ach

O writes Mr. Robinson, a man of New England birth and Harvard education, and sings in his own key and after his own manner with the quiet assurance of one who knows that, although everything has been said, everything still remains to be said.

There is nothing new under the sun, declares the man of the world who sees everything and understands nothing-" the cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing "-and the poet, the man for whom the world is part of the universe, calmly goes down the road threading his way through the crowd singing about things that were old ten thousand years ago, and are so new this morning that the poet finds it difficult to keep his feet on the ground. If one were searching for a real synonym for the fresh rush of life in the world, he would find Shakespeare; if he were looking for an example of old, stale, and unprofitable things, he would find it in some morning newspaper.

There is always a new poetry except in those brief periods when society tries to fool itself with things and put ideas under lock and key. Byron's verse was new, and so was the verse of Shelley; and Keats, whose brain hummed with the tunes that made the morning of time beautiful, was as new as Shelley, who stood on old things only long enough to spread his wings for daring flights

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into the future. It was a very new kind of poetry which found its way to a few readers and later to the heart of the world in the little book, so highly prized by collectors, printed at Kilmarnock in 1786; but it was not newer than the slender book of "Lyrical Ballads" which announced the rebirth of poetry in England.

When "Thanatopsis" appeared in the "North American Review" in 1817, it was so novel in its quality that it marked the beginning of American poetry; and "Israfel" was of a beauty so fresh that it was startling. "The Mystic Trumpeter " and the "Hymns of the Marshes," to say nothing of many later songs, gave the familiar old world a morning air. There is nothing new under the sun until the man of imagination arrives, and then everything has the morning air on it. Sometimes the form is new, but

it is not the novel form that makes new poetry. Whitman set great store by his rejection of what he regarded as the conventionalities of verse-making, but whenever the groundswell of the passion of the comradeship of democracy or the surge of the elemental movement of things lifted his long, unrhymed lines to the level of great poetry, he evoked the splendid effects of the oldest rhapsodists in their inspired moments. His professionally new poetry is often a dreary. procession of unrelated objects.

Nor does novelty of theme make poetry new; one may write about the telephone, wireless telegraphy, and the aeroplane with realistic accuracy, and be as stale and unprofitable as the latest celebrant at the classic altars; while a song about Endymion may stir the pulse like a cry from the future. Poetry is new by virtue neither of its themes nor of its form, but by reason of its freshness of feeling, its energy of imagination, its vitality of phrase. The newness must be in the heart and brain of the poet, not in his tools. As a rule, the poetry that sets out to be new

is depressing reading, and there is a great deal of it; but the poetry that conveys the surprise of the poet as the new day breaks on his imagination is like a spring in a dry and thirsty land.

It is easy to count fifty poets in the younger group; thirty-seven are represented by selections in the book called "The Younger Choir" (Moods Publishing Company, New York), and several well-known names do not appear; among these are Mr. Percy Mackaye, Mr. Robinson, Mr. Hagedorn, Mr. Neihardt, four of the most promising; and in addition the writers of the poetic drama must be taken into account. If one adds the older poets-Messrs. Woodberry, Van Dyke, Riley, Johnson, Carman, Roberts, Santayana, Miss Thomas, Miss Guiney, Mrs. Van Rensselaer, and others-it is evident that Mr. Viereck was well within the truth when he declared that "American poetry needs missionaries in America no less than in Europe," and that there are half a hundred poets in this country who strike their own notes.

For twenty years the country has been too busy to take account of its poetry; but now that it is learning that wealth without poetry is weariness, and that the divorce of the senses from the imagination is a spiritual scandal, and a breeder of material scandals as well, it may turn again to the singers who have neither feared nor flattered it, but have refused to be blinded by its prosperity or confused by its resounding activities. The new poetry is refreshing reading, not because it is great, but because it keeps the old loyalty to the things of the spirit. It has long been the fashion to classify the American with the Phoenician as a born trader and an ingrained materialist. International judgments, as a rule, are worthless for lack of knowledge; but it is surprising that none of the critics of this temper has taken the trouble to read American poetry, which is one long protest against every form of materialism.

And the younger poets are even outspoken than the older poets. The sense of the inhumanity of some forms of the social order of the time gives their verse the same quality of passion which swept Whittier and Lowell in their time. The pictures of bitter poverty, of crushing toil, of heart-deadening misery, have been drawn with uncompromising realism by Mr. Masefield, the English poet. No one can read his "The Everlasting Mercy" without flinching a little from the hard literalism of the details; poverty

is an old theme with the poets, but even Hood's "Song of the Shirt" does not sound the note of hopeless misery as it is sounded in "The Widow in the Bye Street." Another English writer, Mr. W. W. Gibson, gives us short, dramatic pieces in a different key; they are wholly modern in theme, with an almost journalistic nearness to present conditions; their restraint, their appealing simplicity, their trust in the potency of the fact to tell the story, are the virtues of ancient poetry. It is quite probable that these English poets stand too near their themes, and that their work lacks the element of permanence because it lacks perspective. But if it misses fame and gets only reputation, it does not lack the moving appeal of the great cry of human need:

"All life moving to one measure-
Daily bread, daily bread-

Bread of life, and bread of labor,
Bread of bitterness and sorrow,
Hand-to-mouth and no to-morrow,
Dearth for house-mate, dearth for neighbor.

Yet, when all the babes are fed,

Love, are there not crumbs to treasure?" Among the younger American poets Mr. James Oppenheim has listened to this cry with a responsive imagination. His work is very uneven; some of it has the air of straining after newness, and discards the old felicities without putting fresh power in their place. He seems to be saying to himself, as do Mr. Kauffman and Mr. Underwood, "Go to; let us make the new poetry out of hand." This attitude brings strange phrases, halting rhythms, unpoetic words, to their service, but neither the inspiration nor the art without which there is no poetry. But Mr. Oppenheim and Mr. Kauffman have other and happier moods when, forgetting theory and thesis, they write with deep feeling and fresh phrase and produce poetry which is new but not strange; which is vital and convincing, without the self-conscious pose which makes the poet a preacher of doctrines rather than a teacher of truth. In Mr. Kauffman's impressive lines entitled "He Shall Rise " there is unmistakable strength:

"Not risen yet, but soon to rise! The world is sick with hope deferred,

But down the ladder of the stars there comes the whisper and the word;

The few are deaf, the many hear and silently make straight the way,

Who toil through all the dreaming nights and dream throughout the sodden day.

A score of years or but a year; what matter to their farther gaze,

wood's verse; and, it must be added, there is too little of that humor which, in seeking after realism, saves a man from falling upon mere literalism. There is real descriptive power in many of the lines in "The Strap

"O Dream-World lights that lift through the ether millions of miles to the Milky Way! To-night Earth rolls through a golden weather that lights the Pleiades where they play! Yet... God? Does he lead these sons and daughters? Yea, do they feel with a passion that stills,

God on the face of the moving waters, God in the quiet of the hills?

Through one another-through one anotherno more the gleam on sea or land, But so close that we see the Brother-and understand-and understand!

Till, drawn in swift crowd closer, closer, we see the gleam in the human clod,

And clerk and foreman, peddler and grocer, are in our Family of God."

The feeling and vigor of these lines convey a large meaning; but there is, and there always will be, a poetic and a prose vocabulary, and the zeal of the poet must not consume the singer to such a degree that he loses the sense of selection; nor, it be may added, that he loses that saving grace of common sense which is as necessary to the artist as to the man in the street.

The iconoclasm of Mr. Underwood's "Iron Muse" (G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York) and of "Americans " has a journalistic rather than a militant ring, and is more suggestive of exploitation than of the far-flung line of battle in the eternal struggle for freedom. Not only have the themes a reportorial up-todateness, so to speak, but one gets the feeling that the author has sent his Muse out into the streets and tenement-houses as a city editor gives the reporters on the staff special assignments to "write up" a murder, a fire, or a riot, and the Muse goes forth and does the best she can with such subjects as "The Old Grad," "The Strap-Hanger,' "The Commuter," "The Photographer," "The Fan," "The Chauffeur," "The Private Secretary," Central," "The Typewriter." There is poetry in all occupations if one puts imagination into his work, but the method of minute cataloguing is more suggestive of a business directory than of a register of stars; and if the poetry of " mean streets is to be written, there must be stars overhead. There is, in a word, too much of petty realism about Mr. Under

those who cordially recognize Mr. Underwood's genuinely human impulse.

"It's the greatest hold-up ever

gives little promise of the gleam of poetry on the closing verse:

'Through the reek and dust are drifting, heaven while we dream.

For the night is slowly lifting. Somewhere shines the gleam.

Still God's multitudes are marching. Somewhere far away,

Past his Subway's gloom o'erarching, dawns for all His day."

Mr. Underwood believes that poetry must be brought closer to modern life, and that nothing human is alien to it; and this is not only fundamentally true, but precisely what poets in every generation have done. But, in rendering its great service to humanity, poetry must not take on the very prose which it is striving to illumine. Mr. Underwood has too much of the poet in him to ignore this elementary truth; and when he has had his fling, so to speak, he will hearten the marching hosts of his time with real music. has already finely said of poetry:

"It shall stand as the mountains shall stand
Like the visible stairs of the skies;
All the beauty and breadth of the land
They gather and raise as they rise.

And the fire that in millions of hearts flamed hopeless shall triumph in Thee.

And the choir that in silence departs shall aspire to the soul's symphony.

And the wave of all life and its arts shall leap higher toward its heaven to be."

When Mr. Robert Haven Schauffler's "Scum o' the Earth and Other Poems" (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston) appeared, the poem which gave the slender book its title probably made many people aware for the first time of the picturesqueness of the Bohemian, Polish, and Slovak immigrants as they group themselves on the piers of New York, as Mr. Pennell's etchings made many people see for the first time the striking lines of the great modern business buildings. These strangers at the gate were shown in the large fellowship of humanity for which this country stands, and clothed with the dignity of seekers after that better fortune which lies far more in moral and intellectual opportunity