part carried out, a comprehensive treatment, from a modern point of view, of the Arthurian romances. His Songs from Vagabondia (1894), were written in conjunction with Bliss Carman, as were the later collections More Songs from Vagabondia (1896), Last Songs from Vagabondia (1900), and Echoes from Vagabondia (1902). His sudden death in 1900 cut short what promised to be a career of great distinction.

Despite all that Hovey achieved towards making himself the poet of Arthurian romance, he never brought his more pretentious productions to the point of perfection reached by his less aspiring "vagabond" poems. In the latter there is evident a vitality, a youthful touch, and a modernity which have made them appeal to young people throughout the country; his Stein Song (p. 1039) is sung in colleges from coast to coast. Hovey's own view of the poet's calling is best set forth in his own words: "It is not his mission to write elegant canzonettas for the delectation of the Sybaritic dilettanti, but to comfort the sorrowful and hearten the despairing, to champion the oppressed and declare to humanity its inalienable rights, to lay open to the world the heart of man, all its heights and depths, all its glooms and glories, to reveal the beauty in things, and breathe into his fellows a love of it and so a love of Him whose manifestation it is."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hovey's plays, which originally appeared between 1889 and 1900, were republished in a uniform edition in 1907 (N. Y., 5 vols.). His "Vagabondia" volumes, from which all the poems here reprinted have been taken, are listed in the preceding note. What may be considered his final volume, To the End of the Trail (N. Y., 1908) is edited by Mrs. Richard Hovey. No biographical study of Hovey has yet appeared, but Odell Shepard's Bliss Carman, 1924, contains much information concerning Hovey's relations to his friend and collaborator. Bruce Weirick's discussion of the two men, in his From Whitman to Sandburg (N. Y., 1924), is sympathetic and illuminating.

RICHARD WATSON GILDER (1844-1909)

Richard Watson Gilder was born in 1844 at Bordentown, New Jersey, and educated at his father's schools at Bordentown and Flushing. His father was not only a schoolmaster but a minister, and subsequently an army chaplain. Richard volunteered for service in the northern army when he was only nineteen, and after the war took up journalism with such success that by 1881 he was editor-in-chief of the Century, a magazine which for some twenty-five years allowed ample scope for the employment of his un

usual talents. His career as a poet of note began with the publication in 1875 of The New Day, a collection of sonnets and love songs written under the joint influence of Rossetti's poems and Gilder's own friendship for Helena de Kay, whom he subsequently married. During the rest of his life he produced poetry in sufficient quantity to bring his Complete Poems to nearly five hundred pages. In addition to his literary work, he was active in many philanthropic and artistic movements and received four university doctorates in spite of what he called his "total freedom from collegiate training." He made no secret, however, of the fact that his achievements as a poet meant more to him "than all the rest put together." His death in 1909 was a severe blow to American literature, but much of his personality has been preserved in the volume of Letters edited by his daughter and published in 1916.

Verse was to Gilder "a perfectly natural and inevitable medium of expression." Few American poets have achieved so perfect a feeling for form with so little conscious striving for it. He was a deft sonneteer and a natural master of various lyric measures. His admiration for Whitman's poetry was specifically qualified (See the Letters, passim) by the extent to which the Good Gray Poet made his rhythms effective; and his own use of the freer forms of verse, as in The Night Pasture and In a Night of Midsummer (pp. 1042, 1043), is extremely melodious. The best comment on his manner of composition is the reply which he himself made to the question as to how he wrote his poetry: "What I may call my own poetic mental habit is lyrical. As nearly as I can remember, each poem, or theme, or motif (as one would say in music) occurs to me almost simultaneously in both thought and form. A poetic phrase (made up of words in a certain poetic accent and diction) shapes itself in the mind. I do not realize at the moment what the metre is. I may, or may not, realize what the stanza or complete poem form is to be. I think that most of my lyrics have occurred to me 'on the road,' when moving about, going back and forth to my office, travelling, sometimes when I am reading. Sometimes a line or two will rest in my mind for years, and add other lines, like certain creatures of the lower order, spontaneously; it may be in distant scenes.' (Written for Researches on the Rhythm of Speech, and reprinted in the Letters, p. 416.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Complete Poems of Richard Watson Gilder, Boston, 1910, is the best single volume to which to turn for his verse. His Letters, edited by his daughter, Rosamund Gilder, appeared in 1916 (Boston). An essay by G. E. Woodberry, Gilder as a Poet, appeared in the Century for February, 1910.

STEPHEN CRANE (1871-1900)

In a brief life of twenty-nine years Crane won distinction in both prose and verse. As an undergraduate in Syracuse University he had his first taste of journalism while serving as correspondent for the New York Tribune (1890-1891). Leaving college without a degree, he began a career of free-lance writing which took him to Cuba and Greece in search of colorful material, and which eventually came to a close in England in 1900, when his untimely death occurred.

It was Crane's purpose to tell the truth as he saw it, and though at times his work became almost brutally realistic, the frank naturalism of his prose is on the whole one of its chief assets. The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is by general consent his chief work, and as a novel presenting the facts of war is virtually without an equal in the language. The Little Regiment (1896), a collection of short tales dealing with the Civil War, has almost as much merit.

As a poet, Crane belongs to the group of "modernists" who have departed far from the beaten paths in search for material and for new artistic effects. Had he written in 1920, when the new forms of verse had become widely known, it would have been easy to "account for" his work. But when one realizes that his two volumes of poetry, The Black Riders (1895) and War is Kind (1899) appeared long before the recent poetic revolt had got under way, one realizes that Crane anticipated the new movement in many respects, and was in all probability somewhat influential in bringing it about.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Crane's Works are now available in a limited edition, edited by Wilson Follett, N, Y., 1925-26, 12 vols. The only authoritative biographical treatment is Thomas Beer's Stephen Crane; a Study in American Letters, N. Y., 1924. This volume contains an interesting preface by Joseph Conrad.

WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY (1869-1910)

Moody was born in Spencer, Indiana, and was connected with Harvard University as undergraduate, graduate student, and instructor in English. From 1895 to 1903 he taught at the University of Chicago with notable success, but abandoned teaching to devote himself exclusively to creative literary work. Always a great traveller and a thorough student of the world's best literature, he acquired a cosmopolitan view of life and a mastery of the technique of writing that suggest the literary breadth of Longfellow or Lowell. One of his prose plays, The Great Divide (1906), achieved a notable success; and the History of English Literature, written

in collaboration with Robert M. Lovett, is still regarded as standard. To poetry, however, Moody gave his best efforts, for he was by nature a poet. He declined President Harper's offer of a full professor's salary for lecturing during only one quarter of each year at Chicago, and subsequently resisted the lure of a publisher's fifty thousand dollar contract to re-write The Great Divide as a novel. His Masque of Judgment (1900) was followed the next year by a volume of Poems, with which he took his place among the few notable American poets of the new century.

A man of such independent spirit in his private life could hardly fail to achieve an independent style in his poetry. This individuality he manifested first by turning his back resolutely on the soothing sweetness which Poe, Keats, Tennyson, and Swinburne had had in common, and second, in attaining a power of vigorous expression on social and political topics without becoming a servile imitator of Whitman. He differed, too, from many of his contemporaries by recognizing that mere eccentricity is no sign of genius. Endowed, then, with an unusual skill in the technique of verse and a keen power of observing nature, Moody succeeded in writing a number of lyrical and reflective poems that have won him many admirers. Of his freedom from sentimentalism we may infer a good deal from the truthful, though flippant, remark in The Menagerie:

I'm not precisely an eolian lute Hung in the wandering winds of sentiment; but for his highest aspirations as a poet we must turn to the humble but fervent outpouring of his soul in lines 135-154 of The Daguerreotype. His pictorial phraseology has been justly criticised as being occasionally forced, and his moral earnestness is often above the level of popular intelligence; but his posthumous reputation seems to indicate that if any of the American poets of the first quarter of this century are to survive, Moody will be among them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Poems and Plays of William Vaughn Moody, edited by John M. Manly, Boston, 1912, 2 vols., is the one invaluable edition which the student will require. It contains the best life of Moody which has yet appeared. Some Letters of William Vaughn Moody, edited by S. G. Mason, Boston, 1913, supplements Mr. Manly's narrative. Herman Hagedorn's essay in the Independent, February 6, 1913, is an appreciative criticism.

NOTES

ROAD-HYMN FOR THE START

1045. This poem was the result of Moody's bicycle trip from Rome to Lake Como

in May, 1897; it was outlined at that time and completed later.

AN ODE IN TIME OF HESITATION

Published in the Atlantic Monthly for May, 1900, during the height of the agitation for Philippine independence. The transition from the theme of the sacrifice for liberty made in the Civil War to the principal theme of the poem is slow but correspondingly effective. Not till line 212 does the poet actually name "the island men."

GLOUCESTER MOORS

1049. Written at Gloucester in 1900 and published in Scribner's Magazine for December of that year. The accurate portrayal of external nature is blended with philosophic musings and reflections on society which have made the poem a favorite with workers in the slums; while the elaboration of the figure of the world as a ship, though by no means original, is singularly effective.

THE MENAGERIE

1050. Beneath the flow of grotesque humor is an undercurrent of serious suggestion about the evolutionary theory and the present incompleteness of the evolutionary process.

THE DAGUERREOTYPE

1052. The perfect sincerity of the poem is vouched for by the facts of the poet's life as set forth in the Introduction to his Poems and Plays by John M. Manly, who calls the piece "a poem so deep of thought, so full of poignant feeling and clairvoyant vision, SO wrought of passionate beauty that I know not where to look for another tribute from any poet to his mother that equals it." William Cowper's verses entitled On The Recepit of my Mother's Picture are in some ways comparable, but Moody's style is more like that of Browning.

1054. 138. To maiden Mary. The story of the Annunciation may be found in Luke I, 26-38.

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
(1869)

Mr. Robinson, the son of a grain merchant, was born in Head Tide, and was brought up in Gardner-both in the state of Maine. After two years at Harvard he went to New York City, where the necessity of earning a living forced him into various unliterary occupations such as subway-construction; but de

spite the many difficulties involved, he has succeeded in making the writing of poetry his life work. His first four volumes (1896, 1897, 1902, and 1910) contained nothing to bring him prominently before the public, though he did receive from President Roosevelt the American substitute for a pension-a position in the New York Custom House, which he held from 1905 to 1910. The Man Against the Sky (1916), marked a great advance in his work, and was followed in rapid succession by two long poems, Merlin and Lancelot, and the two collections called The Three Taverns and Avon's Harvest. When the contents of all these volumes had been gathered together into the edition of Collected Poems (1921).it was recognized, at least by the poets and critics if not by the general public, that Mr. Robinson had produced a body of carefully wrought and thoughtful verse which none of his American contemporaries had equalled. His variety of subjects and of treatment is so great as to preclude any generalization about his work, but the praise accorded by his fellow-poets is fairly represented by such a statement as Margaret Wilkinson's: "The reader may be sure of finding in his work the faultless meter, the vivid phrase, and the essential nobleness of gesture which is part of being a gentleman." In three of his recent volumes, Roman Bartholow (1923), The Man Who Died Twice (1924), and Tristram (1927), the poet has maintained his own high standard of excellence.

In spite of this achievement, Mr. Robinson's hold on the American public seems to be no stronger than that of Robert Bridges on the British public. He apparently rates the average reader's intelligence high-perhaps too high-and resolutely refuses to cater to the taste of an age that demands sensational effects. His style is so pure and his verse so perfect in technique that the lack of emotional intensity is doubly felt, while the cryptic implications of many poems leave the reader baffled. Occasionally, to be sure, the reader is roused to a sympathetic understanding, as in Lancelot and a dozen of the shorter poems, but more often he feels only a cold admiration.

One of the extraordinary facts of Mr. Robinson's work is that his interest in personalities is so great that some, though not all, of his men and women are detached from any background of time and place. The imagery of external nature is neglected for the study of the human soul; many of his people may have lived in almost any country, at any time these last two thousand years. One grasps if one is fortunate-the significant point of some character-revealing episode or conversation, and struggles to retain it in a limbo of similar psychological studies. The idea carries by its own merit, or not at all. This is not popular poetry, but its very detachment from time and place assures the permanence of its appeal to the limited class

trifling in verse are lacking: the memorable phrase, the sense of form and plan which appeals to a well-ordered mind, a recognizable pattern of sound sufficient to heighten whatever emotional effect the poem may otherwise produce, and many other subtler elements which are perceived, though seldom analyzed, in all that the world has called great poetry from Homer to William Vaughn Moody. Leaving out of consideration, then, those ephemeral productions which aimed to attract attention by startling the reader and too often succeeded in amusing him, there is still a modest body of respectable poetry produced since 1914 worthy of serious consideration. That it is not wholly new is rapidly being recognized; and a few of the more evident foreshadowings may be briefly indicated. (1) The use of freer forms of verse was anticipated by Whitman, who in turn derived from Macpherson's Ossian many hints which he used to advantage, the similarity being more evident if one prints Macpherson's measured prose in the long lines so common in Leaves of Grass. (2) The simplicity of diction may likewise be traced back through Whitman and a dozen others to Wordsworth, and beyond him to Burns. (3) The broadening of the range of subjectmatter to include all phases of life has been an intermittent but powerful tendency ever since the middle of the eighteenth century; Burns' treatment of peasant life, Coleridge's poem To a Young Ass, Wordsworth's effusions both successful and unsuccessful, were only single manifestations of a movement that found fuller expression in such a comprehensive work as Browning's Ring and the Book. (4) The tendency to cut loose from sentimentalism and get down to the facts of life as it is, though more obviously modern, had been notably manifest in the poetry of Whitman and the prose of Hardy.

There are, nevertheless, certain currents in the poetry of these years so wholesome as to merit consideration. Most of them, as might be expected, are what it is popular to call "democratic." (1) The vocabulary has been largely freed from the artificial and florid expressions which often seemed to set the older poetry apart from real life; and the "poetic license' to depart from the logical word-order merely to suit the exigencies of versification has, apparently, become a thing of the past. Granted that this had been recommended and at times practised by Wordsworth in the Lyrical Ballads, it was not the uniform practice of the great poets of the nineteenth century. (2) The romantic versifier's tendency to idealize life, and to treat the world as a sort of fairyland, has been supplemented by the realist's fondness for giving to the sordid side of life at least its full share of prominence. (3) The anti-sentimental and anti-didactic tendency of the age has shown itself in a willingness to let the facts of life, as reproduced in poetry, speak

for themselves; and the result has often been in the direction of greater dramatic power and a more enduring form of art. (4) Critics and editors have shown an almost uniform tendency to recognize the worth of various patterns of sound not commonly employed by the older poets; and though the term "free verse" has caused much confusion, it is clear that certain freer rhythms (as indicated, for instance, in Bliss Perry's Study of Poetry, 1920, pp. 204 ff.) are worth experimenting with, and that some of the "new poetry" is indeed poetry of a high order.

Poetry has thus been made more democratic because it has been made easier to read, it has been brought closer to the experiences of every-day life, it has been freed from an unpopular didacticism, and it has been set loose (for better or for worse) from the more or less rigid traditions of versification. The day has passed when a critic of the standing of Poe dares condemn a line because it does not "scan" according to the "rules." In bringing about these changes the most successful and influential leader was undoubtedly Miss Lowell.

Miss Lowell was peculiarly fitted by birth and training to be a powerful force in our literature. A relative of James Russell Lowell, and sister of Abbott Lawrence Lowell, now (1927) President of Harvard University, she was born in Brookline in 1874, and during her early years had every advantage that could be derived from family associations and foreign travel. When she was twenty-eight, she definitely decided on a literary career, but wisely refrained from rushing into print; in fact, before venturing to publish her first volume of verse she devoted ten full years to the study of English and foreign poetry and to practice in writing. (A single sonnet, to be sure, had appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1910.) In addition to her muchdiscussed work as a poet-of which more anon-she proved herself a critic of no little power; no one can deny that her propaganda for the Imagists and other unorthodox poets was often as sound as it was vigorous. Her ten years of preparation and her subsequent researches bore ample fruit not only in her public lectures but also in three volumes of criticism and biography which serve to illustrate the keenness of her mind and the wide range of her learning: Six French Poets (1915), Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917), and John Keats (1925).

It is futile to discount Miss Lowell's influence by saying it was due to her having a wider newspaper publicity than any other American poet of her generation-that her personal eccentricities and the fervor with which she argued, and wept, for her theories when she was on the lecture platform made every wide-awake reporter her unpaid publicity agent. As a matter of fact, this gratuitous advertising was scarcely of a sort to predispose the public in her favor; with