynner's "Lincoln" is redundant with the spirit of 
 democracy and it is of interest to study this in com 
 parison with his more recent tribute to young France, 
 which found its inspiration in Pierre de Lanux's book, 
 "Young France and America." 
 
 REPUBLIC TO REPUBLIC 
 
 1776-1917 
 France ! 
 
 It is I answering. 
 America ! 
 And it shall be remembered not only in our lips but 
 
 in our hearts 
 And shall awaken forever familiar and new as the 
 
 morning 
 
 That we were the first of all lands 
 To be lovers, 
 
 To run to each other with the incredible cry 
 Of recognition.
 
 24 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Bound by no ties of nearness or of knowledge 
 
 But of the nearness of the heart, 
 
 You chose me then 
 
 And so I choose you now 
 
 By the same nearness 
 
 And the name you called me then 
 
 I call you now 
 
 O Liberty, my Love! 
 
 A FARMER REMEMBERS LINCOLN 
 
 "Lincoln? 
 
 Well, I was in the old Second Maine, 
 
 The first regiment in Washington from the Pine 
 
 Tree State. 
 
 Of course I didn't get the butt of the clip; 
 We was there for guardin' Washington 
 We was all green." 
 
 "Yes, sir. His looks was kind o' hard to forget. 
 
 He was a spare man, 
 
 An old farmer. 
 
 Everything was all right, you know, 
 
 But he wa'n't a smooth-appearin' man at all 
 
 Not in no ways; 
 
 Thin-faced, long-necked, 
 
 And a swellin' kind of a thick lip like. 
 
 "And he was a jolly old fellow always cheerful ; 
 He wa'n't so high but the boys could talk to him 
 
 their own ways. 
 
 While I was servin' at the Hospital 
 He's come in and say, 'You look nice in here' 
 Praise us up, you know. 
 And he'd bend over and talk to the boys
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 25 
 
 And he'd talk so good to 'em so close 
 
 That's why I call him a farmer. 
 
 I don't mean that everything about him wa'n't all 
 
 right, you understand, 
 It's just well, I was a farmer 
 And he was my neighbor, anybody's neighbor. 
 
 "I guess even you young folks would 'a' liked him." 
 
 Witter Bynner is a firm believer in the work of 
 American poets and gives high place to the writings 
 of Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters and Edwin 
 Arlington Robinson. 
 
 With the explosion of spectricism Bynner was dis 
 covered in the capacity of a vers libre baiter which 
 found its inspiration, according to Mr. Bynner, as fol 
 lows: 
 
 "Imagists and Vorticists long had aroused my ire, 
 and one day in Chicago I determined to form an ultra 
 modern school of poetry myself just to show how 
 easily it might be done. I was attending a perform 
 ance of the Russian Ballet in Chicago at the moment 
 when the idea struck me. What should I call my new 
 school? I looked down at my program and found it 
 opened at 'Le Spectre de la Rose.' The word spectre 
 struck me. Spectrists that was a good, suggestive 
 name. I adopted it forthwith." 
 
 In the preface of "Spectra," a collection of the verse 
 by Emanuel Morgan (Witter Bynner) and Anne 
 Knish (Arthur Davison Ficke), the following defini 
 tion is given : 
 
 "An explanation of the term 'Spectric' will indicate 
 something of the nature of the technique which it de-
 
 26 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 scribes. 'Spectric' has, in this connection, three sep 
 arate but closely related meanings. In the first place, 
 it speaks, to the mind, of that process of diffraction 
 by which are disarticulated the several colored and 
 other rays of which light is composed. It indicates 
 our feeling that the theme of a poem is to be regarded 
 as a prism, upon which the colorless white light of 
 infinite existence falls and is broken up into glowing, 
 beautiful, and intelligible hues. In its second sense, the 
 term Spectric relates to the reflex vibrations of physi 
 cal light, and, by analogy, the after-colors of the poet's 
 initial vision. In its third sense, Spectric connotes the 
 overtones, adumbrations, or spectres which for the poet 
 haunt all objects both of the seen and unseen world, 
 those shadowy projections, sometimes grotesque, 
 which, hovering around the real, give to the real its 
 full ideal significance and its poetic worth. These 
 spectres are the manifold spell and true essence of ob 
 jects, like the magic that would inevitably encircle a 
 mirror from the hand of Helen of Troy." 
 
 But if Bynner's little fling into the "Spectric" is re 
 sponsible for style of 'The Beloved Stranger," that 
 new and diverse style of poetical expression in which 
 Mr. Bynner's latest book will appear, it has served a 
 worthy purpose. 
 
 The following poems are from it: 
 
 AUTUMN 
 
 Last year, and other years, 
 
 When autumn was a vision of old friendships, 
 
 Of friends gone many ways 
 
 Yet never gone,
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 27 
 
 I stood alone upon this bank of coppered fern, 
 
 I breathed my height of isolation, 
 
 Encircled by a remembering countryside. 
 
 I touched dead fingers in a larch; 
 
 I sailed on long blue waves of land 
 
 Transfixed the whole horizon round; 
 
 I wore the old imperial shades 
 
 Of aster, sumac, goldenrod; 
 
 I flaunted my banners of maple; 
 
 And, when the sun went down, 
 
 I lay full length 
 
 Upon a scarlet death-bed. 
 
 So happy a thing was autumn, 
 
 Other years 
 
 But here you stand beside me on this hill, 
 
 And shake your head and smile your smile 
 
 And twist these things lightly between your 
 
 fingers 
 
 As a pinch of dust 
 And bare your throat 
 And show me only spring, 
 Spring, spring, 
 
 Fluttering like your slender side, 
 Cascading like your hair. 
 
 COINS 
 
 I am a miser of my memories of you 
 And will not spend them. 
 When they were anticipations 
 I spent them. 
 
 And bought you with them. 
 But now I have exchanged you for memories, 
 And I will only pour them from one hand 
 into the other
 
 28 
 
 And back again, 
 Listening to their 
 Qink, 
 
 Till some one comes 
 Worth using them 
 To buy. . . . 
 
 Then I will change them again into anticipa 
 tions. 
 
 Both poets and critics have found in Witter Bynner 
 a rare genius and have written of him as follows : 
 
 "Witter Bynner has come into his own ... a great 
 poet" Los Angeles Graphic (Margaret B. Wilkin 
 son). 
 
 "Underlying his honest line there is a firm-founded 
 human note that reaches out through the dress of 
 present-day phrase and fixes upon one's mind with the 
 eternal grip of truth." New York Evening Sun. 
 
 "If you haven't seen Bynner's Ode," writes one Har 
 vard man to another, "hasten, hurry, run, waste no 
 time, but get a copy of your own. Here are your 
 memories, your fun, your dreams, your friendships, 
 your professors, your familiar sights and sounds, 
 caught between the covers." 
 
 "We do not know of anything in American litera 
 ture quite like this celebration of a university by one 
 of its sons. ... It is successful from first to last." 
 Boston Transcript. 
 
 "A powerful, eloquent, vehement language and 
 thought that rushes on impetuously toward the sentient 
 end." William Butler Yeats. 
 
 Mr. Bynner is a resident of New York, in which 
 city the greater part of his work is done. His pub-
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 29 
 
 lished poems include "Young Harvard and Other 
 Poems," "Tiger," "The Little King," "The New 
 World," "Iphigenia in Tauris," "Grenstone Poems," 
 and "The Beloved Stranger." Mr. Bynner's most re 
 cent work, "The Golden Wing," a morality play, will 
 be published following its metropolitan presentation, 
 promised for the near future. 
 
 There is Oriental blood which flows in the veins of 
 Witter Bynner, and perhaps it is due to this ancestral 
 heritage that the prophetic utterances found in our 
 greatest poets is so strongly developed in this man. 
 This is evidenced time and again in his writings. 
 
 And as for Bynner's religion, there is no small trace 
 of a deference to Buddah in some of his poems, no 
 doubt again an inheritance. For example : 
 
 Behold the man alive in me, 
 
 Behold the man in you! 
 If there is God am I not he? 
 
 Shall I myself undo? 
 
 I have been waiting long enough . . . 
 
 Impossible gods, good-by; 
 I wait no more. . . . The way is rough 
 
 But the god who climbs is I.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 ROBERT FROST, EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON 
 
 Robert Frost 
 
 William Lyon Phelps, writing in The Bookman, 
 declares that the difference between Vachel Lindsay 
 and Robert Frost is the difference between a drum- 
 major and a botanist, for the former marches gaily at 
 the head of his big band, looking up and around at the 
 crowd; the latter finds it sweet 
 
 with uplifted eyes 
 To pace the ground, if path be there or none. 
 
 New England contemporaries of Frost have praised 
 him and found his work good. His books have been 
 both artistic and commercially satisfactory. But to 
 the author of this book, his poems are cold, often 
 gaunt and bare in their stern realism. 
 
 England first welcomed Frost. He is the sort of 
 poet that many English critics obviously would de 
 clare to be "type pure American." He has chosen the 
 poetic field of an earlier style of popular narrative 
 verse rather than lyric in the majority of his poems, 
 and it is when producing such lines as these from 
 "The Wood-Pile" that he is at his best : 
 
 30
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 31 
 
 Out walking in the frozen swamp one grey day 
 I paused and said, "I will turn back from here. 
 No, I will go on farther and we shall see." 
 The hard snow held me, save where now and then 
 One foot went down. The view was all in lines 
 Straight up and down of tall slim trees 
 Too much alike to mark or name a place by 
 So as to say for certain I was here 
 Or somewhere else ; I was just far from home. 
 A small bird flew before me. He was careful 
 To put a tree between us when he lighted, 
 And say no word to tell me who he was 
 Who was so foolish as to think what he thought. 
 He thought that I was after him for a feather 
 The white one in his tail; like one who takes 
 Everything said as personal to himself. 
 
 Clematis 
 
 Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle. 
 What held it though on one side was a tree 
 Still growing, and on one a stake and prop, 
 These latter about to fall. I thought that only 
 Some one who lived in turning to fresh tasks 
 Could so forget his handiwork on which 
 He spent himself, the labour of his axe, 
 And leave it there far from a useful fireplace 
 To warm the frozen swamp as best it could 
 With the slow smokeless burning of decay. 
 
 Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California, 
 March 26, 1875, and for over nine years he lived in 
 a community that was almost at the other extreme, 
 geographically as well as temperamentally, from that 
 part of the country which later was to claim him as 
 its own poet.
 
 32 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 As a boy Robert Frost tried his hand at various 
 things. Like Louis Untermeyer and Cale Young Rice, 
 he accepted school as one of the necessary evils of life. 
 He attended Dartmouth and later Harvard, spending 
 but a few months at the former and two years at the 
 latter. Between these educational experiences, he mar 
 ried Eleanor Miriam White in 1895. In 1900 he be 
 came a farmer in New Hampshire. In 1911 he taught 
 school and a year later went to England. 
 
 It was in London in 1913 that his first book of 
 poems, "A Boy's Will," was published, just nineteen 
 years after his first published poem appeared in The 
 Independent. His second volume was also published 
 in London in 1914, "North of Boston." In March, 
 1915, he returned to America, with England's stamp 
 of approval upon his work. He bought a farm in 
 New Hampshire, and "Mountain Interval" appeared 
 in 1916. 
 
 Robert Frost is an outdoor poet who glories in such 
 poem titles as "Birches," "Pea Brush," "Putting in 
 the Seed," "The Cow in Apple Time," "A Late Walk," 
 "Wind and Window Flower," and "Blueberries." 
 
 Again to quote Mr. Phelps, who has so well ex 
 pressed the style of Robert Frost in these lines, "In 
 spite of his preoccupation with the exact value of oral 
 words, he is not a singing lyrist. There is not much 
 bel canto in his volumes. Nor do any of his poems 
 seem spontaneous. He is a thoughtful man, given to 
 meditation; the meanest flower or a storm-bedraggled 
 bird will lend him material for poetry. But the ex 
 pression of his poems does not seem naturally fluid. 
 I suspect he has blotted many a line. He is as delib-
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 33 
 
 erate as Thomas Hardy, and cultivates the lapidary 
 style. Even in the conversations frequently intro 
 duced into his pieces, he is as economical with words 
 as his characters are with cash. This gives to his 
 work a hardness of outline in keeping with the New 
 England temperament and the New Hampshire cli 
 mate. There is no doubt that much of his peculiarly 
 effective dramatic power is gained by his extremely 
 careful expenditure of language." 
 
 There is a noticeable contrast between Mr. Frost's 
 book, "A Boy's Will," introspective poems of youth's 
 impressions, "North of Boston," with its hardy New 
 England pictures, and "Mountain Interval," with its 
 strongly atmospheric poems of New England seasons 
 and life. 
 
 Such lines as these are within the poet's love of his 
 New England and its natural beauties that best ex 
 emplify his knowledge and ability to interpret them : 
 
 BIRCHES 
 
 When I see birches bend to left and right 
 
 Across the lines of straighter, darker trees, 
 
 I like to think some boy's been swinging them. 
 
 But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay. ' 
 
 Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them 
 
 Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning 
 
 After a rain. They click upon themselves 
 
 As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured 
 
 As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. 
 
 Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells 
 
 Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust 
 
 Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away 
 
 You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
 
 34 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Mr. Frost lives the year round on his farm in 
 Franconia, New Hampshire. He is not, however, a 
 gentleman farmer. On his farm, backed up against 
 a forest of fir trees and facing one of the most beauti 
 ful mountains in New England, he writes slowly, sur 
 rounded by the nature he loves and the companion 
 ship of his wife and four children, Lesley, Carol, 
 Irma and Marjorie. 
 
 Edwin Arlington Robinson 
 
 "We must never forget that all inherited prejudice 
 and training pulls one way, in these unfortunate cases ; 
 the probing, active mind pulls another. The result is 
 a profound melancholy, tinged with cynicism. Self- 
 analysis has sapped joy, and the impossibility of con 
 structing an ethical system in accordance both with 
 desire and with tradition has twisted the mental vision 
 out of all true proportion. It takes the lifetime of 
 more than one individual to throw off a superstition, _ 
 and the effort to do so is not made without sacrifice. 
 
 "Unless one understands this fact, one cannot com 
 prehend the difficult and beautiful poetry of Edwin 
 Arlington Robinson." 
 
 So writes Amy Lowell in her study of Edwin Ar 
 lington Robinson in "Tendencies in Modern Ameri 
 can Poetry," a most understanding work by a sincere 
 admirer of his talent. 
 
 Edwin Arlington Robinson was born on Decem 
 ber 22, 1869, at Head Tide, Maine. He was only 
 two or three years old when his parents moved to the 
 town of Gardiner. He entered the Gardiner High
 
 35 
 
 School and from there went to Harvard College in 1 
 1891, from which he did not graduate, due to the ill 
 health of his father, which caused him to discontinue 
 his college studies in 1893. In 1896 came the fore 
 runner of his poetic expressions in a privately printed 
 little book. This was followed by "The Children of 
 the Night" in 1897. 
 
 Of "The Children of the Night," Miss Lowefll 
 writes: "It must be admitted that this is one of the 
 most completely gloomy books in the whole range of 
 poetry. The note is struck in this quatrain: 
 
 "We cannot crown ourselves with everything, 
 Nor can we coax the Fates with us to quarrel: 
 
 No matter what we are, or what we sing, 
 Time finds a withered leaf in every laurel." 
 
 Following the publication of this book, Mr. Robin 
 son passed through the lean years of a poet born too 
 soon, and five years went by before his next volume, 
 "Captain Craig," was issued. This bore witness of a 
 psychological growth of most serious import. 
 
 It was during this period of Mr. Robinson's career 
 that Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, at that time Presi 
 dent of the United States, became interested in his 
 work and offered him a position in the New York 
 Custom House, which position he held for five years, 
 leaving it in 1910 upon the publication of his third 
 book, "The Town Down the River." There are three 
 significant studies of famous men in this book Lin 
 coln, Roosevelt, and Napoleon. The poem on Lincoln 
 he calls "The Master" :
 
 36 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 A flying word from here and there 
 Had sown the name at which we sneered, 
 But soon the name was everywhere, 
 To be reviled and then revered : 
 A presence to be loved and feared, 
 We cannot hide it, or deny 
 That we, the gentlemen who jeered, 
 May be forgotten by and by. 
 
 He came when days were perilous 
 And hearts of men were sore beguiled; 
 And having made his note of us, 
 He pondered and was reconciled. 
 Was ever master yet so mild 
 As he, and so untamable? 
 We doubted, even when he smiled, 
 Not knowing what he knew so well. 
 
 He knew that undeceiving fate 
 
 Would shame us whom he served unsought ; 
 
 He knew that he must wince and wait 
 
 The jest of those for whom he fought; 
 
 He knew devoutly what he thought 
 
 Of us and of our ridicule ; 
 
 He knew that we must all be taught 
 
 Like little children in a school. 
 
 We gave a glamour to the task 
 
 That he encountered and saw through, 
 
 But little of us did he ask, 
 
 And little did we ever do. 
 
 And what appears if we review 
 
 The season when we railed and chaffed ? 
 
 It is the face of one who knew 
 
 That we were learning while we laughed.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 37 
 
 The face that in our vision feels 
 Again the venom that we flung, 
 Transfigured to the world reveals 
 The vigilance to which we clung. 
 Shrewd, hallowed, harassed, and among 
 The mysteries that are untold, 
 The face we see was never young 
 Nor could it ever have been old. 
 
 For he, to whom we had applied 
 Our shopman's test of age and worth, 
 Was elemental when he died, 
 As he was ancient at his birth : 
 The saddest among kings of earth, 
 Bowed with a galling crown, this man 
 Met rancor with a cryptic mirth, 
 Laconic and Olympian. 
 
 The love, the grandeur, and the fame 
 Are bounded by the world alone ; 
 The calm, the smouldering, and the flame 
 Of awful patience were his own : 
 With him they are forever flown 
 Past all our fond self-shadowings, 
 Wherewith we cumber the Unknown 
 As with inept, Icarian wings. 
 
 For we were not as other men: 
 'Twas ours to soar and his to see. 
 But we are coming down again, 
 And we shall come down pleasantly; 
 Nor shall we longer disagree 
 On what it is to be sublime, 
 But flourish in our perigee 
 And have one Titan at a time.
 
 38 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 It was with the publication of "The Man Against 
 the Sky" that Edwin Arlington Robinson, six years 
 later, achieved one of the finest things he has yet done. 
 This was in 1916. Here, with all the genius that is 
 his own, he has crammed into a minimum space some 
 colossal verse. 
 
 Robinson refused to be prolific, for in the twenty 
 years between the publication of "The Children of the 
 Night" and this book he had produced in toto four 
 volumes of verse and two plays. 
 
 The poem from which "The Man Against the Sky" 
 takes its name comes from the last one in the book 
 and begins: 
 
 Between me and the sunset, like a dome 
 
 Against the glory of a world on fire, 
 
 Now burned a sudden hill, 
 
 Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made 
 
 higher, 
 
 With nothing on it for the flame to kill 
 Save one who moved and was alone up there 
 To loom before the chaos and the glare 
 As if he were the last god going home 
 Unto his last desire. 
 
 Certain critics have found "Ben Jonson Enter 
 tains a Man from Stratford" to be one of the most 
 original in this book. "Flammonde" also is one of 
 the noteworthy poems in this collection : 
 
 The man Flammonde, from God knows where, 
 With firm address and foreign air, 
 With news of nations in his talk 
 And something royal in his walk,
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 39 
 
 With glint of iron in his eyes, 
 But never doubt, nor yet surprise, 
 Appeared, and stayed, and held his head 
 As one by kings accredited. 
 
 Erect, with his alert repose 
 About him, and about his clothes, 
 He pictured all tradition hears 
 Of what we owe to fifty years. 
 His cleansing heritage of taste 
 Paraded neither want nor waste; 
 And what he needed for his fee 
 To live, he borrowed graciously. 
 
 There was a woman in our town 
 
 On whom the fashion was to frown; 
 
 But while our talk renewed the tinge 
 
 Of a long-faded scarlet fringe, 
 
 The man Flammonde saw none of that, 
 
 And what he saw we wondered at 
 
 That none of us, in her distress, 
 
 Could hide or find our littleness. 
 
 We cannot know how much we learn 
 From those who never will return, 
 Until a flash of unforeseen 
 Remembrance falls on what has been. 
 We've each a darkening hill to climb; 
 And this is why, from time to time 
 In Tilbury Town, we look beyond. 
 Horizons for the man Flammonde. 
 
 "Merlin" was published in March, 1917. It is Rob 
 inson's own version of the time-worn legend and is not 
 nearly so good an example of his work as is found
 
 40 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 in the earlier volumes. It is oftentimes tedious and 
 long drawn out. 
 
 Of passing note is the fact that the two "profes 
 sionally" sworn enemies of each other, Amy Lowell 
 and Witter Bynner, have found his writing good and 
 marked with the genius of true poetry.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 Percy MacKaye 
 
 Poet, dramatist, and pageant-maker is Percy 
 MacKaye, whose work is well worthy of the place it 
 holds in our contemporary American poetry. Here 
 is a man whose work as a dramatist has not imperiled 
 such tuneful lyrics as 
 
 Frail Sleep, that blowest by fresh banks 
 Of quiet, crystal pools, beside whose brink 
 The varicolored dreams, like cattle, come to drink, 
 
 Cool Sleep, thy reeds, in solemn ranks, 
 
 That murmur peace to me by midnight's streams, 
 At dawn I pluck, and dayward pipe my flock of dreams. 
 
 And MacKaye turns with equal ability to the "Pa 
 geant and Masque of Saint Louis," presented in Forest 
 Park of that city on five successive days, at each per 
 formance of which 150,000 people attended. 
 
 The paternal grandfather of Mr. MacKaye came to 
 this country from Scotland about 1800, and his grand 
 father, Colonel James Morrison MacKaye, a staunch 
 adherent of anti-slavery doctrines, was an intimate 
 friend of Clay, Webster, Garrison, and Lincoln. 
 James Steele MacKaye, his father, was dramatist, 
 theatre director and inventor, writing many successful 
 
 41
 
 42 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 plays of his day, conspicuous among which were 
 "Hazel Kirke" and "Paul Kauvar." On his mother's 
 side, Percy MacKaye is of New England Puritan de 
 scent. His maternal grandmother was president of 
 one of the earliest women's colleges, and his mother 
 is the author of a published dramatization of Jane 
 Austen's "Pride and Prejudice," acted at many schools 
 and colleges. 
 
 From this ancestry came the man who has given us 
 such multi-themed poetry but in whose work no better 
 proof of the poetic genius is found than in these ma 
 jestic lines. 
 
 THE CHILD-DANCERS 1 
 
 A bomb has fallen over Notre Dame: 
 Germans have burned another Belgian town: 
 Russians quelled in the east: England in qualm: 
 
 I closed my eyes, and laid the paper down. 
 
 Gray ledge and moor-grass and pale bloom of light 
 
 By pale blue seas! 
 
 What laughter of a child world-sprite, 
 
 Sweet as the horns of lone October bees, 
 
 Shrills the faint shore with mellow, old delight? 
 
 What elves are these 
 
 In smocks gray-blue as sea and ledge, 
 
 Dancing upon the silvered edge 
 
 Of darkness each ecstatic one 
 
 Making a happy orison, 
 
 With shining limbs, to the low-sunken sun? 
 
 1 The Child-Dancers: The little children of the Isadora Dun 
 can School of Dancing, to whom these verses refer, came to 
 America in September, 1914, owing to conditions of war in 
 France. Russian, German, French, and English, they form a 
 happy and harmonious family of the belligerent races.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 43 
 
 See: now they cease 
 
 Like nesting birds from flight: 
 
 Demure and debonair 
 
 They troop beside their hostess' chair 
 
 To make their bedtime courtesies : 
 
 "Spokoinoi notchi! Gute Nachte! 
 
 Bon soir! Bon soir! Good night!" 
 What far-gleamed lives are these 
 Linked in one holy family of art? 
 Dreams : dreams once Christ and Plato dreamed : 
 How fair their happy shades depart! 
 
 Dear God! how simple it all seemed, 
 
 Till once again 
 
 Before my eyes the red type quivered : Slain: 
 
 Ten thousand of the enemy. 
 
 Then laughter! laughter from the ancient sea 
 
 Sang in the gloaming: Athens! Galilee! 
 
 And elfin voices called from the extinuished light : 
 
 "Spokoinoi notchi! Gute Nachte! 
 
 Bon soir! Bon soir! Good night f" 
 
 Percy MacKaye was born in New York City, March 
 1 6, 1875, and in this city he gained from the con 
 stant companionship of his father much knowledge of 
 the theatre. 
 
 In 1892-93 he began his first efforts in poetical lines 
 by writing a series of choral songs for his father's 
 huge musical drama, "Columbus." 
 
 The poet was graduated from Harvard College in 
 1897 and a year afterwards was married to Miss 
 Marion Homer Morse, of Cambridge, Mass., and went 
 abroad to live. In Frascati, near Rome, he wrote "A 
 Garland to Sylvia," and in 1905 came "Fenris the
 
 44 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Wolf," another play. Returning to New York in 
 1900, Mr. MacKaye taught in a private school for 
 boys for three years, and during this time E. H. Soth- 
 ern became interested in his dramatic work and com 
 missioned him to write "The Canterbury Pilgrims," 
 first published in 1903. A year later Mr. MacKaye 
 joined the colony of writers and artists at Cornish, 
 New Hampshire, where he makes his permanent home. 
 Perhaps it was here that came the pastoral inspiration 
 for "The Three Dance Motives" which concluded with 
 "The Chase" : 
 
 Through what vast wood, 
 By what wild paths of beautiful surprise, 
 Hast thou returned to us, 
 Diana, Diana of Desire? 
 Coming to thy call 
 What huntresses are these? 
 What hallowed chase ? What long, long cherished 
 goal? 
 
 Through man's wan mind 
 By radiant paths of rhythmic liberty 
 I am returned to you, 
 Diviner, diviner of dreams! 
 Those huntresses, they are my hallowed desires 
 My unquenched selves with overflowing quivers. 
 Joy is our chase and goal: 
 
 Our bodies the tense crossbows, and our wild 
 souls the shafts ! 
 
 At some stage in the life of nearly every poet he 
 seeks to express his own theories on poetry, usually in
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 45 
 
 verse form. Mr. MacKaye's "Rain Revery" bears 
 testimony to this: 
 
 In the lone of night by the pattering tree 
 
 I sat alone with Poetry 
 
 With Poetry, my old shy friend, 
 
 And his tenuous shadow seemed to blend 
 
 Beyond the lampshine on the sill 
 
 With the mammoth shadow of the hill, 
 
 And his breath fell soft in the pool-dark pane 
 
 With the murmurous, murmuring muffled hoof 
 
 Of the rain, the rain, 
 
 The rain on the roof. 
 
 "Ah, what of the rapture and melody 
 
 We might have wrought, dear Poetry! 
 
 Imagined tower and dream-built shrine, 
 
 Must they crumble in dark like this pale lampshine ? 
 
 Our dawn-flecked meadows lyric-shrill, 
 
 Shall they lie as dumb as the gloom-drenched hill ? 
 
 Our song-voiced lovers! Shall none remain?" 
 
 Under the galloping, gusty hoof 
 
 Answered the rain, rain, 
 
 Rain on the roof. 
 
 The first of Mr. MacKaye's plays to be produced 
 professionally was "Jeanne d'Arc," produced by E. H. 
 Sothern and Miss Julia Marlowe, in 1906. 
 
 Since that time ten other plays of his have been acted 
 by such actors as Mr. Harrison Grey Fiske, Madame 
 Bertha Kalich, Mr. Henry Miller, Mr. Frank Reicher, 
 Henrietta Crosman, Henry E. Dixey, and Prof. J. S. 
 P. Tatlock. His play, "The Scarecrow," was acted 
 during two seasons in England and America.
 
 46 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 In civic pageantry Mr. MacKaye is a pioneer in 
 America, his "Gloucester Pageant" produced for Presi 
 dent Taft in August ( 1906), being the first large-scale 
 pageant produced in this country. Since then his 
 "Sanctuary," a Bird Masque in which Miss Eleanor 
 Wilson acted the chief part, and his "Saint Louis," a 
 Civic Masque in which 7,000 citizens of Saint Louis 
 acted, in four performances, before half a million 
 spectators, have attracted national attention. 
 
 It is by virtue of Mr. MacKaye's "Lincoln Cen 
 tenary Ode," one of his longer poems, that he is ac 
 credited with having produced one of the most splen 
 did tributes in our American literature to this great 
 American. It concludes : 
 
 Leave, then, that customed grief 
 
 Which honorably mourns its martyred dead, 
 
 And newly hail instead 
 
 The birth of him, our hardy shepherd chief, 
 
 Who by green paths of old democracy 
 
 Leads still his tribes to uplands of glad peace. 
 
 As long as out of blood and passion blind 
 
 Springs the pure justice of the reasoning mind, 
 
 And justice, bending, scorns not to obey 
 
 Pity, that once in a poor manger lay, 
 
 As long as, thrall'd by time's imperious will, 
 
 Brother hath bitter need of brother, still 
 
 His presence shall not cease 
 
 To lift the ages toward his human excellence, 
 
 And races yet to be 
 
 Shall in a rude hut do him reverence 
 
 And solemnize a simple man's nativity.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 47 
 
 Mr. MacKaye in the preface to his "Collected Poems 
 and Plays" says: 
 
 "In accepting the invitation of the publishers to col 
 lect a portion of my published work within the com 
 pass of two volumes, poems and plays, the occasion 
 seems fitting for me to comment on some phases of it 
 as related to the reading public. 
 
 "While the writer was still in his teens, he said to 
 himself: 'There is my life-work; it rises over there 
 beyond : I can see its large outlines. I will give myself 
 till I am forty to do its 'prentice work : then perhaps 
 I may be ready to tackle the real job that vision which 
 lies there alluring, waiting to be realized.' 
 
 "Now, then, here is forty; and here is some of the 
 'prentice work gathered together; yet, as far as con 
 cerns myself, apprenticeship has hardly begun : the real 
 life-work still beckons, unrealized, away there beyond. 
 For this reason, in submitting to the reader's interest 
 the works here collected, I should like to introduce 
 them anew rather as the by-gleanings of a journey but 
 just set forth upon, than in any sense the product of 
 a goal attained." 
 
 Mr. MacKaye's published works include the follow 
 ing: "The Canterbury Pilgrims," a comedy; "Jeanne 
 d'Arc," a tragedy; "Sappho and Phaon," a tragedy; 
 "Fenris the Wolf," a tragedy ; "A Garland of Sylvia," 
 a dramatic revery; "The Scarecrow," a tragedy of the 
 ludicrous; "Mater," an American study in comedy; 
 "The Sistine Eve and Other Poems"; "The Present 
 Hour," a book of 'poems ; "Lincoln," a centenary ode ; 
 "The Playhouse and the Play," essays and addresses ; 
 "The Civic Theatre," essays and addresses ; "Uriel and
 
 48 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Other Poems"; "Anti-Matrimony," a satirical com 
 edy ; "To-Morrow," a play in three acts ; "Sanctuary," 
 a bird masque; "Saint Louis," a civic masque; "A 
 Thousand Years Ago," a romance of the Orient, and 
 "The Evergreen Tree." 
 
 In June, 1914, President Nichols, of Dartmouth, 
 conferred upon Mr. MacKaye the honorary degree 
 of M.A., with these words: "Master of Arts to Percy 
 MacKaye, poet, dramatist, critic, whose large vision 
 of the theatre includes the pageantry and idealism of 
 all men." 
 
 Perhaps one of the most significant works of Mr. 
 MacKaye will prove to be a play, based on the life of 
 our first President, soon to be presented and pub 
 lished. Here is exemplified the most significant 
 achievement of Mr. MacKaye the full and complete 
 merging of poet and playwright, a merging against 
 which there has too long been unnecessary distinction.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 Edgar Lee Masters 
 
 "Spoon River Anthology" is a book possessing the 
 dual virtues of artistry and popular appeal. It brought 
 forward the name of Edgar Lee Masters as a poet of 
 note and bore witness to the able judgment of that dis 
 cerning critic William Marion Reedy, who first pub 
 lished Masters in his own Reedy 's Mirror. It has been 
 whispered among those who claim to know that Mas 
 ters wrote his Spoon River poems as a joke, a satire on 
 the people of a small town of his youth, at the sugges 
 tion of Reedy. But the critics found it good and 
 straightway declared Masters a new light in our Amer 
 ican poetry. 
 
 "Edgar Lee Masters," says Jessie B. Rittenhouse in 
 The Bookman, "is, in short, the most penetrating and 
 merciless psychologist of the present day and surely 
 the bravest. He withholds nothing. Witness such a 
 poem as "Samuel Butler et Al," where one indicts his 
 mother for a life of recreance to the finer duties of 
 motherhood, while he pictures with pitiless exactness 
 the whole panorama of her life. This might be in 
 excusable, were it not true. We have all seen this 
 woman and observed every detail that Mr. Masters 
 depicts. Indeed, this book is full of first-hand studies, 
 of minute observation. These souls under a micro- 
 
 49
 
 50 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 scope, however they might wish to escape, can with 
 hold nothing. One marvels continually at the relent 
 less analysis which probes deeper and deeper, seeking 
 for the hidden springs of action. Only the trained 
 mind, the legal mind, could pursue such clues and ar 
 rive at such unappealable decisions. Heredity has an 
 irresistible fascination for Mr. Masters, and it ap 
 pears and reappears in his latest work. In "Excluded 
 Middle" its effect upon a whole family is shown, in the 
 light of that ever-baffling preoccupation of Mr. Masters 
 cross-currents of sex, and parental inharmony. In 
 deed, if we have both a penetrating and a luminous 
 thinker in modern American poetry, it is Edgar Lee 
 Masters, and one says this with full recognition of the 
 fact that it is not always pleasant to follow him in his 
 penetrations." 
 
 "Spoon River Anthology" is a sequence of narrative 
 poems dealing with the supposedly after-death "soul 
 barings" of various "dear departeds" in the village of 
 Spoon River. Here the good and the bad regardless 
 of earthly pose are held up before the mirror of 
 Truth with all their virtues and vices exposed in her 
 fair white light. Here "Cassius Hueffer" says of him 
 self: 
 
 They have chiseled on my stone the words: 
 "His life was gentle, and the elements so 
 
 mixed in him 
 That nature might stand up and say to all 
 
 the world, 
 This was a man." 
 Those who knew me smile 
 As they read this empty rhetoric.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 51 
 
 My epitaph should have been : 
 
 "Life was not gentle to him, 
 
 And the elements so mixed in him 
 
 That he made warfare on life, 
 
 In the which he was slain." 
 
 While I lived I could not cope with the 
 
 slanderous tongues, 
 Now that I am dead I must submit to an 
 
 epitaph 
 Graven by a fool ! 
 
 Masters' tragic poem of slander and gossip is the 
 story of "Mrs. Williams" : 
 
 I was the milliner 
 Talked about, lied about, 
 Mother of Dora, 
 Whose strange disappearance 
 Was charged to her rearing. 
 My eye quick to beauty 
 Saw much beside ribbons 
 And buckles and feathers 
 And leghorns and felts, 
 To set off sweet faces, 
 And dark hair and gold. 
 One thing I will tell you 
 And one I will ask : 
 The stealers of husbands 
 Wear powder and trinkets, 
 And fashionable hats. 
 Wives, wear them yourselves. 
 Hats may make divorces 
 They also prevent them. 
 Well now, let me ask you: 
 If all of the children, born here in Spoon 
 River,
 
 52 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Had been reared by the County, some 
 where on a farm; 
 
 And the fathers and mothers had been 
 given their freedom 
 
 To live and enjoy, change mates if they 
 wished, 
 
 Do you think that Spoon River 
 
 Had been any the worse? 
 
 Grim realism conies in the story of the heretic, 
 "Wendell P. Bloyd" : 
 
 They first charged me with disorderly conduct, 
 
 There being no statute on blasphemy. 
 
 Later they locked me up as insane 
 
 Where I was beaten to death by a Catholic guard. 
 
 My offense was this: 
 
 I said God lied to Adam, and destined him 
 
 To lead the life of a fool, 
 
 Ignorant that there is evil in the world as well 
 
 as good. 
 
 And when Adam outwitted God by eating the apple 
 And saw through the lie, 
 
 God drove him out of Eden to keep him from taking 
 The fruit of immortal life. 
 For Christ's sake, you sensible people, 
 Here's what God Himself says about it in the book 
 
 of Genesis: 
 
 "And the Lord God said, Behold the man 
 Is become as one of us" (a little envy, you see), 
 ''To know good and evil" (The all-is-good lie 
 
 exposed) : 
 
 "And now lest he put forth his hand and take 
 Also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever : 
 Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the 
 
 garden of Eden."
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 53 
 
 (The reason I believe God crucified His Own Son 
 To get out of the wretched tangle is, because it 
 sounds just like Him.) 
 
 One of the most admirable pieces of writing in this 
 volume, however, is found in Masters' lines to a sweet 
 heart of Abraham Lincoln whom he calls "Anne Rut- 
 ledge" : 
 
 Out of me unworthy and unknown 
 
 The vibrations of deathless music; 
 
 "With malice toward none, with charity for all." 
 
 Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions, 
 
 And the beneficent face of a nation 
 
 Shining with justice and truth. 
 
 I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds, 
 
 Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln, 
 
 Wedded to him, not through union, 
 
 But through separation. 
 
 Bloom forever, O Republic, 
 
 From the dust of my bosom ! 
 
 In "Toward the Gulf" Masters demonstrates the 
 precepts of Whitman. It is evidenced in the under 
 lying spirit of these poems rather than in the actual 
 form of expression chosen. 
 
 Masters has established his right to our best con 
 sideration as a poet of high merit, but there are times 
 when some of his lines run parallel with a rather ordi 
 nary and not particularly interesting prose form of 
 verse. Certainly there is little poetry in lines like 
 these : 
 
 "Miranda married a rich man 
 
 And spent his money so fast that he failed.
 
 54 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 She lashed him with a scorpion tongue 
 And made him believe at last 
 With her incessant reasonings 
 That he was a fool and so had failed. 
 In middle life he started over again, 
 And became tangled in a law suit ; 
 Because of these things he killed himself." 
 
 But in "The Awakening" there are the best of Mas 
 ters' lines, lines that throb and pulsate with the music 
 of real song : 
 
 When you lie sleeping; golden hair 
 Tossed on your pillow; sea shell pink 
 Ears that nestle, I forbear 
 A moment while I look and think 
 How you are mine and if I dare . 
 To bend and kiss you lying there. 
 
 A Raphael in the flesh! Resist 
 
 I cannot, though to break your sleep 
 
 Is thoughtless of me you are kissed 
 
 And roused from slumber dreamless, deep 
 
 You rub away the slumber's mist, 
 
 You scold and almost weep. 
 
 It is too bad to wake you so, 
 Just for a kiss. But when awake 
 You sing and dance, nor seem to know 
 You slept a sleep too deep to break 
 From which I roused you long ago 
 For nothing but my passion's sake 
 What though your heart should ache ! 
 
 It was while engaged in the practice of law that 
 Edgar Lee Masters first began to write verse. He had,
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 55 
 
 however, been writing for many years poetry of no 
 especial significance until his Spoon River poems. 
 
 Masters was born in Garnett, Kansas, on August 
 23, 1868, the son of Hardin Wallace. He received 
 his education in a high school and Knox College, Illi 
 nois, after which he studied law in his father's office. 
 He was admitted in 1891 to the Bar, and is at present 
 a member of the Chicago and Illinois State Bar Asso 
 ciations. He was married to Miss Helen M. Jenkins 
 of Chicago in 1898. 
 
 His works include "A Book of Verses," "Maxi 
 milian," "The New Star Chamber and Other Essays," 
 "Blood of the Prophets," "Althea," and "The Trifler," 
 "Spoon River Anthology," "Toward the Gulf," and 
 "Songs and Satires." He has contributed articles and 
 essays on political and constitutional subjects to vari 
 ous periodicals and magazines.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 Vachel Lindsay 
 
 The nearest approach that we in America have to 
 the minstrel of historic times is Vachel Lindsay. 
 
 This poet and troubadour has tramped from his 
 home in Springfield, Illinois, over the prairies and 
 through Kansas wheat fields, over the mountains of 
 Colorado and those vast plains and into cities of tow 
 ered brick and stone that make up our country, sing 
 ing his own songs, and "preaching the gospel of 
 beauty." 
 
 The cloak of the minstrel has fittingly descended 
 upon Lindsay's shoulders, and he has been able to stir 
 his listeners much in that manner as crowds in other 
 days were stirred when they gathered behind the moat- 
 protected castle walls to listen to the minstrel's lay. 
 
 Mr. Lindsay is poet through and through. An edi 
 torial in Collier's Weekly says : "Mr. Lindsay doesn't 
 need to write verse to be a poet. His prose is poetry 
 poetry straight from the soil of America that is, and of 
 a nobler America that is to be." 
 
 There is an interesting comparison in description 
 between Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay's "Poca- 
 hontas." Carl Sandburg says: "Pocahontas' body, 
 lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November 
 or a pawpaw in May did she wonder? does she re-
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 57 
 
 member in the dust in the cool tombs?" Vachel 
 Lindsay says: 
 
 Her skin was rosy copper-red. 
 
 And high she held her beauteous head. 
 
 Her step was like a rustling leaf : 
 
 Her heart a nest, untouched of grief. 
 
 She dreamed of sons like Powhatan, 
 
 And through her blood the lightning ran. 
 
 Love-cries with the birds she sung, 
 
 Birdlike 
 
 In the grape-vine swung. 
 
 The Forest, arching low and wide 
 
 Gloried in its Indian bride. 
 
 Rolfe, that dim adventurer, 
 
 Had not come a courtkr. 
 
 John Rolfe is not our ancestor. 
 
 We rise from out the soul of her 
 
 Held in native wonderland 
 
 While the sun's rays kissed her hand, 
 
 In the springtime, 
 
 In Virginia, 
 
 Our mother, Pocahontas. 
 
 There are none of our American poets of today 
 whose work epitomizes more strongly Americanism 
 than that of Vachel Lindsay. To witness, "Niagara." 
 Here is a poem the very title of which expresses the 
 grandeur, vigor, and inexpressible beauty of our nat 
 ural masterpiece : 
 
 Within the town of Buffalo 
 
 Are prosy men with leaden eyes,
 
 58 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Like ants they worry to and fro 
 (Important men, in Buffalo). 
 But only twenty miles away 
 A deathless glory is at play : 
 Niagara, Niagara. 
 
 
 
 Within the town of Buffalo 
 
 Are stores with garnets, sapphires, pearls, 
 
 Rubies, emeralds aglow, 
 
 Opal chains in Buffalo, 
 
 Cherished symbols of success. 
 
 They value not your rainbow dress : 
 
 Niagara, Niagara. 
 
 What marching men of Buffalo 
 Flood the streets in rash crusade? 
 Fools-to-free-the-world, they go, 
 Primeval hearts from Buffalo. 
 Red cataracts of France to-day 
 Awake, three thousand miles away 
 An echo of Niagara, 
 The cataract Niagara. 
 
 Mr. Lindsay believes in the poetry of the spoken 
 word and that its beauty and charm lies in the spoken 
 lines, in beauty of conception. He has carried out his 
 idea in so many of those poems where one must hear 
 the spoken word to get the proper effect. This is 
 particularly demonstrated in "Two Old Crows," and 
 in his poem games, "The King of Yellow Butterflies," 
 "The Potatoes' Dance" and "The Booker Washington 
 Trilogy." Those splendid lines about Simon Legree 
 run: 
 
 "I like your style, so wicked and free. 
 
 Come sit and share my throne with me.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 59 
 
 And let us bark and revel." 
 And there they sit and gnash their teeth, 
 And each one wears a hop-vine wreath. 
 They are matching pennies and shooting craps, 
 They are playing poker and taking naps. 
 And old Legree is fat and fine: 
 He eats the fire, he drinks the wine 
 Blood and burning turpentine 
 
 Down, down with the Devil; 
 
 Down, down with the Devil ; 
 
 Down, down with the Devil. 
 
 In sharp contrast to poems of this nature is "The 
 Chinese Nightingale," which Mr. Lindsay calls "A 
 Song in Chinese Tapestries," the first poem in his re 
 cently published book, "The Chinese Nightingale and 
 Other Poems," and which was awarded the Levinson 
 Prize by Harriet Monroe, as the best contribution to 
 "Poetry: A Magazine of Verse," for the year 1915. 
 This is a piece of writing gorgeous as the most bril 
 liant of Chinese tapestries which the poet might have 
 followed : 
 
 There were golden lilies by the bay and river, 
 
 And silver lilies and tiger-lilies, 
 
 And tinkling wind-bells in the gardens of the town 
 
 By the black-lacquer gate 
 
 Where walked in state 
 
 The kind king Chang 
 
 And his sweet-heart mate. . . . 
 
 With his flag-born dragon 
 
 And his crown of pearl . . . and . . . jade, 
 
 And his nightingale reigning in the mulberry shade, 
 
 And sailors and soldiers on the sea-sands brown,
 
 6o 
 
 And priests who bowed them down to your song 
 By the city called Han, the peacock town, 
 By the city called Han, the nightingale town, 
 The nightingale town. 
 
 The poem ends 
 
 Life is a loom, weaving illusion . . . 
 
 I remember, I remember 
 
 There were ghostly veils and laces . . . 
 
 There were ghostly bowery places . . . 
 
 With lovers' ardent faces 
 
 Bending to one another, 
 
 Speaking each his part. 
 
 They infinitely echo 
 
 In the red cave of my heart. 
 
 "Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart," 
 
 They said to one another. 
 
 They spoke, I think, of perils past. 
 
 They spoke, I think, of peace at last. 
 
 One thing I remember: 
 
 "Spring came on forever, 
 
 Spring came on forever," 
 
 Said the Chinese nightingale. 
 
 Another side of Mr. Lindsay's poetry is given by 
 Miss Rittenhouse, writing in The Bookman : 
 
 "At the Chicago Little Theatre, about a year ago, 
 Vachel Lindsay, always the innovator, staged one of 
 his most picturesque experiments a dance accompani 
 ment to several of his poems, which he chanted in lieu 
 of music. The dancer was Miss Eleanor Dougherty, 
 who had first improvised an interpretation of Mr. 
 Lindsay's poems when they were both guests at the 
 home of Mrs. William Vaughn Moody.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 61 
 
 "The idea of dancing to the rhythms of poetry rather 
 than to music, to give a visual embodiment of the 
 poet's idea while he himself chanted the lines, held such 
 possibilities that much interest was created by the ex 
 periment. Mr. Lindsay describes it at some length in 
 his latest volume, 'The Chinese Nightingale,' but mod 
 estly speaks of it as an attempt to render Toem 
 Games,' whereas it is much more than this, so much 
 more, indeed, that it holds the possibility of becoming 
 a distinct and beautiful art. 
 
 "During his recent visit to New York, Mr. Lind 
 say and Miss Dougherty gave two programmes, one 
 at the Women's University Club and one at the Cos 
 mopolitan Club. Several of the lighter fantasies, such 
 as The King of the Yellow Butterflies,' the 'Potato 
 Dance,' and 'Aladdin and the Jinn,' were given with 
 charming effect, while 'King Solomon' offered an op 
 portunity for more dramatic presentation. As rhyth 
 mic speech would naturally outrun its accompaniment 
 in the dance or pantomime, Mr. Lindsay uses repeti 
 tion wherever it is needed, and these repetitions are 
 immensely effective, enforcing the beauty of the lines 
 while giving the dancer leisure for their interpreta 
 tion. To be sure Vachel Lindsay's work is remark 
 able for its rhythms, and therefore lends itself par 
 ticularly well to chanting, but any poetry that possesses 
 beauty of tone and picturesqueness is susceptible of 
 dance interpretation. The field is unlimited and, as 
 Mr. Lindsay suggests, could be admirably applied to 
 classic poetry. Why should we not see the school of 
 Mrs. Florence Fleming Noyes or the Duncan Dancers 
 interpret 'Atalanta in Calydon'? The rhythms of
 
 62 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 poetry, as accompaniment, may be made as rich and 
 harmonious as music, and instead of detracting from 
 the beauty of the poet's work, such a representation 
 may enhance it." 
 
 William Lyon Phelps finds in the best work of 
 Vachel Lindsay two qualities : "The zest for beauty and 
 the hunger and thirst after righteousness." 
 
 "Lindsay made a soap-box tour for the Anti-Saloon 
 League, preaching at the same time the Gospel of 
 Beauty," says Mr. Phelps. "As a rule, reformers are 
 lacking in the two things most sedulously cultivated 
 by commercial travellers and life-insurance agents, tact 
 and humor. If these interesting orders of the Knights 
 of the Road were as lacking in geniality as the typical 
 reformer, they would lose their jobs. And yet fishers 
 of men, for that is what all reformers are, try to fish 
 without bait, at the same time making much loud and 
 offensive noise. Then they are amazed at the callous 
 indifference of humanity to 'great moral issues !' ' 
 
 Nicholas Vachel Lindsay was the name under which 
 this poet was christened, though "Nicholas" has long 
 been abandoned, and Vachel is pronounced to rhyme 
 with Rachel. He was born in Springfield, Illinois, on 
 November 10, 1879, and for three years was a stu 
 dent at Hiram College in Ohio, followed by a course 
 in art which extended for five years in Chicago and 
 New York. 
 
 Between 1905 and 1910 Vachel Lindsay was the 
 creator of strange pictures, a lecturer on various topics, 
 and a writer of unique "bulletins." 
 
 In 1910 he took to the highways and by-ways, be 
 ginning his long pilgrimages, walking in winter and
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 63 
 
 spring through the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida and 
 in the North as well. 
 
 As a medium of exchange he carried simply his 
 poems, printed on single sheets, which he exchanged 
 for lodging and food. It was in the summer of 1912 
 that he walked from Illinois into New Mexico. 
 
 In a letter to the author of this book, Mr. Lindsay 
 says, "But bear in mind that my tramp-days were 
 mixed with the rest. I walked in the South in the 
 spring of 1906, in the East in the spring of 1908 and 
 the West in the spring of 1912. There is a very defi 
 nite progress of ideas in the accounts of these three 
 regions. Please remember 'The Handy Guide for 
 Beggars' begins the story. People get so very wide 
 of the mark I am perhaps getting finicky on this matter 
 of chronology." 
 
 Vachel Lindsay's "Song of the Congo" is among 
 the best known of his works : 
 
 Fat black bucks in a wine barrel room, 
 
 Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable, 
 
 Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table, 
 
 Pounded on the table, 
 
 Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom, 
 
 Hard as they were able, 
 
 Boom, boom, boom. 
 
 With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom, 
 
 Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, Boom. 
 
 Then I had religion, then I had a vision, 
 
 I could not turn from their revel in derision. 
 
 Then I saw the Congo, creeping through the black, 
 
 Cutting through the forest with a golden track, 
 
 Then along that river bank
 
 64 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 A thousand miles 
 
 Tattooed cannibals danced in files; 
 
 Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song 
 
 And a thigh-bone beating on a tin-pan gong. . . . 
 
 A negro fairyland swung into view, 
 
 A minstrel river 
 
 Where dreams come true. 
 
 The ebony palace soared on high 
 
 Through the blossoming trees to the evening sky. 
 
 The inland porches and casements shone 
 
 With gold and ivory and ekphant-bone. . . . 
 
 Just then from the doorway, as fat as shoats, 
 Came the cake-walk princes in their long red coats, 
 Canes with a brilliant lacquer shine, 
 And tall silk hats that were red as wine. 
 And they pranced with their butterfly partners there, 
 Coal-black maidens with pearls in their hair, 
 Knee-skirts trimmed with the jessamine sweet, 
 And bells on their ankles and little black feet. 
 
 Vachel Lindsay's published works include "The 
 Congo," "General William Booth Enters into 
 Heaven," "Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of 
 Beauty," and "The Chinese Nightingale."
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 HENRY VAN DYKE, EDWIN MARKHAM, CALE YOUNG 
 RICE, CONRAD AIKEN 
 
 Henry Vcm Dyke 
 
 There is a goodly list of writings to the credit of 
 Henry Van Dyke, who has given such beautiful essays, 
 prose poems and poetry to a large following of readers. 
 
 This popular essayist, certainly one of the most 
 widely read in this country, was born in Germantown, 
 Pa., on November 10, 1852, the son of the Reverend 
 Henry Jackson and Henrietta Ashmead. He was 
 graduated from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn 
 in 1869, and in 1873 was awarded his Bachelor of Arts 
 degree at Princeton University. 
 
 Dr. Van Dyke continued his studies at Princeton 
 Theological Seminary, 1877, University of Berlin, 
 1877-9, Washington and Jefferson University, 1902, 
 Wesleyan, 1903, Pennsylvania, 1906. Ellen Reid of 
 Baltimore became his wife on December 13, 1881, Van 
 Dyke having been ordained in the Presbyterian min 
 istry in 1877. He was professor of English literature 
 at Princeton until his appointment by President Wilson 
 as minister to the Netherlands and Luxembourg, which 
 honor he resigned after having filled the post with 
 distinction for several years. 
 
 65
 
 66 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Dr. Van Dyke's "Blue Flower," "Ruling Passion" 
 and "Fisherman's Luck" have become famous for their 
 value as essays, but "The Builders and Other Poems" 
 contains some of the most significant verses which 
 have resulted from his poetical endeavors. "An An 
 gler's Wish" runs: 
 
 I. 
 
 When tulips bloom in Union Square, 
 And timid breaths of vernal air 
 
 Go wandering down the dusty town, 
 Like children lost in Vanity Fair; 
 
 When every long, unlovely row 
 Of westward houses stands aglow, 
 
 And kads the eyes toward sunset skies 
 Beyond the hills where green trees grow; 
 
 Then weary seems the street parade, 
 And weary books, and weary trade : 
 I'm only wishing to go a-fishing; 
 For this the month of May was made. 
 
 II. 
 
 I guess the pussy-willows now 
 Are creeping out on every bough 
 
 Along the brook; and robins look 
 For early worms behind the plough. 
 
 The thistle-birds have changed their dun, 
 For yellow coats, to match the sun 
 And in the same array of flame 
 The Dandelion Show's begun. 
 
 The flocks of young anemones 
 
 Are dancing round the budding trees:
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 67 
 
 Who can help wishing to go a-fishing 
 In days as full of joy as these? 
 
 III. 
 
 I think the meadow-lark's clear sound 
 Leaks upward slowly from the ground, 
 
 While on the wing, the bluebirds ring 
 Their wedding-bells to woods around. 
 
 The flirting chewink calls his dear 
 Behind the bush; and very near, 
 
 Where water flows, where green grass grows, 
 Song-sparrows gently sing, "Good cheer." 
 
 And, best of all, through twilight's calm 
 The hermit-thrush repeats his psalm. 
 
 How much I'm wishing to go a-fishing 
 In days so sweet with music's balm ! 
 
 IV. 
 
 'T is not the proud desire of mine ; 
 I ask for nothing superfine ; 
 
 No heavy weight, no salmon great, 
 To break the record, or my line: 
 
 Only an idle little stream, 
 Whose amber waters softly gleam, 
 
 Where I may wade, through woodland shade, 
 And cast the fly, and loaf, and dream : 
 
 Only a trout or two, to dart 
 
 From foaming pools, and try my art: 
 
 No more I'm wishing old-fashioned fishing, 
 And just a day on Nature's heart.
 
 68 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Dr. Van Dyke's works, both prose and poetry, in 
 clude "The Reality of Religion," "The Story of the 
 Psalms," "The National Sin of Literary Piracy," "The 
 Poetry of Tennyson," "Sermons to Young Men," 
 "The Christ Child in Art," "Little Rivers," "The 
 Other Wise Man," "The Gospel for an Age of Doubt," 
 "The First Christmas Tree," "The Builders and Other 
 Poems," "Ships and Havens," "The Lost Word," 
 "The Gospel for a World of Sin," "Fisherman's 
 Luck," "The Toiling of Felix," "The Poetry of the 
 Psalms," "The Friendly Year," "The Ruling Pas 
 sion," "Preface to Counsel on Books and Reading," 
 "The Blue Flower," "The Open Door," "Music and 
 Other Poems," "The School of Life," "Essays in Ap 
 plication," "The Spirit of Christmas," "Americanism 
 of Washington," "Days Off," "The House of Rim- 
 mon," "Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land," "Le Genie 
 de 1'Amerique," "The White Bees and Other Poems," 
 "Collected Poems," "The Sad Shepherd," "The Man 
 sion," "The Unknown Quantity." 
 
 He was also editor of "The Gateway Series of 
 English Texts," "Select Poems of Tennyson," "Little 
 Masterpieces of English Poetry" (6 volumes). 
 
 Dr. Van Dyke makes his home at Avalon, Princeton, 
 New Jersey. 
 
 Edwin Markham 
 
 The name of Edwin Markham will be ever asso 
 ciated with that world-famous poem, "The Man with 
 the Hoe," which found its inspiration in Millet's fa 
 mous painting, and which was first published in 1899:
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 69 
 
 Bowed by the weight of centuries, he leans 
 Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, 
 The emptiness of ages in his face, 
 And on his back the burden of the world. 
 Who made him dead to rapture and despair, 
 A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, 
 Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? 
 Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? 
 Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow ? 
 Whose breath blew out the light within this brain ? 
 
 Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave 
 
 To have dominion over sea and land; 
 
 To trace the stars and search the heavens for power; 
 
 To feel the passion of Eternity? 
 
 Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns 
 
 And marked their ways upon the ancient deep ? 
 
 Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf 
 
 There is no shape more terrible than this 
 
 More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed 
 
 More filled with signs and portents for the soul 
 
 More fraught with danger to the universe. 
 
 O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, 
 How will the Future reckon with this Man? 
 How answer his brute question in that hour 
 When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world? 
 How will it be with kingdoms and with kings 
 With those who shaped him to the thing he is 
 When this dumb Terror shall reply to God 
 
 After the silence of the centuries? 
 
 
 
 This poem was hailed as "the battle-cry of the next 
 thousand years."
 
 70 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 In 1901 "Lincoln" appeared a truly splendid study 
 worthy of the man who had voiced Democracy's plea 
 in "The Man with the Hoe." Among various poets' 
 pictures of our beloved hero, these lines of Mr. Mark- 
 ham's have no superior: 
 
 LINCOLN, THE MAN OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 When the Norn Mother saw the Whirlwind Hour 
 Greatening and darkening as it hurried on, 
 She left the Heaven of Heroes and came down 
 To make a man to meet the mortal need. 
 
 She took the tried clay of the common road 
 Clay warm yet with the ancient heat of Earth, 
 Dashed through it all a strain of prophecy ; 
 Tempered the heap with thrill of human tears ; 
 Then mixed a laughter with the serious stuff. 
 Into the shape she breathed a flame to light 
 That tender, tragic, ever-changing face. 
 Here was a man to hold against the world, 
 A man to match the mountains and the sea. 
 The color of the ground was in him, the red earth; 
 The smack and tang of elemental things : 
 The rectitude and patience of the cliff; 
 The good-will of the rain that loves all leaves; 
 The friendly welcome of the wayside well ; 
 The courage of the bird that dares the sea ; 
 The gladness of the wind that shakes the corn ; 
 The mercy of the snow that hides all scars; 
 The secrecy of streams that make their way 
 Beneath the mountain to the rifted rock; 
 The undelaying justice of the light 
 That gives as freely to the shrinking flower 
 As to the great oak flaring to the wind
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 71 
 
 So came the Captain with the thinking heart ; 
 And when the judgment thunder split the house, 
 Wrenching the rafters from their ancient rest, 
 He held the ridgepole up, and spiked again 
 The rafters of the Home. He held his place 
 Held the long purpose like a growing tree 
 Held on through blame and faltered not at praise. 
 And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down 
 As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs, 
 Goes down with a great shout uoon the hills, 
 And leaves a lonesome place against the sky. 
 
 Mr. Markham has never been a prolific writer as 
 poets of today go, but his verse has attained a dis 
 tinction and fineness that some of our younger writers 
 might do well to pattern from. 
 
 It was in March, 1915, that Mr. Markham published 
 "The Shoes of Happiness," so called from the longest 
 poem it contained a long wait from the date of his 
 prior volume of poems for those who love and have 
 followed so closely his career. 
 
 California extended an unusual honor to Mr. Mark- 
 ham, when the evening of April 3Oth was set aside as 
 Markham Evening, and the poet was asked to read 
 from his poems. At this time "Virgila" from "The 
 Shoes of Happiness," which had been set to music by 
 Edith Haines-Kuester, the well-known American com 
 poser, was sung for the first time. 
 
 "Virgila" reads as follows: 
 
 Had we two gone down the world together, 
 I had made fair ways for the feet of song, 
 
 And the world's fang been but a foam-soft feather, 
 The world that works us wrong.
 
 72 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 With you the cloud of my life had broken, 
 And the heavens rushed up to their silver height : 
 
 That lone last peak of my soul had spoken, 
 That last peak lost in sight. 
 
 If you had but stayed when the old sweet wonder 
 Was a precious pain in my pulsing side! 
 
 Ah, why did you hurry our lives asunder 
 You, born to be my bride? 
 
 What sent it upon me my soul importunes- 
 All the grief of the world in a little span, 
 
 All the tears and fears, all the fates and fortunes 
 That the heart holds for man? 
 
 Is this, then, the pain that the first gods kneaded 
 Into all the joy that the strange world brings? 
 
 Did the tears fall into the heap unheeded, 
 These tears in mortal things? 
 
 Edwin Markham was born in Oregon City, Oregon, 
 on April 23, 1852. He went to California in 1857, 
 where he worked as a farmer, then as a blacksmith, 
 and herded cattle and sheep during his boyhood days. 
 Upon entering San Jose Normal School he specialized 
 in ancient and modern languages, following this work 
 in two western institutions of learning. He was mar 
 ried to Miss Anna Catherine Murphy in 1897. He 
 was principal and superintendent of schools in Cali 
 fornia until 1889, and has written poems since his 
 early boyhood for magazines and newspapers through 
 out the United States,
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 73 
 
 Cole Young Rice 
 
 Cale Young Rice is accredited with having written 
 some of the most excellent poetry of the last decade 
 as well as some of the best poetic dramas that American 
 literature reveals. 
 
 Dixon, Kentucky, was the birthplace of this poet 
 whose many lyrics have appeared in publications 
 throughout the country. 
 
 "Now doubtless it would be edifying just here to 
 tell you that I was preternaturally bookish at school 
 and that I had devoured all the libraries within range 
 by the time I was eight," says Mr. Rice. "Or, other 
 wise, that I rebelled against school authorities and be 
 gan individual poetic tendencies beyond the scholastic 
 pale. But nothing is further from the truth. I ac 
 cepted school as a necessary evil of life but also as a 
 place to meet and conspire with other children to suck 
 the orange of existence dry of 'fun.' Some remem 
 brances I seem to have of affectionate teachers wish 
 ing to have me 'really' study and lead classes; but I 
 was much too busy trying to win at tops and marbles, 
 baseball and football, skating, swimming, dancing, 
 hunting and fishing, to be lured from what I regarded 
 as the chief end of man. And poetry, except the poetry 
 of life, which made me shudder or thrill with delight 
 and passion, I knew only from class recitation or from 
 the Biblical influence which was so salutarily thrown 
 about me. 
 
 "At fourteen or fifteen, however, I did begin to 
 study, and to read a bit, and entered Cumberland Uni 
 versity where I remained four happy years,
 
 74 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 "But such years do not last. So before I knew it I 
 was through with them and suddenly aware that I knew 
 nothing about the Universe, or the direction I must 
 take in it. Then to add to my perplexities, actual and 
 philosophical, ambition began its game in me. To Har 
 vard therefore I went not, like Saul, to find my fath 
 er's asses, but to discover just how much of a long- 
 ears I was myself. And like Saul I found a kingdom. 
 For not only did my deeper reading of poetry begin 
 there but as I was taking my degrees in Philosophy 
 I not only found mental freedom philosophically and 
 religiously, but laid the basis for whatever poetic 
 vision of life as a whole I had. So to Poetry, after a 
 year's teaching, I was wedded. And though the two of 
 us have undergone all the suffering and obloquy inci 
 dental to the poetic life in America where the struggle 
 for great poetic achievement is, I believe, more diffi 
 cult than in any other country, neither has sought the 
 divorce court. 
 
 "Of the other wedding in my life, to the present 
 Alice Hegan Rice, I have said enough in the songs I 
 have written to her. With her I have seen much of 
 the strangeness and beauty of the world, for we have 
 travelled much, and all who know her know what a 
 companion she is. 
 
 "My early efforts in poetry ? Well, perhaps I should 
 say first that I was fortunate in escaping academic 
 guidance, for all that I know of that art was instinctive 
 or learned out of school. Some present day radicals, 
 whose excesses or pretences I have not swallowed, have 
 thought me conservative ; and many conservatives dur 
 ing the two decades of my poetic day have scored
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 75 
 
 me for being too free or radical. So if I must accept 
 a tag, I suppose it must be that of liberalism by which 
 I mean a readiness to take poetry of any real kind from 
 whatever source it comes for any one creed can pro 
 duce all too little of it. But the truth is that I think 
 those distinctions, like the distinctions between real 
 ists, romanticists and classicists are wearisome and 
 dangerous for the writer to get too conscious of. A 
 poet must take his poetry from all of life if he wishes 
 to write all his life or any long portion of it. Self- 
 consciousness and creed make for exhaustion. 
 
 "It was some such faith as this together with the be 
 lief that the supreme rule of poetic art, technically, is to 
 let poetic emotion and instinct rather than creed mould 
 the form of a poem, which has always guided me. As 
 a consequence my earliest efforts in a now extinct 
 volume, 'From Dusk to Dusk' were often of the 
 crude free verse sort I condemn to-day. But I soon 
 learned that even free verse rhythms, in order to be 
 truly poetic, must not be out of harmony with the 
 immemorially practised principles of verse music. 
 
 "My early difficulties with the poetic drama are 
 what they would be today. I struggled to get the right 
 dramatic material with a background that would be 
 poetically inspiring; to do the fundamental thinking 
 necessary to construct a modern logical play; and to 
 write lines in the natural un-Elizabethan syntax which 
 modernity and sincerity demand; yet to make sure 
 they had the true poetic quality. To do this success 
 fully is, I think, the finest achievement possible to a 
 poet. 
 
 "What has contemporary American poetry ac-
 
 ;6 OUR POETS 'OF TODAY 
 
 complished? What is its influence? What its future? 
 My answer is that I think the achievement of this 
 poetry, against very great odds, has been splendid. 
 
 "In 1900 almost no portion of the public read mod 
 ern poetry, it was not found on the shelves of the book 
 stores or libraries, and that poetry of great signifi 
 cance could be written by an American was beyond 
 the conception of publishers, editors and public alike. 
 Has a change come? 
 
 "Yes and no. America is not yet a poet's paradise, 
 and will never be except for the poet from abroad, who 
 so easily finds exploitation here. But since the early 
 years of the century the public has gradually become 
 more interested in this primal art, the public libraries 
 have had increasing demands for verse; and finally, 
 since some very fine poets have arisen in America as 
 well as abroad, an interest has culminated which has 
 made it possible for the most freakish of freak verse 
 writers to get in the limelight and how they have 
 danced ! 
 
 "A reaction, as was inevitable, has set in, and there 
 is now a saner tendency to put the freaks in the side 
 show. 
 
 "What influence American poetry of today has had 
 in determining America's present idealistic attitude 
 toward the world, no one can say. In 1914 I expressed 
 the belief, in a preface to 'Collected Plays and Poems,' 
 that the future spirit of America and of American art 
 would be internationalistic or broadly human. To 
 that belief I still hold. The world's greatest poets 
 Shakespeare, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Browning 
 have never striven to be merely nationalist or of the
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 77 
 
 soil. They have but sought the most poetic soil their 
 genius was capable of tilling, and have tilled it with 
 whatever national characteristics they possessed. So I 
 believe the American poets of the future will seek 
 whatever in America or in the world is poetically sig 
 nificant; for between provinciality and universality 
 there can be but one choice. The American of the 
 future who does not shed his provinciality and write 
 for mankind, may attain success but not immortality. 
 Only the provincial which has been of universal im 
 portance to the culture of mankind like the Hebraic 
 or the Greek can abide; and America, I fear, has no 
 such provinciality." 
 
 A typical example of Mr. Rice's writing appeared in 
 The Bellman, that worthy journal where much esti 
 mable poetry is published, and from which the follow 
 ing is quoted : 
 
 AFTER THEIR PARTING 
 (A Woman Speaks) 
 
 You know that rock on a rocky coast, 
 Where the moon came up, a ruined ghost, 
 Distorted until her shape almost 
 
 Seemed breaking? 
 Came up like a phantom silently 
 And dropped her shroud on the red night sea, 
 Then walked, a spectral mystery, 
 
 Unwaking? 
 
 You know this? Then go back some day, 
 When I have gone the moonless way, 
 To that dark rock whereon we lay 
 And waited;
 
 ;8 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 And when the moon has arisen free, 
 Your soiling doubt shall slip from me, 
 And eased of unrest your heart shall be, 
 And sated. 
 
 "Wraiths and Realities," Mr. Rice's most recent 
 work, shows in its contents some war reflections none 
 of which surpass the lines in "Waste" : 
 
 I flung a wild rose into the sea, 
 
 I know not why. 
 
 For swinging there on a rathe rose-tree, 
 By the scented bay and barberry, 
 Its petals gave all their sweet to me, 
 
 As I passed by. 
 
 And yet I flung it into the tide, 
 
 And went my way. 
 I climbed the gray rocks, far and wide, 
 And many a cove of peace I tried, 
 With none of them all to be satisfied, 
 
 The whole long day. 
 
 For I had wasted a beautiful thing, 
 
 Which might have won 
 Each passing heart to pause and sing, 
 On the sea-path there, of its blossoming, 
 And who wastes beauty shall feel want's sting, 
 
 As I had done. 
 
 There are also in this volume many poems sugges 
 tive of various nationalities such as the opening stanza 
 of "Danse MacAbre": 
 
 I heard a great rattle of bones in the night, 
 And saw the dead rise from the earth a sight !
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 79 
 
 They carried them lanterns of will-o'-the-wisps, 
 And their speech cackled and broke with lisps. 
 
 They flung shrouds off and got in a ring, 
 And knuckle to knuckle I saw them spring. 
 Their hair blew off, and skull to skull 
 They gabbled and danced, interminable. 
 
 "A Norse Song" which begins 
 
 Along the coasts of Nevermore 
 A lone loon cries, 
 The gray loon Despair, 
 With a heart that cannot rest. 
 His wail is the world's wail 
 For youth that never dies; 
 And I have listened to it 
 Till the tears are in my eyes, 
 
 is in interesting contrast to "Katenka's Lover," a Rus 
 sian inspired theme. 
 
 Little Katenka took twelve weeds 
 And wove them into a wreath for her hair; 
 Buttercup, rattray and marguerite, 
 Parsley, clover and nettle were there. 
 "I want to behold in dreams," she said, 
 "In magic dreams my destined lover!" 
 And . . . she did; for a weed bane-bred 
 Of peace little Katenka! 
 
 Deep dreams ! so now the ikoned priests 
 Have carried her, at the funeral hour, 
 Out to her princely lover, Death, 
 In the ever-blossoming earth, his bower.
 
 8o OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 And she shall never again desire, 
 But only lie in his arms dreaming. . . . 
 Little Katenka, in a bride-tire 
 Of peace little Katenka ! 
 
 Mr. Rice's books include the following: "The Col 
 lected Plays and Poems," "At the World's Heart," 
 "Porzia," "Far Quests," "The Immortal Lure," "Many 
 Gods," "Nirvana Days," "A Night in Avignon," "Yo- 
 landa of Cyprus," "David," "Charles di Tocca," 
 "Song-Surf" (published by Doubleday, Page & Co.), 
 and "Trails Sunward," and "Earth and New Earth" 
 (published by The Century Co.). 
 
 Conrad Aiken 
 
 "Every sensitive, imaginative, beauty-loving youth 
 lives for a period a dream-life whose great preoccupa 
 tions are love and death, dreamed in a dim borderland 
 between the dusk and dawn of the ideal and the real. 
 It is a delightful land, but one of unsure footing. Be 
 fore the explorer is aware, he steps from sensuousness 
 to the quicksand of sensuality, from a normal eroti 
 cism to the quag of neurosis. Conrad Aiken is the poet 
 of this region and of the passionate shadows that popu 
 late it." 
 
 Thus declares a writer in the New York Times 
 Book Review. But it is good that we have these poets 
 just as we go through those stages of first love, first 
 drink and all the other "firsts" encountered from the 
 adolescent to the more mature stage. 
 
 It was in "Earth Triumphant" that Mr. Aiken gave 
 us a picture of nature beautiful, complete with all its
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 81 
 
 various odors a splendid votive offering to the senses 
 of sight and smell. 
 
 "The Jig of Forslin" showed the dream world in 
 perpetuation of life and the soul of every man, and 
 here were indications of a growth of many promises. 
 
 While his more recent book, "Nocturne of Remem 
 bered Spring" fails to establish this promise, there is 
 rare youth in these lines : 
 
 Mist goes up from the river to dim the stars, . . . 
 And flare of horns, and clang of cymbals, and drums ; 
 And strew the glimmering floor with petals of roses 
 And remember, while rich music yawns and closes, 
 With a luxury of pain, how silence comes. . . . 
 
 It has been said that Mr. Aiken is a psychological 
 poet, and this psychological quality is particularly 
 demonstrated in these lines : 
 
 In the evening, as the lamps are lighted, 
 
 Sitting alone in his strange world, 
 
 He meditates ; and through his musing hears 
 
 The tired footfalls of the dying day 
 
 Monotonously ebb and ebb away 
 
 Into the smouldering west; 
 
 And hears the dark world slowly come to rest. 
 
 Now, as the real world dwindles and grows dim, 
 
 His dreams come back to him: 
 
 Now, as one who stands 
 
 In the aquarium's gloom, by creeping sands, 
 Watching the glide of fish beneath pale bubbles, 
 The bubbles briefly streaming, 
 Cold and white and green, poured in silver, 
 He does not know if this is wake or dreaming;
 
 82 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 But thinks to learn, reach out his hands, and 
 
 swim. . . . 
 
 The music weaves about him, gold and silver ; 
 The music chatters, the music sings, 
 The music sinks and dies. 
 
 Who dies, who lives ? What leaves remain forever ? 
 Who knows the secret of the immortal springs ? 
 Who laughs, who kills, who cries ? 
 
 We hold them all, they walk our dreams forever, 
 
 Nothing perishes in that haunted air, 
 
 Nothing but is immortal there. 
 
 And we ourselves, dying with all our worlds, 
 
 Will only pass the ghostly portal 
 
 Into another's dream; and so live on 
 
 Through dream to dream, immortal. 
 
 Conrad Aiken was born in Savannah, Ga., August 
 5, 1889. He graduated from Harvard in 1912, and 
 married Jessie McDonald of Montreal, Canada, that 
 same year. He lives in Boston. 
 
 Aside from Mr. Aiken's contributions to The Dial in 
 1917, he is the author of "Earth Triumphant and 
 Other Tales," "Turns and Movies," "Nocturne of Re 
 membered Spring," and "Charnel Rose."
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 ROBERT SERVICE, JOHN MCCRAE, EDGAR MIDDLETON 
 
 Robert Service 
 
 While the writer has never seen the royalty state 
 ments of Robert W. Service, it is probable that they 
 would present a showing of figures that would be proof 
 positive of just how financially successful poetry writ 
 ing can be when the popular note is struck. 
 
 Service has been called "The American Kipling" 
 perhaps by the virtue that he is quoted almost as often 
 as his older English contemporary across the sea. 
 
 While "The Songs of a Sourdough" and "The Bal 
 lads of a Cheechako" established his name and fame 
 as a popular poet, he has done the best of his writings 
 so far in "The Rhymes of a Red Cross Man." 
 
 An adventurer in the far North, lured by the prom 
 ises of a gold fortune in the Yukon, like Balboa of 
 old, he found a greater thing than that for which he 
 sought. For here came the inspiration which resulted 
 in such famous lines as these first two stanzas from 
 "The Spell of the Yukon" : 
 
 I wanted the gold, and I sought it ; 
 
 I scrabbled and mucked like a slave. 
 Was it famine or scurvy I fought it ; 
 
 I hurled my youth into a grave. 
 
 83 -
 
 84 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 I wanted the gold, and I got it 
 Came out with a fortune last fall, 
 
 Yet somehow life's not what I thought it, 
 And somehow the gold isn't all. 
 
 No! There's the land. (Have you seen it?) 
 
 It's the cussedest land that I know, 
 From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it 
 
 To the deep, deathlike valley below. 
 Some say God was tired when He made it; 
 
 Some say it's a fine land to shun ; 
 Maybe; but there's some as would trade it 
 
 For no land on earth and I'm one. 
 
 In his "Ballads of a Cheechako" he again is spokes 
 man for the prosecutor and presents his song of the 
 gold hunt in those vigorous lines of "The Trail of 
 '98," which begin: 
 
 Gold ! We leapt from our benches. Gold ! We sprang 
 
 from our stools. 
 Gold! We wheeled in the furrow, fired with the faith 
 
 of fools. 
 
 Fearless, un found, unfitted, far from the night and cold, 
 Heard we the clarion summons, followed the master-lure 
 
 Gold! 
 
 Men from the sands of the Sunland ; men from the woods 
 
 of the West ; 
 Men from the farms and the cities, into the Northland 
 
 we pressed. 
 Graybeards and striplings and women, good men and 
 
 bad men and bold, 
 Leaving our homes and our loved ones, crying exultantly 
 
 "Gold!"
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 85 
 
 The story qualities of these poems is demonstrated 
 by the fact that beginning with the well-known "Shoot 
 ing of Dan McGrew" they have been adapted one by 
 one into successful plays for the motion picture screen. 
 
 Within Service there was a desire that could not be 
 quelled to express the various scenes and adventures 
 through which he was living and so he gave us his 
 poems of real men, "red blood men" they have been 
 called, men who talk in a vigorous tongue, men whose 
 primal instincts and passions spur them to labour, to 
 dream, to achieve, to bow down before defeat in fact, 
 human men. These are the men of "The Spell of the 
 Yukon." 
 
 Service, an ardent motor enthusiast, enlisted as an 
 ambulance driver early in the war. Stories of the 
 bravery of his exploits cannot be given here, but he 
 has faced the shell-stormed road with his loads of 
 wounded, he has lived the things he writes, and just 
 as he has analyzed the Yukon man, so has he inter 
 preted the struggles of the soldier of to-day. 
 
 The war stories that Robert Service tells in "Rhymes 
 of a Red Cross Man" are among the most picturesque 
 things that poetry has produced as a result of the 
 World War. The same vivid stroke that splashed the 
 pages of his Yukon poems with life and adventure is 
 again evidenced with even a stronger amount of feel 
 ing than in his earlier work. 
 
 Among these poems is the dramatic tale of "Jean 
 Desprez." Here Mr. Service pictures a peasant boy 
 of France, who gives a crucified Zouave a cup of cold 
 water during a German invasion in his home village. 
 The effect of this upon the Hun invaders produces
 
 86 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 A roar of rage ! They seize the boy ; they tear him fast 
 
 away. 
 
 The Prussian Major swings around ; no longer is he gay. 
 His teeth are wolfishly agleam; his face all dark with 
 
 spite ; 
 
 "Go, shoot the brat," he snarls, "that dare defy our Prus 
 sian might. 
 Yet stay! I have another thought. I'll kindly be, and 
 
 spare ; 
 Quick ! give the lad a rifle charged, and set him squarely 
 
 there, 
 And bid him shoot, and shoot to kill. Haste ! Make him 
 
 understand 
 The dying dog he fain would save shall perish by his 
 
 hand." 
 
 But the French peasant lad, in spite of the pleas 
 of the Zouave to shoot him, turns the gun upon the 
 Prussian Major instead, and shoots him dead. 
 
 And then there is that little story of "Cocotte," the 
 French girl, whose lover has been called in the war, 
 and who has left her "the rose-wreathed villa at Viro- 
 flay," where they lived together before the war. In 
 Saint Lazare, Cocotte sees two wounded Poilus, one, 
 "a bit of a boy, was blind," and its effect upon her is 
 told by Service as follows : 
 
 "How he stirred me, this blind boy, clinging 
 Just like a child to his crippled chum. 
 But I did not cry. Oh no ; a singing 
 Came to my heart for a year so dumb, 
 Then I knew that at three-and-twenty, 
 There is wonderful work to be done, 
 Comfort and kindness and joy in plenty, 
 Peace and light and love to be won.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 87 
 
 Oh, thought I, could mine eyes be given 
 
 To one who will live in the dark alway! 
 
 To love and to serve 'twould make life Heaven 
 
 Here in my villa at Viroflay. 
 
 So I left my Poilus : and now you wonder 
 
 Why today I am so elate. . . . 
 
 Look! In the glory of sunshine yonder 
 
 They're bringing my blind boy in at the gate." 
 
 In the concluding stanza of "Young Fellow My 
 Lad," Service presents in his own best style the spirit 
 ual side of those words "carry on" 
 
 "So you'll live, you'll live, Young Fellow My Lad, 
 
 In the gleam of the evening star, 
 
 In the wood-note wild and the laugh of the child, 
 
 In all sweet things that are. 
 
 And you'll never die, my wonderful boy, 
 
 While life is noble and true; 
 
 For all our beauty and hope and joy 
 
 We will owe to our lads like you." 
 
 Robert Service was born in Preston, England, on 
 January 16, 1874, the son of Robert Service, man 
 ager of Preston Bank, and Emily Parker of Preston. 
 He was educated at Hillhead Public School, Glasgow, 
 and afterwards served an apprenticeship with the Com 
 mercial Bank of Scotland in the same city. 
 
 Service emigrated to Canada and settled on Van 
 couver Island where he engaged in farming but gave 
 this up for his explorer's life, traveling up and down 
 the Pacific Coast, experiencing many hardships. 
 
 Tiring of this he finally joined the staff of the 
 Canadian Bank of Commerce, in Victoria, B. C., in
 
 88 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 1905 and was transferred to White House, Yukon 
 Territory, and then to Dawson. 
 
 Eight years in the Yukon have resulted in his meta 
 morphosis from a bank employee to one of our most 
 important poets of to-day. 
 
 His books include "Songs of a Sourdough"; "Bal 
 lads of a Cheechako"; "Trail of '98"; "Rhymes of a 
 Rolling Stone" ; "The Pretender" ; and "Rhymes of a 
 Red Cross Man." 
 
 John McCrae 
 
 If one should be asked, "What Canadian poets are 
 contributing to contemporary American poetry?" the 
 answer would be "Robert Service" and there the aver 
 age reader in the United States would stop. 
 
 The Canadian regiments have played one of the 
 most courageous, spectacular and effective parts in the 
 World War and it is natural that from their ranks 
 should come poets. And John McCrae is entitled to a 
 place among our contemporary American poets al 
 though the man himself has paid "the last full measure 
 of devotion." 
 
 Spontaneous and extensive recognition greeted the 
 inspired lines, "In Flanders' Fields" for here was a 
 depth of feeling and experience of tragedy that placed 
 it in the fore of war poems. 
 
 While the following from "In Flanders' Fields" is 
 perhaps the best example of this lieutenant-colonel's 
 work, he has left behind a number of other poems 
 equally as beautiful and which have just been published 
 by Putnams. "In Flanders' Fields" is now known to
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 89 
 
 half the English speaking world, and has been trans 
 lated into a score of languages. 
 
 IN FLANDERS' FIELDS 
 
 In Flanders' fields, the poppies blow 
 Between the crosses, row on row, 
 That mark our place ; and in the sky 
 The larks, still bravely singing, fly, 
 Scarce heard amid the guns below. 
 
 We are the dead. Short days ago 
 We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, 
 Loved and were loved ; and now we lie 
 In Flanders' fields. 
 
 Take up our quarrel with the foe! 
 To you, from failing hands, we throw 
 The torch. Be yours to lift it high ! 
 If ye break faith with us who die 
 We shall not sleep, though poppies blow 
 In Flanders' fields. 
 
 John McCrae was born in Guelph, Ontario, the son 
 of Colonel and Mrs. David McCrae. In civilian life 
 he held the position of lecturer in pathology and medi 
 cine at the Medical School, McGill University. Early 
 in 1914, McCrae who had just arrived in London 
 cabled to Canada, offering his services. He was ap 
 pointed surgeon to the First Brigade of Canadian Ar 
 tillery. He was with the guns along the Ypres sector 
 for a continuous period of fourteen months and here 
 found inspiration for his poems. His health was un 
 dermined by the strain of constant duty and he died
 
 90 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 in France from pneumonia, complicated by meningitis, 
 on January 28, 1918. 
 
 Jesse Edgar Middleton 
 
 Jesse Edgar Middleton, with his "Sea Dogs and 
 Men at Arms," properly designated a Canadian book 
 of songs, has given us a breezy volume of the sea and 
 sailor men in war times. 
 
 His poems fairly bristle with terms of the sea, 
 when he describes a leviathan of the sea in "Missing 
 at Lloyd's," as follows: 
 
 Arch and gusset and sturdy truss 
 
 Riveted strong and true. 
 Plates as firm as the hoary rocks 
 
 Dipping beneath the blue. 
 Spinning turbine and shining shaft, 
 
 Piston and dynamo! 
 With a laugh at the snoring blast 
 
 Into the seas we go. 
 
 Phosphor's light on the raving sea 
 
 Giving us ghostly cheer! 
 Reeling, staggering, nor'-nor'-west 
 
 Into the gale we steer. 
 Arch and rivet and truss give way, 
 
 Turbine and piston cease. 
 Slanting decks and a rocket light ! 
 
 Death and the hills of peace. 
 
 Mr. Middleton can write as well in other forms, to 
 witness, "The Finale," in a section in "Sea Dogs and 
 Men at Arms," which he chooses to call "Moods."
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 91 
 
 THE FINALE 
 
 Now with my comrades, 
 
 Rank on serried rank, 
 
 I march, with soldier laugh 
 
 And rough-hewn jest, 
 
 Past the fair daisy bank, 
 
 Then take my evening rest 
 
 In bosky shades, 
 
 While through the inky glades 
 
 The nightingale 
 
 Hymns his alluring note. 
 
 Above the bivouac 
 
 The moon sails high, 
 
 The cruel five-franc moon, 
 
 Glaring on such as I, 
 
 Doomed, doomed to die, 
 
 On the red sod to lie, 
 
 With fixed blue-purple stare 
 
 Away from love, 
 
 Away from care. 
 
 Mr. Middleton's contrasting study of peace and war 
 is forcibly pictured in his poem of that name : 
 
 PEACE AND WAR 
 
 A pleasant river, clear and blue, 
 
 Went singing to the sea. 
 The sunbeam joined them hand in hand 
 
 To dance the melody. 
 The courtly rushes bowed their heads 
 
 As nobles to the Queen, 
 And saw, reflected in the wave, 
 
 Their coats of Lincoln green.
 
 92 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 God made such horrors? Count that word a lie. 
 God made the pleasant river, clear and blue, 
 Peace is His handiwork, and love, and joy, 
 While man makes sewers and artillery, 
 Grim bayonets, and howitzers and shell, 
 The battle-squadron surging through the tides, 
 Ten thousand hecatombs of reeking red 
 And all the vile magnificence of War. 
 
 Jesse E. Middleton is the only son of the Rev. E, 
 Middleton of the Canadian Methodist Church, and 
 was born in Wellington County, Ontario, Canada, on 
 November 3, 1872. His father is of English birth, 
 but his mother, Margaret Agar, is a native Canadian. 
 His home education, which was very thorough, was 
 supplemented by High School training. 
 
 After four years as a school teacher, Mr. Middleton 
 joined the publishing firm of Burrows Brothers of 
 Cleveland, Ohio, and spent several years there working 
 on the Jesuit Relations. 
 
 He entered journalism in 1899 as political reporter 
 of The Montreal Herald in Quebec City, the provincial 
 capital. Later he was associated with The Quebec 
 Chronicle. 
 
 In 1903, Mr. Middleton came to Toronto as music- 
 critic of The Mail and Empire and after a year of serv 
 ice took up similar work on The Toronto Daily News. 
 He retired from critical work to write a daily column 
 of paragraphs and light verse under the heading "On 
 the Side." This "feature" has awakened a good deal 
 of favourable comment. Mr. Middleton is well-known 
 and highly regarded in Canada. Some of his work is
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 93 
 
 not unknown to the readers of the American maga 
 zines. 
 
 He was married in 1899 to Miss Bessie Alberta 
 Jackson of London, Ontario.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 JOYCE KILMER, ALAN SEEGER, CHARLES DIVINE, 
 JOHN MCCLURE 
 
 Joyce Kilmer 
 
 On a Sunday morning in August, 1918, the great 
 daily papers throughout our country carried this head 
 line: 
 
 JOYCE KILMER, POET, 
 IS KILLED IN ACTION. 
 
 It was a news item of universal interest, for Joyce 
 Kilmer wrote "Trees," and this small lyric of exquisite 
 beauty and simplicity is doubtless one of the best- 
 known among its contemporaries. 
 
 TREES 
 (For Mrs. Henry Mills Alden) 
 
 I think that I shall never see 
 A poem lovely as a tree. 
 
 A tree whose hungry mouth is prest 
 Against the earth's sweet flowing breast ; 
 
 A tree that looks at God all day, 
 And lifts her leafy arms to pray ; 
 
 A tree that may in Summer wear 
 A nest of robins in her hair; 
 94
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 95 
 
 Upon who r e bosom snow has lain ; 
 Who intimately lives with rain. 
 
 Poems are made by fools like me, 
 But only God can make a tree. 
 
 The following letter from Walter Irving Clarke of 
 Auburndale, Mass., appeared in The New York Times 
 soon after the poet's death : 
 
 "I have been looking at the tree tops silhouetted 
 against the sun's sky, and again against the moonlight, 
 and reverently recalling Joyce Kilmer's poem, 'Trees' : 
 
 I think that I shall never see 
 A poem lovely as a tree. 
 
 Poems are made by fools like me, 
 But only God can make a tree. 
 
 "News has just come of Joyce Kilmer's sacrifice of 
 his life on the fields of France. From his boyhood on 
 the banks of the old Raritan, through the fruitful years 
 of his poetic young manhood to his heroism in the fight 
 for freedom, Joyce Kilmer grew strong and beautiful 
 as a tree in the open under the sky. His tribute to the 
 trees is immortal ; his tribute to humanity is celestial : 
 
 I think that I shall never scan 
 A tree as lovely as a man. 
 
 A tree depicts divinest plan, 
 But God himself lives in a man." 
 
 Christopher Morley, writing in The Philadelphia 
 Evening Ledger says : "Joyce Kilmer died as he lived
 
 96 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 'in action/ He found life intensely amusing, un 
 speakably interesting; his energy was unlimited, his 
 courage stout. He attacked life at all points, rapidly 
 gathered its complexities about him, and the more 
 intricate it became the more zestful he found it. Noth 
 ing bewildered him, nothing terrified. By the time he 
 was thirty he had attained an almost unique position in 
 literary circles. He lectured on poetry, he interviewed 
 famous men of letters, he was poet, editor, essayist, 
 critic, anthologist. He was endlessly active, full of 
 delightful mirth and a thousand schemes for outwit 
 ting the devil of necessity that hunts all brainworkers." 
 
 Kilmer, in a letter to the author of this book written 
 shortly before his death, declared that his earlier ef 
 forts in poetry were utterly worthless save one poem 
 called "Pennies" which was eventually published in 
 "Trees and Other Poems." 
 
 "I want all of my poems written before that forgot 
 ten," wrote Kilmer. "They were only the exercises of 
 an amateur, imitations, useful only as technical train 
 ing. If what I nowadays write is considered poetry, 
 then I became a poet in November, 1913. 
 
 "All that poetry can be expected to do is to give 
 pleasure of a noble sort to its readers, leading them 
 to the contemplation of that Beauty which neither 
 words nor sculptures nor pigments can do more than 
 faintly to reflect, and to express the mental and spirit 
 ual tendencies of the people of the lands and times in 
 which it is written. I have very little chance to read 
 contemporary poetry out here, but I hope it is reflecting 
 the virtues which are blossoming on the blood-soaked 
 soil of this land courage and self-abnegation, and
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 97 
 
 love, and faith this last not faith in some abstract 
 goodness, but faith in God and His Son and the Holy 
 Ghost, and in the Church which God Himself founded 
 and still rules. France has turned to her ancient faith 
 with more passionate devotion than she has shown for 
 centuries. I believe that America is learning the same 
 lesson from the war, and is cleansing herself of cyni 
 cism and pessimism and materialism and the lust for 
 novelty which has hampered our national development. 
 I hope that our poets already see this tendency and re 
 joice in it if they do not they are unworthy of their 
 craft. 
 
 "I would venture to surmise that the extravagances 
 and decadence of the so-called 'renascence of poetry' 
 during the last five years a renascence distinguished 
 by the celebration of the queer and the nasty instead of 
 the beautiful have made the poet seem as silly a fig 
 ure to the contemporary American as he seemed to the 
 Englishman of the eighteen-nineties, when the 'aesthetic 
 movement' was at its foolish height." 
 
 Various tributes and appreciations of Joyce Kilmer 
 have followed his death, conspicuous among which is 
 Richardson Wright's intimate study of him, published 
 in The Bellman: 
 
 "The better poet Kilmer became," says Mr. Wright, 
 "the less like a poet he acted. And this better poetry 
 the poetry of simplicity and sincerity toward men and 
 the things men come in contact with was set down 
 in those thirty-one titles that comprise 'Trees and 
 Other Poems.' 
 
 "I believe that he wrote easily and spontaneously, 
 labouring more with his pipe than his pen. The
 
 98 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Twelve-Forty-Five,' if I remember rightly, was writ 
 ten on the 12.45. Strange that he should have said 
 then 
 
 'Perhaps Death roams the hills to-night 
 And we rush forth to give him fight.' 
 
 and that was how he died on a patrol rushed forth, 
 on a little hill." 
 
 Joyce Kilmer was born in New Brunswick, New 
 Jersey, December 6, 1886. He attended Rutledge* 
 College between 1904 and 1906, and secured his de 
 gree of Bachelor of Arts in Columbia University in 
 1908. He married Aline Merry of Norfolk, Virginia, 
 in 1908. Upon receiving his degree, he became an 
 instructor in Latin in the High School at Morristown, 
 New Jersey. But this appealed to him only a short 
 time, and in 1909 he became an editorial assistant on 
 the Standard Dictionary, later editor of The Church 
 man, and in 1913 a member of the staff of the New 
 York Times Review of Books. Much of his verse has 
 appeared in such magazines as The Bellman, The Bos 
 ton Transcript, Colliers, The Outlook, and The Cath 
 olic World. 
 
 Just 17 days after Congress declared war Kilmer en 
 listed in the 7th Infantry and soon attained the office 
 of sergeant. He was acting unofficially in the i65th 
 Infantry of the old Rainbow Division as adjutant to 
 Major Wm. J. Donovan when he met death July 30 
 near Villers-sur-Fere and none in command surpassed 
 the American poet soldier in courage according to his 
 comrades. How well might Kilmer's own lines to that 
 poet who died but a short time before him be applied :
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 99 
 
 IN MEMORY OF RUPERT BROOKE 
 
 In alien earth, across a troubled sea, 
 
 His body lies that was so fair and young. 
 
 His mouth is stopped, with half his songs unsung; 
 
 His arm is still, that struck to make men free. 
 
 But let no cloud of lamentation be 
 Where, on a warrior's grave, a lyre is hung. 
 We keep the echoes of his golden tongue, 
 
 We keep the vision of his chivalry. 
 
 So Israel's joy, the loveliest of kings, 
 
 Smote now his harp, and now the hostile horde. 
 
 To-day the starry roof of Heaven rings 
 
 With psalms a soldier made to praise his Lord ; 
 
 And David rests beneath Eternal wings, 
 Song on his lips, and in his hand a sword. 
 
 Alan Seeger 
 
 While it has been the endeavor of the author to limit 
 this volume solely to American poets who are writing 
 today, the World War has demanded the full price 
 from some of these soldier poets since this work was 
 begun. 
 
 Alan Seeger's world famous poem, "I Have a Ren 
 dezvous with Death," is one of the most popular of 
 the better known war poems. It has reached the hearts 
 of thousands, and will go down in the history of the 
 present war verse with the best of his English con 
 temporary, Rupert Brooke. 
 
 Alan Seeger was born in New York on June 22, 
 1888, His parents, who were of old New England
 
 ioo OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 stock, moved to Staten Island when Alan was but a 
 year old. He was educated in the Staten Island Acad 
 emy, the Horace Mann School, and Harvard College. 
 Before the war was three weeks old, Seeger, with a 
 number of other Americans, enlisted in the Foreign 
 Legion of France. It was a fight and for France, and 
 for the France which he loved. 
 
 Seeger had hoped to have been in Paris on Decora 
 tion Day to read before the statue of Lafayette and 
 Washington, his "Ode in Memory of the American 
 Volunteers Fallen for France," written by him at the 
 request of a committee of American residents, but his 
 leave of absence did not arrive in time. Some critics 
 have found this ode the best of his work. 
 
 "A nobler ode has not come my way," says William 
 Archer in his introduction to Alan Seeger's published 
 poems, from which the following is quoted : 
 
 "Ay, it is fitting on the holiday, 
 
 Commemorative of our soldier dead, 
 
 When, with the sweet flowers of our New England May, 
 
 Hiding the lichened stones by fifty years made gray 
 
 Their graves in every town are garlanded, 
 
 That pious tribute should be given too 
 
 To our intrepid few 
 
 Obscurely fallen here beyond the seas. 
 
 "Now heaven be thanked, we gave a few brave drops; 
 Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops were ours. 
 
 "There, holding still, in frozen steadfastness, 
 Their bayonets toward the beckoning frontiers, 
 They lie our comrades lie among their peers, 
 Gad in the glory of fallen warriors, 
 Grim clusters under thorny trellises,
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 101 
 
 Dry, furthest foam upon disastrous shores, 
 
 Leaves that made last year beautiful, still strewn 
 
 Even as they fell, unchanged, beneath the changing moon ; 
 
 And earth in her divine indifference 
 
 Rolls on, and many paltry things and mean 
 
 Prate to be heard and caper to be seen. 
 
 But they are silent, calm ; their eloquence 
 
 Is that incomparable attitude ; 
 
 No human presences their witness are, 
 
 But summer clouds and sunset crimson-hued, 
 
 And showers and night winds and the northern star. 
 
 Nay, even our salutations seem profane, 
 
 Opposed to their Elysian quietude; 
 
 Our salutations calling from afar, 
 
 From our ignobler plane 
 
 And undistinction of our lesser parts ; 
 
 Hail, brothers, and farewell; you are twice blest, brave 
 
 hearts ; 
 
 Double your glory is who perished thus, 
 For you have died for France and vindicated us." 
 
 But in spite of the perfection in these lines, it will 
 be these more popular lines that shall link his name 
 with the poetry of the World War and the period in 
 which he wrote : 
 
 I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH 
 
 I have a rendezvous with Death 
 
 At some disputed barricade, 
 
 When Spring comes back with rustling shade 
 
 And apple-blossoms fill the air 
 
 I have a rendezvous with Death 
 
 When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
 
 102 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 It may be he shall take my hand 
 And lead me into his dark land 
 And close my eyes and quench my breath- 
 It may be I shall pass him still. 
 I have a rendezvous wfth Death 
 On some scarred slope of battered hill, 
 When Spring comes round again this year 
 And the first meadow-flowers appear. 
 
 God knows 'twere better to be deep 
 Pillowed in silk and scented down, 
 Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep, 
 Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath, 
 Where hushed awakenings are dear. . . . 
 But I've a rendezvous with Death 
 At midnight in some flaming town, 
 When Spring trips north again this year, 
 And I to my pledged word am true, 
 I shall not fail that rendezvous. 
 
 Of his death, William Archer writes : 
 
 "On July i, the great advance began. At six in 
 the evening of July 4, the Legion was ordered to 
 clear the enemy out of the village of Belloy-en-San- 
 terre. Alan Seeger advanced in the first rush, and his 
 squad was enfiladed by the fire of six German machine 
 guns, concealed in a hollow way. Most of them went 
 down, and Alan among them, wounded in several 
 places. But the following waves of attack were more 
 fortunate. As his comrades came up to him, Alan 
 cheered them on; and as they left him behind, they 
 heard him singing a marching song in English : 
 
 Accents of ours were in the Fierce melee.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 103 
 
 They took the village, they drove the invaders out; 
 but for some reason unknown perhaps a very good 
 one the battlefield was left unvisited that night. Next 
 morning, Alan Seeger lay dead." 
 
 There is little to add. He wrote his own best epi 
 taph in the "Ode" : 
 
 And on those furthest rims of hallowed ground 
 Where the forlorn, the gallant charge expires, 
 When the slain bugler has long ceased to sound, 
 And on the tangled wires 
 The last wild rally staggers, crumbles, stops, 
 Withered beneath the shrapnel's iron showers : 
 Now heaven be thanked, we gave a few brave drops, 
 Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops were ours. 
 
 His death was briefly noticed in one or two French 
 papers. The Matin published a translation of part of 
 the poem, "Champagne, 1914-15" and remarked that 
 "Cyrano de Bergerac would have signed it." But 
 France had no time, even if she had the knowledge, 
 to realize the greatness of the sacrifice that had been 
 made for her. That will come later. One day France 
 will know that this unassuming soldier of the Legion, 
 
 Who, not unmindful of the antique debt, 
 Come back the generous path of Lafayette, 
 
 was one whom even she may be proud to have reckoned 
 among her defenders. 
 
 Charles Divine 
 
 It was the War that brought to the full fruit the 
 poems of Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger and John Me-
 
 104 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Crae. It is the war that has developed Private Charles 
 Divine, 27th Division, U.S.A., into one of our most 
 important poets. 
 
 Before the war, Divine was a newspaper reporter 
 on The New York Sun and in idle moments he wrote 
 verses that appeared in Life, Smart Set, and various 
 other magazines. There was a certain charm in these 
 which augured well for the reporter's future as a poet, 
 but it was after his enlistment in the army that as a 
 soldier poet he showed himself able to portray the real 
 spirit of the American citizen soldier. 
 
 Under the title of "City Ways and Company Streets" 
 the best of his soldier poems and poems of civil life 
 have been brought out by Moffat, Yard & Company. 
 Divine makes no attempt to gain exquisite word ef 
 fects. He writes simply, without pretense, of camp 
 life, of its reactions upon the soldier, and of his dreams 
 of the past and the hope of the future. 
 
 "At the Lavender Lantern" is as honest and charm 
 ing a bit of verse as ever came from a poet turned 
 soldier : 
 
 I wonder who is haunting the little snug cafe, 
 
 That place, half restaurant and home, since we have gone 
 
 away ; 
 The candled dimness, smoke and talk, and tables brown 
 
 and bare 
 But no one thinks of tablecloths when love and laughter's 
 
 there. 
 
 I wonder if it's crowded still, three steps below the street, 
 Half hidden from the passing town, where even poets eat ;
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 105 
 
 I wonder if the girls still laugh, the girls whose art was 
 
 play, 
 I wonder who the fellows are that try to make them gay. 
 
 Some said it was Bohemia, this little haunt we knew, 
 Where hearts were high and fortunes low, and onions in 
 
 the stew, 
 
 I wonder if it's still the same, the after dinner ease 
 Bohemia is in the heart, and hearts are overseas. 
 
 Oh, great were all the problems that we settled there, 
 
 with wine, 
 
 And fates of many nations were disposed of, after nine, 
 But France has braved a fate that brought us swarming 
 
 to her shore 
 I wonder who is sitting at the table near the door. 
 
 I wonder who is haunting the little snug cafe, 
 
 That place, half restaurant and home, since we have gone 
 
 away; 
 
 I wonder if they miss me, I don't suppose they do, 
 As long as there are art and girls, and onions in the stew. 
 
 Mr. Grant M. Overton of The New York Sun finds 
 in Divine's verse "the absence of hackneyed ideas and 
 worn old phrases which are the sole stock of most camp 
 verse" and declares that "he writes not for the thou 
 sands but for the tens of thousands." 
 
 Divine is a real poet for he never tries to write of 
 things which he has not seen nor felt. 
 
 "The Moonlight Scrubbers" demonstrates this apt 
 ness. 
 
 Far down the vistaed, tent-lined street, 
 From Blue Ridge Mountains pours the sweet
 
 io6 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Night-kissed bouquet of oak and pine 
 
 That stings the head like potent wine. 
 
 Here soldiers sit bent over tubs 
 
 And wash their clothes with rhythmic rubs. 
 
 Through leaves, white-tipped, each open space 
 
 Floods moonlight, patterned songs, and lace; 
 
 A silver hush on moon-sprayed ground 
 
 Breathes music sweeter than a sound. 
 
 Where beauty is, are loves, desires, 
 
 Night's vague and vibrant softness fires; 
 
 Adventures brighten in the South 
 
 Where romance calls from full-lipped mouth 
 
 And see ! the lifted arms hang still, 
 
 A moment's doubt that guns can kill. 
 
 Then scrubbing hands forget the night: 
 
 "Who's got the soap? The grease sticks tight!" 
 
 Charles Divine was born January 20, 1889, at 
 Binghamton, New York. In a letter written just be 
 fore he sailed for France he wrote, "I don't even know 
 if I was born a poet. There is no record that my 
 father announced to the employees of his insurance of 
 fice the next day : 'Boys, have a cigar ! We've got a 
 little poet down at our house.' 
 
 "I learned later that I was born in a house, and that 
 the house stood close to the shore of the shady Chenan- 
 go River. But neither of my parents put as much 
 emphasis on these facts as they did on the portentous 
 circumstance that their son was born on a 'Sunday 
 evening, when the church bells rang.' The quotation 
 became a familiar one. All through my early years the 
 distinctive augury rang in my ears more than the 
 church bells ever did. The hand of fate had been 
 clearly seen pulling the bell rope. But nothing ever
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 107 
 
 came of this deeply religious significance except that 
 two of my uncles became ministers. 
 
 "I had two grandfathers. One was a soldier in the 
 Civil War, a farmer and a school-teacher. The other 
 was a canal boat skipper. 
 
 "Of the events of my youth, I recall going to public 
 school, a fist-fight with the bully, and getting licked! 
 Selling newspapers. Buying a purple necktie. Spill 
 ing sarsaparilla on it. Getting the nickname 'Chick/ 
 which still survives. Writing the school notes for a 
 local newspaper at a penny an inch. Making Col. 
 Roosevelt my hero. Graduating as class orator (cause 
 and effect). Summers spent reporting on the Bing- 
 hamton Herald and Press, or 'haying it' on my grand 
 father's farm. 
 
 "In the fall of 1907 I entered Cornell University, 
 where for three months I went to bed at night with a 
 breaking heart because the fraternity I liked best hadn't 
 asked me to join. At last the 'bid' came and great 
 exultation ! I had entered the law college, but in Feb 
 ruary, at the beginning of the second term, I realized 
 that I would make but a poor sort of lawyer, and so 
 switched to the College of Arts and Sciences. Sub 
 sequent events followed in this manner : Three years 
 in the Arts College. Writing for the Cornell Daily 
 Sun, The Widow, and The Cornellian, thus helping 
 my father work my way through college. Learning 
 to roll the makings and sing 'close harmony.' Attend 
 ing more clubs than studies. An absence of a year 
 from college, spent as the telegraph editor of the 
 Binghamton Republican and on a cattleboat trip to 
 Europe. The motley crew of cattlemen. One looked
 
 io8 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 like a murderer. The foul, hot bunks in the fo'c's'le. 
 Sleeping at night on bales of hay under an open hatch 
 way and the stars. The continent. Three weeks in 
 Paris. Broke in Liverpool. Fell in again with the 
 'murderer/ who bought me my supper and passage 
 home. 
 
 "Return to college. Making up a year and a half's 
 work in one. Being graduated in June, 1912. Going 
 to New York City in July. Joining the staff of The 
 Sun (elegant for 'I gotta job as reporter'). Cov 
 ering banquets, bread lines, murders, gunmen, million 
 aires, Roosevelt, Wilson, East Side, Fifth Avenue, 
 Chinatown, Bowery, the unemployed, society's di 
 vorces, subway accidents, suffrage speeches, suicides, 
 and more Roosevelt when The Sun made me its staff 
 correspondent for a year with this hero of my youth, 
 who improved his right to that pedestal on closer ac 
 quaintance. 
 
 "Further events : living in Washington Square and 
 Greenwich Village. Growing to love the following : a 
 ride on a Fifth Avenue 'bus, the first cigarette after 
 breakfast, the stories of Booth Tarkington, Joseph 
 Conrad, and Eugene Manlove Rhodes, the poems of 
 anybody, white sails on a blue horizon, open fires in 
 winter, strawberry shortcakes in summer, winding 
 city streets, the walk home from the office at 2 a.m., 
 the wind from the sea, the melancholy tooting of the 
 river-boats at night. Growing to feel an intense 
 hatred for the following: toast without butter, girls 
 who puff cigarettes like a steam launch going phut- 
 phut-phut, Russian novels in which everybody commits 
 suicide except the author, pessimistic people, optimistic
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 109 
 
 people who talk about their optimism, going to bed at 
 night, getting up in the morning, coffee without cream, 
 soiled napkins, fat greasy Germans, fat greasy people, 
 rejection slips, and cold weather. 
 
 "Resigning from The Sun in October, 1916, to have 
 a try at magazine work. Writing stories and verses. 
 Getting some accepted. Getting more rejected. The 
 United States in the War. Trying to enlist and being 
 rejected twice for underweight, wondering, fatuously, 
 what to do next. Hegira to Binghamton. Cottage by 
 the river. Lots of sleep and rustic diet. Gained 
 weight. Appearing at the Binghamton armory for 
 another physical examination. First drinking many 
 quarts of water. Passed examination! 
 
 "July 23, 1917, a private of Co. H., ist Infantry, 
 N. Y. N. G., the captain of which was an old school 
 chum. Drilling. Blisters. Hiking. More blisters. 
 August, a troop train to Van Cortlandt Park, New 
 York City. The farewell parade of the New York 
 guardsmen down Fifth Avenue. September, a troop 
 train to Camp Wadsworth, Spartanburg, S. C. A 
 wilderness, at first. The sport of kings bunking with 
 private soldiers, the best companions in the world! 
 Raising a mustache for foreign service. December, 
 still in camp ! The breaking up of the old 'First' In 
 fantry in order to fill other regiments of the division 
 up to the European war strength. Transferring to the 
 Sanitary Train, where there was another company of 
 Binghamton lads I knew. Talking to a captain, an 
 old friend, who said seductively : Chick, if you want 
 to start for France by the fifteenth of January, join 
 the new outfit I'm getting up.' Joining it. Mustache
 
 I io OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 for foreign service growing fast. January 15, still 
 in camp. February 15 , still in camp. March 15, 
 ditto. April 15, ditto. (Unfair to mustache.) May 
 15, ditto. At last a troop train to an embarkation 
 camp. Another period of waiting several endless 
 weeks. Throbbing mental question : Why doesn't the 
 President put me in a branch of the service where I'll 
 get somewhere ? Oh, why didn't I wait to be drafted 
 and get there first? . . . Then, at length, my trans 
 port. . . . 
 
 "Being with sanitary troops, I expect to go through 
 the war unharmed and come back and be run over by 
 a baby carriage." 
 
 John McClure 
 
 John McClure of Oklahoma, youthful writer of 
 modest airs, is sponsored by that able critic, Mr. H. L. 
 Mencken, one of the editors of Smart Set, author of 
 serious and not so serious critiques and who declares 
 that his judgment of poetry is based solely on the 
 beauty of poetry. He says, "I have little love for 
 long or ambitious poems. My favorites are such men 
 as Heinrich Heine, Robert Herrick, Thomas Campion, 
 Burns at his best, the minor Elizabethans, old ballads 
 and folksongs, Mother Goose. Simple airs and melo 
 dies are what delight me in literature most keenly. I 
 mean to say that it is such verse as the above that has 
 influenced me most in my own work. Pve a great deal 
 of affection for all good English verse, bar none. 
 
 "My only observation on American poetry had bet 
 ter be this, which puzzles me; out of a great many 
 poets who do occasional splendid things, there is not
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY in 
 
 one who does consistently fine work, not one who is a 
 poet of large significance, unless perhaps Sara Teas- 
 dale. I have great admiration and respect for her." 
 
 Mr. McClure first appeared an object for considera 
 tion as a poet in the pages of The Smart Set and his 
 collected poems, many of which had appeared in this 
 periodical, were afterwards published under the title 
 of "Airs and Ballads." 
 
 When Mr. Mencken finds a poet or a writer of any 
 sort in whom he believes, his belief is without stint as 
 is his enthusiasm. For example, he writes in his maga 
 zine: "What I find in these modest airs (the poems of 
 John McClure) is what the late Elijah found in his 
 still small voice ; an assurance and a criticism the first 
 of the making of songs is yet a living art among us, yet 
 young, yet adroit, above all yet natural and innocent. 
 In brief, McClure is the born poet, the poet, first and 
 last, the poet full-fledged from the start, as opposed to 
 all your stock company of sweating poetizers. His 
 simple and perfect songs are to the tortured contrap 
 tions of the self -consecrated messiahs of prosody, with 
 their ding-dong repetitions, their chopped off lines, 
 their cheap shocks, their banal theorizings, their idiotic 
 fustian these songs of his are to such tedious gab- 
 blings as the sonorous lines of Swinburne were to the 
 cacophonous splutters of Browning, the poet of peda 
 gogues and old maids, male and female. What we 
 have here is the Schubert complex the whole pack of 
 professors and polyphonists routed by a shepherd play 
 ing a pipe." 
 
 Whether one shares Mr. Mencken's whole-hearted
 
 ii2 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 enthusiasm or not, John McClure's simple songs may 
 best be judged by his "Elf's Song" : 
 
 She came in the garden walking 
 When shadows begin to steal ; 
 
 She trod upon a wing o' mine 
 And broke it with her heel. 
 
 She was a very queen, I think, 
 
 A queen from the West, 
 I should have only smiled 
 
 Had she stepped on my breast. 
 
 But I have told nobody, 
 
 I have told nobody yet! 
 I have told nobody 
 
 Only the violet. 
 
 Or the opening lines to "The Celts" : 
 
 We are the gre} r dreamers 
 
 With nets of moonlight 
 That always go a-hunting 
 
 About the fall o' night. 
 
 True, there are some immature spots in his work. 
 There is a fondness for comparisons to jewels that is 
 similar to George Sterling, over-use of such trite and 
 inexpressive words as "red gold," "white silver," 
 "lady," "hoary head," and "wee." But these are only 
 specks on the surface of such lines as : 
 
 But she shall dress more strangely still: 
 In all men's eyes she shall be seen 
 
 To wear my little silver dreams 
 Like tinkling trinkets of a queen.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 113 
 
 Ay, queenlike, she shall move them all 
 
 To adoration and desire ; 
 For she shall wear my golden dreams 
 
 As though they were a robe of fire. 
 
 Or in his lines called "Man to Man" : 
 
 Better it were, my brother, 
 
 You twain had never met, 
 Then were no hearts broken 
 
 And no dream to forget. 
 
 Now you must not remember, 
 
 After you are gone, 
 The mystic magic of her eyes 
 
 At twilight nor at dawn. 
 
 Now you must not remember 
 The songs her red lips sing 
 
 Of love and lovers' ecstasy 
 At dawn or evening. 
 
 An interesting comment on McClure's work was re 
 cently made to me by one of his contemporaries : 
 
 "John McClure's 'Airs and Ballads' impress me as 
 the work of a man who has not (and perhaps, cannot) 
 outgrow the impulse to enthusiasm which is character 
 istic of young writers of the romantic school. There 
 is in his poems a certain naivete, a certain artless sim 
 plicity which his very real lyrical ability makes quite 
 charming. In reading him I feel as though I were in 
 the presence of an unusually well-bred youth who 
 wishes to forget his 'good breeding' in favor of a more 
 impulsive and less 'civilise' attitude toward life and
 
 ii4 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 toward his own experiences. The result is not without 
 beauty (at times, as in 'The Lass of Galilee' the author 
 reaches a very high mark of poetic feeling), but at the 
 same time I imagine that I detect the note of 'fabrica 
 tion'; not the species of deliberate fabrication prac 
 tised by the great decadents and lovers of artifice (as 
 Huysmans, Baudelaire, Mendes, Rimbaud, 'Maldoror' 
 and others) but a kind of straining after pure simplic 
 ity which it is very hard to succeed in especially in 
 these days when nothing can escape the influence of the 
 cosmopolitan spirit. . . . However, I like McClure; 
 I like him because he has lyrical charm, because he is 
 indifferent to all the ceremonials of adoration for the 
 Muse of Poetry. McClure is an independent: poetry 
 is not a ritual with him, but a simple, human need. I 
 think that, if he should ever acquire subtlety, he could 
 with his technical ability turn out some very powerful 
 things. At present he is a singer, a 'troubadour' 
 and perhaps well content to remain one." 
 
 Out in Oklahoma with its sun-baked roads, fields of 
 corn and wheat and cotton, McGure lived and wrote 
 until the war when he entered service in the 394th 
 Cavalry. It must be gratifying to Oklahoma and the 
 Middle West to know that Oklahoma has produced an 
 American poet in interesting contrast to those of the 
 New England states and the East. 
 
 McClure was born in Ardmore on December 19, 
 1893, of a Southern family of Scotch Irish descent. 
 He is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma, of 
 which he was later an assistant librarian. 
 
 In 1913 and 1914 he was in Paris with Henry Mc- 
 Cullough, who was then studying art.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 115 
 
 "I did nothing whatever there," says Mr. McClure, 
 "except catch vers libre, from which I believe I have 
 recovered." 
 
 "Poetry? . . . " he writes, 
 
 "The voice that leaps up 
 
 "With the spring water 
 
 "And thunders 
 
 "Out of the mountain." 
 
 Mr. McClure is a member of the national hobo fra 
 ternity "Quo Vadis" and has tramped about 2,000 
 miles in the Southwest. 
 
 He has also compiled and edited "The Stag's Horn- 
 Book," a bachelor's anthology of verse.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 CHARLES WHARTON STORK, GEORGE STERLING, LOUIS 
 
 UNTERMEYER, JOHN GOULD FLETCHER, JOHN 
 
 HALL WHEELOCK 
 
 Charles Wharton Stork 
 
 Like some great morality play written in lines of 
 clear poetic beauty, is Charles Wharton Stork's "Sea 
 and Bay," which he chooses to call a poem of New 
 England. This limitation, however, is wrong, for it 
 might more properly be called The Journey of Every 
 Youth as it is the story of Man's spiritual develop 
 ment his restlessness in the bay the home ; his long 
 ing for the sea the world and then its climactic fusion 
 of sea and bay. 
 
 So that at last within me bay and sea, 
 My peaceful boyhood and my stormy prime, 
 Unite their warring natures and are one. 
 
 This narrative poem is the best of Mr. Stork's poetic 
 works, superior to "The Queen of Orplede," or "Day 
 Dreams of Greece," or even that original imaginative 
 poem, "Flying Fish : an Ode." 
 
 The central character of "Sea and Bay" is Alden 
 Carr, who describes his youth : 
 
 116
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 117 
 
 I made no friends ; as soon as school was done 
 
 I used to trudge off gravely by myself 
 
 To lord it in the kingdom of my choice; 
 
 A pebbly beach, walled in on every side 
 
 By scarred gray cliffs that shut the world of school 
 
 And farm completely out, yet left me free 
 
 To share the gladness of the romping waves, 
 
 And steep my being in the soft warm air. 
 
 The spirit of adventure, desire to live, a weariness 
 of a curbed and routine life, come to Alden with his 
 first sight of the ocean. 
 
 For when those Atlas arms of swimming blue 
 Reached out as if to bring heaven down to me, 
 I knew myself akin to that wide scene 
 By the great throb with which I leaped to it there 
 And caught it to my spirit. 
 
 Written for the main part in free verse, but ever 
 possessing harmonious cadence, there are various 
 breaks in Stork's general style with lines like the sea 
 song with which the book begins : 
 
 I have lent myself to thy will, O Sea ! 
 
 To the urge of thy tidal sway; 
 My soul to thy lure of mystery, 
 My cheek to thy lashing spray. 
 
 For there's never a man whose blood runs warm 
 But would quaff the wine of the brimming storm. 
 As the prodigal lends have I lent to thee, 
 For a day or a year and a day. 
 
 The shores recede, the great sails fill,
 
 Ii8 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 The lee rail hisses under, 
 As we double the cape of Lighthouse Hill 
 Where sea and harbor sunder. 
 
 Then here's to a season of glad unrest ! 
 With an anchor of hope on the seaman's breast, 
 Till I claim once more from thy savage will 
 A soul that is fraught with wonder. 
 
 Mr. Stork's command of words is admirable, and 
 his expression of life's thoughts, too often expressed 
 tritely, with him take on new light : 
 
 No matter how or where, the crucial point 
 Of each man's life is when he leaves the bay, 
 Spreads his white sails before the ruffling breeze, 
 And takes the first plunge of the hollow surge. 
 Oh, thrill of first adventure! Overhead 
 Flew pearly cloudlets ; on our lee the cliffs, 
 So formidable once, were fading low; 
 Beneath, the cloven waves' translucent green 
 Spring into spray along the dipping stem; 
 And somewhere out beyond those curling crests 
 Lay, golden as with promise, the unknown. 
 
 To revert again to the theme of "Sea and Bay" 
 Alden, leaving behind him the home life of the bay, 
 visits France and Italy. He sees the false Paris but 
 later discovers 
 
 Like a deep stream that runs through stagnant pools, 
 The true French people, clean and pure and strong. 
 
 And that 
 
 Art after all is just a sort of dress 
 
 For soul: sometimes too meagre, oftener though 
 
 Too rich.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 119 
 
 Altho Carr is disappointed in his first love, when 
 on returning home from a long trip, he learns of the 
 betrothal of the sweetheart of his youth to his brother, 
 he finally finds true love and builds a home in sight 
 of both bay and sea. 
 
 Charles Wharton Stork was born on February 12, 
 1 88 1, in Philadelphia and studied at Haverford, Har 
 vard and the University of Pennsylvania. He has 
 done much for furthering interests in modern poetry 
 both in America and abroad as Editor of Contemporary 
 Verse, a monthly magazine devoted solely to original 
 poems. He makes his home in Philadelphia but in the 
 summer lives in a little house far up on the New Eng 
 land coast which he calls "The Stork's Nest." 
 
 George Sterling 
 
 There is a certain richness of words that dis 
 tinguishes the poetry of George Sterling, whose writ 
 ings were first so popular upon the Pacific coast, and 
 which in good time have found their way into the 
 hearts of a less local American audience. 
 
 Although of almost perfect craftsmanship, Mr. 
 Sterling's poems are inclined to cloy by sheer heavi 
 ness of splendor. An example of this is found in the 
 name poem of his collected verse, "The House of 
 Orchids." 
 
 And in its antic flight 
 Behold the vampire-bat veer off from thee 
 
 As from a phantom face, 
 Or watch Antares' light peer craftily 
 
 Down from the dank and moonless sky,
 
 120 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 As goblins' eyes might gleam 
 
 Or baleful rubies glare, 
 Muffled in smoke or incense-laden air. 
 And thou, most weird companion, thou dost seem 
 
 Some mottled moth of Hell, 
 
 That stealthily might fly 
 To hover there above the carnal bell 
 Of some black lily, still and venomous, 
 
 And poise forever thus. 
 
 Sterling delights in the use of jewel-like compari 
 sons, and many of his poems scintillate with this 
 jeweled brilliancy. In them is color in abundance and 
 often a touch of delicate fantasy : 
 
 Then from the maelstroms of the surf arose 
 With laughter, mystical, and up the sands 
 Came two that walked with intertwining hands 
 Amid those ocean snows. 
 
 Ghostly they shone before the lofty spray 
 Fairer than gods and naked as the moon, 
 The foamy fillets at their ankles strewn 
 Less marble-white than they. 
 
 Laughing they stood, then to our beacon's glare 
 Drew nearer, as we watched in mad surprise 
 The scarlet-flashing lips, the sea-green eyes, 
 The red and tangled hair. 
 
 George Sterling was born at Sag Harbor, New York, 
 on December i, 1869, the son of George Ansel and 
 Mary Parker (Havens) Sterling. He was educated 
 in private and public schools and at St. Charles Col 
 lege, Elliott City, Md t
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 121 
 
 He was married to Miss Carrie Rand, of Oakland, 
 Cal., February 7, 1896. 
 
 Mr. Sterling's works include "The House of Or 
 chids," "The Testimony of the Suns" and "A Wine 
 of Wizardy." 
 
 Louis Untermeyer 
 
 In the dedication of "These Times," by Louis Un 
 termeyer, he has written "To Robert Frost, Poet and 
 Person." Were these too few and inadequate com 
 ments on Mr. Untermeyer's work to bear a dedication 
 it would read, "To Louis Untermeyer, Poet and Friend 
 of Poets" for his talents, both as poet and critic, have 
 fallen upon fertile soil. 
 
 Mr. Untermeyer's verses have appeared in various 
 magazines, and include "First Love," "Challenge 
 and Other Poems," "Heinrich Heine," a translation of 
 325 poems, and "These Times." 
 
 His poems show a broad horizon as a creator and 
 interpreter. Of this last characteristic one needs but 
 turn to his translations of Heine, which are among the 
 best that have been done. 
 
 As a realist, note the following from "On the Pali 
 sades" : 
 
 Like a blue snake uncoiled, 
 
 The lazy river, stretching between the banks, 
 
 Smoothed out its rippling folds, splotchy with sunlight, 
 
 And slept again, basking in silence. 
 
 A sea-gull chattered stridently; 
 
 We heard, breaking the rhythms of the song, 
 
 The cough of the asthmatic motor-boat 
 
 Sputtering toward the pier. . . , 
 
 And stillness again,
 
 122 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 He declared to Beauty 
 
 You shall not lead me, Beauty 
 
 No, on no more passionate and never-ending quests. 
 
 I am tired of stumbling after you, 
 
 Through wild, familiar forests and strange bogs ; 
 
 Tired of breaking my heart following a shifting light. 
 
 Mr. Untermeyer, who is thirty-two years of age, de 
 clares that his childhood was a "school-hating" one, 
 and his Alma Mater, the "radical" De Witt Clin 
 ton High School. 
 
 He says that as a younger man if one may speak 
 in such terms of thirty-two his taste in literature was 
 execrable. "There was even a time when I consid 
 ered Alfred Noyes a great poet. My taste in music 
 was a far different matter. At sixteen I came peri 
 lously near being a concert pianist I can still play 
 most of Beethoven, Brahms, and Schumann without 
 threats from the neighbors. Started to write extremely 
 bad essays and even worse poetry at the age of seven 
 teen. Up to then, my life was blameless ! Upon the 
 birth of a son, I became convinced that children must 
 be fed. My wife also seemed to require food. Where 
 upon, after flirting with the idea of writing songs for 
 the concert stage, I entered the jewelry manufacturing 
 concern of my father of which establishment I am 
 now designer, superintendent, and vice-president." 
 
 John Gould Fletcher 
 
 Miss Amy Lowell, who classes herself with the 
 imagists, declares that imagism is presentation, not 
 representation, and for example cites Mr. Fletcher's
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 123 
 
 poem, "The Calm," conforming to the imagists' idea of 
 not speaking of the sea as "the rolling wave" or the 
 "vasty deep" but thus: 
 
 At noon I shall see waves flashing, 
 White power of spray. 
 
 The steamers, stately, 
 
 Kick up white puffs of spray behind them. 
 
 The boiling wake 
 
 Merges in the blue-black mirror of the sea. 
 
 That suggestion, the implication of something rather 
 than the statement of it which is one of the marked 
 characteristics of imagists' verse is thus demonstrated 
 by Mr. Fletcher in "The Well" : 
 
 The well is not used now 
 Its waters are tainted. 
 
 I remember there was once a man went down 
 
 To clean it. 
 
 He found it very cold and deep, 
 
 With a queer niche in one of its sides, 
 
 From which he hauled forth buckets of bricks and dirt. 
 
 At the age of eleven years, John Gould Fletcher was 
 sent to school for the first time and then he began to 
 write verses. In 1899 ne entered high school and was 
 graduated in 1902. Later to Philips Academy, An- 
 dover, to prepare for Harvard, which plans he aban 
 doned and sailed to Europe in August of 1908. He 
 has lived much abroad since and his European life 
 rather than American is reflected in a major portion 
 of his work.
 
 I2 4 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 An interesting bit of art is his "The Vowels" which 
 he dedicated to Leon Bakst: 
 
 A light and shade, E green, I blue, U purple and yellow, 
 
 O red, 
 All over my soul and song your lambent variations are 
 
 spread. 
 
 A, flaming caravans of day advancing with stately art 
 Through pale, ashy deserts of grey to the shadowy dark 
 
 of the heart ; 
 
 Barbaric clangor of cataracts, suave caresses of sails, 
 Caverned abysms of silence, assaults of infuriate gales ; 
 Dappled vibrations of black and white that the bacchanal 
 
 valleys track; 
 Candid and waxlike jasmine, amaranth sable black. 
 
 E, parakeets of emerald shrieking perverse in the trees, 
 Iridescent and restless chameleons tremulous in the 
 
 breeze, 
 
 Peace on the kaves, peace on the sea-green sea, 
 Ethiopian timbrels that tinkle melodiously : 
 I, Iris of night, hyacinthine, semi-green, 
 Intensity of sky and of distant sea dimly seen, 
 Chryselephantine image, Athena violet-crowned, 
 Beryl-set sistra of Isis ashiver with infinite sound: 
 Bells with amethyst tongues, silver bells, E and I, 
 Tears that drip on the wires, Aeolian melody ! 
 
 It was under the title "Irraditions Sand and 
 Spray" that Mr. Fletcher's style of writing was pre 
 sented in April, 1915, here. In his preface he argues 
 in favor of vers libre. He says : "The basis of Eng 
 lish poetry is rhythm, or, as some would prefer to call 
 it, cadence. This rhythm is obtained by mingling 
 stressed and unstressed syllables. . . .
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 125 
 
 "I maintain that poetry is capable of as many grada 
 tions in cadence as music is in time. We can have a 
 rapid group of syllables what is called a line suc 
 ceeded by a slow heavy one; like the swift scurrying 
 of the wave and the sullen dragging of itself away. 
 Or we can gradually increase or decrease our tempo, 
 creating accelerando and rallentando effects." 
 
 In April, 1916 came "Goblins and Pagodas" which 
 contains his much discussed "Green Symphony." 
 
 In contrast to Mr. Robinson's picture of Lincoln, it 
 is of interest to note the beginning of Mr. Fletcher's 
 study of the same theme : 
 
 Like a gaunt, craggly pine 
 
 Which lifts its head above the mournful sandhills; 
 And patiently, through dull years of bitter silence, 
 Untended and uncared for, starts to grow. 
 
 Ungainly, labouring, huge, 
 
 The wind of the north has twisted and gnarled its 
 
 branches ; 
 Yet in the heat of midsummer days, when thunderclouds 
 
 ring the horizon, 
 
 A nation of men shall rest beneath its shade. 
 
 / 
 
 John Hall Wheelock 
 
 Three books of love poems, poems of nature, red 
 olent of the sea, and the various wonders of the stars 
 and flowers, bear the name of John Hall Wheelock 
 as author. In 1911 Mr. Wheelock's "The Human 
 Fantasy" was published. Here are pictures of the city 
 more specifically such things as "The Italian Res 
 taurant" :
 
 126 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 "And the canary silent on the wall 
 
 Trilled through the smoky air; 
 The clever bird, it never sang at all 
 
 He said, till she was there." 
 
 And "The Theater-Hour" : 
 
 "At night the city's dazzling ways 
 
 Flare dizzily, like fierce and flaming suns, 
 A million lights all scattering at once 
 
 A garish glare abroad and desolate blaze. 
 
 The narrow canons and the gorges deep 
 Cut south and north in many a lurid line, 
 Like the starred streets of luminous heaven shine 
 
 That from the center to the circle sweep." 
 
 A year later Mr. Wheelock brought out "The Be 
 loved Adventure," a generous volume of verse, con 
 spicuous for its sea poems. Typical of the best of 
 these are: 
 
 The somber waters move where sky and cloud-line are, 
 The odor of all the sea is huge within the night; 
 
 Within her spray hangs drenched the jeweled evening star. 
 
 Still the hand of twilight with darkness strokes and stills 
 The somber and immense breast of the swelling sea, 
 
 And the pale hand of dawn across the darkness spills 
 Her clear and crystal cup of radiant ecstasy ; 
 
 The white, immaculate waste of morning sobs and thrills ! 
 
 His "Moon-Dawn" shows his ardent worship of the 
 beautiful : 
 
 "O Loveliness ! O Light ! God ! O seraphic Breath ! 
 Radiant Supreme ! For this one moment now
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 127 
 
 I thank Thee, thank Thee, thank Thee; I bless Thee 
 
 from beneath 
 
 I thank Thee, I cannot say I cannot tell Thee how! 
 O Beauty, thou atonest for all things, even death !" 
 
 Mr. Wheelock has an almost Balzacian relish in 
 writing about dead loves, a theme of which he appar 
 ently never tires, and his lines are filled with such 
 descriptions. 
 
 His latest work, "Love and Liberation," contains 
 "The Songs of Adshed of Meru and Other Poems." 
 Here is the oriental influence upon Mr. Wheelock's 
 writing, conspicuous among which are his lines on 
 "Bird-Songs and Roses," which ends with the follow 
 ing song : 
 
 Life went forth in the strength 
 Of the morning from his lair 
 
 The first young joy he found, 
 He seized it by the hair. 
 
 So ruthlessly your heart 
 
 Against my own I pressed, 
 And whirled against my own 
 
 The radiance of your breast. 
 
 But clinging about my neck 
 
 Your arms to a taming yoke 
 Grew, that stilled my heart; 
 
 Love within me awoke. 
 
 Then at first was I sad , 
 
 But the old, the rebellious strength 
 
 Tore my lips apart, 
 
 Turned to a song at length !
 
 128 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Song at the source of Song 
 
 Sweet it is to confess, 
 And loveliness to humble 
 
 At the feet of Loveliness. 
 
 John Hall Wheelock was born at Far Rockaway, 
 Long Island, New York, in 1886. He attended Har 
 vard University, the University of Gottingen, and 
 the University of Berlin. He is a conspicuous member 
 of the Poetry Society of America, and makes his home 
 in New York City. As a contributor to Scribners, 
 Harpers, and The Century magazines his work has 
 been widely circulated. His works include "The Hu 
 man Fantasy," "The Beloved Adventure" and "Love 
 and Liberation."
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 CARL SANDBURG, FREDERICK MORTIMER CLAPP, DONALD 
 
 EVANS, EZRA POUND, BENJAMIN DE CASSERES, 
 
 ROY HELTON 
 
 Carl Sandburg 
 
 "Carl Sandburg is an observer with sympathy but 
 without fear. . . . He puts words to the uses of 
 bronze. His music at times is of clearest sweetness 
 like the tinkling of blue chisels, at other times it has 
 the appropriate harshness of resisting metal." 
 
 So Carl Sandburg is endorsed by Edgar Lee Masters 
 for his "Chicago Poems," published in April, 1916. 
 
 A number of poems included in this certainly orig 
 inal volume were first printed in Poetry: A Magazine 
 of Verse, Chicago, Poetry, and in Reedy's Mirror. 
 Their creator is a man who glories in free verse, 
 whose lines are sometimes almost primeval in their 
 intensity but they are American to the core, and re 
 echo something of Whitman in both form and expres 
 sion. 
 
 Sandburg's "Chicago" has much of the vim found in 
 Whitman's lines: 
 
 Hog Butcher for the World, 
 Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, 
 
 129
 
 130 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler ; 
 Stormy, husky, brawling, 
 City of the Big Shoulders: 
 
 They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I 
 
 have seen your painted women under the gas lamps 
 
 luring the farm boys. 
 And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, 
 
 it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free 
 
 to kill again. 
 And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is : On the 
 
 faces of women and children I have seen the marks 
 
 of wanton hunger. 
 
 Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois, in 
 1878 of Swedish parents. His mother had but two 
 years of schooling and his father, three months. In 
 Sweden he bore the name of August Johnson, but 
 there were so many other August Johnsons on the 
 pay roll of the Burlington railroad shop where he was 
 employed as a blacksmith that the family name was 
 changed to Sandburg. 
 
 Carl, when thirteen years old, left school to enjoy the 
 sights of Galesburg from the seat of a milk- wagon, 
 which position he resigned to become respectively, 
 porter in a barber shop, scenery-mover in a theatre, 
 driver of a truck in a brickyard kiln, and moulder of 
 clay in a pottery shop. 
 
 The call of the West entered this youth's being at 
 the age of seventeen. He dish-washed in Denver, 
 worked in a construction camp, threshed wheat in 
 Kansas, and finally returned to Galesburg to learn the 
 painter's trade. And then war with Spain was de-
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 131 
 
 clared and Sandburg enlisted in Company C of the 
 Sixth Illinois Volunteers, the first company to set foot 
 on the island of Porto Rico. When mustered out, he 
 had $100.00 in cash, the largest sum he had ever pos 
 sessed in his life. He forthwith returned to Galesburg 
 ajid took a course in Lombard College. At the end 
 of his first year various of the men of his military 
 company voted him a cadetship at West Point, where 
 he passed 99% physically and qualified in everything 
 but arithmetic, which was a sorry failure. 
 
 Back to Lombard he went where he earned his 
 tuition and expense by ringing the college bell and act 
 ing as janitor in the gymnasium. Then the desire 
 for self-expression came, and he became editor of his 
 college monthly paper, and editor and chief writer of 
 an annual called The Cannibal, and the college cor 
 respondent for a newspaper. 
 
 Galesburg at the time of Sandburg's stay was des 
 tined to produce some noteworthy men, among whom 
 were John Finley, the educator ; Frank H. Sisson, well- 
 known in the magazine world; Ben B. Hampton and 
 other men who have since become famous as writers, 
 singers, and explorers. 
 
 Sandburg left college in 1907, and began the trip 
 to Wisconsin where he spoke on street corners and at 
 factory gates, wrote leaflets and pamphlets, and worked 
 as a district organizer for the Social-Democratic party 
 of Wisconsin. He also worked on various newspapers 
 and magazines, and is at present on the editorial staff 
 of the Chicago Daily News. 
 
 Sandburg declares that his "pals" are his wife and
 
 132 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 two daughters who have cured him forever of the 
 wanderlust. 
 
 Carl Sandburg was awarded the Helen Haire Lev- 
 inson prize of $200 in 1914 by The Poetry magazine 
 editorial board for the "best poem written by a citizen 
 of the United States" and submitted to Poetry. The 
 editorial board was divided two to two, and the de 
 ciding vote was cast by Hobart Chatfield-Taylor. 
 
 Sandburg's poems are generally written first in a 
 pocket note-book "at or near some storm center down 
 town in the daytime." They are then rewritten at 
 home at night. His latest work is "The Corn Husk- 
 ers," published in the fall of 1918. 
 
 Whenever a Chicagoan pays tribute to the Muses of 
 Poetry and Prose, one is always prepared for some 
 sort of a slap at Broadway. To witness Mr. Sand 
 burg's idea of that great avenue, 
 
 BROADWAY 
 
 I shall never forget you, Broadway, 
 Your golden and calling lights. 
 
 I'll remember you long, 
 Tall-walled river of rush and play. 
 
 Hearts that know you hate you 
 
 And lips that have given you laughter 
 
 Have gone to their ashes of life and its roses, 
 
 Cursing the dreams that were lost 
 
 In the dust of your harsh and trampled stones. 
 
 In the following poem, however, Mr. Sandburg has 
 brought into play all the beauty of words, of which art 
 he is master.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 133 
 
 In the loam we sleep, 
 In the cool moist loam, 
 To the lull of years that pass, 
 And the break of stars. 
 
 From the loam, then, 
 The soft warm loam, 
 
 We rise; 
 
 To shape of rose leaf, 
 Of face and shoulder, 
 
 We stand, then, 
 
 To a whiff of life 
 Lifted to the silver of the sun 
 Over and out of the loam 
 A day. 
 
 This poem is in "Others, An Anthology of the New 
 Verse" edited by Alfred Kreymborg. 
 
 The section of his book devoted to his war poems 
 is worthy of consideration among some of the most 
 striking lines that have found their inspiration in the 
 World War. 
 
 MURMURINGS IN A FIELD HOSPITAL 
 
 (They picked him up in the grass where he had lain two 
 days in the rain with a piece of shrapnel in his lungs.) 
 
 Come to me only with playthings now. . . . 
 
 A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes 
 
 Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sun 
 flowers. . . . 
 
 Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling 
 stories 
 
 Of days that never happened anywhere in the world. . . .
 
 134 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 No more iron cold and real to handle, 
 
 Shaped for a drive straight ahead. 
 
 Bring me only beautiful useless things. 
 
 Only old home things touched at sunset in the quiet. . . . 
 
 And at the window one day in summer 
 
 Yellow of the new crock of butter 
 
 Stood against the red of new climbing roses. . . . 
 
 And the world was all playthings. 
 
 WARS 
 
 In the old wars drum of hoofs and the beat of shod feet. 
 In the new wars hum of motors and the tread of rubber 
 
 tires. 
 In the wars to come silent wheels and whirr of rods not 
 
 yet dreamed out in the heads of men. 
 
 In the old wars kings quarreling and thousands of men 
 following. 
 
 In the new wars kings quarreling and millions of men 
 following. 
 
 In the wars to come kings kicked under the dust and mil 
 lions of men following great causes not yet dreamed 
 out in the heads of men. 
 
 The poem of Sandburg's which shows how poetic 
 form in its generalities may be disregarded and still 
 be effective is shown in "Sheep" : 
 
 Thousands of sheep, soft-footed, black-nosed sheep 
 one by one going up the hill and over the fence one by 
 one four-footed pattering up and over one by one wig 
 gling their stub tails as they take the short jump and go 
 over one by one silently unless for the multitudinous 
 drumming of their hoofs as they move on and go over
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 135 
 
 thousands and thousands of them in the grey haze of 
 evening just after sundown one by one slanting in a 
 long line to pass over the hill 
 
 I am the slow, long-legged Sleepyman and I love you, 
 sheep in Persia, California, Argentine, Australia, or Spain 
 you are the thoughts that help me when I, the Sleepy 
 man, lay my hands on the eyelids of the children of the 
 world at eight o'clock every night you thousands and 
 thousands of sheep in a procession of dusk making an 
 endless multitudinous drumming on the hills with your 
 hoofs. 
 
 Frederick Mortimer Clapp 
 
 In "New York and Other Verses" Frederick Morti 
 mer Clapp approaches the standards of writing laid 
 down by Whitman. Certainly no poet since Whit 
 man's day has gauged better the pulse of the city, 
 than Clapp. The soul of the city that Ernest Poole 
 depicts so well in "The Harbor" is done by Clapp in 
 "New York and Other Verses" ; bear witness to the 
 titles even that he selects "My Own City," "Ware 
 houses," "Steam," "Trade," and "Brooklyn Bridge." 
 
 Here is a poet whose use of words achieves a de 
 scriptive value found in the work of too few American 
 poets. In his poem, "The Warehouses" he writes: 
 
 . . . the curd-white soaps that they make in Jaffa, 
 
 crated in cubes and inert and labelled 
 
 quantity, quality, weight and size; 
 
 and a hundred thousand sacks of grain 
 
 in which lies hidden 
 
 a whole fierce summer's sun on Dakotan prairies 
 
 a hundred thousand sacks of grain 
 
 stacked like cubes and inert and labelled.
 
 136 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 There are floors that groan with figs of Smyrna, 
 
 and Biskran dates; 
 
 there are cumquats from the Inland Sea, 
 
 crated and stacked and inert and labelled ; 
 
 there are stiffened hides of a race of cattle 
 
 that hardly a year ago 
 
 filled the skies with the dust of their trampling 
 
 on Argentine plateaux, 
 
 bale upon bale and inert and labelled. 
 
 Frederick Mortimer Clapp was born in New York 
 City on July 26, 1879. He prepared under a private 
 tutor and entered the College of the City of New York 
 in January of the Sophomore year. He was awarded 
 two year honors in English, and secured the Larned 
 Fellowship and was a member of Phi Gamma Delta be 
 fore entering Yale. He was married to Miss Maud 
 Caroline Ede, author of that remarkable book, "A 
 Green Tent in Flanders," one of the most artistic 
 achievements to come out of the World War. 
 
 Mr. Clapp's publications include: "On Certain 
 Drawings of Pontormo," "Les Dessins de Pontormo," 
 "II ritratto d' Allessandro de'Medici nella raccolta 
 Johnson," "On the Overland," "On the Overland and 
 Other Poems," "Jacopo Carucci de Pontormo, His 
 Life and Work," and "New York and Other Poems." 
 
 Mr. Clapp is now serving in France as a Lieutenant 
 in the 22nd Aero Squadron, American Expeditionary 
 Forces. 
 
 Donald Evans 
 
 "Sonnets from the Patagonian" was the opening gun 
 jn the Modernists' war against accepted literary tradi-
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 137 
 
 tions and Donald Evans, the author, became a veri 
 table target for the critics. There was much damning 
 and some praise. To the orthodox he was a mad man, 
 "a futurist charlatan," "an insincere poseur," "a mon 
 ster of salacity" ; to the liberal he opened up a new vista 
 with his satires on sex and sanity, which only now 
 are beginning to be really understood. Such lines as 
 
 For I had bitten sharp kiss after kiss 
 Devoutly, till her sleek young body bled. 
 
 Then Carlo came ; he shone like a new sin. 
 
 certainly were destined to stir up a Puritanical rip 
 ple among those accustomed to traditional ways. As 
 for "In the Vices," these lines brought upon his head 
 the accusation of sheer vulgarity. 
 
 In a little booklet on "The Art of Donald Evans" 
 Mr. Hollis calls him "the comedian of modern verse, 
 a curiously vivid figure, never commonplace." It 
 was not, however, until Mr. Evans' second book of 
 verse, "Sonnets From the Patagonian," was published 
 in 1914 that he became generally known to modern 
 poetry readers. In six weeks' time, every line of his 
 book had been quoted in different reviews. Here 
 were novel phonetics, strange new values and harmon 
 ies. Donald Evans is, however, entitled to the laurels 
 of the pioneer and for such lines as these in "Extreme 
 Unction" due value must be given him : 
 
 Across the rotting pads in the lily lake 
 Her gesture floated toward the iris bed, 
 Wrapped in a whispered perfume of the dead, 
 And her gaze followed slowly in its wake.
 
 138 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Now was the summons come, she must obey, 
 For Beauty pleaded from the charnel house, 
 For violet nights and violent carouse 
 To free her from the cerements of decay. 
 
 Crapulous hands reach out to strangle thee, 
 And every moment is a winding-sheet, 
 With bats to chant corruption's litany. 
 Be thou a torch to flash fanfaronade, 
 And as the earth crumbles beneath thy feet 
 Flaunt thou the glitter of a new brocade ! 
 
 "Her Smile" presents a very different study: 
 
 Her hidden smile was full of little breasts, 
 
 And with her two white hands she stroked her fears, 
 
 The while the serpent peered at her arched ears, 
 
 And night's grim hours stalked in, unbidden guests. 
 
 A noise was in her eyes that sang of scorn, 
 
 And round her voice there gleamed a nameless dread, 
 
 As though her lips were hungry for the dead, 
 
 Yet knew the food of dawn would be forlorn. 
 
 The cold hours ebbed, and still she held her throne ; 
 Across the sky the lightning made mad play, 
 And then the scarlet screams stood forth revealed. 
 She turned her back, and grasped a monotone ; 
 It answered all ; she lived again that day 
 She triumphed in the tragic turnip field. 
 
 Donald Evans was born in Philadelphia in 1884, 
 was educated at Haverford College and under tutors 
 in England. He took up newspaper writing in 1905 
 and continued in this work until 1917, producing the 
 following books in the meanwhile;
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 139 
 
 . "Discords," "Two Deaths In the Bronx," "Nine 
 Poems From a Valetudinarium" and "Sonnets From 
 the Patagonian." 
 
 Donald Evans was married to Leah Winslow in 
 1907. His second marriage, to Esther Porter, was in 
 1918. 
 
 Upon our declaration of war in May, 1917, he en 
 listed in the army concerning which he wrote the 
 following to his friend, Cornwall Hollis : 
 
 "Before you have seen my book through the press 
 I may be dead. With all my heart I hope I shall not 
 come back, for then impersonally I shall have fallen 
 for a cause in which I have no faith. What more dis 
 tinguished end for an incurable poseur? Have I not 
 been called that? Plant, I beg you, migonette to en 
 circle my arrowroot fields." 
 
 Ezra Pound 
 
 "All talk on modern poetry, by people who know," 
 wrote Carl Sandburg in Poetry, "ends with dragging 
 in Ezra Pound somewhere. He may be named only 
 to be cursed as wanton and mocker, poseur, trifler 
 and vagrant. Or he may be classed as filling a niche 
 today like that of Keats in a preceding epoch. The 
 point is, he will be mentioned." 
 
 This is Ezra Pound in a nutshell. Critics have 
 found him primarily a scholar, a translator, declared 
 that his early work was beautiful or that his latter 
 work was indicative of little but cheap advertisement. 
 Then there has been that following who have found 
 in him a leader of untrammelled thought and poetic
 
 I 4 o OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 expression, a sincere poet and not a fantastic, erratic 
 poseur. 
 
 Ezra Pound's first book was published in Venice 
 just before he took up his residence in London in 
 1908. "A Lume Spento" was its title, and of it a 
 Venetian critic wrote : "Wild and haunting stuff, abso 
 lutely poetic, original, imaginative, passionate, and 
 spiritual. Those who do not consider it crazy may 
 well consider it inspired. Coming after the trite and 
 decorous verse of most of our decorous poets, this poet 
 seems like a minstrel of Provence at a suburban musi 
 cal evening. . . . The unseizable magic of poetry is in 
 the queer paper volume, and words are no good in 
 describing it" 
 
 From Venice Mr. Pound went to London with his 
 little book, and here an English edition was brought 
 out by Mr. Elkin Mathews. In a little book called 
 "Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry," published by 
 Alfred A. Knopf, the following lines are of particular 
 interest : 
 
 "Ezra Pound has been fathered with vers libre in 
 English, with all its vices and virtues. The term is a 
 loose one any verse is called 'free' by people whose 
 ears are not accustomed to it in the second place, 
 Pound's use of this medium has shown the temperance 
 of the artist, and his belief in it as a vehicle is not that 
 of the fanatic. He has said himself that when one 
 has the proper material for a sonnet, one should use 
 the sonnet form; but that it happens very rarely to 
 any poet to find himself in possession of just the block 
 of stuff which can perfectly be modelled into the son 
 net. It is true that up to very recently it was impos-
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 141 
 
 sible to get free verse printed in any periodical except 
 those in which Pound had influence, and that now it 
 is possible to print free verse (second, third, or tenth 
 rate) in almost any American magazine. Who is re 
 sponsible for the bad free verse is a question of no 
 importance, inasmuch as its authors would have writ 
 ten bad verse in any form; Pound has at least the 
 right to be judged by the success or failure of his own. 
 Pound's vers libre is such as is only possible for a poet 
 who has worked tirelessly with rigid forms and dif 
 ferent systems of metric. His 'Canzoni' are in a way 
 aside from his direct line of progress; they are much 
 more nearly studies in mediaeval appreciation than any 
 of his other verse, but they are interesting, apart from 
 their merit, as showing the poet at work with the most 
 intricate Provencal forms so intricate that the pat 
 tern cannot be exhibited without quoting an entire 
 poem. (M. Jean de Bosschere, whose French is trans 
 lated in the 'Egoist,' has already called attention to 
 the fact that Pound was the first writer in English 
 to use five Provencal forms.) Quotation will show, 
 however, the great variety of rhythm which Pound 
 manages to introduce into the ordinary iambic penta 
 meter : 
 
 "Thy gracious ways, 
 
 O lady of my heart, have 
 
 O'er all my thought their golden glamour cast; 
 As amber torch-flames, where strange men-at-arms 
 Tread softly 'neath the damask shield of night, 
 Rise from the flowing steel in part reflected, 
 So on my mailed thought that with thee goeth, 
 Though dark the way, a golden glamour falleth.
 
 142 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Following the publication of Ezra Pound's first book 
 came others, including the following titles : 
 
 "Provenca," "The Spirit of Romance," "The Son 
 nets and Ballads of Guido Cavalcanti," "Ripostes," 
 "Des Imagistes," "Gaudier-Brzeska," "Noh," "Lus 
 tra," and "Pavannes and Divisions." 
 
 Mr. Pound was born in Hailey, Indiana, October 
 31, 1885, and was educated in the University of Penn 
 sylvania and Hamilton College. While Mr. Pound 
 makes his home abroad, he is a steady contributor both 
 in capacity of editor and writer for The Little Re 
 view, "a magazine of the arts making no compromise 
 with the public's tastes." He makes his home in Hol 
 land Place Chambers, Kensington, London, England. 
 
 Benjamin De Casseres 
 
 The New York World Magazine at one time printed 
 an article by Henry Tyrell with the heading some 
 thing like this : "Poems of a Shadow-Eater De Cas 
 seres, Psalmist of Night and Nietzscheism, Lives Un 
 known in New York and Writes Like Poe, Whitman, 
 Baudelaire and King David, While Railing at the Me 
 tropolis as 'A City Whose Splendor Is in the Dazzling 
 Glitter of All That Is Monstrous and Soulless.' ' And 
 this is an excellent approach to the work of Benjamin 
 De Casseres. His much commented upon "De Pro- 
 fundis" runs: 
 
 Night ! Night ! Eternal Night, whose black vapors have 
 
 filled all the sluice-ways of 
 Time Night, pageless and void;
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 143 
 
 Night upgurgling from chaos, upswirl of the noumenal 
 seas, drape me and veil me from the illusory light of 
 this world! 
 My being's at nadir, 
 I pass into my solstice, 
 I have touched of ITS garment, the black thing IT 
 
 weaves on ITS sentient looms, 
 While we crawl in ITS creases and guess. 
 Sit I in the night of ITS sleeve, 
 Withering into eternities, 
 Bowed in ITS night, in ITS might! 
 
 Benjamin de Casseres was born in Philadelphia, 
 forty years ago, of Spanish-Hebrew parents, through 
 whom he traces his lineal descent from the i/th cen 
 tury Jewish philosopher, Spinoza. Not Spinoza, how 
 ever, but Nietzsche is his psychic godfather, and, need 
 less to say, Benjamin de Casseres is a born radical. 
 He is a master of many languages, and a deep student 
 of art, specializing on the archaeological remains of 
 the ancient Aztecs. 
 
 Roy Helton 
 
 Time will decide whether or not Roy Helton will 
 share honors with Edgar Lee Masters. Much of the 
 quality found in the latter's poems is evidenced in Hel 
 ton's book, "Outcasts in Beulah Land," published in 
 the fall of 1918. This book, which is his first, offers 
 poems of rare genius, for here is a man who can touch 
 with magic understanding the homely things of life. 
 He sees the ten-cent store and the automat lunch-room 
 and similar themes in terms which the average poet 
 might shun.
 
 144 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 To quote from Helton is difficult, but the following 
 lines from "Mazie" present a meagre example of his 
 ability : 
 
 Lonely-eyed Mazie sat 
 
 In the old Automat, 
 
 Dreaming, ah, dreaming a 
 
 Dream of some golden day; 
 
 Dreaming, ah, dreaming 
 
 Strange dreams never told 
 
 By the shy hidden-hearted 
 Dear ladies of old. 
 
 Nobody found her. 
 
 Gentle-eyed Mazie who 
 Wanted a hero too. 
 
 But at the last, I saw 
 Nature assert the sway 
 Of her relentless law: 
 Mazie's shy star arose 
 In new-caught glory: 
 Day's end and stars and tide, 
 Love for the weary-eyed, 
 These the grave god supplied 
 To her mild story. 
 
 Eating his ham and eggs 
 Over a cup of tea, 
 Scanning the ladies' legs 
 Under the tables; he 
 Sidled across to her 
 Grimly and grimly; 
 Sidled across, as though 
 He were a pirate, out
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 145 
 
 Of Treasure Island, who 
 Had a new lay in mind 
 For wholesale murder: grim 
 Wasn't the name for him: 
 Growled out a greeting. 
 
 That was their meeting; 
 Her part all wonder 
 At gold band and blue. 
 His part? I puzzled, till 
 Somehow God knows 
 The hidden child 
 ^Rose from his war-beaten 
 *Eyes, and he smiled. . . .
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 KATHERINE LEE BATES, HARRIET MONROE, JESSIE RIT- 
 
 TENHOUSE, SARAH CLEGHORN, ALICE BROWN, ANNA 
 
 HEMPSTEAD BRANCH, JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY, 
 
 OLIVE TILFORD DARGAN 
 
 Katherine Lee Bates 
 
 "As a child in what was then the little seafaring 
 village of Falmouth, Mass., twenty miles from a rail 
 road, I found myself reading poetry with joy," writes 
 Katherine Lee Bates, "and very soon, child-fashion, 
 making verses of my own. Early in my sophomore 
 year at Wellesley College I was surprised and de 
 lighted to have a poem of mine accepted by The At 
 lantic Monthly, and ever since have been looking for 
 ward to a period in life when I shall be free to devote 
 the best of my strength and the most of my time to 
 poetry. That period has never come, as I have been 
 all my years a very busy teacher, doing a good deal of 
 incidental writing, as studies on special subjects, for 
 example, American Literature and the English Re 
 ligious Drama, and editions" of English Classics. 
 But I am still expecting, and shall continue to expect 
 until I reach the Amaranth Meadows, a holiday all my 
 own on Parnassus." 
 
 W. S. B., writing in the Boston Transcript, pays a 
 most admirable tribute to Miss Bates: 
 
 146
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 147 
 
 "By a strange paradox the most satisfying war 
 poetry in America has been written by women. Jose 
 phine Preston Peabody's 'Harvest-Moon,' published 
 some time ago, is one of the most spiritually illumi 
 nating volumes on the war; Miss Lowell has done bet 
 ter than any man, some of her pieces being charged 
 with indignant wrath and the persuasive eloquence of 
 patriotism; Miss Burr's 'Silver Trumpet' is blown 
 through with the ecstatic celebration of the Great 
 Cause, giving voice to the common anguish of the 
 trampled nations, and to the common sentiments of 
 the multitudes in the great democracies for the liberty 
 and peace of the world; and Miss Bates, in 'The 
 Retinue and Other Poems,' has touched with tender 
 ness and with a fine idealism the spirit of the Allied 
 peoples into expression from 'consternation at the hor 
 ror of war itself to recognition of the supreme issues 
 involved. 1 ' 
 
 In the "New Crusade," Miss Bates writes : 
 
 Life is a trifle ; 
 Honor is all ; 
 Shoulder the rifle; 
 Answer the call. 
 "A nation of traders"! 
 We'll show what we are, 
 Freedom's crusaders 
 Who war against war. 
 
 Life is but passion, 
 Sunshine on dew. 
 Forward to fashion 
 The old world anew !
 
 148 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 "A nation of traders" ! 
 We'll show what we are, 
 Freedom's crusaders 
 Who war against war. 
 
 And in "New Roads" : 
 
 Far road for words that rush, 
 Arrowing space, 
 Swifter than meteors flush 
 Star-road in race. 
 
 Wireless! Tireless, leaping the wave! 
 
 Roger Bacon laughs in his grave. 
 
 One road, o'er-steep to climb 
 Since world began, 
 Winged in our wonder-time, 
 Sun-road for man. 
 
 Air-ship! Fair ship, soaring the blue! 
 
 Galilee had burned for you. 
 
 Dread road for Freedom's sons, 
 Sworn to release 
 Life from the threat of guns, 
 Red road to peace. 
 
 New knights ! true knights ! gleam of God's blade ! 
 
 Lincoln leads in the Last Crusade. 
 
 Katherine Lee Bates was born in Falmouth, Mass., 
 on August 12, 1859. Her works include: "College 
 Beautiful and Other Poems," "Rose and Thorn," 
 "Sunshine and Other Verses for Children," "Hermit 
 Island," "English Religious Drama," "American Lit 
 erature," "Spanish Highways and By-ways," "From
 
 CUR POETS OF TODAY 149 
 
 Gretna Green to Land's End," "The Story of Chaucer's 
 Canterbury Pilgrims Re-told for Children," "America 
 the Beautiful and Other Poems," "In Sunny Spain," 
 "The Retinue and Other Poems." 
 
 Harriet Monroe 
 
 One of the most important factors in contemporary 
 American poetry is Harriet Monroe, for as founder 
 and editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, she has 
 done much for fostering the spirit so necessary in 
 young poets, which thrives upon seeing their efforts 
 in print. 
 
 Aside from her editorial duties Miss Monroe counts 
 to her credit, "Valeria and Other Poems," "The Co 
 lumbian Ode," "John Wellborn Root a Memoir," 
 "The Passing Show," and "You and I." In 1917, to 
 gether with Alice Corbin Henderson, Miss Monroe 
 edited "The New Poetry, An Anthology," one of the 
 most valuable books of its kind. 
 
 In "Love Song," Miss Monroe shows her own abil 
 ity as a poet : 
 
 I love my life, but not too well 
 To give it to thee like a flower, 
 
 So it may pleasure thee to dwell 
 Deep in its perfume but an hour. 
 
 I love my life, but not too well. 
 
 I love my life, but not too well 
 To sing it note by note away, 
 
 So to thy soul the song may tell 
 The beauty of the desolate day. 
 
 I love my life, but not too well.
 
 150 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 I love my life but not too well 
 To cast it like a x cloak on thine, 
 
 Against the storms that sound and swell 
 Between thy lonely heart and mine. 
 
 I love my life, but not too well. 
 
 Miss Monroe was born in Chicago. She was grad 
 uated from the Visitation Academy, Georgetown, 
 D. C, in 1891, and invited by the Committee on Cere 
 monies of the Chicago Exposition to write the dedi 
 catory poem for its opening. Her "Columbian Ode" 
 was sung and read at the ceremonies of dedication 
 celebrating the 4OOth anniversary of the discovery of 
 America, October 21, 1892. 
 
 N Jessie B. Rittenhouse 
 
 For the past twenty years Jessie B. Rittenhouse has 
 devoted her life to the criticism of modern poetry, to 
 the various movements looking to the advancement of 
 poetic appreciation in America. She was the first to 
 enter this field, and to insist that in the poets of the 
 nineties, who were at the fore when she begun, we had 
 the finest group, Whitman, Poe, and Emerson ex 
 cluded, that America had produced. 
 
 As a pioneer in the poetry movement, Miss Ritten 
 house published in 1904 "The Younger American 
 Poets," a volume of criticism devoted to the work of 
 the poets of *the nineties, and, in retrospection, it is of 
 interest to note that this book had to create its field, 
 as no subject was at that time so completely discredited 
 as poetry. It not only made its field, but turned the 
 first furrow for what has followed. It is in use at
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 151 
 
 the Sorbonne, the University of Tokio, the college at 
 the Hague, and other foreign institutions, as well as in 
 most of our own colleges. 
 
 Following its publication, Miss Rittenhouse came to 
 New York and during the next ten years did most 
 of the criticism of poetry for The New York Times 
 Review of Books, and various other newspapers and 
 periodicals, lecturing in universities and before clubs 
 on poetry, and in the office of perpetual Secretary of 
 the Poetry Society of America, hewing the way for 
 our own renaissance. 
 
 While Miss Rittenhouse has been so busily engaged 
 proselyting for our American poets, the poetic muse 
 has had little chance to express itself in creative work, 
 but during 1917 and 1918 Miss Rittenhouse wrote 
 those delightful poems which make up "The Door of 
 Dreams." 
 
 Such stanzas as the following, for example, best 
 show the quality of Miss Rittenhouse's work: 
 
 THE HOUR 
 
 You loved me for an hour 
 
 Of all your careless days 
 And then you went forgetting 
 
 Down your old ways. 
 
 How could you know that Time would work 
 
 A magic deed for me 
 And fix that single hour 
 
 For my eternity! 
 
 Another example for those who admire simplicity, 
 expression without effort, and yet perfect in form :
 
 152 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 THE GHOST 
 
 A score of years you had been lying 
 
 In this spot, 
 Yet I, to whom you .were the dearest, 
 
 Had seen it not. 
 
 And when today, by time emboldened, 
 
 I looked upon the stone, 
 'Twas not your ghost that stood beside me, 
 
 But my own. 
 
 While one is apt to consider Miss Rittenhouse 
 merely in the light of a critic, no book such as this is 
 designed to be would be complete without proper trib 
 ute paid to one who must be valued for her poetry as 
 well as her critiques. For "The Door of Dreams," 
 small book though it is, shows real lovers of poetry 
 just how able are the talents that Miss Rittenhouse 
 possesses along creative lines. There are no false notes 
 in her writings. Here is construction that borders on 
 the best principles of poetry. And not a few of the 
 poems show kinship to the writings of Sara Teasdale. 
 
 "Songs to One Passing," a series of four poems, 
 offers the following noteworthy quotation : 
 
 Your wistful eyes that day you left, 
 
 They haunt me all the night. 
 I never saw in any eyes 
 
 So mystical a light. 
 
 I knew the day you went from me 
 That you would come no more, 
 
 And yet I said the casual words 
 That I had said before.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 153 
 
 And only then I had been true 
 
 And held you in my arms, 
 And shielded you a moment's space 
 
 From death's alarms! 
 
 Sarah Cleghorn 
 
 "I was always beguiled with a notion of writing 
 verses, and perhaps unfortunately never received much 
 of the wholesome ridicule from my relations which 
 might have cured me of trying," says Sarah Cleghorn. 
 
 Her own story told in her own way runs some 
 thing like this : "I believe that when I was growing up 
 (from 1885 to 1895 we M * I 95 perhaps, when I 
 was almost thirty) poetry in this country was at as 
 low an ebb of beauty, originality and force as ever it 
 was in its life. My sunbonnet sort of verses, describ 
 ing old-timey people and places, with as much of the 
 charm such subjects always had for me, as I could get 
 into my pen, had for several years a fair sale in a num 
 ber of well-known magazines. And I am afraid that 
 is proof of poetry being very anaemic in this country at 
 that time. Mr. Bliss Perry, at that time editor of The 
 Atlantic, once wrote me a most kind letter advising me 
 to try to go outside this old-timey field. I did go a 
 little outside it, and managed to express some of 
 my accumulated indignation at various social wrongs. 
 Magazines were still muck-raking, and I still had a 
 fair sale. I had also a sale of sorts for some of the 
 ideas a little practice of the art of contemplation had 
 given me. The war then began, and, if you remember, 
 the first feeling in this country was revolt against the 
 idea of war. I shared it to a degree that hardened
 
 154 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 into settled pacifism, at about the time when the 
 thought of my countrymen began to turn to prepared 
 ness. Some of my pacifist verses were applauded and 
 reprinted by papers which a year or so later abhorred 
 the very idea of them. This of course means that such 
 verses as rise to my mind and heart nowadays could 
 not find a hole anywhere to creep into print through, 
 were they written with far more wit and melody than 
 I possess. 
 
 "But meantime, from about the time when I ceased 
 to write sunbonnet verses, the sky of poetry began to 
 be lighted with real stars. The authentic fire was burn 
 ing again. John Masefield had begun to write the 
 great poetry that will ennoble our times forever. 
 Those of us who had tended our little sparks of 
 lighted straw read his 'Everlasting Mercy, Dauber, and 
 Widow,' and realized that he is a poet of the same 
 immortal splendor as Milton greater than Browning 
 and immeasurably greater than any other poet now 
 alive who writes in English. His sombre and pene 
 trating thought in the 'Sonnets' is like the deep thought 
 of Meredith; his descriptions of the sea can only be 
 compared with the 'Ancient Mariner' ; and his burning 
 feeling for human values, his extreme tenderness and 
 his religious intensity exceed everything I ever read 
 in any poet except 'Piers Plowman.' No one writing 
 poetry in English now sustains thought or feeling in 
 any way comparable to him. 
 
 "Of course this is a personal opinion merely, and 
 that of a mere lover of poetry whose reputation as a 
 judge of it has yet to be made. I find few indeed who 
 agree with me.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 155 
 
 "But when I can forget Masefield's (as I think) 
 overpowering greatness, I find a large body of other 
 poetry which seems to me immeasurably in advance of 
 what used to be written fifteen or twenty-five years 
 ago. First of all poets in this country, as it seems to 
 me, is Robert Frost. I don't think it is altogether be 
 cause I am a New Englander that I find his Puritan 
 strength and restrained fire so splendid. The first time 
 I saw his poetry practically finished any idea I might 
 have had that I could write verses worth reading. His 
 masterpiece 'The Death of the Hired Man/ 'The 
 Self Seeker/ the prize poem called 'Snow/ and half 
 a dozen others just barely less powerful and beautiful, 
 give me more delight than anything else of American 
 poets I ever read. Nothing I've ever read (or heard 
 the author read) by Vachel Lindsay seems to me so 
 fine as his great poem, 'General William Booth Enters 
 Into Heaven.' Of all the numbers of Harriet Mon 
 roe's magazine Poetry which I have seen, the one con 
 taining that poem seems to me the best number by far. 
 Of course, "The Congo' and 'The Chinese Nightingale* 
 are wonderful, conceived in a burst of genius : I don't 
 see how they can ever be forgotten, but I feel that 
 they are diffuse. Lincoln Colcord wrote one or two 
 great poems which I have seen and which reverberate 
 in my mind. But I think I should place next to Mr. 
 Frost, in my own mind, Edgar Lee Masters. Some of 
 the epitaphs in the 'Spoon River Anthology/ I think 
 memorably beautiful, as beautiful as the conception of 
 the whole is bold and bizarre. 
 
 "Well, there it is, perhaps; the notion of modern
 
 156 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 American poetry which I have is that it is splendidly 
 bold, individual and inquisitive. It recognizes no 
 'field' for poetry. 'The field is the world.' I tried to 
 sum it up in a piece of verse some years ago, which I 
 enclose. 
 
 "Its influence and future. I feel rather in a re 
 ceptive mood as regards those questions. I hope it 
 will have an influence, in time, something like the in 
 fluence of Jane Addams gentle, fearless, immeasur 
 ably open to ideas, humane to the inmost core, full of 
 the spirit of that saying of Froude's, 'But the heart 
 must often correct the follies of the head.' 
 
 "Perhaps it will seem a whimsical notion if I say 
 that it has a great field in some day trying to interpret 
 animal psychology and in so doing, gentling the 
 world in its rawest, most brutal spot. 
 
 "And I have a dream of it, too, so painting the 
 future co-operative earth that they help to bring it to 
 pass. 
 
 "I love free verse no better than rhymed, but I think 
 it is more candid." 
 
 Miss Cleghorn is a descendant of Scotch and New 
 England parents. She has lived almost all of her life 
 in the village of Manchester, Vermont, which her an 
 cestors helped to settle. She has travelled in Italy, 
 England, and Scotland. She studied at Radcliffe in 
 1895-06, and her verses have been published in a small 
 book called "Portraits and Protests." 
 
 In a study of our American poets it is of interest to 
 note Miss Cleghorn's lines from "My Muse Among 
 the Young Poets":
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 157 
 
 I said to my faded old Muse, 
 
 "What means this hectic color in your cheek ? 
 
 Why do you wear that Liberty cap? 
 
 And what are you looking down the road to ee?" 
 
 My Muse did not answer. 
 
 It seemed that she was not listening. 
 
 There was a rout of young poets coming, singing and 
 
 shouting up the road. 
 She called out to them, 
 "O let me hear you with a hundred ears ! 
 Throw off that old corset of rhyme! 
 Toss to the winds that old delicate finicking vocabulary !" 
 "What, what, my Muse? what are you saying?" 
 "Take the whole brawny and beautiful English language, 
 And all its irregular colors and harmonies 
 To paint nude the meanings of our time. 
 Paint imbecile war, embruted labor, 
 The confused glorious passion for togetherness, 
 Art still-born in the purlieus of poverty, 
 And art triumphant, militant and fearless ; 
 Paint the whole rape of manhood by wealth the lecher; 
 Paint the escape and defiance of manhood to wealth! 
 Paint naked our crimes against animals, 
 And our sweating fight for the hindmost." 
 "Hush, Muse, back to the desk, and write salable verses 
 
 on autumn winds and Italian gardens." 
 Neither then did she hear me : but she went on, 
 "Let who will, envy and long 
 For the unborn poets of the Commonwealth, 
 With their far more lucid beauty and clearer fire. 
 Dearer to me are you, my own poets, 
 Shouting freedom and fury! 
 My heart would burst 
 If I should ever rejoice more than now I rejoice in you."
 
 158 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 "My Muse, how comely you look, and how youthful, all 
 
 of a sudden !" 
 "Thank God that I ever was born !" 
 
 Alice Brown 
 
 Poems, plays and stories, all of distinctive merit, 
 have come from Alice Brown. Born at Hampton 
 Falls, New Hampshire, December 5, 1857, and grad 
 uated from the Robinson Seminary at Exeter, N. H., 
 in 1876, Miss Brown was not long in making her 
 genius felt not only in New England but throughout 
 the entire country. With simple words she sets down 
 such gems of verse as "Revelation" : 
 
 Down in the meadow, sprent with dew, 
 
 I saw the Very God 
 Look from a flower's limpid blue, 
 
 Child of a starveling sod. 
 
 As for the descriptive poetry of Miss Brown, it 
 would be difficult to surpass these lines from "Morn 
 ing in Camp" : 
 
 Above spice-budded tops of fringing firs, 
 The shimmering birches, delicate ministers 
 To eye's delight, and o'er the deepening rose 
 Of the still lake, a soundless shade she goes. 
 What shall withstand her ? Not the mountain wall 
 Where the first potencies of dawning fall, 
 Touching and moulding till awakes a flower, 
 A jewelled heart of light, a throne of power. 
 Not all the barriers of rock and stream ; 
 For who hath caught the swift, evanished gleam
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 159 
 
 Of Beauty's mantle hath the charmed eye 
 Fated to follow wheresoe'er she fly. 
 O happy soul ! led only by the voice 
 That bids her turn to some more wondrous choice ! 
 Upon the herby field she sets her foot ; 
 Staying, she listens there to creeping root; 
 Blesses the opening bud, and smells the mould, 
 Sinks in a fern-bed where faint coils, unrolled, 
 Etch on the air a curving tracery 
 None but the morning's postulant may see. 
 She steals great gospels from a sphere of dew, 
 That little globe where ancient lore lies new ; 
 And while her tenderest fibres wake and stir, 
 The realm o'er which she reigns reconquers her. 
 Prostrate she falls in worship high and lone; 
 She swoons with rapture by the altar-stone. 
 God and the world, they are the dual Great, 
 And through her dust are they communicate. 
 
 Miss Brown makes her home in Boston. Her works 
 include the following titles : 
 
 "Fools of Nature," "Meadow-Grass," "By Oak and 
 Thorn," "Life of Mercy Otis Warren," "The Road to 
 Castaly," "The Day of His Youth," "Robert Louis 
 Stevenson," "Tiverton Tales," "King's End," "Mar 
 garet Warrener," "The Mannerings," "High Noon," 
 "Paradise," "The County Road," "The Court of 
 Love," "Rose MacLeod," "The Story of Thyrza," 
 "Country Neighbors," "John Winterbourne's Family," 
 "The One-Footed Fairy," "The Secret of the Clan," 
 "Vanishing Points," "Robin Hood's Barn," "My Love 
 and I," "Children of Earth," "The Prisoner," and 
 "Bromley Neighborhood."
 
 160 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Anna Hempstead Branch was awarded the first of 
 The Century prizes to be given college graduates in a 
 best poem contest. The title of this prize-winning 
 poem was "The Road 'Twixt Heaven and Hell," which 
 gave Miss Branch a place earned by merit among 
 American poets. 
 
 In "The Masque of Poets," edited by Edward J. 
 O'Brien, Miss Branch's contribution was "The Name," 
 which concludes with these stirring lines : 
 
 Love, by this Name I sing, and breathe 
 
 A fresh, mysterious air. 
 By this I innocently wreathe 
 
 New garlands for my hair. 
 
 By this Name I am born anew 
 More beautiful, more bright. 
 
 More roseate than angelic dew, 
 Apparelled in delight. 
 
 I'll sing and stitch and make the bread 
 
 In the wonder of my Name, 
 And sun the linen for the bed 
 
 And tend the fireside flame. 
 
 By this Name do I answer yes 
 
 Word beautiful and true. 
 By this I'll sew the bridal dress 
 
 I shall put on for you. 
 
 Anna Hempstead Branch was born at New London, 
 Connecticut, and is a graduate of Adelphi Academy of 
 Brooklyn, Smith College and the American Academy 
 of Dramatic Art.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 161 
 
 Miss Branch's works include "The Heart of the 
 Road," "The Shoes That Danced," "Nimrod and 
 Other Poems," and "Rose of the Wind," a play pro 
 duced in Carnegie Lyceum in 1907. 
 
 Josephine Preston Peabody 
 
 "The Piper" is another prize-winning piece of writ 
 ing, for with this play Josephine Preston Peabody ob 
 tained the Stratford-on-Avon prize in 1910. It was 
 produced in England and a year later in America. 
 
 Among the shorter poems of this poet is "A Song 
 of Solomon," selected by Miss Monroe for "The New 
 Poetry, An Anthology." 
 
 King Solomon was the wisest man 
 
 Of all that have been kings. 
 He built an House unto the Lord ; 
 
 And he sang of creeping things. 
 
 Of creeping things, of things that fly 
 
 Or swim within the seas; 
 Of the little weed along the wall, 
 
 And of the cedar-trees. 
 
 And happier he, without mistake, 
 
 Than all men since alive. 
 God's House he built ; and he did make 
 
 A thousand songs and five. 
 
 Josephine Preston Peabody was born in New York. 
 She was married to Lionel Simeon Marks in June, 
 1906. Her home is at Cambridge, Mass. 
 
 Her writings include "Old Greek Folk-Stories,"
 
 1 62 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 "The Wayfarers," "Fortune and Men's Eyes," "Mar 
 lowe," "The Singing Leaves," "Pan, a Choric Idyl," 
 "The Wings," "The Book of the Little Past," "The 
 Piper," "The Singing Man," "The Wolf of Gubbio," 
 and "Harvest Moon." 
 
 Olive Tilford Dargan 
 
 Olive Tilford Dargan was born in Gray son County, 
 Kentucky. She taught school in Arkansas, Mexico, 
 Texas and Canada until her marriage to Pegram Dar 
 gan. 
 
 In 1916 she was awarded the $500 prize by the 
 Southern Society of New York for the best book by a 
 Southern writer. 
 
 Contributor to numerous magazines, Mrs. Dargan 
 has won a large following. "Fatherland" was her 
 share to Edward J. O'Brien's "The Masque of Poets." 
 
 Come fingered as a friend, O Death ! 
 Unfrock me, flesh and bone ; 
 These frills of smile and moan, 
 These laces, traces, all unpin; 
 These veins that net me in, 
 This ever lassoing breath, 
 Remove from me, 
 If here is aught to free! 
 
 To know these hills nor wait for feet ! 
 
 O Earth, to be thy child at last ! 
 Thy roads all mine, and no white gate 
 
 Inevitably fast! 
 
 To enter where thy banquets are 
 When storms are called to feast ;
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 163 
 
 And find thy hidden pantry stair 
 When Spring with thee would guest; 
 
 Into thine attic windows step 
 From humbled Himalays, 
 
 And round thy starry cornice creep 
 Waylaying deities; 
 
 Though for my hand 
 
 Space hold out spheres like roses, and 
 
 Like country lanes her orbits blow 
 
 My Earth, I know, 
 
 If thou be green and blossom still, 
 
 That I must downward go; 
 
 Leave stars to keep 
 
 House as they will; 
 
 The winds to walk or turn and sleep, 
 
 Seas to spare or kill ; 
 
 Behind my back shall sunsets burn 
 
 Bereft of my concern; 
 
 Each wonder passed 
 
 Shall feed my haste, 
 
 Till I have paused, as now, 
 
 Beneath a bending orchard bough, 
 
 An April apple-bough, 
 
 Where southern waters creep. 
 
 Mrs. Dargan is the author of "Semiramis and Other 
 Plays," "Lords and Lovers," "The Mortal Gods and 
 Other Dramas," and "The Cycle's Rim."
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, EDGAR GUEST, BERTON BRALEY, 
 
 THOMAS A. DALY, ANTHONY EUWER, CHARLES HANSON 
 
 TOWNE, JOHN CURTIS UNDERWOOD, ELLA WHEELER 
 
 WILCOX, ARTHUR GUITERMAN 
 
 Christopher Morley 
 
 Perhaps you have seen this graceful and unusual 
 little poem. It has been reprinted in numerous news 
 papers and magazines throughout the country : 
 
 A CHARM 
 
 O wood, burn bright ; O flame, be quick ; 
 O smoke, draw cleanly up the flue 
 My lady chose your every brick 
 And sets her dearest hopes on you! 
 
 Logs cannot burn, nor tea be sweet, 
 Nor white bread turn to crispy toast, 
 Until your charm be made complete 
 By love, to lay the sooty ghost. 
 
 And then, dear books, dear waiting chairs, 
 Dear china and mahogany, 
 Draw close, for on the happy stairs 
 My brown-eyed girl comes down for tea ! 
 164
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 165 
 
 It is dedicated "for our new fireplace, to stop its 
 smoking," and was one of a popular volume of poems 
 which made up "Songs for a Little House," by Chris 
 topher Morley, who before this publication had gained 
 something of a name for himself with his book-read 
 ing-propaganda novelette, "Parnassus on Wheels." 
 
 In "Songs for a Little House" some critics found 
 Morley inclined toward the sentimental, but generally 
 it was accorded a warm welcome as a volume of merit 
 and promise of finer things to come. 
 
 Concerning Christopher Morley, the following sta 
 tistics, statistical and otherwise, are set down by Mor 
 ley himself : 
 
 "Born May 5, 1890, at Haverford, Pa. My father 
 is a mathematician and a poet, my mother is a musi 
 cian and a fine cook and a poet, so you see I was handi 
 capped by intellectual society and good nourishment. 
 I have always yearned to be a poet, but will never get 
 anywhere because I fall into the happy slough of 
 mediocrity. I can't write either badly enough or well 
 enough to dull the abhorred shears. My chief trouble 
 is that I am too well fed. Great literature proceeds 
 from an empty stomach. 
 
 "Most of my boyhood was spent in miscellaneous 
 deviltry in Baltimore, ringing doorbells and putting 
 out purses on the pavement with strings to them. 
 Most of the money I see still has a string tied to it, and 
 some one else has hold of the string. I never thought 
 of cudgelling the muse until I went to college at Hav 
 erford, which is just a mile from Bryn Mawr. Enough 
 said. The nymphs of Bryn Mawr are responsible for 
 more juvenile verse in eastern Pennsylvania than the
 
 166 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 statisticians dream. When I was eighteen I had an 
 idea that if I could only write a poem a day for twenty 
 years, the world would be made safe for Helicon. 
 
 "I graduated from Haverford in 1910, and a benev 
 olent posse of college presidents in Maryland sent me 
 to New College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. 
 
 "At Oxford I learned to drink shandygaff. 
 
 "I came home from England in 1913 and started 
 work for Doubleday, Page & Company. At Garden 
 City I learned to read Conrad and McFee. 
 
 "In 1917 I joined the editorial staff of The Ladies' 
 Home Journal, and spent a year in studying the lit 
 erary technique of Grace S. Richmond. My most 
 exciting adventures during this period were reading a 
 few million jokes sent in by readers of The L. H. J. 
 for the famous 'That Reminds Me' page. 
 
 "In 1918 Mr. Bok decided that I would not make a 
 good vestryman for The L. H. J., and I became a mill 
 stone on the neck of The Philadelphia Evening Public 
 Ledger. 
 
 "I wrote a poem in 1918, and I intend to write one 
 in 1919. 
 
 "I was married in 1914, and live at Wyncote, Pa., 
 ten miles from Philadelphia on the Cinder and Blood 
 shot. Commutation, $6.88 per month. Plumbers' bills, 
 ditto per week. 
 
 "I belong to the Phi Beta Kappa, but I am reticent 
 about it. 
 
 "I belong to the Grolier Club and Coffee House in 
 New York, and the Franklin Inn in Philadelphia. 
 
 "I am proud of having founded the 'small fry' that 
 used to meet at Browne's Chop House, and hope it will
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 167 
 
 continue to do so as long as there are small fry in the 
 journalistic business. 
 
 "Unlike Ben Franklin, I love to halve my income by 
 doubling my desires. 
 
 "My favorite amusement is hanging about second 
 hand bookstores. My ambition is to be a college pro 
 fessor with a wedge-shaped honey-colored Assyrian 
 beard, and to write one good novel and one good play, 
 and the first stanza of a good poem." 
 
 Edgar Guest 
 
 There is nothing pretentious about the writings of 
 Edgar Guest, but he handles so ably themes of every 
 day that he has been rightly called "the poet of the 
 people." 
 
 There are smiles and tears in his poems set down in 
 the terms that are easiest understood. They are gen 
 uine and portray the poet's faith in human nature. 
 
 Guest is a newspaper poet. R. Marshall, an old- 
 time newspaper man of Detroit, writes of him as fol 
 lows : 
 
 "One bleak winter morning back in 1894, a thirteen- 
 year-old boy answered a 'liner' advertisement by walk 
 ing into Doty Brothers' drug store, which was at the 
 corner of Sibley and Clifford streets in Detroit, and 
 convinced one of the Dotys that he could shine soda- 
 water glasses to such a polished state of brilliance that 
 the customers would have to wear yellow goggles, thus 
 making one department of the business feed another 
 department, a principle recognized by all merchant 
 princes. This lad was Edgar A. Guest.
 
 168 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 "Every night after school Eddie attacked that soda 
 fountain with such fervor that by supper time it shone 
 like a fire-engine. It was only a question of time when 
 such fine enthusiasm would attract attention outside of 
 the business organization that profited by it. So when 
 Dave Robbins, who ran a rival store down on Third 
 Avenue, offered Eddie a position that carried a more 
 princely hire, Eddie resigned his old job and waited 
 upon trade at the Robbins store. 
 
 "One of the customers of the Robbins fountain was 
 a bookkeeper in the employ of The Detroit Free Press. 
 To him the youthful Guest confided his ambition to 
 be a reporter, and so, in the summer of 1895, when 
 they needed a boy in the business department of the 
 paper, the bookkeeper pulled the wires and Eddie got 
 the job. 
 
 "William E. Quinby, lately returned to the edi 
 torial chair from his ministerial duties at The Hague, 
 took an interest in the new office boy, and when a 
 vacancy occurred on 'the local staff/ Eddie was made 
 a reporter and started his career behind the scenes of 
 the city's life. In course of time he was transferred 
 temporarily to the exchange desk and there's another 
 joy that most of us in the workaday world shall never 
 know and can never appreciate. 
 
 "Eddie read exchanges and clipped and pasted many 
 a printed column to be grabbed frantically by the pro 
 fane foreman of the composing room to plug a hole 
 on page six when the town's foremost haberdasher 
 fell down in his laudable intention to come through 
 with double-column advertising copy instead of single. 
 
 "And it was in this stuffy, littered little room one
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 169 
 
 day that a poetry microbe wriggled out from between 
 one of Marse Henry Watterson's virile editorials and 
 bit Eddie Guest good and proper. Eddie started to 
 write verse and more verse, and those that got into 
 print were read and were then cut out and preserved 
 in family albums. 
 
 "At odd times, between fire alarms, Eddie wrote 
 verse and shortly started publishing it once a week in 
 a column under the heading 'Chaff.' When he felt epi- 
 grammatical he wrote paragraphs those bits of wit, 
 humor, and pathos that the editor runs after his edi 
 torials, as a sort of goal toward which the reader will 
 plod through the dreary waste of wisdom-laden words. 
 These he headed 'Homely and Home Made.' A little 
 later, his column of verse became a regular weekly 
 feature, appearing every Monday morning under the 
 heading 'Blue Monday Chat.' 
 
 "So the malady that started a year or two before 
 waxed to a fever, and the time came when they took 
 Eddie off the crime beat and ordered him to be funny 
 for a column every day. He collaborated with the 
 various artists on the paper and wrote most of the 
 feature stuff for the Sunday edition. Those readers 
 who found amusement in the writings of A. N. Bene 
 dict, G. A. Edwards, Mr. Mutt (long before Bud 
 Fisher created him) and Charlie the Barber would 
 probably have laughed just as loud, or maybe louder, 
 had they known that Eddie Guest was writing it all. 
 And maybe they'd have laughed still louder had they 
 known that he was dubbed A. N. Benedict at that time 
 because that's what he was. He married Miss Nellie 
 Corssman in 1906.
 
 170 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 "From that time to this, Eddie Guest has written 
 daily for The Free Press a column of verse and anec 
 dotes and epigrams and what-not published under the 
 heading 'Breakfast Table Chat.' " 
 
 Although born in Birmingham, England, on August 
 20, 1 88 1, Guest merits the right of a place in this 
 volume by reason of the fact that his poems are strictly 
 American. He came to America, more specifically to 
 Detroit, Michigan, with his parents in 1891, and in 
 1895 joined the staff of The Detroit Free Press. It 
 was ten years later that he began to write an original 
 column for this paper, and, as he expresses it, "I have 
 been at it ever since." He has published three books 
 of verse, "Home Rhymes," "Just Glad Things," and 
 "Breakfast Table Chat," and in 1916 the Reilly & 
 Britton Company introduced him to a larger public, 
 with "A Heap o' Livin'," followed with "Just Folks," 
 and in March, 1918, "Over Here," a collection of war 
 time rhymes. 
 
 "American poets," says Mr. Guest, "have inspired 
 millions of Americans with love for the ideals of de 
 mocracy, and are to-day crystallizing in the beauty of 
 their songs the splendor of unselfish, patriotic service. 
 Its future is rich with opportunity. Many fine minds 
 are turning to poetry as the medium which best ex 
 presses their thoughts, and the great mass of Ameri 
 can readers is finding in American poetry the mirror 
 of themselves." 
 
 Guest is particularly well known for his poems about 
 children, although his poem "Home" is perhaps the 
 best loved
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 171 
 
 HOME 
 
 It takes a heap o' livin' in a house t' make it home, 
 
 A heap o' sun an' shadder, an' ye sometimes have t' roam 
 
 Afore ye really 'predate the things ye lef behind, 
 
 An' hunger for 'em somehow, with 'em allus on yer mind. 
 
 It don't make any differunce how rich ye get t' be, 
 
 How much yer chairs an' tables cost, how great yer 
 
 luxury ; 
 
 It ain't home t' ye, though it be the palace of a king, 
 Until somehow yer soul is sort o' wrapped round every 
 thing. 
 
 Home ain't a place that gold can buy or get up in a 
 
 minute ; 
 
 Afore it's home there's got t' be a heap o' livin' in it ; 
 Within the walls there's got t' be some babies born, 
 
 and then 
 Right there ye've got t' bring 'em up t' women good, 
 
 an' men ; 
 
 And gradjerly, as time goes on, ye find ye wouldn't part 
 With anything they ever used they've grown into yer 
 
 heart : 
 The old high chairs, the playthings, too, the little shoes 
 
 they wore 
 Ye hoard; an' if ye could ye'd keep the thumb-marks 
 
 on the door. 
 
 Ye've got t' weep t' make it home, ye've got t' sit an' sigh 
 An' watch beside a loved one's bed, an' know that Death 
 
 is nigh; 
 
 An' in the stillness o' the night t' see Death's angel come, 
 An' close the eyes o' her that smiled, an' leave her sweet 
 
 voice dumb. 
 Fer these are scenes that grip the heart, an' when yer 
 
 tears are dried,
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Ye find the home is dearer than it was, an* sanctified ; 
 An' tuggin' at yer always are the pleasant memories 
 O' her that was an' is no more ye can't escape from 
 these. 
 
 Ye've got t' sing an' dance fer years, ye've got t' romp 
 
 an' play, 
 
 An' learn t' love the things ye have by usin' 'em each day ; 
 Even the roses 'round the porch must blossom year by 
 
 year 
 
 Afore they 'come a part o' ye, suggestin' some one dear 
 Who used t' love 'em long ago, an' trained 'em jes' t' run 
 The way they do, so's they would get the early mornin' 
 
 sun; 
 Ye've got t' love each brick an' stone from cellar up 
 
 t' dome; 
 It takes a heap o' livin' in a house t' make it home. 
 
 Berton Braley 
 
 Of various collected volumes of verse of Berton 
 Braley's, none offers a more interesting study of this 
 popular poet than "A Banjo at Armageddon." This 
 book is divided into five parts, subtitled "In the 'Big 
 Show,' " "Open Air Ballads," "City Ballads," "Farce 
 and Frivol," and "Ballads of the Workaday Adven 
 tures." 
 
 His concluding paragraph in "America Speaks" 
 demonstrates his ability as interpreter of American 
 patriotism : 
 
 I know my sons ; the grand old strain is in them, 
 And they will never fail me in my need, 
 
 But talk of fame and glory will not win them 
 For "no heroics" is their quiet creed ;
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 173 
 
 They'll jest at service in a cynic manner 
 And swear that guns would make them flee pell-mell, 
 
 And yet I know they'd bear my starry banner 
 If need be, through the very fires of hell ! 
 
 Berton Braley was born in Madison, Wisconsin, 
 January 29, 1892. He was graduated from the Uni 
 versity of Wisconsin in 1905 and was married to 
 Marion A. Rubincam of Philadelphia in 1915. As 
 journalist and poet he has contributed about five thou 
 sand poems and three hundred short stories to nu 
 merous magazines and newspapers throughout this 
 country. 
 
 Included in his works are "Sonnets of a Freshman," 
 "Oracle on Smoke," "Sonnets of a Suffragette," 
 "Songs of a Workaday World," "Things as They 
 Are," and "A Banjo at Armageddon." 
 
 Thomas A. Daly 
 
 Thomas Augustine Daly T. A. Daly, Litt. D., poet, 
 humorist, lecturer, newspaper writer all are one and 
 the same. 
 
 To begin at the beginning and according to Harry 
 Dunbar, Thomas Daly and his "Pegasus" made their 
 dual debut as follows: "A dozen years ago there ap 
 peared in the East a new light. Since then millions 
 of readers of newspapers and magazines have come 
 to know 'Carlotta,' 'Giuseppe,' and 'Tony/ not as dumb 
 and soulless 'dagoes,' but as honest, industrious, lov 
 able, but new-made Americans; and myriads of de 
 lighted readers have welcomed, too, the clever Irish 
 poems from the pen of America's newest dialectician,
 
 174 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Thomas Augustine Daly, while hundreds of audiences 
 have heard Mr. Daly in author's recitals and humorous 
 addresses. 
 
 "As the spokesman for these Americans of the first 
 generation, as their interpreter and friend, we honor 
 the genius of a countryman, and thus we honor our 
 selves. Mr. Daly's poems are among the brightest 
 gems of recent literature, and it is because of them 
 that Fordham University conferred upon the poet the 
 degree of Doctor of Letters. It would not surprise his 
 friends if a similar honor were to come to him from 
 abroad. An American literary man traveling in Eng 
 land recently wrote : 'I must tell you that while I was 
 stopping in Oxford the other day I found a warm ad 
 mirer of T. A. Daly among the dons of the University, 
 a Mr. Osborne by name, who has developed quite a 
 Daly cult among the undergraduates, who are read 
 ing him like everybody reads Dowson at Harvard.' 
 
 "As a humorist Mr. Daly has won unqualified dis 
 tinction, having been made president of the American 
 Press Humorists' Association, and recognized by prac 
 tically every metropolitan newspaper as one of the 
 cleverest of humorous speakers. He is a member of 
 the famous 'Players' and 'Authors' Clubs of New York 
 and of the 'Poetry Society of America.' ' 
 
 Mr. Daly begins his book "Carmina" with "Two 
 'Mericana Men." This poem denotes his favorite style 
 and theme: 
 
 Beeg Irish cop dat walk hees beat 
 
 By dees peanutta stan', 
 Rist wo, t'ree week w'en we are meet 
 
 Ees call me "Dagoman."
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 175 
 
 An' w'en he see how mad I gat, 
 
 Wheech eesa pleass heem, too, 
 Wan day he say : "Wat's dat, 
 
 Ain't 'Dago' name for you? 
 Dat's 'Merica name, you know, 
 
 For man from Eetaly; 
 Eet ess no harm for call you so, 
 
 Den why be mad weeth me?" 
 First time he talka deesa way 
 
 I am too mad for a speak, 
 But nexta time I justa say: 
 
 "All righta, Meester Meeck!" 
 
 O ! my, I nevva hear bayfore 
 
 Sooch langwadge like he say; 
 An' he don't look at me no more 
 
 For mebbe two, t'ree day. 
 But pretta soon agen I see 
 
 Dees beeg poleecaman 
 Dat com' an' growl an' say to me : 
 
 "Hallo, Eyetalian! 
 Now, mebbe so you gon' deny 
 
 Dat dat's a name for you." 
 I smila back an' mak' reply: 
 
 "No, Irish, dat's a true."' 
 "Ha ! Joe," he cry, "you theenk dat we 
 
 Should call you 'Merican?" 
 "Dat's gooda 'nough," I say, "for me, 
 
 Eef dat's w'at you are, Dan." 
 
 So now all times we speaka so 
 
 Like gooda 'Merican : 
 He say to me, "Good morna, Joe," 
 
 I say, "Good morna, Dan." 
 
 Mr. Daly's first book, "Canzoni," was issued in
 
 176 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 1906, and the poet was greeted with applause by the 
 critics. Colonel Roosevelt, then President, was one of 
 the first to acclaim him. "Your poems," he wrote, 
 "are charming. I am particularly pleased with 'The 
 Song of the Thrush,' and I hope you'll give us many 
 more like it." 
 
 "Canzoni" is now in its fifteenth thousand, and his 
 other books have also become "standards" in the book 
 shops. "Carmina," published by the John Lane Com 
 pany, of New York and London, is now in its seventh 
 thousand, and the same is true of "Madrigali," pub 
 lished in 1912 by David McKay, Philadelphia. Last 
 year, 1913, the Devin-Adair Company of New York 
 City, brought out his "Little Polly's Pomes" and Davis 
 McKay published "Songs of Wedlock" in 1916. 
 
 The following letter from Mr. Daly to the author 
 is a "close-up" of interest : 
 
 "It's sweet of you to invite me to your party, and 
 I'll be glad of a chance to show off my best clothes. 
 Or would you prefer that I be just naturally comic? 
 
 "I rather balk at the autobiographical stuff, but if 
 everybody's doing it, I won't spoil the procession. I 
 can tell you 'most anything you'd care to hear. 
 
 "I like all kinds of life and fun, but I have my 
 serious moods and sometimes take myself ditto-ly. I 
 am a newspaper poet because I have elected to be and 
 not because of a landslide of magazine rejection-slips 
 against me. I naturally believe the bulk of America's 
 output of newspaper verse assays more gold to the ton 
 than the magazine poetry shows. I like a lot of things 
 that I have done, but you haven't time to listen. You 
 should hear chanted in my own deep and expressive
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 177 
 
 voice my 'Song of the Thrush' (Irish), 'The Birth 
 of Tom O'Shanter' and 'Ode to a Thrush' (English 
 undefiled) ; 'Da Leetla Boy' and 'The Audience' 
 (Italian- American). I've written one really good son 
 net, 'To a Tenant,' and ever so many ballades, ron- 
 deaux, etc. But this is enough, surely. 
 
 "I'm very fond of other poets, but not when they 
 get together say at the aviary in Gramercy Park 
 to sing competitively and pick each other's feathers. 
 I like Shakespeare and Whitcomb Riley, the two kits 
 (Marlowe and Morley), Shelley and Marquis, Keats 
 and Masefield, all the Elizabethans in fact, everybody 
 who ever sang even one wood note wild. As for the 
 vers librists, I just can't help saying "to hell with 
 them' even if Amy Lowell is a perfect gent!" 
 
 And just to make this biography complete, Daly was 
 born in Philadelphia, May 28, 1871, and was educated 
 at public schools, Villanova College, Pa., and Ford- 
 ham University to the close of the sophomore year, 
 
 Anthony Euwer 
 
 Anthony Euwer is known for his original work, 
 "The Limeratomy," an unusual essay into the too sel 
 dom explored fields of the limerick. But in spite of 
 the popularity of this book, it is perhaps for "Wings," 
 made popular in Liberty Loan campaigns, that he has 
 become best known. From it these lines are quoted : 
 
 If wings will help our men to see 
 Some Boche's belching battery, 
 Unloosing from a screen of trees 
 Its screeching death upon the breeze
 
 178 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Or help our giant guns to search 
 With truer aim each hidden perch 
 Of Teuton guns, and make them meek 
 Ere they again may chance to speak 
 If wings, oh, God, will do these things, 
 Then give us wings. 
 
 If great destroying wings might stay 
 
 Munitions on their hurried way, 
 
 Or hold a reinforcement back 
 
 By dropping ruin on its track, 
 
 Or yet set free the pent-up hell 
 
 Of depots filled with shot and shell, 
 
 Or swiftly give eternal sleep 
 
 To ships that prowl the nether deep 
 
 If wings, oh, God, will do these things, 
 
 Then give us wings and still more wings. . . . 
 
 Anthony Henderson Euwer was born in Allegheny, 
 Pa., February n, 1877. He studied at Shadyside 
 Academy, Pittsburgh, Princeton and at the New York 
 School of Expression and American Academy of Dra 
 matic Arts. He makes his home in New York when 
 not on poetry reading tours. 
 
 The writings of Mr. Euwer include "Rickety Rimes 
 and Riginaro," "Christopher Cricket on Cats," 
 "Rhymes of Our Valley," and "Wings and Other War 
 Rhymes." 
 
 Charles Hanson Towne 
 
 Charles Hanson Towne, aside from being editor 
 of The Designer, comes up for consideration among 
 American poets through his numerous contributions of 
 verse to leading American magazines.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 179 
 
 "To One in Heaven," published in Good House 
 keeping, presents the genius of Mr. Towne in one of 
 his most able moods : 
 
 After you died, a few stray letters came, 
 
 Bearing your name. 
 
 A friend across the sea 
 
 Wrote with the old light laughter; tenderly 
 
 She wished that you were with her, never knowing 
 
 That now for you the winds of heaven were blowing; 
 
 That you were faring to a distant bourne, 
 
 Whence your white feet would nevermore return. 
 
 And then there came, 
 
 Like little bundles of flame, 
 
 Bright-colored ribbons red, and yellow, and blue, 
 
 Samples from some gay shop, dainty as you. 
 
 A bit of lace, a bit of gossamer, 
 
 A rainbow sheaf, like dreams that never were. 
 
 And when I saw them, through my blinding tears, 
 
 I thought of your bright years, 
 
 Your love of all this filmy green and gold 
 
 And your brief story told. 
 
 I hope the angels give you your desire, 
 
 O little heart of fire 
 
 Give you the fairy garments that you crave 
 
 Even beyond the grave! 
 
 You would not be quite happy in your new place 
 
 Without your golden lace, 
 
 Without those little, trivial, tender things 
 
 The looms wove out of dim imaginings. 
 
 For you loved feathery textures, airy spinnings, 
 
 Like cobwebs from the world's remote beginnings ; 
 
 Soft stuffs as fleecy at the clouds above, 
 
 That grew more lovely for your lovely love.
 
 i8o OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Who knows but now your wings may be of fleece, 
 Your robe of some fine fabric made of these: 
 Rainbows and star-dust and a lost moonbeam, 
 And a white thought from Lady Mary's dream 
 Of that first moment when she knew that One 
 Would live through her. ... Is this your garment 
 
 spun 
 
 From rapture at the living loom of heaven? 
 O little angel-maid, God's gifts are freely given ! 
 
 Mr. Towne is the author of "The Quiet Singer and 
 Other Poems," "Manhattan," "Youth, and Other 
 Poems/' "The Tumble Man," with M. Mayer; "A 
 Love Garden" and "An April" in collaboration with 
 H. Clough-Leighter, and "A Lover in Damascus," 
 "Five Little Japanese Songs," "A Dream of Egypt" 
 and "The Little Princess" in collaboration with Amy 
 Wood f orde-Finden. 
 
 Charles Hanson Towne was born in Louisville, Ken 
 tucky, on February 2, 1877, and was educated : n the 
 common schools of New York and attended the Col 
 lege of the City of New York for one year. 
 
 John Curtis Underwood 
 
 Poet of the chorus girl, the motion picture star, the 
 straphanger, and all those various types which make 
 up the every-day life, is John Curtis Underwood. In 
 surgent though he is, he has a knack of portraying the 
 soul of the tenderloin in a realistic, graphic fashion. 
 
 In his poem "Central" he writes: 
 
 Though men may build their bridges high and plant their 
 piers below the sea,
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 181 
 
 And drive their trains across the sky; a higher task is 
 left to me. 
 
 I bridge the void 'twixt soul and soul ; I bring the long 
 ing lovers near. 
 
 I draw you to your spirit's goal. I serve the ends of 
 fraud and fear. 
 
 The older fates sat in the sun. The cords they spun were 
 
 short and slight. 
 I set my stitches one by one, where life electric fetters 
 
 night 
 Till it outstrips the planet's speed, and out of darkness 
 
 leaps today; 
 And men in Maine shall hear and heed a voice from San 
 
 Francisco Bay. 
 
 He has published four volumes of poems: "The 
 Iron Muse" (1910), "Americans," (1912), "Proces 
 sionals" (1915), and "War Flames" (1917). 
 
 Ella Wheeler Wilcox 
 
 Whatever one may think of the merits of Ella 
 Wheeler Wilcox's writings, which have had so wide a 
 newspaper circulation, certainly here is a woman whose 
 prolific pen has made her known to thousands of peo 
 ple who would hardly be classed as orthodox poetry 
 readers. 
 
 As a commercial venture Ella Wheeler Wilcox's 
 verse has been a decided success, and an admirable 
 medium of increased circulation for The New York 
 Journal and allied Hearst publications, for which 
 papers she has been an editorial writer and contributor 
 for a number of years.
 
 182 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 It was with the publication of "Poems of Passion" 
 that Mrs. Wilcox enlarged her following of readers, 
 and while much water has run under the bridge since 
 this was published, there is a noticeable improvement 
 in her latest book, "Sonnets of Sorrow and Triumph." 
 For example, the second stanza in that section of the 
 book bearing "Sonnets of Sorrow": 
 
 I know my heart has always been devout, 
 And faith burned in me like a clear white flame. 
 There was no room among my thoughts for doubt. 
 Though hopes were thwarted and though sorrows came, 
 God seemed a living Presence, kind and just, 
 And ever near. Yea, even in great grief 
 When parents, friends and offspring turned to dust 
 He stood beside me, refuge and relief. 
 
 But when one hideous night you went away 
 Deaf to my cry and to my pleadings dumb, 
 You took God with you. Now in vain I pray 
 And beg Him to return: He does not come: 
 Nor has He sent one Angel from His horde 
 To comfort me with some convincing word. 
 
 Here is a vital and universal experience for a theme, 
 and thij book conies nearest to real and vital sonnets 
 of anything that Mrs. Wilcox has done. Edward N. 
 Teall, writing in The New York Sun, says : "The 'son 
 net sequence' in good hands is very high art, and less 
 capably managed it can get pretty low. Ella Wheeler 
 Wilcox's 'Sonnets of Sorrow' attain a lofty level the 
 paradox is harmless in plumbing the depths of a 
 heart's despair. Her 'Sonnets of Triumph,' continu-
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 183 
 
 ing the paradox, are on a much lower plane of art in 
 measuring the sad soul's upward recovery. 
 
 "The sorrow, if not more genuine than the joy, is at 
 least better founded; for it rests upon the universal 
 experience of the bereft, while the joy springs from 
 the thin soil of spiritualism. The collection of poems 
 not all of them sonnets has true logical conse 
 quence, and that is a major merit. The individual 
 poems have certain characteristic and easily recogniz 
 able ellawheelerwilcoxian defects of technique. Equally 
 characteristic is the mixture of easy sentiment and 
 cheap hyperbole with truly noble feeling and phrase 
 ology." 
 
 Ella Wheeler Wilcox was born in Johnstown Cen 
 tre, Wisconsin, in 1855. She was graduated from the 
 University of Wisconsin, and married Robert M. Wil 
 cox in 1884. She now makes her home at "The Bun 
 galow," Short Beach, Connecticut. 
 
 Her works include the following : 
 
 "An Ambitious Man," "Poems of Pleasure," "A 
 Woman of the World," "A Double Life," "Three 
 Women," "Poems of Sentiment," "Drops of Water," 
 "Kingdom of Love," "New Thought, Common Sense, 
 and What Life Means to Me," "Sweet Danger," "An 
 Erring Woman's Love," "The Love Sonnets of Abel- 
 ard and Heloise," "Was It Suicide?," "Men, Women 
 and Emotion," "Poems of Progress and New Thought 
 Pastels," "Everyday Thoughts," "The Beautiful Land 
 of Nod," "Sailing Sunny Seas," "Poems of Passion," 
 "People of Power," "Gems," "Maurine," "Around the 
 Year With Ella Wheeler Wilcox," "Picked Poems," 
 and "Women of the World."
 
 184 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Arthur Guiterman 
 
 Arthur Guiterman has made his poetry known to 
 thousands through his contributions to Life. 
 
 "Though of American parentage," says Mr. Guiter 
 man, "I was born, November 20, 1871, in Vienna, 
 Austria, my name being registered as that of a newly- 
 arrived citizen of the United States at the American 
 consulate at the time. The family returned to New 
 York when I was two years old, so I haven't any Eu 
 ropean recollections. I was educated mainly at Gram 
 mar School 69, and at the College of the City of New 
 York, from which I was graduated in 1891. I'm only 
 a plain B.A., but they saw fit to elect me to Phi Beta 
 Kappa a couple of years ago. 
 
 "I stumbled into journalism and various editorial 
 jobs, but have been out of harness for a dozen years 
 or so, devoting myself almost exclusively to writing 
 verse. For the last nine years I have been the principal 
 contributor of verse to Life, and I suppose that I am 
 popularly known as the originator of 'Rhymed Re 
 views' and other humorous metrical stunts in that 
 paper. But don't try to pigeon-hole me in any com 
 partment, or I'll fool you ; because I have always writ 
 ten, and shall continue to write, on any theme that in 
 terests me or fills me with enthusiasm, and in what 
 ever style happens." 
 
 Mr. Guiterman's works include : "Betal Nuts," 
 "Guest Book," "Sonnets from the Portuguese," 
 "Orestes" (with Andre Tridon), "The Laughing 
 Muse," and "The Mirthful Lyre." Among his most 
 popular ballads are the titles of "The Call to the
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 185 
 
 Colors," "The Rush of the Oregon," "Quivira," "The 
 Storm Ship," "Sleepy Hollow," "Haarlem Heights," 
 "The Ballad of John Paul Jones," "The Quest of the 
 Ribband," "The Legend of the First Cam-u-el," and 
 "This Is She." In the fable of the "Beaver and the 
 Chick-a-dee" there is a lesson that many moderns 
 should take to heart : 
 
 A melancholy Beaver 
 
 Resided by a rill ; 
 He either had a fever 
 
 Or else he had a chill ; 
 
 For Mental Inquisition 
 Had filled him full of dole 
 
 About his Earthly Mission 
 Or his Eternal Soul. 
 
 In June, instead of basking 
 
 Or helping build the dam, 
 He vexed his conscience, asking 
 
 "Why Is It That I am?" 
 
 Mr. Guiterman conducted a class in newspaper and 
 magazine verse in the New York University for three 
 years, and he is noted as a clever expert of intricacies 
 of metre and rhyme that most poets lack the patience 
 to master. He was married in 1909 to Vida Lindo of 
 New York and Panama.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 MARGARET WIDDEMER, EUNICE TIETJENS, CLEMENT 
 
 WOOD, HERMANN HAGEDORN, FRANCIS CARLIN, RIDGELY 
 
 TORRENCE, HARRY KEMP 
 
 Margaret Widdemer 
 
 Few poets of today are so fortunate in securing 
 names for their respective works as is Margaret Wid 
 demer. Her most recent volume of verse, "The Old 
 Road to Paradise," has music in its name, and Miss 
 Widdemer has written no finer poem than the one from 
 which this book takes its title. 
 
 Ours is a dark Easter-tide, 
 
 And a scarlet Spring, 
 But high up at Heaven-Gate 
 
 All the saints sing, 
 Glad for the great companies 
 
 Returning to their King. 
 
 Oh, in youth the dawn's a rose, 
 
 Dusk's an amethyst, 
 All the roads from dusk to dawn 
 
 Gay they wind and twist; 
 The old road to Paradise 
 
 Easy it is missed! 
 But out on the wet battlefields, 
 
 Few the roadways wind, 
 186
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 187 
 
 One to grief, one to death 
 
 No road that's kind 
 The old road to Paradise 
 
 Plain it is to find! 
 
 (Martin in his Colonel's cloak, 
 
 Joan in her mail, 
 David with his crown and sword 
 
 None there be that fail 
 Down the road to Paradise 
 
 Stand to greet and hail!) 
 
 Where the dark's a terror-thing, 
 
 Morn a hope doubt-tossed. 
 Where the lads lie thinking long 
 
 Out in rain and frost, 
 There they find their God again, 
 
 Long ago they lost: 
 
 Where the night comes cruelly, 
 
 Where the hurt men moan, 
 Where the crushed forgotten ones 
 
 Whisper prayers alone, 
 Christ along the battlefields 
 
 Comes to lead His own: 
 
 Souls that would have withered soon 
 
 In the hot world's glare, 
 Blown and gone like shriveled things, 
 
 Dusty on the air, 
 Rank on rank they follow Him, 
 
 Young and strong and fair ! 
 
 Ours is a sad Easter-tide, 
 And a woeful day,
 
 i88 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 But high up at Heaven-Gate 
 
 The saints are all gay, 
 For the old road to Paradise, 
 
 That's a crowded way! 
 
 Critics have found this to be one of the finest war- 
 inspired poems; certainly it has been a popular one, 
 and it is a just example of Miss Widdemer's beautiful 
 imaginative work, so well noted for its quality and 
 thought fulness of heart. 
 
 Margaret Widdemer was born in Doylestown, Penn 
 sylvania, and was educated at home. She is well 
 known as a novelist as well as poet. 
 
 Her other volume of published verse appeared un 
 der the title of "Factories and Other Poems." 
 
 Eunice Tietjens 
 
 William Stanley Braithwaite, some few years ago, 
 gave prominent mention in his annual anthology to 
 Eunice Tietjens, whose work in verse was beginning 
 to attract considerable attention among a more dis 
 cerning audience. She has written but one volume of 
 verse, "Profiles from China," an admirable piece of 
 writing, which was published in 1917. 
 
 From "The Most Sacred Mountain," published in 
 Poetry, A Magazine of Verse, of which Miss Tietjens 
 is an associate editor, the following is quoted : 
 
 Here, when Confucius came, a half a thousand years be 
 fore the Nazarene, he stepped, with me, thus into 
 timelessness. 
 
 The stone beside us waxes old, the carven stone that
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 189 
 
 says: "On this spot once Confucius stood and felt 
 
 the smallness of the world below." 
 The stone grows old : 
 Eternity is not for stones. 
 
 But I shall go down from this airy space, this swift white 
 
 peace, this stinging exultation. 
 And time will close about me, and my soul stir to the 
 
 rhythm of the daily round. 
 Yet, having known, life will not press so close, and always 
 
 I shall feel time ravel thin about me; 
 For once I stood 
 In the white windy presence of eternity. 
 
 Eunice Tietjens was born in Chicago in 1884, and 
 after having studied in Paris, Dresden and Geneva, 
 returned to the city of her birth, where she makes her 
 home. 
 
 Clement Wood 
 
 Poetry, tennis and life these, according to his own 
 declaration, are the interests of Clement Wood, whose 
 first volume of verse, "Glad of Earth," was published 
 early in 1917. 
 
 In The Newarker appeared one of Mr. Wood's most 
 significant poems, which he calls "The Smithy of God, 
 a Chant," which concludes as follows: 
 
 But still I labor and bend and toil, 
 
 Shaping anew the stuff I spoil ; 
 
 And out of the smothering din and grime 
 
 I forge a city for all time: 
 
 A city beautiful and clean, 
 
 With wide sweet avenues of green,
 
 190 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 With gracious homes and houses of trade, 
 Where souls as well as things are made. 
 I forge a people fit to dwell 
 Unscathed in the hottest heart of hell, 
 And fit to shine, erect and straight, 
 When we shall see His kingdom come 
 On earth, over all of Christendom, 
 And I stand up, shining and great, 
 Lord of an unforeseen estate. 
 Then I will cry, and clearly then, 
 I am Newark, forger of men. 
 
 Clement Wood was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 
 September I, 1888. He resides in New York. 
 
 Hermann Hagedorn 
 
 Hermann Hagedorn is engaged in writing and farm 
 ing in normal times, but during the war has been 
 spending his efforts in propaganda work on the exec 
 utive committee of the Vigilantes. 
 
 "To the Makers of Song," with which William 
 Stanley Braithwaite began his "Anthology of Maga 
 zine Verse for 1917," Mr. Hagedorn writes: 
 
 Surely the time for making songs has come 
 Now that the Spring is in the air again! 
 Trees blossom though men bleed; and after rain 
 
 The robins hop; and soon the bees will hum. 
 
 Long was the winter, long our lips were dumb, 
 Long under snow our loyal dreams have lain. 
 
 Surely the time for making songs has come 
 Now that the Spring is in the air again !
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 191 
 
 The Spring! with bugles and a rumbling drum! 
 Oh, builders of high music out of pain, 
 Now is the hour with singing to make vain 
 
 The boast of kings in Pandemonium! 
 
 Surely the time for making songs has come ! 
 
 Born in New York City on July 18, 1882, Mr. 
 Hagedorn was educated at Bedford Academy, Poly 
 technic Institute, Brooklyn, The Hill School, and Har 
 vard University. His home is at Sunnytop Farm, 
 Fairfield, Connecticut. 
 
 Francis Carlin 
 
 Under the title of "The New Floor-Walker Poet 
 Genius," William Stanley Braithwaite, writing in The 
 Boston Transcript, of Francis Carlin, says: "Most 
 Irish poets, it seems, have two names, but I know only 
 one who has two lives. . . . New York is nourishing 
 a new poetic sensation in the person of a young Irish 
 man whose vocation is pursued as the floor superin 
 tendent in the rug and drapery department of the R. H. 
 Macy Co.'s store. All day this young man is the effi 
 cient director of his employers' interests and the pub 
 lic's needs, keeping the service of his assistants up to 
 standard and adjusting the claims of patrons to their 
 satisfaction. The superintendent is Mr. J. F. C. Mac- 
 Donnell, a bright, alert young man of mercantile habits 
 and suavity ; the poet is Francis Carlin, with a passion 
 for Beauty and Ireland that is one of the most ex 
 traordinary accidents I know no other term by which 
 to name his case in contemporary American poetry.
 
 192 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 I heard everywhere in New York City, during my re 
 cent visit, gossip and praise of this poet about whom 
 little or nothing has been said in print. My curiosity 
 and interest led me on a pilgrimage to "Macy's" to see 
 the poet, to get into the current, as it were, of his per 
 sonality, and to get him to tell me something of him 
 self for readers waiting to hear the news of a 'new 
 poet.' " 
 
 Mr. Carlin dedicates his book, "My Ireland," as 
 follows : 
 
 It is here that the book begins 
 And it is here that a prayer is asked 
 For the soul of the scribe who wrote it for 
 The glory of God, 
 The honor of Erin 
 And the pleasure of the woman 
 Who came from Both 
 His mother. 
 
 Of the Celtic poems written by Mr. Carlin, "The 
 Ballad of Marget" best shows the piquant music of this 
 American Celt: 
 
 O God, that I 
 
 May arise with the Gael 
 To the song in the sky 
 
 Over Inisf ail ! 
 
 Ulster, your dark 
 
 Mold for me; 
 Munster, a lark 
 
 Hold for me!
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 193 
 
 Cannaght, a caoine 
 
 Croon for me; 
 Leinster, a mean 
 
 Stone for me I 
 
 O God, that I 
 
 May arise with the Gael 
 To the song in the sky 
 
 Over Inisfail! 
 
 Altho Mr. Carlin sings the true lyric of Erin, he 
 is an American by birth, having been born at Bay 
 Shore, L. I., on April 7, 1881. 
 
 Ridgely Torrence 
 
 "Granny Maumee and Other Plays" caused a dis 
 tinct ripple in New York's theatrical season when these 
 were presented in 1917. Ridgely Torrence, their au 
 thor, instantly came to the fore as a writer to be con 
 sidered, and since that time more of his poems- ex 
 tremely good ones, by the way have found their way 
 into print. 
 
 His lines, "The Son," appeared as follows in the 
 "Monroe-Henderson Anthology" : 
 
 I heard an old farm-wife, 
 
 Selling some barley, 
 Mingle her life with life 
 
 And the name "Charley." 
 
 Saying: "The crop's all in, 
 We're about through now;
 
 i 9 4 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Long nights will soon begin, 
 We're just us two now. 
 
 "Twelve bushel at sixty cents, 
 
 It's all I carried 
 He sickened making fence; 
 
 He was to be married 
 
 "It feels like frost was near 
 
 His hair was curly. 
 The spring was late that year, 
 
 But the harvest early." 
 
 Ridgely Torrence was born at Xenia, Ohio, on No 
 vember 27, 1875, and was educated by private tutors 
 and at Miami (Ohio) University and Princeton. He 
 was married to Olivia Howard Dunbar in February of 
 1914. He has been librarian of the Astor Library of 
 New York, the Lenox Library, assistant editor of The 
 Critic, assistant editor of The Cosmopolitan Magazine, 
 and is a member of the National Institute of Arts and 
 Letters. His writings include : "The House of a Hun 
 dred Lights," "El Dorado, a Tragedy," "Abelard and 
 Heloise," "Granny Maumee," "The Rider of Dreams," 
 and "Simon the Cyrenian." 
 
 Mr. Torrence makes his home in Xenia, Ohio. 
 
 Harry Kemp 
 
 Harry Kemp was born in Youngstown, Ohio, in 
 1883. He was educated in the public schools and at 
 the age of ten wrote his first poem, which was on the 
 subject of intoxication.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 195 
 
 Reading books of travel and adventure planted the 
 seed of wanderlust in his soul, and at the age of thir 
 teen he ran away from home. When he was seven 
 teen he joined a German sailing ship as cabin boy and 
 went with it to Australia. There he wandered through 
 the country for some time, after which he travelled to 
 Taku, China, as a cattleman. He was smuggled on 
 board a transport which was going to the Philippines. 
 He next went to California, then through the south 
 eastern states. His high ideas of romance and love of 
 adventure were fulfilled when he was held in Texas 
 on a charge of burglary. While awaiting trial he 
 studied mathematics, history and literature. When he 
 was acquitted he returned home, spending the next 
 few years at Mt. Hermon School. He tramped 
 through the country again, finally settling down at the 
 University of Kansas, where he spent the happiest 
 years of his life. 
 
 About this time his first poem was accepted by Dr. 
 William Hayes Ward of The New York Independent, 
 after which other poems and articles were published 
 in magazines and in book form. Mr. Kemp, wishing 
 to reach London and have a literary season there, went 
 as a stowaway, having no funds, on the Oceanic. 
 He was held for three weeks in a Winchester jail on 
 a technical charge of embezzling passage by the steam 
 ship company. He reached London, however, and 
 succeeded in causing the sensation that he wished in 
 the literary realm. He was privileged in being the pet 
 of society, as well as becoming personally acquainted 
 with George More, Edward Carpenter, John Burns, 
 Alan Seeger and Rupert Brooke. He then became ac-
 
 196 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 quainted with the younger radical set. After a full 
 season in London, he sailed for New York on the 
 Kaiser and Augusta Victoria, arriving July 2nd. In 
 August the World War cast its shadow upon the earth 
 and Mr. Kemp wished to enlist in the Foreign Legion, 
 but Cupid changed his plans, for he met Miss Mary 
 Pyne and married her soon after. Since then he has 
 lived in New York City. 
 
 Mr. Kemp is the author of "Judas," "The Cry of 
 Youth," and "The Thresher's Wife," but distinctive 
 among the war poems of 1917 was "Two Ways," 
 published in The New York Tribune : 
 
 It's a long, long journey to the weary end of war, 
 While the shells burst above into star on colored star 
 And the guns lift and flash like the Northern Lights afar. 
 
 It's a long, long journey where the sniper's bullet speeds, 
 And the hid machine gun sows all the air with deadly 
 
 seeds, 
 While each grappling hour brings forth Iliads of noble 
 
 deeds. 
 
 It's a long, long journey as the Huns are hammered back 
 By the big guns and the small, bayonet and gas attack, 
 Where the fields are blasted bare and the towns are 
 charred and black. . . . 
 
 It's a short, short journey to the peace that must not be, 
 To the ready lips that wait for the cheek of liberty 
 To the Judas peace that waits with its thirty pence for 
 fee!
 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE, THOMAS WALSH, 
 
 WILLARD WATTLES, BLISS CARMAN, SHERWOOD 
 
 ANDERSON 
 
 William Stanley Braithwaite 
 
 There are few critics of American poetry whose 
 criticism is more respected than that of William Stan 
 ley Braithwaite, whose annual anthology of magazine 
 verse is one of the literary events of each fall publish 
 ing season and for the appearance of which so many 
 poets eagerly await. 
 
 No critic of American poetry has been more con 
 structive in his writing than Mr. Braithwaite. He has 
 sponsored the good that has manifested itself in many 
 of our younger poets and his enthusiasm is of a sane, 
 well-founded stock. He seeks the best in our Ameri 
 can verse and nearly always finds it. 
 
 It is therefore of two-fold interest when Mr. Brai 
 thwaite produces such poetry as "The Wet Woods," 
 quoted from Edward J. O'Brien's "Masque of Poets." 
 
 This path leads to the laurel, 
 
 And that winds to the burn ; 
 Hemlocks, pines and birches, 
 
 Know the one that I turn. 
 197
 
 198 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 It is wet in the woods today, 
 And perhaps, the sun tomorrow, 
 
 Shall weave its gold, while away 
 I will be alone with my sorrow. 
 
 On December 6, 1878, William Stanley Braithwaite 
 was born in Boston, the son of Mr. and Mrs. William 
 Smith Braithwaite. Unlike most critics and poets he 
 is mainly self-educated. He married Emma Kelly of 
 Montross, Virginia, on July 30, 1903. As editor of 
 The Poetry Journal, Boston, Mr. Braithwaite won 
 admittance to the Poetry Society of America, and is 
 now a member of the Authors' Club. His works in 
 clude "Lyrics of Life and Love," "The Book of Eliz 
 abethan Verse," "The House of Falling Leaves," "The 
 Book of Georgian Verse," "The Book of Restoration 
 Verse," "Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1913," 
 "The Message of the Trees," "Contemporary Reviews- 
 Essays in Literary Opinion," and "New England 
 Poems and Lyrics." Mr. Braithwaite is also a con 
 tributor to the Boston Transcript, Forum, Century, 
 Lippincott's, Scribners, Atlantic Monthly, etc. He re 
 sides at Boston, Mass. 
 
 Thomas Walsh 
 
 Thomas Walsh, critic and poet, has to his credit a 
 number of American poems of significant value in the 
 estimate of contemporary American poets. There is 
 a love of the old world and the new in his writings, as 
 may be noted in the opening paragraph of his poem, 
 "The Great Adventure," and his lines, "On the Lutes
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 199 
 
 of France," in his volume, "Gardens Overseas and 
 Other Poems": 
 
 In my heart is the sound of drums 
 And the sweep of the bugles calling; 
 
 The day of the Great Adventure comes, 
 And the tramp of feet is falling, falling, 
 
 Ominous falling, everywhere, 
 
 By street and lane, by field and square, 
 To answer the Voice appalling ! 
 
 (From 'The Great Adventure") 
 
 THE FAUN 
 
 A terra-cotta Faun grimaces 
 Smiling o'er his grassy places, 
 Doubtless in his foresight keen 
 Thinking on the hapless scene 
 Soon to mock this pause serene, 
 That hath led me and hath led thee 
 In pilgrim's doleful vagrancy 
 Unto this moment now, that comes 
 To sweep us to the sound of drums. 
 (From "On the Lutes of France.") 
 
 Thomas Walsh was born in Brooklyn, New York, 
 October 14, 1875. He was educated in the George 
 town University, Columbia, and Notre Dame Univer 
 sity, and was author of the class poem of Georgetown 
 University in 1892. He has been a contributor of both 
 prose and verse to English and American magazines 
 and reviews. Mr. Walsh is a member of the Royal 
 Academy of Seville, Georgetown Society, New York, 
 Colombian (S. A.) Academy of Letters, and the His 
 panic Society of America.
 
 200 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Mr. Walsh's works comprise the following titles: 
 "The Prison Ships," "The Pilgrim Kings," "Eleven 
 Poems of Ruben Dario," and "Gardens Overseas and 
 Other Poems." 
 
 Willard Wattles 
 
 Magazine editors and book publishers have forecast 
 a brilliant future for Willard Wattles, who has seen 
 much of his verse already published in various repre 
 sentative magazines and whose first book appeared in 
 the fall of 1918 under the title of "Lanterns for Geth- 
 semane." This volume is made up of a number of 
 lyrics so arranged as to form a long sequence, the one 
 central theme of which is a modern and somewhat 
 mystical treatment of x the religion and personality of 
 Christ. His poem, "Return," published in Contem 
 porary Verse, shows the religious quality of his work, 
 from which the following paragraphs are taken : 
 
 Jesus, Jesus, 
 
 Go along before 
 To a high house 
 
 With a silver door. 
 
 But I'll stop first 
 
 To clean my feet, 
 And then sit down 
 
 By the chimney seat. 
 
 And Jesus will laugh 
 
 And say it's good 
 That I've moved into 
 
 His neighborhood.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 201 
 
 When he lights his pipe 
 
 I think he'll scratch 
 The Morning-Star 
 
 For his safety-match. 
 
 We'll drink all night 
 
 From a good brown cup, 
 And not go to bed 
 
 Till the sun comes up. 
 
 Wise man, wise man, 
 
 Fingers and thumbs, 
 This is the way 
 
 That Jesus conies. 
 
 Willard Wattles was born at Baynesville, Kansas, 
 June 8, 1888, and was educated at the University 
 of Kansas, where he was an instructor until the War 
 called his services into somewhere "over there." Ac 
 cording to Mr. Braithwaite, Wattles is "university in 
 structor, harvest-hand, critic, hobo, poet, and interested 
 in practical Christianity, but not in creeds." He was 
 co-author with Harry Kemp of a volume of verse, 
 "Songs from the Hill." He makes his home in Law- 
 rence^ Kansas. 
 
 Bliss Carman 
 
 When Edward J. O'Brien was conducting his 
 Masque of Poets in The Bookman, there was one of 
 the collection that caused more than passing com 
 ment, and many were the opinions given as to the 
 author. It's title was "Moment Musicale," and when 
 the authors of the respective poems were announced,
 
 202 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 the name of Bliss Carman was attached to this poem, 
 one of the finest in the series : 
 
 The round moon hangs above the rim 
 Of silent and blue shadowed trees. 
 
 And all the earth is vague and dim 
 In its blue veil of mysteries. 
 
 On such a night one must believe 
 The Golden Age returns again 
 
 With lyric beauty, to retrieve 
 
 The world from dreariness and pain. 
 
 And down the wooded aisles, behold 
 
 Where dancers through the dusk appear! 
 
 Piping their rapture as of old, 
 
 They bring immortal freedom near. 
 
 A moment on the brink of night 
 
 They tread their transport in the dew 
 
 And to the rhythm of their delight, 
 Behold, all things are made anew ! 
 
 Bliss Carman was born at Fredericton, N. B., on 
 April 15, 1 86 1. He was educated at the University 
 of New Brunswick, University of Edinburgh and Har 
 vard. He has been editor of The Independent, The 
 Chap Book, and is author of the following works : 
 
 "Low Tide on Grand Pre," "A Sea-Mark," "Behind 
 the Arras," "Ballads of Lost Haven," "By the Aurelian 
 Wall," "Songs from Vagabondia" (with Richard Ho- 
 vey), "More Songs from Vagabondia," "Last Songs of 
 Vagabondia," "St. Kavin," "A Ballad," "At Michael 
 mas," "The Girl in 'the Poster," "The Green Book of 
 the Bards," "The Vengeance of Noel Brassard," "Ode
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 203 
 
 on the Coronation of King Edward," "From the Book 
 of Myths," "Pipes of Pan, No. i," "Pipes of Pan, 
 No. 2," "Pipes of Pan, Nos. 3, 4 and 5," "Poems," 
 "Collected Edition," "Kinship of the Book of Valen 
 tines," "The Making of Personality," "The Gate of 
 Peace," "The Rough Rider," "A Painter's Holiday," 
 "Echoes from Vagabondia," "Daughters of Dawn" 
 (with Mary Perry King). 
 Mr. Carman's home is at New Caanan, Conn. 
 
 Sherwood Anderson 
 
 Sherwood Anderson's "Spring Song," published in 
 his "Mid-American Chants," is one of the most ad 
 mirable poems to come from this writer of the mid 
 west. 
 
 SPRING SONG 
 
 In the forest, amid old trees and wet dead leaves, a shrine. 
 
 Men on the wet leaves kneeling. 
 
 The spirit of God in the air above a shrine. 
 
 Now, America, you press your lips to mine, 
 Feel on your lips the throbbing of my blood. 
 Christ, come to life and life calling, 
 Sweet and strong. 
 
 Spring. God in the air above old fields. 
 
 Farmers marking fields for the planting of the corn. 
 
 Fields marked for corn to stand in long straight aisles. 
 
 In the spring I press your body down on wet cold new- 
 plowed ground. 
 Men, give your souls to me. 
 I would have my sacred way with you.
 
 204 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 In the forest, amid old trees and wet dead leaves, a shrine. 
 Men rising from the kneeling place to sing. 
 Everywhere in the fields now the orderly planting of corn. 
 
 In his own preface to "Mid-American Chants," Mr. 
 Anderson says : "For this book of chants I ask simply 
 that it be allowed to stand stark against the back 
 ground of my own place and generation. In secret a 
 million men and women are trying, as I have tried 
 here, to express the hunger within and I have dared to 
 put these chants forth only because I hope and believe 
 they may find an answering and clearer call in the 
 hearts of other Mid-Americans." 
 
 Mr. Anderson also is a short story writer of unusual 
 and unique style. He makes his home in New York.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 FLORENCE EARLE COATES, AMELIA JOSEPHINE BURR, 
 
 EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, LIZETTE WOODWORTH 
 
 REESE, BENJAMIN R. C. LOW, HAROLD COOK 
 
 Florence Earle Coates 
 
 "The Smile of Reims," by Florence Earle Coates, 
 published in "The Bellman," is one of the most ad 
 mirable poems yet to come from this talented poet. 
 
 "The smile," they called her, "La Sourire"; and fair 
 A sculptured angel on the northern door 
 Of the Cathedral's west fagade she wore 
 
 Through the long centuries of toil and caVe 
 
 That smile, mysteriously wrought and rare, 
 As if she saw brave visions evermore 
 Kings, and an armored Maid who lilies bore, 
 
 And all the glories that had once been there. 
 
 How like to thee, her undefeated Land! 
 Wounded by bursting shells, a little space 
 
 Broken she lay beneath her ancient portal ; 
 But lifted from the earth with trembling hand, 
 Victorious, still glowed upon her face 
 
 Thy smile, heroic France, love-given and immortal! 
 
 Florence Earle Coates was born in Philadelphia and 
 educated at private schools and at the Convent of the 
 
 205
 
 206 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Sacred Heart, France. She also studied in Brussels. 
 
 On January 7, 1879, she was married to Edward 
 Hornor Coates. She was president of the Browning 
 Society, 1895 to 1903 and 1907 and 1908, and is a 
 founder of the Contemporary Club, Philadelphia, 1886. 
 
 Her published works include : "Poems," "Mine and 
 Thine," "Lyrics of Life," "Ode on the Coronation of 
 King George V," and "The Unconquered Air." 
 
 "To Mrs. Coates, as to many of our poets, literature 
 and its heroes offer a cherished stimulus ; yet she makes 
 us feel, much more than do many of her contempo 
 raries, how suggestive are the things that lie beyond 
 the printed page. So clearly indicative of her whole 
 attitude as a poet is the 'Song of Life,' that we must 
 quote it intact: 
 
 Maiden of the laughing eyes, 
 
 Primrose-kirtled, winged, free, 
 Virgin daughter of the skies 
 Joy whom gods and mortals prize, 
 
 Share thy smiles with me! 
 
 Yet lest I, unheeding, borrow 
 
 Pleasure that today endears 
 And benumbs the heart tomorrow 
 Turn not wholly from me, Sorrow ! 
 
 Let me share thy tears! 
 
 Give me of thy fulness, Life! 
 
 Pulse and passion, power, breath, 
 Vision pure, heroic strife 
 Give me of thy fulness, Life ! 
 
 Nor deny me death !
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 207 
 
 "The sensitive spirit reflected in these lines runs 
 through all of Mrs. Coates' work. It comes out in 
 her commemorative poems, in her graceful tributes to 
 Stedman, Stevenson and others; it is discernible in 
 such a trilogy as she has written on an historic figure, 
 Joan of Arc ; it illuminates the vignette of pathos which 
 she calls 'Alms/ and it tells constantly in those poems 
 in which purely poetical moods are expressed. Her 
 optimism has no strain of weakness; it is rooted rather 
 in a fine and courageous conception of life." 
 
 This is The New York Tribune's very excellent sum 
 mary of Mrs. Coates' work, whose poems have found 
 such real favor with critics throughout the country 
 and of whom James Whitcomb Riley said, "The poems 
 are truly poems because of their simple, natural in 
 spiration. A new uplift and hopefulness comes with 
 the reading of the volume every line!" 
 
 Amelia Josephine Burr 
 
 While the name of Amelia Josephine Burr has for 
 many years been associated with the best in American 
 poetry, it is in "The Silver Trumpet" that the old 
 Revolutionary spirit of America finds birth once more 
 in a new war verse that is of compelling merit. 
 
 "Old feelings love old forms, and Miss Burr, never 
 much prone to capering or simpering innovation, has 
 spoken reverently and simply in the speech and intona 
 tion of the fathers," says The Nation. "The poems 
 have their limitations ; they are a little stressful, a lit 
 tle hortatory; the distinction they achieve may not 
 have that finality which means duration.
 
 208 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Is all our world upon a counter laid? 
 
 That is their taunt who say they know us well. 
 Then let us like true merchants to our trade; 
 
 What wares has God to sell ? 
 
 A world at liberty, a path made clear 
 
 For steadfast justice and enduring peace, 
 
 Nations released forever from the fear 
 Of evil days like these. 
 
 A sound investment ! but the price is high. . . . 
 
 Long hoarded wealth in ruin, flame and steel, 
 Death lurking in the sea and in the sky 
 
 What say you? Shall we deal? 
 
 We take thy bargain, Master of the Mart, 
 Though we may flinch, we cannot turn away. 
 
 Send thy resistless fire upon our heart 
 And make us strong to pay ! 
 
 Amelia Josephine Burr was born in New York in 
 1878 and received her education at Hunter College. 
 She lives at Englewood, New Jersey. Among her pub 
 lications are "The Point of Life and Plays in the 
 Market-Place," "Afterglow," "The Roadside Fire," 
 "In Deep Places," "Life and Living," "A Dealer in 
 Empires," and has edited "Sylvander and Clarinda," 
 and "The Love Letters of Robert Burns and Agnes 
 McLehose." 
 
 s 
 
 Edna St. Vincent Millay 
 
 "Renascence," written at the age of nineteen, 
 brought the name of Edna St. Vincent Millay to the
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 209 
 
 fore as one to be considered in contemporary poetry. 
 Although Miss Millay lives in New York, her pub 
 lished "Figs from Thistles" bears out her claim of 
 being a later Elizabethan poet rather than a modern. 
 "The Faithful Lover" is a worth-while example of 
 Miss Millay's writing: 
 
 Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow ! 
 
 Faithless am I save to Love's self alone. 
 Were you not lovely I would leave you now: 
 
 After the feet of beauty fly my own. 
 Were you not still my hunger's rarest food, 
 
 And water ever to my wildest thirst, 
 I would desert you, think not but I would ! 
 
 And seek another as I sought you first. 
 
 But you are mobile as the veering air, 
 
 And all your charms more changeful than the tide; 
 Wherefore to be inconstant is no care: 
 
 I have but to continue at your side. 
 So wanton, light and false, my love, are you, 
 I am most faithless when I most am true. 
 
 There is a rare whimsical quality and a true lyric 
 sense in the poems of Miss Millay. Witness "The 
 Penitent," from Harriet Monroe's Poetry: A Magazine 
 of Verse: 
 
 I had a little Sorrow, 
 
 Born of a little Sin, 
 I found a room all damp with gloom 
 
 And shut us all within ; 
 And, "Little Sorrow, weep," said I, 
 "And, Little Sin, pray God to die,
 
 210 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 And I upon the floor will lie 
 And think how bad I've been !" 
 
 Alas for pious planning 
 
 It mattered not a whit! 
 As far as gloom went in that room, 
 
 The lamp might have been lit! 
 My little Sorrow would not weep, 
 My little Sin would go to sleep 
 To save my soul I could not keep 
 
 My graceless mind on it! 
 
 So up I got in anger, 
 
 And took a book I had, 
 And put a ribbon on my hair 
 
 To please a passing lad. 
 And, "One thing there's no getting by 
 I've been a wicked girl," said I ; 
 "But if I can't be sorry, why, 
 
 I might as well be glad !" 
 
 Lisette Woodsworth Reese 
 
 Lizette Woodsworth Reese, a new voice in our 
 American poetry, and admired greatly by Mr. H. L. 
 Mencken, is represented in Stanley Braithwaite's "An 
 thology of Magazine Verse" with the following poem : 
 
 ARRAIGNMENT 
 
 What wage, what guerdon, Life, asked I of you ? 
 
 Brooches ; old houses ; yellow trees in fall ; 
 
 A gust of daffodils by a gray wall; 
 Books ; small lads' laughter ; song at drip of dew ? 
 Or said I, "Make me April. I would go,
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 211 
 
 Night-long, day-long, down the gay little grass, 
 And therein see myself as in a glass ; 
 There is none other weather I would know !" 
 Content was I to live like any flower, 
 Sweetly and humbly; dream each season round 
 
 The blossomy things that serve a girl for bread, 
 Inviolate against the bitter hour. 
 You poured my dreams like water on the ground : 
 I think it would be best if I were dead. 
 
 Lizette Woodsworth Reese was born in Baltimore 
 County, Maryland, in 1856, and was educated in Bal 
 timore. Teacher by profession, she has found time 
 to publish four books of verse which have endeared 
 her to many discerning contemporaries of good poetry. 
 "A Branch of May," "A Handful of Lavender," "A 
 Quiet Road," and "A Wayside Lute" are the titles of 
 her books. Her home is in Baltimore. 
 
 Benjamin R. C. Low 
 
 Benjamin R. C. Low's tribute to Alan Seeger in 
 "These United States" will stand out as one of the 
 most striking war poems produced by an American 
 poet of today. Majestic in its swing, international in 
 its thought and feeling, this splendid poem concludes 
 as follows : 
 
 Unrest, like mist, grows ghostlier, it seems 
 
 The Thinker questions. . . . Travail. Fire and dreams. 
 
 Dark overhead the clouds of Europe blow, 
 
 Heat-lightning-lit, dull, ominous and low. 
 
 Not yet, not yet the hour, but, tryst to keep, 
 
 A spirit moves abroad upon the deep
 
 212 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 And will be stirring soon. And will be sung, 
 Soon, to a clarion of nobler tongue 
 Than inks on ticker-tapes or glibly reads 
 From pompous records of parochial greeds 
 Promulgate for the People. . . . Midnight blue, 
 Stars of these States a-shining through, 
 The dawn awaited. Dreaming, peaks and spires; 
 The house still locked and dreaming. Dreams and fires. 
 
 Thou whose full time both buds and stars await ; 
 
 On the curved cup of destiny whose hold 
 
 Permits no bubble world its concave gold 
 
 Too buoyant to relinquish; at whose gate 
 
 Love takes her lantern and goes out to Hate, 
 
 Bending above the battle's bleeding mould ; 
 
 Our country thou in fire and dreams enfold 
 
 In forest freshness, her, thy consecrate. 
 
 There must be some strange beauty hid in her, 
 
 With withes uncut by sharp awakening sword; 
 
 Some precious gift not veined, some truth of power 
 
 Thou art maturing, great artificer. 
 
 Fools we, and blind ; impatient of an hour ; 
 
 But make her worthy, for we love her, Lord ! 
 
 This poem originally appeared in The Boston Tran 
 script and was afterwards used by William Stanley 
 Braithwaite in his "Anthology of Magazine Verse" of 
 1917. 
 
 Mr. Low was born at Fair Haven, Mass., on June 
 22, 1880. Following his education at Yale and Har 
 vard he entered the practice of law but since the war 
 has been a Captain in the Ordnance, U. S. R., at 
 Washington, D. C. His home is in Brooklyn, New 
 York.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 213 
 
 Mr. Low has published the following volumes of 
 verse: "The Sailor Who Has Sailed, and Other 
 Poems," "A Wand, and Strings, and other Poems," 
 and "The House That Was, and Other Poems." 
 
 Harold Cook 
 
 There are a number of sincere young poets writing 
 in the United States to-day, some of whose work is 
 just beginning to be recognized by publishers of maga 
 zines. 
 
 Foremost among these is Harold Cook, twenty-one 
 years old, whose life has been spent in school and 
 college, intercepted by a season of stock company, 
 until the war. 
 
 "I left Union College before graduation to join up. 
 
 That is all " he recently said. And now he is with 
 
 the U. S. Army Base Hospital, Southern General Hos 
 pital, in Portsmouth, England. 
 
 "The New Song" of this young poet recently ap 
 peared in The Smart Set : 
 
 Of old she mused about the winds 
 That pass with whisperings of leaves, 
 Of little kindred in the grass 
 And swallows moving in the eaves. 
 
 And she would look with wonder eyes 
 Upon the bursting of a dawn, 
 Or draw the curtain of the room 
 To watch a moon above the lawn. 
 
 Ah, but now has Love come 
 With all dawn's beauty in his eyes,
 
 214 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 With mysteries of things that lie 
 Within the roofs of paradise. 
 
 And now her song is of his hair, 
 That it is like a golden sun, 
 That his arms are a little house 
 After a sullen day is done.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 LOUIS V. LEDOUX, JOHN G. NEIHARDT, GEORGE 
 EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 Louis V. Ledoux 
 
 Conspicuous among the few purely classic poets 
 which American literature has produced is Louis Ver- 
 non Ledoux. There is Helenic beauty in his lines, and 
 a stately richness combined with the simplicity that 
 secures a combined effect of style and sustained in 
 terest. 
 
 "Yzdra," a tragedy of 326 B. C, sustains one's in 
 terest throughout. This is one of the best of Mr. 
 Ledoux's works, filled with such colossal lines as 
 
 "Yea, that were good ; to live one perfect hour, 
 Then fall like stars while all men stand amazed." 
 
 and 
 
 "The audience I craved this afternoon 
 
 Must now be held, so many silken hours 
 
 Have slipped unfelt between our wayward fingers." 
 
 Louis Vernon Ledoux was born in New York on 
 June 6, 1880. He was graduated from Columbia 
 University in 1902, and married to Jeanne Logan of 
 
 215
 
 216 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Yonkers, New York, in 1907. He makes his home 
 at Cornwall on the Hudson. Mr. Ledoux's works 
 include "Songs From the Silent Land," "The Soul's 
 Progress," "The Shadow of Etna," "The Story of 
 Eleusis," and "George Edward Woodberry, a Study 
 of His Poetry." 
 
 John G. Neihardt 
 
 A distinctive narrative poem is John G. Neihardt's 
 "The Song of Hugh Glass." Graphic in color, finely 
 presented, warm with such pictures as 
 
 "It was the hour when cattle straggle home. 
 Across the clearing in a hush of sleep 
 They saunter, lowing; loiter belly-deep 
 Amid the lush grass by the meadow stream. 
 How like the sound of water in a dream 
 The intermittent tinkle of yon bell. 
 A windlass creaks contentment from a well, 
 And cool deeps gurgle as the bucket sinks. 
 Now blowing at the trough the plow-team drinks ; 
 The shaken harness rattles. Sleepy quails 
 Call far. The warm milk hisses in the pails 
 There in the dusky barn-lot. Crickets cry. 
 The meadow twinkles with the glowing fly. 
 One hears the horses munching at their oats. 
 The green grows black. A veil of slumber floats 
 Across the haunts of home enamored men." 
 
 John G. Neihardt was born in Sharpesburg, Illinois 
 on June 8, 1881. He was educated at the Nebraska 
 Normal College, and at the University of Nebraska. 
 His marriage to Mona Martinson, a sculptress, took 
 place on November 29, 1908.
 
 OUR POETS OF TODAY 217 
 
 Neihardt lived among the Omaha Indians for six 
 years, in order that he might study their character 
 istics and learn 'their legends. 
 
 He is the author of "The Divine Enchantment," 
 "The Lonesome Trail," "A Bundle of Myrrh," "Man 
 Song," "The River and I," "The Dawn-Builder," "The 
 Stranger at the Gate," "Death of Agrippina," "Life's 
 Lure," "The Song of Hugh Glass," "The Quest," and 
 "The Song of Three Friends." 
 
 George Edward Woodberry 
 
 Thoughtful, philosophical, cultivated, are the adjec 
 tives employed by Louis V. Ledoux in describing the 
 poetry of George Edward Woodberry, who sits in high 
 place with the modern New England poets. 
 
 "The Flight and Other Poems" is a collection of 
 about fifty of his more recent pieces. It was published 
 in 1914, and here is "a poignant realization of absolute 
 equality and brotherhood of man." Many of these 
 record a passionate search within the soul for satisfac 
 tion, as may be seen in these lines : 
 
 "We sit in our burning spheres 
 
 inimitably hung; 
 By the speed of light we measure the years 
 
 On purple ether flung; 
 
 Without a shadow time appears, 
 
 A calendar of echoing lights 
 That flame and dusk from depths and heights, 
 
 And all our years are young. 
 
 We gaze on the far flood flowing 
 Unimaginably free,
 
 218 OUR POETS OF TODAY 
 
 Multitudinous, mystical, glowing, 
 
 But all we do not see; 
 
 And a rapture is all our knowing, 
 
 That on fiery nerves comes stealing, 
 An intimate revealing 
 
 That all is yet to be." 
 
 George Edward Woodberry was born at Beverly, 
 Mass., May 12, 1855. He holds degrees from Har 
 vard, Amherst and Western Reserve, and is a fellow 
 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and 
 the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His 
 works include the following, both prose and poetry, 
 volumes : "History of Wood Engraving," "Edgar Al 
 lan Poe," "Studies in Letters and Life," "The North 
 Shore Watch," "The Heart of Man," "Wild Eden," 
 "Makers of Literature," "Nathaniel Hawthorne," 
 "America in Literature," "Great Writers," "The Life 
 of Edgar Allan Poe," "The Inspiration of Poetry," 
 "Poems," "Ralph Waldo Emerson," "The Apprecia 
 tion of Literature," "The Torch," "Wendell Phillips," 
 "A Day at Castrogiovanni," "The Kingdom of All- 
 Souls," "Two Phases of Criticism," "North Africa 
 and the Desert," "The Flight," "Shakespeare," "The 
 Ideal Passion." 
 
 Mr. Woodberry makes his home in Beverly, Mass.
 
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