Howard Willard Cook, Our Poets of Today
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MODERN AMERICAN WRITERS OUR POETS OF TODAY Our Poets of Today BY HOWARD WILLARD COOK NEW YORK MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY 1919 COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY MOFFAT, YARP & COMPANY C77I I count myself in nothing else so happy as in a soul remembering my good friends: JULIA ELLSWORTH FORD WITTER BYNNER KAHLIL GIBRAN PERCY MACKAYE 4405 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To our American poets, to the publishers and editors of the various periodicals and books from whose pages the quotations in this work are taken, I wish to give my sincere thanks for their interest and co-operation in making this book possible. To the following publishers I am obliged for the privilege of using selections which appear, under their copyright, and from which I have quoted in full or in part: The Macmillan Company: The Chinese Nightingale, The Congo and Other Poems and General Booth Enters Heaven by Vachel Lindsay, Love Songs by Sara Teasdale, The Road to Cas- taly by Alice Brown, The New Poetry and Anthology by Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson, Songs and Satires, Spoon River Anthology and Toward the Gulf by Edgar Lee Masters, The Man Against the Sky and Merlin by Edwin Arlington Rob- inson, Poems by Percy MacKaye and Tendencies in Modern American Poetry by Am> Lowell. Messrs. Henry Holt and Company: Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg, These Times by Louis Untermeyer, A Boy's Will, North of Boston and Mountain Interval by Robert Frost, The Old Road to Paradise by Margaret Widdener, My Ireland by Francis Carlin, and Outcasts in Beulah Land by Roy Helton. Messrs. G. P. Putnam's Sons: The Shadow of &tna by Louis V. Ledoux, Sea Dogs and Men at Arms by Jesse E. Middleton, Helen of Troy by Sara Teasdale, and In Flanders' Fields by John MacCrae. Messrs. John Lane Company: Mid-American Chants by Sherwood Anderson, Gardens Overseas and Other Poems 'by Thomas Walsh, Carmina by T. A. Daly, Sea and Bay by Charles Wharton Stork, The Sailor Whc Has Sailed, A Wand and Strings and The House That Was by Benjamin R. C. Low. The Stratford Press: The Poets of the Future by Henry T. Schnittkind. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Messrs. George H. Doran Company: Main Street and Other Poems and Trees and Other Poems by Joyce Kilmer, The Silver Trumpet by Josephine Amelia Burr, A Banjo at Armageddon by Berton Braley, Sonnets of Sorrow and Triumph by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and Songs for a Little House by Christopher Morley. The Four Seas Company: The Jig of Forslin by Conrad Aiken, and Nocturne of Remembered Spring by Conrad Aiken. The Century Company: Wraiths and Realities by Cale Young Rice. Messrs. Dodd, Mead and Company: The Masque of Poets by J. O'Brien. Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons: American Poetry by Percy H. Boynton, and Poems by Alan Seeger. Messrs. Frederick A. Stokes: Grenstone Poems by Witter Bynner. Messrs. Small, Maynard and Company: Anthology of Magazine Verse by William Stanley Braithwaite. Messrs. Barse and Hopkins: The Spell of the Yukon, The Ballads of a Cheechako, and Rhymes of a Red Cross Man by Robert W. Service. Messrs. Moffat, Yard and Company: City Ways and Com- pany Streets by Private Charles Divine, and Wings and Other War Rhymes by Anthony Euwer. Mr. Mitchell Kennerley: Spectra by Emanuel Morgan and Anne Knish. Messrs. Doubleday, Page and Company: The Man With the Hoe by Edwin Markham. Alfred A. Knopf: Airs and Ballads by John McClure. Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry. Mr. John Hall Wheelock: The Human Fantasy, Love and Liberation, and The Beloved Adventure. Mr. Donald Evans: Sonnets from the Patagonian. The Little Review: She Goes to Pisa, Dreams in War Times, Depression Before Spring and Patterns. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The Boston Transcript, The New York Sun, The New York Times, Poetry, A Magazine of Verse, Smart Set, and Reedy's Mirror. Marshall Jones Company: New York and Other Verses by Frederic K. Mortimer Clapp. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.: Irradiations Sand and Spray by John Gould Fletcher. William Lyon Phelps, Annie L. Laney and Richard Hunt. Good Housekeeping: To One in Heaven by Charles Hanson Towne. Harper's Magazine: The Bather by Amy Lowell. The Newarker, The Nation, and the New York Tribune. New York Times Book Review, The Bellman, The Bookman and Poetry. Harper Brothers: The Mirthful Lyre by Arthur Guiterman. John G. Neihardt: A Song of Hugh Glass. Louis Vernon Ledoux: Yzdra. George Edward Woodberry: The Flight and Other Poems. Wilmrath Publishing Company: The Shadow-Eater by Benja- min De Casseres. FOREWORD It has been said that we are passing through a renaissance of poetry. No longer does the cartoonist of the popular comic or timely satire picture the long- haired individual with his ream of spring verse be- neath his arm, a moth-eaten object for the pity of sane beings. He's as obsolete as the Dodo, save per- haps in the sacred and, thank God, limited circles of Greenwich Village, Island of Manhattan. Today the poet has come into his own. He receives a fair price for his lines and has forced the publisher out of his traditional rut with gasps of amazement that a book of verse could be listed as a best seller. From both artistic and commercial standpoints con- temporary American poetry has achieved much. Sara Teasdale phrases it, "Contemporary American poetry has proved that this chaotic, various, intensely young, masculine country of ours is producing the best poetry that is being written in English today. I think that this has been true for only a few years but I believe it is true at this time and will continue to be so." It is about these men and women, practical purveyors of a necessary food, that this book is written. Nowadays, instead of going abroad for many things, we look for them within our own borders. With Sara Teasdale, I agree that America today is produc- ing poetry, some of it as fine as has been inspired by the World War. FOREWORD Many critics have attributed to the war the so- called poetry market. Certain it is that Rupert Brooke was largely responsible for the awakened interest in poetry in America. As a nation, not as individuals, our poetic sense had been lying temporarily dormant. This may have been due to our highly developed com- mercial pulse. If a poem were the right size to fill a certain space in a magazine, the editor paid a few dollars for it. Today there are magazines devoted exclusively to the publication of these once-upon-a-time "fillers," a vindi- cation that must be full sweet to the poet. One of the greatest poets in the English language had to be "found" in England. I refer to Walt Whit- man. He was never properly published nor generally read in his own day by his own countrymen. Yet he has immortalized democracy, and it is his spirit that has found rebirth in many of our best poets of today. To them he says: to "O make the most jubilant poem ! Even to set off these, and merge with these, the carols of death. O full of music! full of manhood, womanhood and in- fancy ! Full of common employments! full of grain and trees. O for the voices of animals ! O for the swiftness and balance of fishes! O for the dropping of raindrops in a poem! O for the sunshine, and motion of waves in a poem." FOREWORD We have been slow in recognizing our own liter- ary genius. No nation ever has had a sweeter, finer, nobler singer of a national song, than America in Walt Whitman. But it is not of our poets of yesterday that I have written. My purpose in this book is simply to present our American poets of today, to tell something of their lives, their writings, what they have done, and what they bid fair to do. To them we must look for the heart-beat of our times. Not long ago I heard Arthur Hunt Chute of the late First Canadian Con- tingent say of our present day poets, "They are fight- ing with us and for us/' I have endeavored to dispute here the statement that poets are for "highbrows" they are not. Poets must rise from the people, be of the crowds, their songs must be the song of the mother who rocks her little one in her arms, of the clerk at his desk, of the student who sits alone into the morning hours, and of the soldiers in the trenches fighting for the soul of the world. They are our own people. Their writings mirror our good and our bad, our understanding and our misunderstanding, our ideals, and our belief in a God whose creed is love. HOWARD WILLARD COOK. INTRODUCTION ON SOME POTENTIALITIES OF OUR POETRY BY PERCY MACKAYE This book makes its entrance with a new age. Youth is in the air youth, the flower and seed and sustenance of poetry. At this moment, though the world war is expiring on the verges of physical winter, spiritually peace sweeps towards us tidal with colossal spring, thawing with the break-up of old congealed forms, fluid with warm, fresh currents, fecund with plastic life. The armistice of the nations is glorious and terrible with spring. What shall be the bourgeoning tomorrow? Outwardly, the works collected in this volume are not of that in tomorrow ; yet inwardly they may some measure forecast its substance and spirit. Here is a reality achieved, culled from that recent past which we call today. So it will be read and as- sayed. But here also is something latent, unachieved a potentiality of today which is the new age in embryo.