them and run them for their own selfish ends. The old attitude re-appears with a new emphasis in the following poem in prose by Lord Dunsany, who looks upon the great city as a violent distortion of the purpose of nature.

THE PRAYER OF THE FLOWERS *

It was the voice of the flowers on the West wind, the lovable, the old, the lazy West wind, blowing ceaselessly, blowing sleepily, going Greecewards.

"The Woods have gone away, they have fallen and left us; men love us no longer, we are lonely by moonlight. Great engines rush over the beautiful fields, their ways lie hard and terrible up and down the land.

"The cancrous cities spread over the grass, they clatter in their lairs continually, they glitter about us blemishing the night.

"The Woods are gone, O Pan, the woods, the woods. And thou art far, O Pan, and far away."

I was standing by night between two railway embankments on the edge of a Midland city. On one of them I saw the trains go by, once in every two minutes, and on the other, the trains went by twice in every five.

Quite close were the glaring factories, and the sky above them wore the fearful look that it wears in dreams of fever.

The flowers were right in the stride of that advancing city, and thence I heard them sending up their cry. And then I heard, beating musically up wind, the voice of Pan reproving them from Arcady-"Be patient a little, these things are not for long."

*

Lord Dunsany (1878-)

Copyrighted by Little, Brown and Company.

CHAPTER XII

THE CONTEMPORARY POETS

Lo, with the ancient
Roots of man's nature,
Twines the eternal

Passion of song.

Ever Love fans it,

Ever Life feeds it;

Time cannot age it,

Death cannot slay.

William Watson: "England my Mother"

We are living in a poetic age. It is a little difficult to grasp this fact until one recalls the status of poetry some twenty years ago. In 1900 the public read little beside fiction; the short story was in its heyday. A volume of verse was something to be printed at the author's expense and read only by the poet's friends. The few poems that were published were, in the main, thin and bookish reechoings of older poets. Poetry had nearly lost its contact with life. Only those writers who cultivated light verse and the French forms were making any real advance. In England twenty years ago there was no younger poet of first importance except Kipling. In America the older New England poets were all dead, and

such poets as were writing were not widely read. Edmund Clarence Stedman, Madison Cawein, and William Vaughn Moody did not write the kind of poetry which many persons will ever care to read. Even as recently as 1910, only one of the strictly contemporary American poets had begun to write: this was Edwin Arlington Robinson, then almost entirely unknown. Foreign observers might well imagine that America was too materialistic ever to produce a supremely great poet. We even said the same thing of ourselves. Some shared Macaulay's opinion that “as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines."

Today, however, no poet has cause to lament, like Milton, that he is "fallen on evil days," for never before in the history of the world were so many people interested in poetry. The evidence is unmistakable. There are several magazines devoted wholly to poetry. Many of the older publications, which in 1910 used verse only as a "filler," now make it a feature. In recent years both publishers and authors have been known to reap large profits from a volume of verse. Nor is this all. At hundreds of club meetings and popular lectures recent poetry is being read and discussed. Numerous handbooks and anthologies have been published to meet the widespread demand for information in regard to contemporary poets. Most remarkable fact of all perhaps, present-day poetry has at last received recognition in that conservative quarter, the college curriculum. If we except the little community around Boston in the middle of the last century, nothing like this wide interest in poetry has ever been known in America.

One of the most striking aspects of contemporary poetry is its re-conquest of much of the territory which verse had lost to prose. When literature emerged from the twilight obscurity of prehistoric times, it consisted solely of poetry; prose was a later development. The Greeks had no Muse for either the novel or the short story. Ever since the invention of printing, prose has encroached more and more upon the narrowing confines of poetry. The novel, the short story, and the essay rendered the epic and the ballad well-nigh obsolete. It began to look as though poetry were to be limited to the lyric. For a decade or more-if we except certain brilliant young novelists who have come into prominence within the last two or three years-prose fiction has been conventional and inferior in quality; this is especially true of America. The short story in particular has become stereotyped, machine-made, and out of touch with life. Hence those writers who have stories to tell now frequently turn to poetry as a freer medium of expression. The best of the poems of Noyes and Masefield, of Frost, Robinson, Masters, and Amy Lowell are narrative.

We shall discuss the British poets first because they illustrate, better than the American, the transition from the older poetry to the new. In English poetry we find two strongly contrasted groups of poets, who, for want of more exact terms, are usually called the conservatives and the radicals. Among the conservatives we may class William Watson; Robert Bridges, the poet laureate; Alfred Noyes; and three poets no longer living, Stephen Phillips, Andrew Lang, and Austin Dobson. The best

known poets of the radical group are John Masefield and Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. With them we may class two older poets, Kipling and Yeats, and the younger poets known as the Georgians. The conservative poets, in the main, continue the ideals and methods of the Victorians, especially Swinburne and Tennyson. The radicals rebel against the ideals of the Victorians and seek new themes and experiment with new modes of expression.

Tennyson is the pet aversion of the radicals; and Tennyson, though a genuine poet and a great artist, had certain faults which his successors widely imitated. The result was that poetry became highly conventional in language, in ideas, and in technique. Professor Thorndike in a brilliant study of the Victorian period, Literature in a Changing Age, points out the conventional side of Tennyson's diction: "Flowers, moonlight, the lapping wave, jewels and silks, the open road, the wind in the trees, the flash of swords, the pale face and the deep eyes, the rose of dawn, the lone sea mew-whatever is pretty, melodious, picturesque, and rather superfluous in the day's work-furnish the thread of poetic embroidery for Tennyson, and for how many imitators!" Tennyson's followers, being unable to rival his original merits, imitated his faults: his over-ornate diction, his sentimentality, his artificial themes. The subjects of Swinburne, Morris, and Rossetti, for instance, are drawn oftener from books than from life; their poems presuppose more culture than the average reader possesses. Late Victorian poetry was out of touch with the life of the English people. The time was ripe for a new poetic move