The modern idea seems to be that poetry has no relation to life. Life in
the modern sense is action, progress, success. Poetry has been conceded
special themes: it can deal with passion,--the strange and unnatural and
unreal physical attraction of the sexes--with nature, with the symbols
of mythology, and with the characteristic sentimental heroism of history
and events. With reality, it must have nothing to do. It is supposed, by
the modern world of Anglo-Saxon literalness, to create an atmosphere of
illusion, which one must avoid to keep one’s emotions from going astray
in a civilization that needs the hardest kind of common sense. It is
paradoxical that the English-speaking people who have given the world
the greatest poets, should take this false attitude while in possession
of the greatest spiritual and imaginative legacy of life and experience,
bequeathed them from one generation to another during the last four
hundred years.
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. 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 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.
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. There was a man who was so absolutely
sane that the scoffers of his day called him mad--this man was William
Blake. Christ was a madman to the community of his day, even his closest
friends and disciples were not without doubt at times as to his sanity.
But these two men were never a hair’s breadth from the commonest reality
of existence. 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. That kind of a mind does not understand symbols. It belongs
to the so-called practical people of the world, who obey, but do not
comprehend, laws; whose laws, indeed, are the conventions of minds
similar to their own. They organize, but do not construct; they
interpret, but do not create. They are the wheels, and not the
motor-power, of the engine of civilization and humanity. These are the
people who make up nine-tenths of the world’s population; without the
other tenth, they would perish. 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; the crises of their joys and sorrows, their
aspirations and passions, hidden in the reality of their consciousness
where exists an infinite universe of being, and where every event of
their lives is enacted before their shadow is thrown upon the stage of
the world. 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.
Poetry comes nearer finality in embodying the exact meaning and
intensity of human feeling than any other art. Human feeling, being the
root of all individual intelligence, is the most inexplicable quantity
in life. Intuition is the primary significance of our existence. And it
is the quality which gives to poetry its visionary and spiritual
substance. In a nation it is the register of a people’s culture.
* * * * *
The study of poetry in the magazines which I began ten years ago, has
grown into the convincing evidence of the following pages of this book.
During this time we have passed through a number of phases in our
national life; but through these changing aspects of national
aspirations, there has run, like a widening and brightening strand of
culture, the development of a new period of poetry, both in its
productive and appreciative aspects. 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.
A factor that should be taken into consideration, and which affects
poetry and its audience, is the attitude of the book reviews in our
most influential literary journals. A characteristic example is the New
York Nation, which has been in the habit of grouping in a few articles
during the year with indiscriminate selection, the volumes of poetry
which it receives. In these reviews there is a supercilious and academic
attitude which dismisses really important work with opinions which have
every suggestion of preconceived judgment. One has only to turn back his
files to the review of Masefield’s “Everlasting Mercy” and “The Widow in
the Bye Street,” to see the type of poetry reviewing that is more common
than uncommon in American periodicals and newspapers. I do not mean to
make The Nation an exception, but an illustration of the kind of
stewardship with which reviewers in some of our most authoritative
publications perform the duties of a serious and distinguished branch of
American authorship.
To show that there is a quality of poetry in our national production
worthy of pride and support, it has been my privilege for a number of
years to emphasize in an annual review the distinction of the verse in
the magazines. 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 achievement, has been permitted to drift along throughout our
entire critical history without this sort of attention.
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. What influences there are, seem to come from French sources.
_Vers libre_ has been taken out of the hands of weak and pompous
innovators, and made a distinctive medium by a few earnest and powerful
singers. The most notable distinction in this respect is to be found in
the work of James Oppenheim, whose book, “Songs for the New Age,” is a
milestone in our poetic progress. So is Vachel Lindsay’s new work. He
has mastered a new form of poetic expression in his volume “The Congo
and Other Poems.” Miss Amy Lowell, in the better parts of “Sword Blades
and Poppy Seed,” is working toward a new elasticity in rhythm, which is
beginning to produce effective and beautiful results. On the other hand
Mr. Arthur Stringer in “Open Water” utterly fails to embody in actual
performance the principles expounded in the introduction to that
volume, though this introduction is as important a piece of critical
writing in English upon the subject as I know. No matter how
revolutionary they attempt to be in expression, there is still in these
writers a traditional note imbuing the substance which makes up the
significant part of their creativeness.
The selections in this volume are chosen from all kinds and methods of
poetic expression, and the reader’s attention is invited to their
differences in many aspects--though the aspect of quality is, I think,
of equal attainment in all--of such poems as Bliss Carman’s Phi Beta
Kappa Poem, Percy MacKaye’s “Fight,” Vachel Lindsay’s “The Firemen’s
Ball,” Eloise Briton’s “The Two Flames,” Conrad Aiken’s “Romance,” Olive
Tilford Dargan’s “Old Fairingdown” and “Path Flower,” Joyce Kilmer’s
“Twelve-Forty-Five,” and Don Marquis’s “The God-Maker, Man.” Of the
shorter pieces, I think the standard is decidedly above last year’s
quality. Mahlon Leonard Fisher has again followed the success of
previous years with his sonnet “Afterwards,” which sustains his position
as one of the foremost sonnet-writers this country has yet produced.
This poet has the unusual distinction of a fine reputation without
having published a book, but his definite contribution to American
poetry will soon take place with the publication of his first volume,
“An Old Mercer, and Other Poems.” A poem likely to create a profound
impression is Don Marquis’s “The God-Maker, Man,”--a fine achievement,
not only for its flashing images, but for spiritual substance shaped
with compelling conviction.
The selections in this volume reflect the extraordinary richness of the
published volumes this year. I do not recall any year of the past decade
when the quantity and quality alike have been so notable. The autumn
season’s publication of verse usually shows a preponderance in quality
of books by English poets, who seem to meet with more favorable
consideration from the best established publishers. There have been this
year a number of notable volumes by English poets brought out in this
country, but the balance of distinction, both in standard and numbers of
books, belongs this year most emphatically to the American poets.
Thirty-five volumes of distinguished poetry stand to our credit, and
these are only a selection from a larger number of books which merit
appreciation. Books by Louis V. Ledoux, George Edward Woodberry, Louis
Untermeyer, Walter Conrad Arensberg, William Rose Benét, Vachel Lindsay,
George Sterling, Olive Tilford Dargan, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson,
Conrad Aiken, James Oppenheim, Harry Kemp, Amelia Josephine Burr, Joyce
Kilmer, Amy Lowell, Percy MacKaye, Arthur Davison Ficke, Edwin Markham,
Agnes Lee, and Bliss Carman, are among those which have advanced the
significance of the year’s output.
The European war has had a more immediate effect upon literature than
almost anything else. All books of a non-military character published
just before the war, with the exception of poetry, have been thrown into
relatively ineffective significance. Poetry endures because it is
integrally woven with the warp of man’s real existence, and not of that
illusory substance, of which other kinds of imaginative literature are
fashioned, and which has been so easily wiped away by this war’s primal
brutality. 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. 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. Moreover, such pieces as “If!” and “The Other
Army,” by Bartholomew F. Griffin; “Prelude,” by Edmond McKenna; “He Went
for a Soldier,” by Ruth Comfort Mitchell, and “To a Necrophile,” by
Walter Conrad Arensberg, are striking and spontaneous poetry of a high
order. In E. Sutton, a poet is presented, who has produced martial
poetry in “The Bugle,” “The Drum,” and the stirring “Pipes of the
North,” which, for swinging rhythm and profound reflection upon the pomp
and futility of military glory, has not been equalled by any
contemporary poet.
A notable feature of the poetry year is the Kennerley edition of Walt
Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” The works of Whitman have been transferred
from publisher to publisher so often, that there has been little
opportunity for their circulation among the people for whom he wrote.
This edition contains the text and arrangement preferred by the poet
himself, and is the only perfect and complete issue, comprising one
hundred and six additional poems not included in any other edition.
There are suitable editions to meet the demand of all classes of Whitman
enthusiasts and students: an India paper edition bound in leather, a
library edition bound in cloth, and two issues of a Popular edition,
bound in cloth and in paper respectively. To these are added the
“Complete Prose” in a Library and Popular edition in cloth. None of the
leading American poets of the past generation have been so unfortunate
in publication; and many who believe Whitman to be America’s greatest
poet will be glad to know, that now, by the authorization of his
executors, all his works are gathered in uniform editions under one
imprint.
Other important new editions of poetry are the cheap reissue by the
Oxford University Press of John Sampson’s final and authoritative text
of William Blake’s complete poems, and the new reprint in Bohn’s Popular
Library issued by The Macmillan Company of Henry Vaughan’s Complete
Poems.
* * * * *
As in former years in my annual summary in the _Boston Transcript_, I
have examined the contents of the leading American magazines. To the
seven magazines which I examined last year,--namely, _Harper’s_,
_Scribner’s_, _The Century_, _The Forum_, _Lippincott’s_, _The Smart
Set_, and _The Bellman_,--I have added this year three monthlies, _The
Trend_, _The International_, and _The Masses_; and one quarterly, _The
Yale Review_. _The Bellman_ still maintains its high poetic distinction,
by virtue of which it prints more good poetry than any other American
weekly, and most American monthlies. As last year, I have winnowed from
other magazines distinctive poems for classification and notice:--one
each from _The Metropolitan_, _The Craftsman_, _The Poetry Journal_, the
_Southern Woman’s Magazine_, _Puck_, and _The Infantry Journal_; and two
each from _Poetry: A Magazine of Verse_, _The Nation_, _The Atlantic
Monthly_, and the _Outlook_; while from three newspapers I have selected
fourteen poems:--eleven from the _Boston Evening Transcript_, two from
the _Boston News Bureau_, and one from the _New York Evening Sun_. In
quoting from the _Boston Transcript_, I wish to testify to the ready
recognition and encouragement this daily paper has offered to poets and
poetry. It is one of the paper’s finest traditions.
The poems published during the year in the eleven representative
magazines I have submitted to an impartial critical test, choosing from
the total number what I consider the “distinctive” poems of the year.
From the distinctive pieces are selected fifty-two poems, to which are
added thirty from other magazines and from newspapers not represented in
the list of eleven, making a total of eighty-two, which are intended to
represent what I call an “Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1914.”
Quoting from what I have written in previous years, to emphasize the
methods which guided my selections, the reader will see how impartial
are the tests by which the distinctive and best poems are chosen: “I
have not allowed any special sympathy with the subject to influence my
choice. I have taken the poet’s point of view, and accepted his value of
the theme he dealt with. The question was: How vital and compelling did
he make it? The first test was the sense of pleasure the poem
communicated; then to discover the secret or the meaning of the pleasure
felt; and in doing so to realize how much richer one became in a
knowledge of the purpose of life by reason of the poem’s message.”
In one hundred and forty-seven numbers of these eleven magazines I find
there were published during 1914 a total of 647 poems, of which 157 were
poems of distinction. The total number of poems printed in each
magazine, and the number of the distinctive poems are: _Century_, total
71, 19 of distinction; _Harper’s_, total 39, 10 of distinction;
_Scribner’s_, total 49, 18 of distinction; _Forum_, total 33, 13 of
distinction; _Lippincott’s_, total 56, 8 of distinction; _The Smart Set_
(excluding November and December), total 148, 18 of distinction; _The
Bellman_ (until November 7th), total 42, 23 of distinction; _The Yale
Review_, total 19, 10 of distinction; _The Trend_ (April, and June to
November), total 51, 16 of distinction; _The Masses_ (excluding
December), total 53, 13 of distinction; _The International_ (excluding
November and December), total 86, 9 of distinction.
Following the text of the poems making the anthology in this volume, I
have given the titles and authors of all the poems classified as
distinctive, published in the magazines of the year; in addition I give
a list of all the poems and their authors in the one hundred and
forty-seven numbers of the magazines examined, as a record which readers
and students of poetry will find useful.
I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness and thanks to the editors of
_Scribner’s Magazine_, _Harper’s Magazine_, _The Forum_, _The Century
Magazine_, _The Outlook_, _Lippincott’s Magazine_, _The Bellman_, _The
Smart Set_, _The Yale Review_, _Poetry: A Magazine of Verse_, _The
Poetry Journal_, _The International_, _The Masses_, _The Metropolitan_,
_Harper’s Weekly_, _The Craftsman_, _The Nation_, _The Southern Woman’s
Magazine_, _Puck_, _The Infantry Journal_, _The Boston News Bureau_,
_The New York Evening Sun_, and the _Boston Evening Transcript_, and to
the publishers of these magazines and newspapers, for kind permission
to reprint in this volume the poems making up the “Anthology of Magazine
Verse for 1914.” To the authors of these poems I am equally indebted and
grateful for their willingness to have me reprint their work in this
form. Since their appearance in the magazines and before the close of
the year when the contents of this volume was made up, twenty-eight
poems herein included have appeared in volumes of original poetry by
their authors. For the use of “Yankee Doodle” and “The Firemen’s Ball”
by Vachel Lindsay, included in his volume “The Congo, and Other Poems”;
of “Fight,” “France,” and “Six Sonnets (August, 1914)” by Percy MacKaye,
included in his volume “The Present Hour”; and for “Romance” by Conrad
Aiken, included in his volume “Earth Triumphant,” I have also to thank
The Macmillan Company, under whose imprint these volumes appear. Similar
acknowledgment is due to the George H. Doran Company for permission to
reprint “The Twelve-Forty-Five” by Joyce Kilmer, included in his volume,
“Trees and Other Poems”; and to print “In the Roman Forum” and “A
Lynmouth Widow” by Amelia Josephine Burr, included in her volume “In
Deep Places.” I am grateful to Charles Scribner’s Sons for two poems by
Olive Tilford Dargan, “Old Fairingdown” and “Path Flower,” included in
her volume “Path Flower”; and for two poems by Corinne Roosevelt
Robinson, “From a Motor in May,” and “If You Should Cease to Love Me,”
included in her volume “One Woman to Another.” I am indebted to Mr.
Mitchell Kennerley for kind permission to reprint Sonnets XXIX, XXX, and
XXXVII from “Sonnets of a Portrait-Painter”; and to Mr. A. M. Robertson
for two poems by George Sterling, “Ballad of Two Seas” and “The Hunting
of Dian,” included in his volume “Beyond the Breakers, and Other Poems.”
Finally, The Century Company have been kind enough to permit me to
republish “Landscapes” and “Summons” by Louis Untermeyer, from his
volume entitled “Challenge”; and “Patterns,” “A Handful of Dust,” and
“We Dead” by James Oppenheim, from his volume entitled “Songs for a New
Age.” If I have omitted any acknowledgments, it is quite unintentional,
and I trust that any such omission will be regarded leniently. I wish it
to be understood that the privilege extended to me so courteously, by
the authors, magazine editors and publishers, and book publishers, to
print the poems in this volume, does not in any sense restrict the
authors in their rights to print the poems in volumes of their own or in
any other place. I wish to thank the _Boston Transcript_ for the
privilege of reprinting material in this book which originally appeared
in the columns of that paper.
A new feature this year is the series of critical summaries of new
volumes of verse, which are significant, and which have been appraised
in accordance with the same principles as the poems in the “Anthology of
Magazine Verse.” It is believed that by adding this feature, the book
will more nearly approximate to being an actual Year-Book of American
Poetry, and it is in this belief that a subtitle has been added to this
volume. I believe that not only libraries, but private individuals will
welcome the selected lists of the best volumes for library purchase,
graded according to the requirements of a large or a small purse. A list
is also subjoined of the best books _about_ poetry, and if there seems
to be a demand for this innovation, it is planned next year to include
in the book critical summaries of these volumes, as well as of the
volumes of original verse.
I shall be grateful for suggestions as to improvements of this year-book
in future years, and as to valuable extensions of its scope. To all
friends who have assisted this volume by their personal efforts, and to
the readers of past years who have made this annual publication possible
by promoting it through their interest in poetry, I tender my grateful
thanks. They are too many to name here, but my gratitude for their
efforts is none the less sincere.