Literary Snapshots Impressions of Contemporary Authors RICHARD BUTLER GLAENZER w \ LITERARY SNAPSHOTS IMPRESSIONS OF CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS BY RICHARD BUTLER GLAENZER COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY BRENTANO'S All rights reserved THE PLIMPTON -PRESS NOBWOOD-MASS-U-S-A TO S. B. G. WHO ENCOURAGED ME TO DEVELOP THESE EXPERIMENTS To The Atlantic Monthly and The Bookman grateful acknowledgment is made for the privilege of reprinting Snapshots which were first shown in these magazines. A FEW REMARKS WHAT would you have called them? Portraits? Humour forbid! Sketches? Perhaps; but then even sketches imply the use of brush, pencil or pen, and neither oil, water-color, graphite nor ink was employed in their primary composition. Surely they aren't engravings, etchings, lithographs or woodcuts. They slipped into consciousness too suddenly and much too vaguely to be written on steel or copper, stone or even wood. They bubbled into being, as it were, under skies of an amazingly serene blue, but skies mis' chievous for all that, and it isn't so far from the truth to say that they were scratched on sand, the sands of Bermuda, with a brine- moist twig of cedar. The incoming tide blurred many an impression, made some of the char- acterizations read like skits, others like senti- ments, a few like pasquinades. The lot, a heterogeneous gathering, were photographed by my familiar with tongue in cheek. "Why don't you publish these what-you- call-'ems?" he suggested. "As what? They resemble poems," said I somewhat lamely. "Do they?" he chuckled. "Well, they don't look like prose." "No, they don't." A very ambiguous familiar mine. "You snapped them, so I'll call them Snap- shots," I ventured. "Four Snapshots?" he inquired. Famili- arity from familiars is to be expected, one finds. I promised him due credit. He ap- peared mollified. "Let me at least add one all my own." This he said with an air of meekness which should have warned me. Here it is. No use suppressing it. The monster has threatened to send it to each of the snapshotees (his neologism) if I do. YOURSELF Jack-of-few-trades, You are the mistress of one, Book Lore, The oldest and youngest of the Cyclops. He has enslaved you, Made you his handmaiden. Your poetry verges on prose, Your prose on poetry. Without me you are nothing: With me you are only Yourself. RICHARD BUTLER GLAENZER NEW YORK, JANUARY, 1920 CONTENTS PAGE ENGLISH AUTHORS: Hardy 17 Galsworthy 18 Wells 19 Kipling 20 Barrie 21 Shaw 22 Hewlett 23 Moore. I 24 Moore. II 25 Bennett 26 Locke 27 G. K. C 28 George 29 Conrad 30 Hope 31 Stacpoole 32 Quiller-Couch 33 Lyons 34 Dunsany 35 Doyle 36 Hudson 37 Blackwood 38 AMERICAN AUTHORS: Howells 41 Dreiser 42 Wharton 43 Tarkington 44 James Lane Allen 45 Deland 46 Cable . 47 Hergesheimer 48 CM 3 CONTENTS PAGE Churchill 49 Cobb 5 Morris 5 1 W. A. White 52 Atherton 53 Wister 54 FOREIGN AUTHORS: France 57 Loti 58 RoIIand 59 Maeterlinck 60 Gorky 61 Artzibashef 62 Sudermann 63 Schnitzler 64 D'Annunzio 65 Boyer 66 LOLLYPOPS: Harold Bell Wright 69 Florence L. Barclay 70 Robert W. Chambers 71 Elinor Glyn 72 Owen Johnson 73 Marie Corelli 74 Upton Sinclair 75 Frances Hodgson Burnett 76 FLICKS AT PEGASUS THE HELICONIANS: Bridges 79 Watson 80 Noyes 81 CONTENTS PAGE Benet 82 Yeats 83 Le Gallienne 84 Sterling 85 Kemp 86 THE NEOWHATS: Masefield 89 Gibson 90 De la Mare 91 Lawrence 92 Aiken 93 Torrence 94 Oppenheim 95 Bynner 96 THEMSELVES: Robinson 99 Frost 100 Teasdale 101 Hueffer 102 Masters 103 Kreymborg 104 Lindsay 105 Eliot 106 PRISONERS OF FREEDOM: Pound 109 H. D no Aldington in Fletcher 112 Lowell 113 Sandburg 114 RILEY (!N MEMORIAM) 115 ENGLISH AUTHORS A. HARDY L N English oak Whose leaves have so long listened To the winds from Stonehenge That their own messages Are tinged with Druid sadness; But what a stately melancholy, A noble pensiveness That hawthorn blossoms cannot last, That summer must come claiming at the end; And then autumn, and then winter! The golden gorse and purple heather Hearken to him quite as rapt as we. GALSWORTHY unmistakably the gentleman That, now and again, One suffers embarrassment On being led to Whitechapel Into gaol or the coal-pits. An artist hampered a bit By his Varsity blazer, His Varsity accent, By formulae and strings; An artist, a genuine artist, So much the devotee of Nemesis, That Sophocles would have said: " Behold a mind of amber!" But first and last, the gentleman. r.183 A WELLS SEER under a brown derby, With ideas so outrageously active That they leap-frog over one another Straight into the To-morrow. Guy Fawkes to Mrs. Grundy: Her house is doomed; Her daughters fan the fuse, For he knows their quirks And the twists of their antagonists Meaning all men. From the tragedies and comedies Of his own up-hill life, He has ferreted out, Piece by piece, The heart of realities. These pieces he has unblushingly Combined and recombined, And cast before us, Bound together by an invincible dream - This glorified Mr. Polly! T< SHAW PREFACE OM was born blind. Impeach the Past! Dick is pig-headed. Stick him! Harry's a muddler. Thumbs down! Joan, as usual, has the best of Darby. Shakespeare? . . . England, good old junker England .... Christian and atheist, Pietist and pagan, Every last man of them is wrong. I am not the last man; So come, use your logic!" THE PLAY An inverted pyramid Spinning gyroscopically On a quicksand. C22J HEWLETT APESTRIES. . . . Tapestries such as Yseult Might have woven for Tristan; Arras and verdure, Courts of Love; Cinque-cento fantasies and grotesqueries. Tapestries cunning with anachronisms: Venus geared with a pshem And Mars with hauberk and cracowes. Tapestries after the dark cartoons Of a Stuart Velasquez; Tapestries smacking of sun-drenched SoroIIa, Enamoured of the gipsyings of Borrow. Tapestries flowered, tissued and purfled, Undulating with the folds Charming but often distortive Peculiar to tapestries. 233 T< SHAW PREFACE OM was born blind. Impeach the Past I Dick is pig-headed. Stick him! Harry's a muddler. Thumbs down! Joan, as usual, has the best of Darby. Shakespeare? . . . England, good old junker England .... Christian and atheist, Pietist and pagan, Every last man of them is wrong. I am not the last man; So come, use your logic!" THE PLAY An inverted pyramid Spinning gyroscopically On a quicksand. HEWLETT APESTRIES. . . . Tapestries such as Yseult Might have woven for Tristan; Arras and verdure, Courts of Love; Cinque-cento fantasies and grotesqueries. Tapestries cunning with anachronisms: Venus geared with a pshem And Mars with hauberk and cracowes. Tapestries after the dark cartoons Of a Stuart Velasquez; Tapestries smacking of sun-drenched SoroIIa, Enamoured of the gipsyings of Borrow. Tapestries flowered, tissued and purfled, Undulating with the folds Charming but often distortive Peculiar to tapestries. 233 MOORE. I .E will grin To hear himself called English; And would knife me with ridicule In the next autobiography Were I famous enough! A master-critic of painting, But when he dissects and lays bare The nerves of the living, We think of rabbits and guinea-pigs; And when he dishes up the rechauffe Of his own follies, It is with the air of a rake of fourteen, Standing before a mirror, Smirking his hope that the girls Will believe the pimples on his face A sign of virility. MOORE. II After reading "The Brook Kerith L /AYING down the Gospel According to St. George, I marvel greatly At the grave beauty, The rare reality of the work. Anything may be said, I find myself thinking, If said with dignity In a detached undertone. BENNETT rRIST-MILL of the Five Towns; Baker of so many loaves, So finely kneaded and so large That they have startled America Into overwhelming him with praise; Brilliant, versatile, diffuse, With an amusing nose For the picaresque; Perhaps too self-complacent, Like his mouth. . . . Our fault, for we gild our laurels, Forgetting, like himself, That his is "the way of all flesh." LOCKE ERE Anatole France Not so erudite, less the cynic No, there is the golden margin Of a dream. The strength that hides in weakness, The daring of diffidence, The wisdom of the fool, Roused by the wand of his chivalry, Transform existence Into the brave romance we know it to be When young. I G. K. C. S it for himself or the people That he sets off these fireworks? One sees him materialize from the shadows A Brobdingnag pygmy or a Lilliput giant Jovially cursitating in the moidering flare Of pinwheels that whiz back on themselves, Or silhouetted against Gargantuan set-pieces Whose knights become windmills; whose anarchists, kings. There is always the titillating dread Of his patting or clutching too long The tail of some hair-trigger sky-rocket. Would it burst and bemuse him with suns Or lift him and land him in Mystical earwigs, What thimblerig Heaven, what Amalthsean Hell? 283 A GEORGE SEVENTH son of L'esprit de France and England's humour; Foster-child of a grimly gentle Castilian Ready with Moorish proverbs but most simpdtica (The Spanish is untranslatable); His governess surely a sailor's daughter Who has dabbled in all the arts; His tutor the self-made H. G. Wells; Eve, his first sweetheart; Then all of the lovely ladies Whom Villon laments Never was hand more tender When dealing with women, More just in the weighing of men. CONRAD oj comet's hair! The image was born Because it would be needed To do service to his vaulting subleties. Poet-explorer of all seas, all jungles, Whether of earth or of the microcosm: Who has sailed, from seaman to master, All the ships of his art; And made through love and loyalty The landfall, Truth. C303 HOPE HESE unmapped principalities Outlast Balkan kingdoms And are less merciful. They seized you for ransom The moment you used them To capture England's fancy. They refuse to release you Though you have paid time and again In sterling British gold. You remain prisoner of Zenda. 31] STACPOOLE XvUFFLING the glassy surface Are the fingers of gigantic currents. For the eye, bizarre beauty; For the ear, exotic cadences Which disturb, by degrees sound normal, Only to murmur, insidiously murmur: Fingers, delicate but resistless, Move under the surface, Snap under the surface, Under the surface . . . R< QUILLER-COUCH .OMANCER, fanciful chronicler, The buccas of Cornwall Have mumbled to you deep grim tales And the fairies of all lands Hummed their most witching ones. Because you loved them, Dry-as-dust parchments Have exhaled a living past And faded missals Illuminated your pen Till it glows like Stevenson's. C333 A. NEIL LYONS HROUGH your jocosity Rumbles a litany of rage Whose echo is despair; For they are blind, your actors; Stumbling against impediments Sketched by Hogarth; Pawning for sixpenny pieces The diamond necklaces of their birthright; Rats in the wheel-cage of Cockneydom Which during April only, When the daffodils dream, Is the Land of Cockaigne. C343 DUNSANY JLlOW often has one man created gods Grand as the gods which Nature shaped for men When men believed in gods And gods in man? Your gods are godlike, Grim, sublime, austere; Your wonders, wonderful. I dreamed the other night You were a god in exile. I dream that dream awake. I DOYLE T'S no use! The knights of your White Company And Rodney Stone And the gallant Brigadier Gerard Have put up a good fight; But it's no use. That fellow Sherlock Will squeeze you like a sponge. Talk about Frankensteins. . . . W. H. HUDSON 'N mare's milk and wild honey, On the eggs of eagles, On brews of bittersweet From the pampas and sierras, From jungle and gray wilderness, Were you nurtured, surely; Among scenes spacious and untamed, Splendid in their naturalness, Which, for a flash of your eyes, You make us see, feel, be, Till cities shrink to the stuff Of cramped nightmares. C373 ALGERNON BLACKWOOD CjREAT spirit, By what chance Were you imprisoned in flesh? Or did you plead To serve as interpreter Between us and the fairies And the fauns and the angels And the AII-in-AII Which is God? AMERICAN AUTHORS O HOWELLS TEN-EYED, open-hearted, open-souledl So, sun, moon and stars Have flooded you with their light And their light's vision. These states stand united Through wisdom like yours: Wisdom of the open-eyed Allowing for blindness; Wisdom of the open-hearted Allowing for meanness; Wisdom of the open-souled Allowing for self-deceit. Y DREISER OU, at least, have provoked Opinion. How many, how many, Have done more than sneak along The groove of tradition? You, at least, have created Two women and one man Who cannot die. How many, how many Can preserve their own puny souls From living a daily death? WHARTON IGNETTESrin metallic tones On crackled olive black The more modern, The more essentially i8th Century As stimulating But as out of key As the Princess de Lamballe Discoursing at a The Dansant. Exquisite as a border For a black-glazed Golden Bowl! 433 TARKINGTON FAIRY tales, Bully old fairy tales: Cinderella Coaxed from Heliopolis To Indianapolis; The Beast turned Barber And Beauty Manicure? And now young Jack the Giant-killer, Death to all grown-ups! Fairy tales, Corking old fairy tales, Old only as spring is old Or dawn is old Or humour or love. 443 c JAMES LANE ALLEN OLOR and music, music and color! At one with the rhythm of the Universe, You know that the heart of all youth Is the heart of the Seeker, of Earth, Advancing, eternally advancing, Swinging, rapturously swinging, Between the Sun's golden huzza And the silver-white song of the moon. C453 DELANO .OW thrilling but hard For the spirit of old New England To act young, For the rock to compromise With the moss, Warm heart of a woman Smiling through granite lips. 46] T< CABLE O read your tales Is like opening a cedar-box Of ante-bellum days, A box holding the crinoline and fan And the tortoise-shell diary, With flowers pressed between the leaves, Belonging to some languid grande dame Of Creole New Orleans. 47] I HERGESHEIMER F an image-maker of Ravenna or Mt. Athos Had been reborn in this New World After a brief sojourn in Cathay; Had been reborn in drab-and-gaudy America And written of it, haunted by his past, His work, like yours, Would be a glazed mosaic Glowing with sapphire, ruby and emerald Outlined with black onyx, A reserved composition Embodying figures lifelike yet symbolical, Facet-forms of a universe Too deep for the vulgar eye. C483 CHURCHILL \VlTH so many "C"s As crutches, You should have escaped The corral of Culture; Yet I cannot encounter you Without considering Your consanguinity with Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Y< COBB OU'RE tremendously funny, I suppose; But some of us like our humour In thin slices And lose the edge of our appetites At a barbecue. Your grimness is convincing And your prolificacy (Or is it prolixity?), Like the range of your vocabulary, Simply overwhelming. Beware of pernicketiness transmogrified! [503 MORRIS .ORE modern than Masters, More ancient than Blondel de Nesle, You, born a minstrel, Have cheated the gold of your songs, Casting it in odd little idols Plated with steel and with brass. But the gold is too hot: Again and again it burns through In spite of that cynical self Which isn't yourself! WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE HERE was a certain plain-spoken boy In our Latin Class at boarding-school. He hailed from Lyon Co., Kansas; And we kids loved to josh him By inflecting the Latin for "bad" As mains, Emporia, pessimist. His retorts had us skinned a mile When it came to straightforward U.S.A. Nevertheless, we considered ourselves The natural trustees of Old Glory. Times have changed since '90: The East is on the wrong side of Two and seventy-five per cent Americanism. You folks west of the Missouri Have the backbone, horse sense And old-fashioned sentiment Needed to pull us through; And you, old-timer, have done the most To make us think so. ATHERTON CALIFORNIAN opulence, West Coast hatred of shams, Cosmopolitan vision, Are the horses of the chariot You drive so recklessly In the amphitheatre of Public Opinion; Challenging Philistine and Puritan, Nine-eyed Censor and pursy Reformer With the same sense of world citizenship And recognition that good and evil Are common to us all As was shown, with fewer feathers, By your great kinsman, Ben Franklin. Ti WISTER HE moderation of your humour Is an unmixed blessing To jazz-racked city ears. A Bret Harte without a formula, A pragmatist without a pose, A Dixie-lover without a drawl, A sportsman to the core, You have a land-wide following Whose only complaint is That you're too close-mouthed. FOREIGN AUTHORS FRANCE HE sanctum of your mind Must be an enchanting spot For eclectics to luxuriate: Athanasius communing with Renan, Joan of Arc gossiping with Thais, Rabelais jesting with Paracelsus A gathering gorgeous with irony But manipulated without discords Like a Liszt fantasy Played by Joseph Hofmann. C573 I , TOO, have seen the fishing fleet Come home to Paimpol And the wives and the mothers Bravely 'prepared for the worst. And I have been in the graveyard Where are buried only women And children and very old men; And there I bowed to you, Poet of the others, The husbands and the sons Who went down fighting like Frenchmen. HOLLAND HEY are our intimates As well as yours, A human family Humming fragmentary Credos To give themselves courage Through the wild humoresque of life. At their side, Yet somehow high above, You smile sadly Like one from Nazareth. C593 I MAETERLINCK T is thrilling but terrible To wander through the vaults, The echo-haunted crypts Of your Fomorian imagination. It is maddening, crushing, To see the blind grope hopelessly, To hear the dumb choking for speech And to be utterly helpless. Drops oozing from the corbels Eat slowly into our temples Like water dripping on stone. We know the joy of children Released from a closet, When carried to heaven by your bees. C603 GORKY OU drive your pen As if it were a troika, Its three horses, Czar, bureaucrat and priest; Your words crack like whips As you gallop along Tearing off ukases, Ditching uniforms, Ripping out icons, While shouting to the moujiks To stop skulking in the willows. W. ARTZIBASHEF IND across the steppes, Each gust demolishing some part Of the House of Convention And loosening some other Until the whole of it is in ruins And its inmates are driven Out into the open To make friends at last With the rain and sun and air, Their natural brothers, And their father, The soil. C623 A SUDERMANN DARK gray skiff Drifting down a roiled river Under low damp bridges; With leaves falling, Scattered here and there By moaning autumn winds, Tossed before the skiff To be muddied and sunk. C633 SCHNITZLER L S cleverly as a surgeon's scalpel You lay bare their hearts, Or what we call our hearts When suffering from the same ailment. The difference is You chuckle all the time. It may be a joke, But it's a cruel joke Which the victims can no more prevent Than the sun his spots Or the moon her allurement and servitude. C643 D'ANNUNZIO 1 OU have come centuries too late! You should have reigned as Prince In Antioch of the Garden of Daphne Or as Duke of Byzantine Athens Or have lorded it in Sicily, That blue-domed glittering mosaic Of all the ancient worlds; With some daggered Cellini To fix your esurient reveries In gold, ivory and precious stones. Years after, Webster of St. Andrews Would have devised a play about you, "Gabriele, or the Scarlet Angel." 653 BOJER OPIRIT cousin of John Davidson, That life-crucified Scotchman Who skirted the great hoax with "Dogmas are frozen metaphors," Your wanderings have carried you Forward or backward Leagues further than he. Meditating on the dizzy ledge Of some narrow, deep-gnawing fiord, With the midnight sun in your eyes, You have discovered this: Man must be his own Balder And defeat black-hearted Loki By whispering in his own ear: "Sow corn in my enemy's field, That Light may exist." C663 LOLLYPOPS HAROLD BELL WRIGHT Y< OU believe in God, And are not ashamed of it. You believe in good, And are not ashamed of it. One can see this In the quality of your taffy, Old-fashioned home-pulled stuff Easy enough to make If one knows how. How many do? And it seems to be the best seller. 69] FLORENCE L. BARCLAY I NCOMPARABLE confectioner Of Cyrilesque heroes In immaculate white flannels, Of virginal Amazons Too intelligent " to know." Your very quotes are pearls, O Sugar-Lady to the teens Of all ages and sexes That cry out in horror: "Avaunt, Satan!" ROBERT W. CHAMBERS CURATORS of Museums, Mme. Blavatsky, Zenobia, All of the precieuses Were simps To the slender demure young things Who hold forth naively Against your sophisticated backgrounds. One wants to warn the attractive villain To have a care And the "intended" to sit on ice Films are so inflammable! C7O ELINOR GLYN Y OUR males are perfect ladies; Your females, perfect terrors, Petticoat Casanovas Saved by asterisks From being pilloried Or Comstockized Like the out-and-out sinners Of naturalism. C723 OWEN JOHNSON JJALZAC did it much better And so did Gunter; But then one was the master of character And the other, of plot However, it pays to advertise. 733 MARIE CORELLI AT is all too utterly utter And too immensely immense. On the other hand, If World Fairs and Luna Parks Are your aim, You ring the gong Nine times out of ten. C743 UPTON SINCLAIR LoLLYPOPPISH Though advertised As pepsin. De gustibus . . . but Neither the Upper Ten Nor Submerged Tenth Recognize themselves In the little mirror Of your vanity case. Zola concealed himself. FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT HROUGH you The Pelion of New Thought Is piled on the Ossa of optimism: You are a Comfort To the Poor Working Girl, Though perhaps dearest As a novelized Burke's Peerage. Your connection With the De Willoughby Claim Is an association To be proud of. 76] FLICKS AT PEGASUS THE HELICONIANS BRIDGES .LOVER of flowers that fade Nay, lover of faded flowers, Delicate rare flowers of the Past, Flowers consecrate to Eros, Jessamy of Araby and myrrh! Chaste lover, dream-lover, Shadow of Lycidas, " freak'd with jet," Deaf to the grating Iron Muse: Lover of all beauteous things I C793 WATSON Y OURS were rich wood-wind notes, Soothing, noble, ennobling, Leading us to Pan. Why famish for applause? Why enlist with Rage? Flutes squeak When blown like trumpets. NOYES OIR Knight in Golden Armour Who hate violence, Minstrel of Golden Peace Who praise Drake, Which way does your steed charge, Which way your galleon sail This side the stars? I BENET NTO the East You prick your blooded courser, A falcon on your wrist Or a- wing in your jeweled heavens; Before your eyes A rapturous vision. C82] YEATS JEWELER of the Gray That was wind among the reeds, Water lapping on the shore In the moth-hour. . . . That was beryl and chrysoberyl Glimmering in the midnight. . . , That wandered with Oisin What has broken the vase? The shards no longer combine. 83] B. LE GALLIENNE IEAUTY and duty Are strangers forever," You have sung in a moment Of passionate loneliness; And the lover of beauty You always will be. And your tributes to beauty Roll sweet on the tongue And stir the jaded nerves And warm the sluggish heart. They are rich amber wines From a golden age In a period of wood alcohol. M. STERLING .AUGRE adamantine resolves You suffer deliciously From the thorns of the phantom rose. Celebrant of the constellations, Orpheus of the stellar suns, Your lyre was drawing Eurydice From Hades unto Edenic vales When you lost faith, gazed back And forfeited her forever. Magic wines have not availed To inocclude your piteous soul, Nor evanescent raptures To unsepulchre your heart. Shadows of the sevenfold Past Fall athwart your orchideal paeans: You are cinctured in gentle sadness. 85] KEMP .0, singer of white and gold, Wanderer with Jason to Colchis, To ^aea with Odysseus. . . . Un-fanging the dragon, Life, By chanting Cytherean spells. . . . Disarming the very Sirens With Paphian incantations. Carver of chryselephantine lays, Sung lustily, face to the wind. . . . Bold keel to the blue-veined surge, Anadyomene, changeable as the moon. From the first dawn to the last Vagabond, minstrel, Cyprogene! C86H FLICKS AT PEGASUS THE NEO-WHATS W, MASEFIELD KITING of the sea, Your words leap up, a song; And the song weds Earth to Heaven; And from them is born The failure that is success, Dauber! Writing of the earth, Your words bake a pot; And the pot reeks with stale beer. Writing of God, Your words slip into a noose; And the noose strangles Your song! [893 GIBSON A^EN before the War Your work seemed "dug in," Khaki-colored. Once in a while, A star-shell Beautiful as a flower; But even that Discloses sordor, Ruin and death. DE LA MARE JLlKE the needlework hangings Of times Elizabethan and Jacobean, Figures all but primitive Peering from garth and close; Like the samplers of lavender days, Mellow, grave with sentiment, Playing on forgotten heart-strings; Like the violet shadows On walls of sunken gardens. LAWRENCE X OU are a turret Rising above the domes Of the palace of Eros, A turret whose stairs Wind ever so steeply In pursuit of light. At every landing Your passions beat hot Against the windows; But you crush them back And resume the ascent In a torment of hope. Y< AIKEN OUR moods evolve a music Which makes dumb matter sing; And the echoes of these songs Surge back in a dozen keys, Some, delicate and sweet Virginal kisses; Some, sharp and scornful A spinsterlike bitterness; Some, deep and caressing The magic of fulfillment. 933 TORRENCE .T IRST, you offer sackcloth to my soul, Plunging it into the crypt, And, with vague rites, chasten it; Then, flooding it with light From a rose-window, Lead it to the high altar Before which swings the thurible Of your dreams. C943 OPPENHEIM Y OUR opulence of phrase Is magnificent; Bathsheba could not have withstood you But when the son of Jesse Hasted against Goliath, He took a stone And slang it. For the fighter, the stone; For the singer, the harp! 95] BYNNER 'H, you have charm enough; But yours is not simplicity So much as archness Steeped in the sly conceits And slyer metaphysics Of Donne and Suckling. Led by the Shropshire Lad, Your love of him sets you free And you sing like Herrick; Wheedled back by ambition, You aim to express the New World. No tinkling, charming in itself, Can reflect or interpret Problems demanding a Browning. C963 FLICKS AT PEGASUS THEMSELVES ROBINSON .OPE and Fear Calmly debating In close-knitted, Philosophic Jingle rhymes The footprint On the sand. C993 FROST OOMETHING there is of power in one's name That tends to shape one's life by love of it Or hate or resignation. A silver grayness Films the slow sureness of your speech That which was not Grips mightily And goes digging down, down, Coldly, after its nature, Into the roots of things. C ioo Yc TEASDALE OU are the voice Crowning the joyous embrace Of Cupid and Psyche: Voice of triumphant surrender Whose undertones Are the murmur of leaves To the earth, Whose overtones Are the singing of birds To the dawn. Y< HUEFFER OU paint with words, Paint Heavens and Hells and Earths With words of red and blue and green Orange and gray and black Like an ancient cosmographer Reborn as a friend of Blake's, Reborn again as your Self With impressions too vast For a page to picture. 102] A MASTERS MOVIE-CAMERA is needed To make even a snapshot Of a mind so nimble. The arc of your vision Extends from Before till After. Your vivid intimations Flicker and flash and glow Like heat-lightning Through the sultry night Of our misunderstanding. C 103 T KREYMBORG HEY climb too high For mushrooms. They possess the shapely slenderness, The crisp nervous movement, Of white birches That laugh with the wind. C 104 3 LINDSAY To be mumbled darkly as at the Movies Trombones very delicately Tom-toms and sbak-sbaks fastidiously Kazoos can amore OAY, are you deef? Such bellowing cracks Heaven And J ... A ... R ... S, jars, Old Atlas, Pleione And the peachy Seven. In Brobdingnag the tympanum Of Beauty may be like a drum; But H ... E ... R ... E, here, I eastward-of-Chicago fear, Although we love your stuff, Enufs enough! !!!...! Diminuendo to a dulcet fanfare ELIOT VyNE'S intellect chuckles all the way through And hopes that Wells and George and Swin- nerton Have not missed anything that you have written; For you have points in common with all three, Being, first and foremost, a novelist-realist, Who has resorted to rhythm, rhyme, counter- point To strike a happy medium between music and prose. On second thoughts, your works are tone poems To accompany certain haunting musical varia- tions In C minor and E flat major, not yet com- posed. 06: FLICKS AT PEGASUS PRISONERS OF FREEDOM POUND /ounsfecoac estiro eder ximinoa, Balis ere setascoa Basque Proverb. .ANG them all, I say too, For sniffing at a god's heels At every turnstile! Oime! OI/KH! Ah-eh! and Aie-e! Still, nom c/'un cbien, There's the jungle of Zansar, The Popol Vuh and Ko-ji-Ki In which to lose them; Or Gombo Zhebes to throw them off, Se il cor ti manca. C 109 J T. H. D. HE teeth of your spirit have bitten me: my mind is a desert afraid of the pools. They mirror froth and the arrows of date-palms. T. ALDINGTON RUTH . . . Beauty . . . Duarchs of a thousand facets . . . ! Since both are your faith, Why make difference Their religion, And leanness Its priest? "Thou shalt not make unto thee Any graven image: Thou shalt not bow down thyself To them, nor serve them." No matter what your god, For dogmatists God is a jealous God. Be sure of that! Cm] Ti FLETCHER HE shimmering leaves of nasturtiums Swing like lanterns in the hot night air: While over the roofs Blue stars play hop-scotch with each other. Like frightened chickens Blobs of moonlight freckle the terrace Bistre and bice and puce. I am a shimmering dewdrop Cuddled soft by the crisp nasturtiums But explain it to me I LOWELL Not James Russell W HEN you came you were like spice and lightning And the mixture splintered the Back Bay fog. Now you are like Biglow Doing the fox trot. I hardly hear you at all, for I follow your measures; But I am completely astonished. SANDBURG HEN you pluck your lyre, Though it's hacked from an ox-skull And strung with bull-tendons, With the finger-tips Of your five senses, Dream music gushes out; But when you use for plectrum A butcher's cleaver, The bull in the china-shop Tosses you his laurels. RILEY IN MEMORIAM V>*HILDREN love you, and old men! Swimmin' holes are mighty refreshin' And there's nothin* to beat An old-fashioned chuckle For clearing cobwebs. Some pumpkin, some pumpkin The feller that just naturally wins The love of children and old men Don't have to watch out. UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A 000 047 362 9 \ x / \