JOHN P. MORTON & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY.
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, in the _North American Review_ for January, 1902.
"One never praises an author for certain things without afterward
doubting if they were the characteristic things, or whether just the
reverse might not be said. Praise is, in fact, a delicate business, and
I, who am rather fond of dealing in it, never feel quite safe. Not only
is it questionable at the moment, but the later behavior of the author
is sometimes such that one is sorry not to have made it blame. It is
always with a shrinking, which I try to hide from the public, that I
take up the fresh venture of a poet whom I have once bet on. But there
is a joy when I find that I have not lost my wager, which is full
compensation for the anxiety suffered. This joy has lately been mine in
the latest little book of Mr. Madison Cawein, whose work I long ago
confessed my pleasure in. I am not sure that he has transcended the
limits which he then seemed to give himself as the lover, the prophet,
of beauty in the woods and waters and skies of the southern Mid-West. I
do not know that he need have done more than unlock the riches of
emotion within these limits. What I am sure of is that in 'Weeds by the
Wall' he has more deeply charmed me with an art perfected from that I
felt in 'Blooms of the Berry' ten or fifteen years since. Many little
books of his have come (I hope not also gone) between the first and
last, and none of them has failed to make me glad of his work; and now,
again, I am finding the same impassioned moods in the same impassive
presences. To my knowledge, no such nature poems have been written
within the time since Mr. Cawein began to write as his are, or from such
an intimacy with the 'various language' which nature speaks. There are
other good poems in the book, poems which would have made reputes in the
eighteenth century, and which it would be a shame not to own good in the
twentieth; but those which speak for 'The Cricket,' 'A Twilight Moth,'
'The Grasshopper,' 'The Tree-Toad,' 'The Screech Owl,' 'The Chipmunk,'
'Drouth,' 'Before the Rain,' and the like, are in a voice which
interprets the very soul of what we call the inarticulate things, though
they seem to have enunciated themselves so distinctly to this poet. It
is cheap to note his increasing control of his affluent imagery and the
growing mastery that makes him so fine an artist. These things were to
be expected from his early poems, but what makes one think he will go
far and long, and outlive both praise and blame, is the blending of a
sense of the Kentucky civilization in such a poem as 'Feud.'...
Civilization may not be quite the word for the condition of things
suggested here, but there can be no doubt of the dramatic and the
graphic power that suggests it, and that imparts a personal sense of the
tragic squalor, the sultry drouth, the forlorn wickedness of it all. By
such a way as this lies Mr. Cawein's hope of rise from nature up to man,
if it is up; and also, as I perceive too late, lies confusion for the
critic who said that the poet does not transcend the limits he once
seemed to give himself."
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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: Page 76 "wickednsse" changed to "wickedness" (the
forlorn wickedness of it all.)