Jessie Belle Rittenhouse

“ Burton’s work most representative of his feeling toward life. Any poet worthy of the name will come at last to a vision that only his eyes can see. Life will rise before him in a different semblance from that she presents to another; and if Beauty has lured him on, votary to that he might not wholly see, Life’s yearning face wears no disguise, and, once having looked upon it with seeing eyes, it is an image not to be effaced. There are many who look and never see,—the majority, perhaps. Their eyes are holden by the shapes that cross the inner sight, by hope and memory and their own ideal. ”

“ It is as intricate in form and phrase as if not consecrated to the lyre by poets in the dawn of art. The divorce between poetry and song grows more absolute year by year; composers search almost vainly through modern volumes of verse for lyrics that combine the melody and feeling, the spontaneity and grace, indispensable to song. It is not that the modern poet is unable to produce such, but that he does not choose. It has gone out of fashion, to state the case quite frankly, to write with a singing cadence; something rare and strange must issue from the poet’s lips, something inobvious. ”

“ A dew-fresh song would teach the crocus’ lesson, or many another lesson, without a hint of teaching it, merely by beauty; by the creed of Keats. Pope’s didactic, sententious lines are gone; but Keats, who never pointed a moral in his life, sings on eternally. Miss Reese too is votary to beauty for its own sake; she gives one the flower, and he may extract the nectar for himself. The nectar is always there for one’s distilling into the truth which is the essence of things. She does not herself extract and distil it, for hers is the art of suggestion. ”

“ Carman’s divination of the finished work to be that is at fault; one feels that the subject is clearly visioned in his mind at the outset, but that it proves in some cases too alluring to his fancy. His work is not artificial; he is not fashioning poetic bric-à-brac to adorn his verse; sincerity is writ large upon it; but his mood is so compelling that he is carried on by the force of momentum, and finding, when the impulse is spent, so much beauty left behind, he has not the heart to destroy it. ”

“ XV MARY MCNEIL FENOLLOSA TO be a poet of the East, one must be a painter, using words as a colorist uses pigment. His poem must be a picture wherein form and detail are subjected to the values of tone and atmosphere; like the dawn-crest of Fujiyama it must glow, it must dazzle with tints and light. To convert the pen into an artist’s brush, the vocabulary into a palette, is an end not to be gained by striving; it is a talent a priori, a temperamental color, a temperamental art. ”

“ To divine the dumb emotion, the unexpectant desire, of the man of the streets, and to become his interpreter, is a nobler achievement than to catch in delicate fancies the airiest thoughts of Pan. The poet who remains merely the voice of the wood-god, or the voice of the mystic, or the voice of the scholar dreaming and aloof, may float a song over the treetops, but it will not be known at the hearth, which is the final test. Not to anticipate Mr. Burton’s later ideal, however, let us return to Dumb In June and go with him upon the way of nature, unshadowed and elate. ”

“ VI JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY A BEAUTIFUL and delicate art is that of Miss Josephine Preston Peabody, but somewhat elusive of analysis, so much is its finer part dependent upon the intuition which one brings to it; for Miss Peabody is a poet-mystic, sensitive to impressions from which the grosser part has slipped away,—impressions which come to her clothed upon with a more ethereal vesture than the work-a-day garment of thought,—and while she would fain reveal their hidden import, they often elude her and grow remote in the telling, as if fearful of betraying too openly their secret. ”

“ One may even be an avowed philanthropist and never come in sight of a human soul, as will the poet who looks upon the individual not as a case to be classified and tabulated, but as one walking step to step with him, though more heavily, whom he may reach out and touch now and then with the quickening hand of sympathy, and whose load he may bear bewhiles on the journey.
Such a poet is Mr. Burton, whose nature is shapen to one image with his fellows. To him literature is not an entity to be weighed only in the scales of beauty by the balances of Flaubert ”

“ Roberts’ out-of-door verse in that volume which first truly reveals him,—The Book of the Native. So conscious is one of a new force in this book that it would seem to represent another personality. Its opening poem, “Kinship,” turns for inspiration,
Back to the bewildering vision
And the border-land of birth;
Back into the looming wonder,
The Companionship of Earth,
and puts the query to nature:
Tell me how some sightless impulse,
Working out a hidden plan,
God for kin and clay for fellow,
Wakes to find itself a man. ”

“ How Miss Reese has been able, in the hurly-burly of American life, to find some indesecrate corner, some daffodiled garden-close, holding always the quiet and the glint of sunshine out of which these songs have come, is an enigma worth a poet’s solving. She is a Southern woman, which may furnish some clew to the repose of her work. There is time down there to ripen, to let life have its own way of enrichment with one. ”

“ One seldom reads a poem by Miss Thomas without bringing away from it a suggestive thought or a spiritual stimulus, sometimes introduced so subtly that it breaks upon one in the after-light of memory rather than at the moment of reading; for Miss Thomas is not a homiletic singer, obtruding the moral. She is too much the artist for that. She delivers no crass counsel, does no obvious and commonplace moralizing; but she has the nature that resolves every phase of life into its spiritual elements, and, seen imaginatively, these elements are material for Art. ”

“ One loses thought of print, and is for the nonce following his errant fancy through meadow and coppice to the heart of the spicy fir-woods, picking his way over the forest brooks, from stone to stone; following the alluring skid-roads, latticed by new growths on either side and arched above by interlacing green; penetrating into the tamarack thickets at the lure of the hermit-thrush, that spirit-voice of song; resting on a springy bed of moss and fern,—becoming, in short, wayfellow of desire, and thrall but to his will. ”

“ It is for those who know that poetry can no more be adapted to all than could the spoken words of a great teacher reach equally the diverse minds of a multitude whom he might address; and that while it may be the office of one poet to interpret the struggles, the activities, the aims of life, it may be equally the part of another to penetrate to that calm at the depth of the soul where throes have brought forth peace. ”

“ Roberts has succeeded in conveying that sense of isolation in a throng, that heavy loneliness and reaction, throwing one back upon his own spiritual personality, which belongs to the bewildering city night, and from which the finer companionships of love arise as a refuge and need.
The Nocturnes have the city’s over-soul incarnate in them; for in the last analysis, the commerce, the art, the ambition, the strife, the defeat, that one may term the city’s life, are but as hands and feet to minister to the spirit of love. ”

“ They have beauty of spirit, beauty of word; but their motive is so subtle, their thought so intangible, that while they charm one in the reading, they have, with a few exceptions, melted into vapor, gone the way of the foam, when once the eye has left them. One feels throughout the volume an ingenuous simplicity, a naïveté, that is, in many of her poems, exceedingly charming, but which, becoming the pervasive note of the collection, communicates to it a certain artificial artlessness, as if June, disregarding the largess of the rose, yearned back to April and the violet ”

“ We leap to the infinite dark, like the sparks from the anvil,
Thou leadest, O God! all’s well with Thy troopers that follow!
“The Kings” and “The Perfect Hour” are other trumpet notes of Miss Guiney’s, illustrating the individuality of her point of view and the personality of her expression.
A poet’s words may be wind-blown feathers, or they may be flint-tipped arrows singing to a mark. The defect with much of present-day poetry is that it is not aimed, it is content to be a pretty flight of feathers, blown by the breath of fancy, and reaching no vital spot. ”

“ Here is the simplest Saxon, and wholly without ornament, yet who could be unconscious of the heart-beat of life in the words? In her poem, “In Extremis,” one is moved by the same intensity of feeling expressed in the litany imploring deliverance from fear.
Of the more purely devotional poems, “Hora Christi” is perhaps the most reverent, and instinct with delicate simplicity. It is a song of the spirit, interpreting a mood whose springs are deep in the pain of life, but whose hidden wells have turned to sweetness and healing. ”

“ XIV CLINTON SCOLLARD THAT genial and delicate satirist, Miss Agnes Repplier, laments in one of her clever essays that our modern poets incline to dwell upon the sombre side of things, and hence contribute so little to the cheer of life. One cannot but wonder what poetry Miss Repplier has been reading, for our own acquaintance with the song of to-day has been so much the opposite that it is difficult on the spur of the moment to recall any poet of the present group in America whose work is not in the main wholesome and heartening and who is not facing toward the sun. ”

“ It is in such poems as bring from the heart of life a certain poignant strain that Miss Thomas is at her best. She is not a melancholy singer, but her work is too deeply rooted in the pain and unrest of life to be joyous. A certain longing, an almost impalpable sadness, pervades much of her verse. Nevertheless, it is not so emphasized as to be depressing, and, indeed, adds just the touch of personality by which one treasures that which he feels has been fused in experience. ”

“ There is nothing of that development of man that shall find a higher way, no visioning of a world-standard to which nations shall conform; it is rather the celebration of brawn, as in the sonnet “America.” The jubilant note of his call of the “Bugles,” however, thrills with passionate pride in his country as the deliverer of the weak, for the ultimate idea in Hovey’s mind was his country’s altruism; but, as a whole, the battle-songs lack the larger vision and are unequal in workmanship, falling constantly into the commonplace from some flight of lyric beauty. ”

“ Daily his own heart he eats,—
not morbidly, but finding within his own spirit daily manna, and living by this aliment and not by the mere nectar of things. Everything in life bestows this manna and daily renews it; and the poet is he who assimilates and transmutes it to personal needs until his thought is fed from his own heart as in Emerson’s couplet.
This is Mr. Knowles’ ideal of growth, evidenced by the eager interest and open sympathy with which he seeks from life its elements of truth, and from experience its developing properties. ”

“ If poetry become too much a matter of observation, of report, vitality goes from it; for imagination is stultified and emotion quenched, and poetry at its best is a union of imagination and emotion. Mr. Burton’s poems in the main escape this indictment, but their danger lies along this line. His perception of identities is so acute, his sympathy so catholic, that not only is nothing human alien to him, but there is nothing in which he cannot find a theme for poetry. For illustration, there is an imaginative beauty in the symbol of the homing bird, but its artistic value is lost from over-use. ”

“ Originality is not crushed by cultivation, nor will native impulse go far without it. The need is of a poet who shall divine the underlying harmonies of life, who shall stimulate and develop the higher nature, and disclose the alchemizing truth that shall transmute the gross ore of experience into the fine metal of character and spiritual beauty,—such a poet as Mr. Knowles himself may become when his idealism shall have taken on that inner sight of the mystic which now he shows so definitely in certain phases of his work. ”

“ While the metaphorical idea in these strophes is not new, they record with freehand strokes one of those suddenly suggestive moods that nature assumes, one of the swift similitudes she flashes before us as with conscious delight. Mr. Burton’s nature-outlook is all open-air vision; no office desk looms darkly behind it, as is sometimes the case in his other verse. It is the sort of inspiration that descends upon one when he is afoot with his vision, roaming afield with beauty. A leaf torn hastily from a notebook serves to catch the fleeting spell; magnetism tips the pencil ”

“ It is interesting to note, in studying the formative time of many poets, that nature is the first mistress of their vows, and a less capricious one than they shall find again; hence their fealty to her and their ardor of surrender. Life has not yet come by, and paused to whisper the one word that shall become the logos of the soul; truth is still in the cosmos, the absolute, and one despairs of reducing it to the relative as he might of detaching a pencil of light from the rays of the sun. ”