“ The great secret of life is to discover by a process of related effects, this common reality of experience. Most of mankind grope blindly in the dark, and miss it, and by a kind of frenzied and pitiable ignorance acquire the abnormal character of conduct. The poet discovers, or at least puts his being wholly at the disposal of, these secrets, wins a serene and contemplative relationship to these effects, and lives a normal spiritual life. Harmony and rhythm are but two common terms that express and designate infinity. ”

“ The poet at the core and centre of life, surrounded with his dreams, his clairvoyant madness imbibed from the full draught of experience, his intensity of emotion, his childlike tenderness of sympathy, his quickening ecstasy of unashamed and unrestrained feeling, is considered{x} the abnormal product of modern civilization; while in truth he is alone the one normal type of modern mankind, because he alone is in absolute harmony and understanding with the real and common impulse of human destiny. ”

“ That gashes thy granite length from the towers of sleep to the Bay
When the West rolls in with a rush and the North comes down with a roar
And the tramp of the Island men is loud on thy island shore.{47}
Shoulder to shoulder they come from the loins of a hundred lands,
The men with the New World brains and the men with the Old World hands,
And the vision is bright on the sky of the City to be
And the joy of the morning is there and the thrill of the sea.
As a surf is the sound of thy labor, O City ”

“ With more self-conscious art than Whitman, in the verse form which Whitman was once thought to have perfected, Mr. Oppenheim sings the joys and sorrows of the race now and to come. The vision of these poems is swift and sure: their philosophy, mature and American. If there is one volume of verse this year which we might safely recommend to every American man and woman who has not read poetry before, it is this book, where they will find their dreams and strivings sung and interpreted in a book which has qualities of greatness. ”

“ The poetry in the magazines this year has been of an excellence in the longer pieces beyond the standard of any year in which I have made these estimates. The selections in this volume give evidence of a serious, even anxious, probing of human life. The lyric, represented by some lovely work, has not been practiced with the same irresponsible emotional delight as in past years. Perhaps, there has never been a year when the American poets have shown the independence of their own efforts, when comparatively new work has been so free from English influences. ”

“ The face whose images we are;
We find each other’s hand upon the wheel
Piloting every star.
Shall we then watch with a less lonely breath
Gradual, sudden, everlasting death?
Oh, lest a separating wind assail
The jocund stars and all their ways be dearth,
And love, undone of its immense avail,
Go homeless even on earth,
Let us be constant, though we travel far,
With every mortal token of our trust,
And not forget, piloting any star,
How dear a thing is dust!
Yale Review Witter Bynner
REMEMBRANCE: GREEK FOLK-SONG
Not unto the forest—not unto the forest, O my lover! ”

“ We still flee out of Babylon, its sobbing and its sighing,
Where the strong grow ever stronger, and the weary fail!
We still flee out of Babylon, the feverish, the fretful,
That saps the sweetness of the soul and leaves but a rind;
We still flee out of Babylon, and fain would be forgetful
Of all within that thrall of wall threatening behind!
Oh, Babylon, oh, Babylon, your toiling and your teeming,
Your canyons and your wonder-wealth,—not for such as we!
We who have fled from Babylon contented are with dreaming,—
Dreaming of earth’s loveliness, happy to be free! ”

“ Their reality in life is mathematical immediacy, the cloak of visibility in which they are wrapped to go about their daily tasks in the world. Now poetry sees in these people and their affairs only the symbols of what is real, looks upon their whole fantastic display of living as the illusion beneath which their real living is concealed ”

“ O Autumn! bringing to old adventures death,
Sadness at all things past, things passing still,—
You touched this love with strange and dreadful breath;
Easy as leaf is human love to chill,—
Easy as leaf is human to kill;
Yet beautiful is that death with sudden flame,
Ere it goes down to darkness, whence it came!...
{92} The Poetry Journal Conrad Aiken
“IF YOU SHOULD CEASE TO LOVE ME”
If you should cease to love me, tell me so! ”

“ As a grail is the gleam of thy towers and the glow of the Great White Way,
And a thousand ships have sailed and sailed to the lure of the lights on the Bay,
And the spell of thy song, O Enchantress, is sweet on the southern air,
And the shepherd far out on the plains feels the sting of thy hair.
Thou art young with the youth of them, strong with the strength of them, filled with the beauty of girls ”

“ They realized imaginative facts, and kept in absolute tune with the harmony and rhythm of life, not merely with what they saw with the actual eye, but with that more penetrative, more limitless sense, the seeing soul. They were poets, and the one insistent quality of their message, was the reality of mortal and immortal life.
It is hard to make a certain type of mind understand that all which is seen with the physical eye, and touched with the fleshly hand, is illusion.{xi} That kind of a mind does not understand symbols. ”

“ And Speed throws her myriad shuttles and the ambulance hurries by,
And the foam of the evening papers is white on the living sea,
And the deep defiles are black with men as far as the eye can see,
And loaded trains rush north and west from thy mighty central heart,{49}
And the rivers foam and the bridges sag till their strong steel cables start,
And the Rock drinks in its thousands from the moving flood in the street
As the strong male tide goes out with the roar of a million feet. ”

“ Escaping the illusion, this modern world has become the prisoner of delusion. For, if poetry deals with anything, it deals with reality. No matter how remote the setting, how subtle the communication, the one hard fact about true poetry, is its reality. ”

“ And the brown arms of the reapers bent to toil another morn;
Close beside me in the glimmer, in the golden sweep and shimmer,
Knelt a reaper strange among us, crooning thro’ the ragged corn:
“Born of sorrow,
Gone to-morrow—
Gone to lie in yonder valley where their fathers long have lain;
Men who know not ship nor sabre,
Each but drudges by his neighbor,
And the fields wherein they labor are a heritage of pain!” ”

“ A new volume of verse by Mr. Lindsay, whose first book was the most significant publication in American poetry last year. While this book does not mark an advance, many of the poems written to be chanted aloud fully sustain the poet’s reputation, and the volume is graced with a selection of the best and less strident of the Rhymes to be Traded for Bread. As the poetic interpreter of the Middle West, Mr. Lindsay is performing a great social service, as well as a great service to poetry by bringing it into the homes and hearts of the people. ”

“ And poetry has aspired to sustain the nobler part of man’s nature during the confusion into which civilization has been plunged since the war began. The English people, who have been in the world’s vanguard practising democratic ideals, have, in their poets to-day, shattered the idol of war and are glorifying the ideals of peace.
The best poems in English directly inspired by the war have been produced by American poets. Of these I have gathered a representative group in this volume. ”

“ Come over thy toiling miles with a slack of thy terrible power
When story on story lets out on the pavement below
And thy streets are a-swarm with the Jew and the parks overflow.
Far-famed is the rustling hour when the shoppers flow in,{48}
For miles thy walks are abloom and the monstrous fairs begin,
And the aisles of the merchants are crowded, and dark-faced boys,
Are out on the corners with flowers, and fakirs are there with their toys.
I have paused with the passing throng where the hoyden sea wind whirls
And whisks round the tall gray towers the skirts of the laughing girls ”

“ Although Paul Claudel is unknown to English readers, his influence is the strongest shaping force there is on the young poetry of most European countries. This volume is as much of a literary event as the publication of John Synge’s first volume in this country. I know of no living writer of whom we may more confidently predict immortality for his work. The present volume reveals the soul of China in wonderful strophes, and though perhaps the slightest of Claudel’s books, is the volume by which Claudel may be most fittingly introduced to the American public. ”

“ He’s skirlin’ ’em, he’s dirlin’ ’em, he’s blowin’ like a storm—
O pipes of the North, O the pibroch pourin’ forth,
You’re fierce and loud as Winter but ye make the blood run warm!
All the battle-names of story, all the jewel-names of song
Down the spate of the clangor swing and reel,
And the claymores come a-flashin’ for a thousand years along
From Can-More to bonnie Charlie and Lochiel. ”

“ The fact of life is there, hidden away in the solitary soul, determining the illusions of conductual existence. It is crowded with moods, emotions and feelings, experienced with such intensity that what breaks forth in actual deed and event is but a faint reflection of the real experience the soul has gone through. The ideal is the real, because it is what one has lived but cannot express in the related experience of human intercourse. ”

“ Leading with Downie’s crew
The line. With long booms swung to starboard they heave to,
Whistling their flock of galleys who advance
Behind, then toward the Yankees, four abreast,
Tack landward, west.
Landward the watching townsfolk strew the shore;
Mist-banks of human beings blur the bluffs
And blacken the roofs, like swarms of roosting choughs.
Waiting the cannon’s roar
A nation holds its breath for knell of Nevermore{27}
Or peal of life: this hour shall cast the sloughs
Of generations—and one old dame’s joy:
Her gunner boy. ”

“ From 1900 to 1905, poetry had declined; and I think there has never been another period in our history when so unintelligent and indifferent an attitude existed toward the art. The scale since 1905 has been ascending, and the high pitch of achievement has not yet been reached. Whether fine poetry creates a general and popular recognition of the art, or the sympathetic appreciation of poetry for itself encourages excellent production, I cannot say. But this is apparent: that a period or epoch of the highest achievement has always been one of popular appreciation. ”

“ I know the town where the yellow man goes by on his velvet soles;
I have threaded the still, dark canyons where the clustered towers rise;
Not a foot is heard of the thousands; they are ghosts on the midnight skies ”

“ The most artistic volume of poetry this year in its technique. Aloofness, controlled emotion, conscious art, are the characteristics of his poetry. Despite an occasional bizarrerie, despite echoes of Verlaine and Laforgue, Mr. Arensberg is a classicist. His technique is faultless. Each line is not only exquisite in itself, but it is perfectly coördinated with every other line. If these poems leave the reader cold, they offer an abundant intellectual compensation for the “thrills” of other poets. ”

“ The verse in this volume is of a kind that has eminent qualities without eminent distinction. The earnestness and sincerity of Mr. Burt’s poetic moods give to his poetry those sound qualities which at least compel attention, if they do not excite the emotions. The elements of poetry are not fused with imaginative heat in his work, and hence it lacks magic, but it reflects the gentlemanly feeling of a lover of poetry in verse which demands respect. ”

“ The form of these poems is so difficult to shape perfectly that Mr. Oppenheim’s technical achievement can only be characterized as masterly. The volume is the only one in which the use of “polyrhythmic verse” can claim complete justification since Leaves of Grass, and its art is as individual as its matter. Songs for the New Age may reaffirm much of Whitman, but they do not echo him. The volume will prove more and more satisfying with each rereading. And its message to the American people may not pass unheeded. ”

“ Woodberry’s finest volume of verse, in which he gives expression to many moods of intellectual beauty and a philosophy of the ideal akin to Shelley. It contains one lyric, Comrades, absolutely peerless and worthy to be set beside Browning’s The Guardian Angel, if it does not surpass it. These poems are the fruit of a ripe culture and a passionate idealism thoroughly American in its voicing of its message. ”

“ The work achieved by Percy MacKaye on different phases of the European war has made more secure than ever his position as a poet. It is no exaggeration to say that the two groups of sonnets which originally appeared in the Boston Transcript in August and September, and which are now included in his volume, “The Present Hour,” are comparable as a whole to William Watson’s “The Purple East,” and in such individual pieces as “Kruppism,” and “The Real Germany,” he has done work finer and more impressive than is to be found in any of the older writer’s sonnets. ”

“ Out of these reviews has grown a demand for a more permanent preservation of the best work, resulting in this annual “Anthology of Magazine Verse,” to which are added records, references, and criticisms, which constitute a “Year-Book of American Poetry.” While all the other arts have had this service performed in their interests, poetry, the one art that most needed such a special reinforcement of its{xiv} achievement, has been permitted to drift along throughout our entire critical history without this sort of attention. ”