CHAPTER XXIX

THE LATER POETRY

All of the calculated activities for the promotion of the stage during

the last few years in America have as yet been limited and indirect in

their results. Among them it is very possible that there was a blazing

of the way for another development of great importance which has taken

place without any leagues or schools or organized propaganda. This has

been the restoration of poetry as a living language. Not only have

authors' readings taken the place of dramatic interpretations in the

lecture market but the audiences who flock to hear Tagore and Noyes

and Masefield and Gibson and Bynner and Lindsay and Frost go to listen

to poems with which they are already familiar and to get that sense of

personal acquaintance with poets which ten years ago they coveted with

playwrights and, further back, with novelists. The dominant fact about

the contemporary reading public is its reawakened zest for poetry.

In 1890 the English poetry-reading world was chiefly conscious of the

passing of its leading singers for the last half century. It was a

period when they were recalling Emerson's "Terminus" and Longfellow's

"Ultima Thule," Whitman's "November Boughs" and Whittier's "A

Lifetime," Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar" and Browning's "Asolando."

There was no group in the prime of life who were adequate successors

to this greater choir. Stedman, Aldrich, and Stoddard had courted

the muse as a kind of alien divinity and enjoyed excursions into the

distant land of her dwelling-place. But their poetry was a poetry of

accomplishment; an embellishment of life, and not an integral part of

it (see pp. 324-326). It was a period when people were tempted with

some reason to dwell on the "good old days," and for a while it seemed

as though it would be long before the world would see their like again.

The spirit of the times seemed to be expressed by a group of younger

artists who were in conscious revolt against Victorian literature and

rather noisily assertive on their favorite theme of art for art's sake.

They were occupied in composing intricate and ingenious poems. They

were engrossed like Masters's "Petit, the Poet" in inditing

Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,

Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,

Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics,

While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines!

Some of them did pastels in prose, and many edited transitory little

periodicals like _The Yellow Book_, _The Chap Book_, _The Lark_,

and _Truth in Boston_. Fourteen of these came into existence in the

United States in the first two months of 1897, and almost none of them

survived till the Fourth of July of that year. Probably the only lines

in any of them recalled by the readers of to-day are Gelett Burgess's

quatrain on the purple cow. The burden of these young poets was many

words fairly spoken of "organic growth," "development," "progress,"

"liberalism," "freedom of speech," and "independent thought"; and the

chief product of their thinking was a frank and free Bohemianism, an

honest unconventionality much more real than the diluted thing about

which Stedman and Aldrich had rimed thirty years before.

The most vigorous and enduring of the new group was Richard Hovey

(1864-1900). He was Western-born, schooled at Washington, and a

graduate of Dartmouth in 1885. His next years included study in the

General Theological Seminary in New York, an assistantship in a New

York ritualistic church, excursions into journalism and acting, and

then, after some years as poet and dramatist, a professorship of

English literature in Barnard College, Columbia University. Hovey grew

perceptibly during his eager enjoyment of these various pursuits. For a

while he seemed content to sing the praises of convivial comradeship:

For we know the world is glorious

And the goal a golden thing,

And that God is not censorious

When his children have their fling;

but he passed before long to the stage in which the good fellowship of

youth was a symbol of something far larger than itself--nothing less

than the promise of humankind. The ode delivered before his fraternity

convention in 1896 quite transcends the sort of effusion usually evoked

by such occasions. The spring in the air, in the world, and in the

heart of youth culminate in the oft-sung "Stein Song"; and after it the

poem goes on to "The first low stirring of that greater spring,"

Of something potent burning through the earth,

Of something vital in the procreant air.

This potent something is the "unceasing purpose" of Tennyson, but with

a difference, for in Hovey's mind it is not the purpose of a detached

God who imposes his will benevolently on mankind from without, but the

creative impulse which is inherent in life itself, the evidence of the

divine spirit in the heart of man. Comradeship, then, became to Hovey

a symbol of altruism, and he looked beyond this springtide of the year

and of the youthful collegians to the time when science, art, and

religion should emancipate men in the truth that should set them free

and bring them, in spite of delays, in the fullness of time to "the

greater to-morrow."

Yet while Hovey was uplifted by the fine fervor of such a faith, he

experienced a reaction with the outbreak of the Spanish-American

War. In the sudden self-righteousness of an inflamed patriotism he

nationalized God and deified war. Excited beyond measure by the

immediate issue, he not only justified America against Spain but,

forgetting all the lessons of evolution, he declared that the race

could develop only through the repetition of old experiences.

By strife as well as loving--strife,

The Law of Life,--

In brute and man the climbing has been done

And shall be done hereafter. Since man was

No upward-climbing cause

Without the sword has ever yet been won.

His mistake lay in justifying all wars in order to justify the national

altruism of the war with Spain, and his fallacy came in his assumption

that biological and physical life were governed by the same laws. For

the moment Hovey turned "jingo," as most of his countrymen did, yet

even then he invoked the sword for the suppression of tyranny and not

in the name of nationalistic ambition.

The home of Hovey's imagination was where the true poet's always

is--"far in the vast of sky, ... too high for sound of strife, or

any violation of the town." From this high vantage point he sang

the glories of the things he loved the best, but with maturity he

moved from the world of material pleasure to the realms of spiritual

adventure. In 1893 he wrote

Down the world with Marna!

That's the life for me!

Wandering with the wandering wind,

Vagabond and unconfined!

Five years later he could no longer catalogue his places on the map,

for his goal was "the unknown" and "the wilderness" in pursuit of the

high human adventure which Moody was to celebrate in his "Road Hymn for

the Start." In a parallel way Hovey's first conception of fellowship

rose from the early relish for beer and song to the fellowship of

kindred souls of which the fine flowering is the love of man and woman.

Spirit to spirit finds its voiceless way,

As tone melts meeting in accordant tone,--

Oh, then our souls, far in the vast of sky,

Look from a tower, too high for sound of strife

Or any violation of the town,

Where the great vacant winds of God go by,

And over the huge misshapen city of life

Love pours his silence and his moonlight down.

At the age of thirty-six, just on the threshold of maturity, Hovey died.

William Vaughn Moody (1869-1910) was another son of the Middle West.

Born in southern Indiana, he lost his mother in his fifteenth year and

his father, a river-steamboat captain, in his seventeenth. By alternate

study and teaching he prepared himself for Harvard, and entering at

somewhat more than the average age he completed his college work in

three years and followed these with a year in Europe as private tutor.

In addition to a receptiveness for learning he had the capacity for a

rich and varied culture which is sometimes mistakenly thought to belong

only to blue-blooded inheritors of family tradition. From the close

of his residence in Cambridge till his death, seventeen years later,

Moody's life included long and extended travels, varied and profound

study, eight years' teaching at the University of Chicago, from

which President Harper was reluctant to accept his resignation, and

distinguished work as painter, poet, and dramatist. Suddenly stricken

with a fatal illness, he died in 1910.

Mention has already been made of his work as playwright (see pp. 445,

446). His lyric and narrative poems all have the same breadth of view

which is inherent in his poetic dramas. He was familiar with a wide

range of the world's art and literature, but in the work which he chose

to collect for republication he was imitative of none. His imagination

roved freely through all time and space. "Gloucester Moors" were the

vantage point from which he conceived the earth as a "vast, outbound

ship of souls"; "Old Pourquoi" challenged the scheme of creation

from beneath the Norman sky; "The Death of Eve" is derived from the

Hebrew past, "The Masque of Judgment" from the Greek, "A Dialogue

in Purgatory" from the Italian, "The Fountain" from early American

legend, "On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines" from a current event.

Thus he did not maintain his citizenship of the world by any denial

of allegiance to America. In the third section of "An Ode in Time of

Hesitation" he sketched as splendid a pageant of America as has ever

been devised. The Cape Ann children seeking the arbutus, the hill lads

of Tennessee harking to the wild geese on their northern flight, are

one with the youth of Chicago, the renewing green of the wheat fields,

the unrolling of the rivers from the white Sierras, the downward creep

of Alaskan glaciers, and the perennial palm-crown of Hawaii. It is in

very truth

the eagle nation Milton saw,

Mewing its mighty youth.

Moody's love of America did not lead him to embrace the "manifest

destiny" illusion. He was quite as conscious of the misdirection of

human leadership as he was of the riches with which God had endowed

the natural land. "Gloucester Moors" is deeply solicitous for a future

which seems to be insured for the grasping capitalist; "The Brute" is

both more vigorous and more hopeful in its certitude that the factory

system in its worst forms is a short-lived social abortion. The demon

of the machine is sure to be caught and subdued:

He must give each man his portion, each his pride and worthy place;

He must batter down the arrogant and lift the weary face.

On each vile mouth set purity, on each low forehead grace.

These poems were of life within America or without it, but in "An Ode

in Time of Hesitation" and "On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines"

Moody warned the rulers in Washington that the country, now awake to

its duties in the world, would forgive blindness, but baseness it would

smite. Finally, in "The Quarry" he cried out in pride at America's fine

part in preventing the partitioning of helpless China by the grasping

European empires,--the achievement of the poet-diplomat, John Hay.

Throughout all Moody's work is a constant undercurrent of evolutionary

thought--not the brutal mechanism associated with the term "Darwinism,"

but the aspiring impulse within all life which makes it rise not

through struggle against outer forces so much as through the innate

impulse to develop. In the sardonic "Menagerie" the idea is ironically

stated:

Survival of the fittest, adaptation,

And all their other evolution terms,

Seem to omit one small consideration,

which is no less than the existence of souls:

Restless, plagued, impatient things,

All dream and unaccountable desire;

and these souls are expressions of the universal soul which finds

its own salvation in unceasing "groping, testing, passing on,"--the

creative struggle described by Raphael in "The Masque of Judgment" as

The strife of ripening suns and withering moons,

Marching of ice-floes, and the nameless wars

Of monster races laboring to be man.

In his attitude toward and his literary treatment of woman Moody was

emphatically modern. He was far beyond the supercilious and hollow

amenities with which eighteenth-century poetry was filled, and he

was not satisfied with the sincerer expression of deep personal

tributes to individual women. In his philosophy woman was the dominant

influence in the development of humankind. Eve and Prometheus were one

in seeking the knowledge and power to lift man above brute creation

and in producing the clash between God and man which was the price

of knowledge and the cost of progress. But Prometheus was a poor and

defeated character in comparison; for Moody, in Eve and Pandora,

presented woman not only as the donor and the fulfillment of love but

as the final agent of reconciliation between the human and the divine.

In the various poems there are acknowledgments of awe, of reverence,

of spiritual love, and of passion; taken together they show the same

breadth of view that belongs to the human equation in which Moody

regards woman as the greatest factor. It is most significant that the

dramatic trilogy was planned to conclude with a song of Eve, and that

twice--in "I am the Woman" and part five of "The Death of Eve"--Moody

composed studies toward that final song that was never perfected.

Both progress through the ages when woman was subtly molded by man's

conception of her, so that her happiness and her very being consisted

in conforming herself to him.

Still, still with prayer and ecstasy she strove

To be the woman they did well approve,

That narrowed to their love,

She might have done with bitterness and blame.

And in both she appears as the indomitable Promethean spirit who in the

end was to fulfill that plan which in the beginning she had endangered.

There is no reference to any woman in any of Moody's poems which is out

of harmony with this dominating and progressive idea.

For several reasons Moody's poetry is not easy to read and is therefore

undestined to wide popularity (see pp. 263, 264). He was not interested

to compose simple lyrics or narratives. Seldom does he aid the reader

by means of even an implied narrative thread. The poems inspired by

history are not self-explanatory nor accompanied by footnotes. Moody

consistently employed events, whether actual or imagined, as mere

avenues of approach to emotional and spiritual experiences, and he

expected the reader to contribute to the poems from his own resourceful

imagination. It is because the whole meaning is not laid out on the

surface of his verses--like Christmas-card sentiments--that Moody

has become very largely a poet's poet. Their instinctive grasp of

the figurative deeper meanings, their immediate response to elusive

metaphor, and their understanding of his vigorous, exact, but sometimes

recondite diction make them his best audience. For they too can most

nearly appreciate the distinguished beauties of his work--his wide and

intimate knowledge of world literature, the opulence of his style, the

firmness of his structure, the scrupulousness of his detail. Through

the rising and the risen poets of the present generation Moody's

influence is exerted on thousands who are all unconscious of it.

An approach to contemporary American poetry in a fraction of a chapter

at the end of a general history can be justified on only one ground:

it serves the purpose of a guideboard on a transcontinental highway.

American literature was not concluded with the deaths of the great New

England group nor has it come to an end since then. The student should

recognize this in his respect for the fine promise of what is now being

written, and he should recognize that the study of our past literature

can bear no richer fruit than a sane understanding of the literature

of the day. Furthermore he should be intelligent enough to see that

literature need not be old to be fit for study--that it is not only

absurd but vicious to assume (as used to be said, with a difference, of

the Indian) that there is no good poet but a dead poet. These few pages

are therefore devoted to a half-dozen writers who represent tendencies.

They are arbitrarily selected as the contemporary dramatists in the

preceding chapter were. Yet their weight is greatly reënforced by the

many others to whom no allusion can be made. A comparison of the three

books on recent American poetry suggests the speed of the literary

current. Miss Rittenhouse's "The Younger American Poets" (1904)

includes eighteen poets of whom thirteen were born before 1865. Miss

Lowell's "Tendencies in Modern American Poetry" (1917) includes six

poets, none of whom were mentioned in the earlier book, and the oldest

of whom was born in the closing days of 1869. Of the sixteen poets

indicated by name in the chapter headings of Mr. Louis Untermeyer's

"New Era in American Poetry" (1919), only three were born before 1875.

The reading of contemporary poetry should be done with zest and without

calculation, but the study of the same material must be approached with

self-conscious deliberateness and with a definite resolve not to be

carried away by the cheap and easy generalizations current on the lips

of the careless talker. Contemporary poetry is not all of one kind nor

is it chiefly characterized by defiant revolt against old forms and

old ideas. It is true that in all branches of artistic endeavor new

methods and new points of view are being advanced. In music Debussy and

Schoenberg, in painting Cézanne and Matisse, in sculpture Rodin and

his disciples, in stage setting and costuming Gordon Craig and Leon

Bakst, have shocked and surprised quite as many as they have edified,

and have given rise to the same sort of querulous protest indulged in

by those who talk as if all modern poetry were typified by the most

extravagant verses of Alfred Kreymborg, or "Anne Knish." But in poetry

most of the recent work has not been wantonly bizarre, most of the

more distinguished verse has not been "free," and most of the men and

women who have written free verse have shown and have practiced a firm

mastery of the established forms. The point, then, is to maintain an

open mind and to make sure of conclusions before adopting them, and

the surest method of doing these two student-like things is to read

and study authors by the bookful and not by the pseudo-royal road of

anthologies and eclectic magazines. If you want to become acquainted

with a man you will sit down at leisure with him in his study, instead

of forming snapshot judgments from contact at afternoon teas, and

you will form your own opinion in preference to gleaning it from the

conversation of others.

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869- ), the oldest of this latter group,

was born in the same year with Moody and is now in the prime of

life. The Tilbury of many of his poems is really the town of his

upbringing--Gardiner, Maine. It is an unusual but not a unique village

in America--a colonial old-world village. The atmosphere of Puritanism

had not been blown away from it, and it still felt the subtle influence

of a preëminent family. When "the squire" passed,

We people on the pavement looked at him;

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean-favored, and imperially slim.

It is easy to think of Tilbury as an English town; it is utterly

different from Lindsay's Springfield or Masters's Spoon River. It is

not without significance that the clearest single picture presents a

little boy of twelve as the companion of "Isaac and Archibald," two old

men on the ominous verge of superannuation. It was life in Gardiner

that gives so real a sense of the town on the Avon in "Ben Jonson

Entertains a Man from Stratford." In 1891 Mr. Robinson entered Harvard,

withdrawing at the end of two years and entering business in New York

City. Here he remained till 1910, the last five years as an appointee

of President Roosevelt in the New York Customhouse, and since the

latter date he has lived again in Gardiner, bearing some resemblance

in his mellowed maturity, perhaps, to Larry Scammon in his play "The

Porcupine."

As a matter of literary history the most striking fact about Mr.

Robinson is that the poetry-reading public has been redeveloped since

he began to write. Although his first volume, "The Children of the

Night," appeared in 1897, and his second, "Captain Craig," in 1902, it

was possible for him to be omitted from "The Younger American Poets" of

1904. With "The Town down the River" in 1910 his recognition began to

come, and with the republication of "Captain Craig" the public became

aware of a volume which they could have been reading for full thirteen

years.

Miss Lowell displays a mild contempt for the title poem of this book,

and Mr. Phelps--in his "Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth

Century"--echoes her verdict. Yet for many readers there is a splendor

in it and a richness that brings them back to it again and again.

It is doubtless long, discursive, and condensible. In fact it is

already condensed in such a bit as "Flammonde." It is an elaboration

of the title lyric for "The Children of the Night"; but only a wanton

perversion of criticism will discount a philosophical poem for not

submitting to lyric standards. It is a poem of childhood, sunlight,

laughter, and hope declaimed by an indomitable old vagabond of eternity

who is invincible in death and is fittingly borne to the grave while

the trombones of the Tilbury band blare the Dead March in "Saul."

Captain Craig is a character who would not be his complete self

without his verbosity. His type, in fact, is never succinct. They are

extravagant of time, of gesture, of vocal and rhetorical emphasis, of

words themselves. Out of the abundance of their hearts their mouths

speak all sorts of irresponsible, whimsical, exalted, and splendid

extravagance. They give voice to the dumb, and they amuse and stimulate

the good listeners, but they bore the cleverly communicative, who

dislike any consecutive talk but their own. Thus, for example, the

captain writes on one May day:

I have yearned

In many another season for these days,

And having them with God's own pageantry

To make me glad for them,--yes, I have cursed

The sunlight and the breezes and the leaves

To think of men on stretchers and on beds,

* * * * *

Or of women working where a man would fall--

Flat-breasted miracles of cheerfulness

Made neuter by the work that no man counts

Until it waits undone; children thrown

To feed their veins and souls with offal....

Yes,

I have had half a mind to blow my brains out

Sometimes; and I have gone from door to door

Ragged myself, trying to do something--

Crazy, I hope.--But what has this to do

With Spring? Because one half of humankind

Lives here in hell, shall not the other half

Do any more than just for conscience' sake

Be miserable? Is this the way for us

To lead these creatures up to find the light,

Or the way to be drawn down to find the dark

Again?

Captain Craig, in a word, is self-expression in very being and condemns

in joyous scorn the man who believes that life is best fulfilled

through discipline and renunciation. Instead he offers something

positive:

Take on yourself

But your sincerity, and you take on

Good promise for all climbing; fly for truth,

And hell shall have no storm to crush your flight,

No laughter to vex down your loyalty.

This is the note throughout all Robinson's poems and plays. His

disbelief in negativism leads him often to be impatient and caustic

and leads the cloudy minded to timid deprecation of his cynicism,

not knowing the difference between this and irony; but Mr. Robinson

is never cynical toward the things that are more excellent. He is

only convinced that people's Puritan convictions as to what is more

excellent result in a perverted estimate; he is only attempting to

substitute light for shadow, laughter for gloom; he is only saying with

Larry Scammon:

"Stop me if I am too cheerful; but at the same time, if I can instil

the fertile essence of Hope into this happy household, for God's

sake, let me do it.... You had far better--all of you--begin to

get yourselves out of your own light, and cease to torment your

long-bedevilled heads with the dark doings of bogies that have no

real existence."

As a craftsman Mr. Robinson has won distinction by his simple, direct

realism. He employs for the most part the old iambic measures, a

sentence structure which is often conversational, and a diction which

is severe in its restraint. There are few "purple patches" in his

poetry, but there are many clear flashes of incisive phrasing. His work

is like a May day in his own seacoast town--not balmy, but bracing,

with lots of sparkle on the blue, and the taste of the east wind

through it all.

Robert Frost (1875- ) is known as the author of three books of verse:

"A Boy's Will," 1913, "North of Boston," 1914, and "Mountain Interval,"

1916. He is known also--and rightly--as the voice and embodiment of

rural New England. Yet he was born in San Francisco, his mother was

born in Edinburgh, he first came to New England at the age of ten, and

he lived for the next eight schoolboy years in a mill town, Lawrence,

Massachusetts. Nevertheless, in his capacity for receiving impressions,

he seemed to have a selective memory which made him sensitive to the

aspects of country life in the regions north of Boston--the regions

trod by nine generations of forbears on his father's side of the

family. And so it was that though his first two volumes were published

in London, there is no local trace of the old country in them, nothing

in them that he had not known in farm or village between 1885 and 1912,

when he set sail with his wife and children toward a residence of two

and a half years in England. On his return to America he bought a farm

in New Hampshire. Since 1916 he has taught in Amherst College.

The common statement that Mr. Frost is content solely to present the

appearances of New England life should be given distinct qualifications

in two respects: the first is that his earliest book, "A Boy's Will,"

is wholly subjective and analytical, completely falling outside the

generalization. And the second is that while "North of Boston" and

"Mountain Interval" are objective pictures of New England life, the

truth in them is by no means limited to New England, but is pertinent

to human kind, although deeply tinged with the hue of that particular

district.

"A Boy's Will," a little volume, is made up of thirty-two lyrics,

each of them complete and most of them lovely. They are not, however,

detached, although it is an open question how many readers would

see their relationship if this were not indicated in the table of

contents. It is the record of a young artist's experience who marries,

withdraws to the country, revels in the isolation of winter, in the

coming of spring, and in the farm beauties of summer. This isolation,

however, cannot satisfy him long. Let the contents for Part Two show

what happens: "'Revelation'--He resolves to become intelligible,

at least to himself, since there is no help else--'The Trial by

Existence'--and to know definitely what he thinks about the soul; 'In

Equal Sacrifice'--about love; 'The Tuft of Flowers'--about fellowship;

'Spoils of the Dead'--about death; 'Pan with Us'--about art (his own);

'The Demiurge's Laugh'--about science." With the five lyrics of Part

Three, the youth and his bride return to the world with misgivings:

Out through the fields and the woods

And over the walls I have wended;

I have climbed the hills of view

And looked at the world, and descended;

I have come by the highway home,

And lo, it is ended.

* * * * *

Ah, when to the heart of man

Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things,

To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

Of a love or a season?

This book does not represent the work of Frost as it appears in his

later volumes, but it does represent the poet himself:

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth.

The second volume, "North of Boston," is twice as long as "A Boy's

Will" and contains half as many titles. There would be nothing in this

mathematical formula if it did not carry with it a real difference

in content. But this second book is made up not of lyrics, but of

unimpassioned vignettes of New England life. This is the grim New

England which the poet attempted to shut out in "Love and a Question":

But whether or not a man was asked,

To mar the love of two

By harboring woe in the bridal house,

The bridegroom wished he knew.

The book presents the death of a farm laborer, the maddened bereavement

of a mother whose child is buried within sight of the house, the black

prospect faced by a household drudge who faces the insanity which is

an inherited blight in her blood. They are not amiable pictures, and

they offer neither problem nor solution, only the life itself. They

are not, however, all equally grim. "The Mountain" tells of a township

of sixty voters with only a fringe of level land around the looming

pile. It dominates life, limits it, and rises above it, for few have

either time or curiosity to reach the top. "The Black Cottage" presents

a widowed relict of the Civil War who knew only her sacrifice and

whose unthinking orthodoxy was as hazy as her political creed. With

liberalism in the parish, the preacher was inclined to omit "descended

into Hades" from the ritual:

... We could drop them

Only--there was the bonnet in the pew,

Such a phrase couldn't have meant much to her.

But suppose she had missed it from the Creed

As a child misses the unsaid Good-night,

And falls asleep with heartache--how should I feel?

Of another sort are the poems which have most of outdoor in them:

"Mending Wall," the symbol of barriers between properties which the

winters throw down; "Blueberries," which indicates the complex of

ownership in a countryside filled with nature's gifts of uncultivated

fruit; "After Apple Picking," the weariness forced upon the farmer

in his effort to husband an embarrassment of orchard riches; and

"The Woodpile" with its suggestion of the slow processes of nature

contrasted with the temporal efforts of man. The woodpile is discovered

far out in a swamp, long abandoned and vine-covered:

... I thought that only

Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks

Could so forget his handiwork on which

He spent himself, the labour of his axe,

And leave it there far from a useful fireplace

To warm the frozen swamp as best it could

With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

The last volume, "Mountain Interval," is something of a composite,

with elements in both the former two. One reads Mr. Frost's pages

thoughtfully and leaves them in a thoughtful mood. Not all are grim,

but very few are gay. They have the rock-ribbed austerity of the

country from which they spring and some of its beauty, too. They are

suffused with the smoky haze of an Indian-summer day.

Edgar Lee Masters (1869- ) was born in Kansas in the same year with

Moody and Robinson. In the next year his family moved to Illinois,

which is his real "native" state. As a boy he had wide opportunities

for reading. At the age of twenty-one he entered Knox College and

plunged with zest into the study of the classics, but was forced

to withdraw at the end of the year because Mr. Masters, Sr., would

acknowledge no value in these studies for the practice of law,

toward which he was directing his son. After a brief experiment in

independence the young man surrendered and eventually entered on a

successful career as a Chicago attorney. Yet the law did not take

complete possession of him; he has always been a devoted reader of

Greek literature. "Songs and Satires," published in 1916, contains

a few lyrics from a volume of 1898 which was printed, but through

an accident of the trade never published. One of these ends with the

significant stanza:

Helen of Troy, Greek art

Hath made our heart thy heart,

Thy love our love.

For poesy, like thee,

Must fly and wander free

As the wild dove.

Mr. Masters's next venture was a poetic drama in 1900, "Maximilian," a

tragedy in verse which was accorded a few sympathetic reviews but no

wide reading. Other works followed in the next fifteen years, some in

law and some in literature. And finally, in 1915, appeared the "Spoon

River Anthology." This is in all probability the most widely circulated

book of new poems in the history of American literature; others may

have achieved a greater total of copies during a long career, but it is

doubtful whether any others have equaled fifty thousand within three

years of publication.

The most valuable single utterance on this much-discussed work is the

richly compacted preface of Mr. Masters in "Toward the Gulf," with its

inscription to William Marion Reedy. Mr. Masters had submitted various

contributions to Reedy's _Mirror_, but had received most of them back

with friendly appeals for something fresh. The first five Spoon River

epitaphs were written almost casually in answer to this repeated

challenge. At the same time they were a more than casual application

of a hint from the Greek: a "resuscitation of the Greek epigrams,

ironical and tender, satirical and sympathetic," assembled into an

ultimate collection of nearly two hundred and fifty brief units, each

a self-inscribed epitaph by one of the Spoon River townsfolk. These

represent the chief types in an American country town and recognize in

particular the usual line of cleavage between those who choose to be

considered virtuous and those who do not care what they are considered.

Unfortunately the first of these classes includes both the idealist

and the hypocrite; and the second, both the conscious radical and

the confirmed reprobate. A typical issue which might arise in such a

town, as well as a typical alignment of forces, is described in "The

Spooniad," the closing mock-heroic fragment and the longest unit in the

book.

The "Anthology" has been violently assailed as a wantonly cynical

production, each assault on this ground carrying within itself a

proof that the censor either had not read the book through or did not

understand it. As a matter of fact the most impressive element in the

book and the one which bulks largest in the last quarter of it are the

victorious idealists. There is Davis Matlock, who decided to live life

out like a god, sure of immortality. There is Tennessee Claflin Shope,

who asserted the sovereignty of his own soul, and Samuel Gardiner,

who determined to live largely in token of his ample spirit, and the

Village Atheist, who knew that only those who strive mightily could

possess eternal life, and Lydia Humphrey, who in her church found the

vision of the poets. In spite of the protests of readers who were so

disgusted with the Inferno of the earlier portion that they never

progressed to the concluding Paradiso, the book achieved its great

circulation among a tolerant public and enviable applause from the most

discriminating critics.

"Spoon River" established Mr. Masters's reputation and prepared the

public for further thrills and shocks in the volumes to follow. This

expectation has been only half fulfilled. The certainty of a public

hearing has naturally encouraged the poet to more rapid production, but

the subsequent books--"Songs and Satires" and "The Great Valley" of

1916 and "Toward the Gulf" of 1918--have been divided both in tone and

content between the caustic informality for which Mr. Masters was known

in his earlier work and the classic finish which is a return to his

unknown, earliest style.

In his treatment of sex, however, Mr. Masters has supplied the shocks

and thrills expected, dealing with various aspects of passion with

a frank minuteness which is sometimes distasteful and sometimes

morbid. Unusually his discussions of passion are more analytical than

picturesque. He assumes its existence as a dominant factor in life

and discusses not the experience itself so much as its influence.

Frequently whole poems are concerned with it. He takes for granted

passionate love without benefit of clergy, recording it without either

idealizing it or defending it. Doubtless life has included the material

for the "Dialogue at Perko's," for "Victor Rafolski on Art," and for

"Widow La Rue," and certainly modern poetry supplies parallels in the

works of other men. In a more significant way the sex psychology of

Freud crops out in many poems not ostensibly devoted to it, as, for

example, in "To-morrow is my Birthday." This soliloquy attributed to

Shakespeare in his tercentenary year stands in striking contrast to Mr.

Robinson's "Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford." In these two

poems (of about four hundred lines each) Mr. Robinson writes in the

manner of Ben Jonson, paying his tribute to Shakespeare at the height

of his powers in London, touching on his susceptibility to women but

passing this to dilate on his almost superhuman wisdom; Mr. Masters

devotes the last two thirds of Shakespeare's monologue on the night of

his last carousal to sex confessions which become increasingly gross as

the bard becomes increasingly drunk. Mr. Robinson's passage is only a

few lines in length and concludes:

There's no long cry for going into it,

However, and we don't know much about it.

Mr. Masters's approaches two hundred and fifty lines, begins with "The

thing is sex," continues with

Give me a woman, Ben, and I will pick

Out of this April, by this larger art

Of fifty-two, such songs as we have heard,

Both you and I, when weltering in the clouds

Of that eternity which comes in sleep,

Or in the viewless spinning of the soul

When most intense,

and ends with common brothel profanity. The popular method of

justifying the Masters treatment is to gibe at the Robinson reticence

as Puritan prudishness, but it is a gibe which for many enforces the

value of reticence even in modern art.

So much for the negative side of Mr. Masters's work--the so-called

cynicism declaimed at by the inattentive reader and the preoccupation

with sex which is fairly open to criticism. On the positive side the

greater weight of his work lies in poems of searching analysis. "So

We Grew Together" is the changing relations of an adopted son for

his Bohemian father; "Excluded Middle," an inquiry into the mystery

of inheritance; "Dr. Scudder's Clinical Lecture," the study of a

paranoiac--dramatic monologues suggestive of Browning in execution

as well as content. The reader of Mr. Masters as a whole is bound to

discover in the end that all these analyses are searchings into the

mystery of life. It appears in "The Loom" as it does in "The Cry":

There's a voice in my heart that cries and cries for tears.

It is not a voice, but a pain of many years.

It is not a pain, but the rune of far-off spheres.

* * * * *

Deep in darkness the bulb under mould and clod

Feels the sun in the sky and pushes above the sod;

Perhaps this cry in my heart is nothing but God!

And he is bound to confess that Mr. Masters, instead of being a cynic,

is a sober optimist. Take the last lines of the opening and closing

poems in "Toward the Gulf":

And forever as long as the river flows toward the Gulf

Ulysses reincarnate shall come

To guard our places of sleep,

Till East and West shall be one in the west of heaven and earth!

* * * * *

"And after that?"

"Another spring--that's all I know myself,

There shall be springs and springs!"

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (1879- ), born in Springfield, Illinois, of

which he is the most devoted and distinguished citizen since Lincoln,

studied for three years at Hiram College and then for five years as

an art student in Chicago and New York. Unfortunately his drawings

are accessible only in a quarto pamphlet--"A Letter to Program

Managers"--which is not for sale. They show the same vigor and the same

antic play of fancy inherent in his verse. In 1906 he took his first

long tramp through Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, and in 1908 a

second through the northeastern states. During these two, as in his

latest like excursion through the Western wheat belt, he traveled as a

minstrel, observing the following rules:

(1) Keep away from the cities.

(2) Keep away from the railroads.

(3) Have nothing to do with money. Carry no baggage.

(4) Ask for dinner about quarter after eleven.

(5) Ask for supper, lodging and breakfast about quarter of five.

(6) Travel alone.

(7) Be neat, truthful, civil and on the square.

(8) Preach the Gospel of Beauty.

These appeared at the head of a little pamphlet entitled "Rhymes to

be Traded for Bread," the only baggage he carried besides a further

printed statement called "The Gospel of Beauty." In smiling defense

of his course Mr. Lindsay has said that up to date there has been no

established method for implanting beauty in the heart of the average

American. "_Until such a way has been determined upon by a competent

committee_, I must be pardoned for taking my own course and trying

any experiment I please." Mr. Lindsay has not limited himself to this

way of circulating his ideas. He has posted his poems on billboards,

recited them from soap boxes and on the vaudeville stage, and has

even descended to select club audiences. He has, however, not allowed

the calls of the lyceum managers to convert him from a poet to an

entertainer.

His books have been six in number and, according to his own advice,

are to be read in the following order: "A Handy Guide for Beggars,"

"Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty," "The Art of the

Moving Picture," "General William Booth Enters into Heaven," "The

Congo," and "The Chinese Nightingale." The first three are prose

statements of his social and religious philosophy; the second three

are poems. His seventh volume is announced as "The Golden Book of

Springfield." In its title it is a reaffirmation of what appears in

many of his poems and of what he stated in "The Gospel of Beauty"

(1912): "The things most worth while are one's own hearth and

neighborhood. We should make our own home and neighborhood the most

democratic, the most beautiful, and the holiest in the world."

The obvious first point about the poetry of Mr. Lindsay is that in it

he lives up to his own instructions. He keeps quite as close to his own

district as Mr. Masters and Mr. Frost do and he indulges in as wide a

play of imagination as does Mr. Robinson. In the rôle of an apostle

he tries to implant beauty in the heart of the average American. Yet

"implant" is not the proper word; his own word is "establish," for he

re-enforces a latent sense of beauty in hearts that are unconscious of

it and he reveals it in the lives of those whom the average American

overlooks or despises. On the one hand, he carries whole audiences into

an actual participation in his recitals and, on the other, he discloses

the "scum of the earth" as poets and mystics.

Thus "General William Booth Enters into Heaven" tells of Booth's

apotheosis as it is seen and felt by a Salvation Army sympathizer.

Booth with his big bass drum, followed by a motley slum crowd, leads to

the most impressively magnificent place within the ken of a small-town

Middle Westerner. This is an Illinois courthouse square. As a matter of

fact, it is bleak, treeless, dust-blown, mud-moated--the dome of the

courthouse in the middle, flanked on all sides with ugly brick blocks

and alternating wooden shacks with corrugated iron false fronts; but

this is splendor to the mind of the narrator. And so in all reverence

he says:

(_Sweet flute music_)

Jesus came from out the court-house door,

Stretched his hands above the passing poor.

Booth saw not, but led his queer ones there

Round and round the mighty court-house square.

From this scene General Booth ascends into heaven. "The Congo" is a

similar piece of interpretation. Few types could seem more hopeless

than the levee negroes, yet through them Mr. Lindsay makes a study

of their race. In a drunken saloon crowd he sees the basic savagery

which back in the Congo forests displays itself in picturesque poetry

stuff. In a group of crapshooters who laugh down a police raid he finds

the irrepressible high spirits which carry the negroes in imagination

back to a regal Congo cakewalk, and in the exhortations of an African

evangelist he sees the same hope of religion which the slave brought

with him from his native soil. Once again, "The Chinese Nightingale"

is written in the same spirit, this time accounting for the Chinese

laundry-man's tireless industry through the fact that while his iron

pounds in the dead of night he is living in a world of oriental romance.

Mr. Lindsay's poetry has two chief aspects, sometimes separated,

sometimes compounded. One of these is an ethical seriousness. He might

be called an ideally provincial character. He chooses to express

himself in terms of his home and neighborhood, but his interests move

out through a series of concentric circles which include his city, his

state, America, and the world federation. The poems on Springfield,

therefore, are of a piece with the poems on "America Watching the

War" and those on "America at War." "The Soul of the City," with Mr.

Lindsay's own drawings, is quite as interesting as any of the poems

above mentioned. "Springfield Magical" suggests the source of his

inspiration:

In this, the City of my Discontent,

Sometimes there comes a whisper from the grass,

"Romance, Romance--is here. No Hindu town

Is quite so strange. No Citadel of Brass

By Sinbad found, held half such love and hate;

No picture-palace in a picture-book

Such webs of Friendship, Beauty, Greed and Fate!"

"The Proud Farmer," "The Illinois Village," and "On the Building of

Springfield"--three poems which conclude the General William Booth

volume--are all on his favorite thesis and were favorites with his

farmhouse auditors.

His poems related to the war reveal him as an ardent democrat, a hater

of tyranny, a peace-loving socialist, and, in the end, like millions

of his countrymen, a combatant pacifist, but none the less a pacifist

in the larger sense. A pair of stanzas, "Concerning Emperors," are

a very pretty cue both to himself and his convictions. The first in

fervent seriousness prays for new regicides; the second states the case

unsmilingly, but as it might be put to any newsboy, concluding:

And yet I cannot hate the Kaiser (I hope you understand).

Yet I chase the thing he stands for with a brickbat in my hand.

This leads naturally to his verses of fancy and whimsy, like the

group called the "Christmas Tree," "loaded with pretty toys," or the

twenty poems in which the moon is the chief figure of speech. And

these lead naturally to his distinctive work in connection with poetic

form, his fanciful and often whimsical experiments in restoring the

half-chanted Greek choral odes to modern usage--what W. B. Yeats calls

"the primitive singing of music" (expounding it charmingly in the

volume "Ideas of Good and Evil"). Mr. Lindsay, in the "Congo" volume

has indicated on some of the margins ways in which the verses might

be chanted. Before many audiences he has illustrated his intent with

awkwardly convincing effectiveness. And with the Poem Games, printed

with "The Chinese Nightingale," he has actually enlisted unsuspecting

audiences as choruses and sent them home thrilled and amused at their

awakened poetic susceptibility. Mr. Lindsay's theories are briefly

indicated in the two books just mentioned, in Miss Harriet Monroe's

introduction to the former and in the poet's explanation of Poem Games

in the latter. They are briefly stated and should be read by every

student of his work. Like most of the developments in modern poetry

they are very new only in being a revival of something very old, but in

their application they are local, and they partake of their author's

genial, informal, democratic nature in being very American. Among the

contemporary poets who are likely to leave an individual impress on

American literature, Mr. Lindsay, to use a good Americanism, is one of

the few who "will certainly bear watching."

Miss Amy Lowell (1874- ) was born in Brookline, Massachusetts. James

Russell Lowell was a cousin of her grandfather, and she numbers among

her relatives her mother's father, Abbott Lawrence, minister to

England, and a brother, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard.

In her education general reading and wide travel were the most

important factors. In 1902, at the age of twenty-eight, she decided

to devote herself to poetry, and for the next eight years she studied

and wrote without attempting publication. Her first verse was printed

in the _Atlantic Monthly_ in 1910, and her first volume, "A Dome of

Many-Colored Glass," was published in 1912. Her further volumes have

been "Sword Blades and Poppy Seed" (1914), "Six French Poets" (1915),

"Men, Women and Ghosts" (1916), "Tendencies in Modern American Poetry"

(1917), and "Can Grande's Castle" (1919),--in all, four volumes

of verse and two of prose criticism. She has been a conspicuous

personality among contemporary poets in France, England, and America,

and though she has not been lacking in self-assertiveness she has been

without question chiefly interested in the progress of contemporary

poetry and finely generous in both theory and practice in the support

of her fellow-poets.

As one of her most recent critics has pointed out, she has been

notable and notably American in her zest for argument and in her love

of experiment--"a female Roosevelt among the Parnassians." She has

championed the cause of modern poetry and has fought the conventions of

Victorian verse wherever she has encountered them, and in her liking

for experiment and her absorption in technique she has taken up the

cudgels successively for free verse, for the tenets of Imagism, and

for polyphonic prose. She has been most closely identified with the

activities of the Imagist poets,--three Englishmen, two Anglicized

Americans, and herself,--and it is therefore well to summarize the six

objects to which they committed themselves: (1) to use the language of

common speech, but to employ always the exact word, (2) to create new

rhythms as the expression of new moods, (3) to allow absolute freedom

in the choice of subject (within the limits of good taste), (4) to

present an image (hence the name "Imagist"), (5) to produce poetry that

is hard and clear, (6) to insist on concentration as the essence of

poetry. A stanza from "Before the Altar," the opening poem in her first

book, serves to illustrate her technique as an Imagist:

His sole condition

Love and poverty.

And while the moon

Swings slow across the sky,

Athwart a waving pine tree,

And soon

Tips all the needles there

With silver sparkles, bitterly

He gazes, while his soul

Grows hard with thinking of the poorness of his dole.

The fourth section of "Spring Day," the poem in "Men, Women and Ghosts"

which begins with the much-discussed "Bath," is an example of her

"polyphonic prose":

MIDDAY AND AFTERNOON

Swirl of crowded streets. Shock and recoil of traffic. The

stock-still brick façade of an old church, against which the waves

of people lurch and withdraw. Flare of sunshine down side-streets.

Eddies of light in the windows of chemists' shops, with their blue,

gold, purple jars, darting colors far into the crowd. Loud bangs and

tremors, murmurings out of high windows, whirring of machine belts,

blurring of horses and motors. A quick spin and shudder of brakes

on an electric car, and the jar of a church-bell knocking against

the metal blue of the sky. I am a piece of the town, a bit of blown

dust, thrust along with the crowd. Proud to feel the pavement under

me, reeling with feet. Feet tripping, skipping, lagging, dragging,

plodding doggedly or springing up and advancing on firm, elastic

insteps. A boy is selling papers, I smell them clean and new from

the press. They are fresh like the air, and pungent as tulips and

narcissus.

The blue sky pales to lemon, and great tongues of gold blind the

shop-windows, putting out their contents in a flood of flame.

In her essay on John Gould Fletcher, in "Tendencies in Modern American

Poetry," Miss Lowell has defined the æsthetic intent of this poetic

form: "'Polyphonic' means--many-voiced--and the form is so-called

because it makes use of all the 'voices' of poetry, namely: metre,

_vers libre_, assonance, alliteration, rhyme and return. It employs

every form of rhythm, even prose rhythm at times, but usually holds

no particular one for long.... The rhymes may come at the ends of the

cadences, or may appear in close juxtaposition to each other, or may

be only distantly related." These two forms, with the aid of the two

formulas, may be tested at leisure from an abundance of passages; they

correspond with their recipes, are distinct from each other, and have

certain distinctive beauties. But a further experiment--the attempt to

make the cadences of free verse harmonize with the movements of natural

objects--is by no means so successful. "If the reader will turn," says

Miss Lowell, in the preface to "Men, Women and Ghosts," "to the poem 'A

Roxbury Garden,' he will find in the first two sections an attempt to

give the circular movement of a hoop bowling along the ground, and the

up-and-down, elliptical curve of a flying shuttlecock." The following,

presumably, is a segment of the circular movement:

"I will beat you Minna," cries Stella,

Hitting her hoop smartly with her stick.

"Stella, Stella, we are winning," calls Minna,

As her hoop curves round a bed of clove-pinks.

It is an example, in fact, of the fruitlessness of dwelling on a matter

of artistic form till it becomes more important than the artistic

content. Miss Lowell admits in this connection that there flashed into

her mind "the idea of using the movement of poetry." The student,

therefore, should not regard the resultant verses as anything more than

experiments in technique, and at the same time he should speculate as

to whether a vital artistic form can ever be imposed upon a subject

instead of springing spontaneously from it.

Yet, although Miss Lowell's reputation rests mainly on her experiments

in novel and striking poetic forms, most of her work has been written

in conformity with classic traditions. The opening volume is all in

common rhythms, and so is most of the second, and quite half of the

third. The last alone is devoted to a new form; "Can Grande's Castle"

contains four long poems in polyphonic prose. The tendency is clearly

in the direction of the innovations, but thus far the balance is about

even between the new and the old.

As to subject matter, Miss Lowell's thesis is Poe's: that poetry should

not teach either facts or morals, but should be dedicated to beauty; it

is a stained-glass window, a colored transparency. And the poet is a

nonsocial being who

spurns life's human friendships to profess

Life's loneliness of dreaming ecstacy.

Like Poe she limits herself to the production of lyrics and tales and

resorts not infrequently to grotesques and arabesques. Unlike Poe her

resort to horror leads her to the composition of sex infidelities which

are sometimes boring, sometimes foul, and rarely interesting. On this

point (rule three for the Imagists) Miss Lowell falters awkwardly.

"'How can the choice of subject be absolutely unrestricted?'--horrified

critics have asked. The only reply to such a question is that one had

supposed one were speaking to people of common sense and intelligence."

The bounds of taste are assumed; yet these, she hastens to state,

differ for different judges, and she illustrates her contention by

the extreme extensiveness of her own. Finally, and again like Poe,

Miss Lowell is to a high degree bookishly literary in her choice and

treatment of subjects.

After all, for the attentive reader of contemporary poetry Miss

Lowell's most distinguished service has been in her two books of

criticism. In the concourse of present-day poets she is a kind of drum

major. One cannot see the procession without seeing her or admiring the

skill with which she swings and tosses the baton. But when the parade

is past, one can easily forget her until the trumpets blare again. She

leads the way effectively, and one is glad to have her do it,--glad

that there are those who enjoy being excellent drum majors. Then one

pays farewell to her in the words with which she salutes Ezra Pound in

her verses headed "Astigmatism": "Peace be with you, [Sister]. You have

chosen your part."

Witter Bynner (1881- ) was born in Brooklyn and is a graduate of

Harvard in the class of 1902. He took the impress of his university and

recorded it not only in an "Ode to Harvard" (1907)--reprinted in "Young

Harvard and Other Poems"--but also in the two plays that followed,

"Tiger" (1913) and "The Little King" (1914), neither of which have

anything to do with Harvard, but both of which reflect the intelligent

interest in drama encouraged at that seat of learning. Aside from

"Iphigenia in Tauris" (1915), his remaining work, in which his real

distinction lies, is the single poem "The New World" (1915) and the

collection "Grenstone Poems" (1917). Into both of these are woven

threads of the same story,--the poet's love and marriage to Celia, the

inspiration which comes to him from her finer nature, the birth and

loss of their child, the death of Celia, his dull bereavement, the

dedication of his life to the democracy which Celia had taught him to

understand.

"Grenstone Poems" is a series of little idyls comparable in some

respects to Frost's "A Boy's Will." They are wholly individual in

tone, presenting in brief lyrics, nearly two hundred in number, the

quaint and lovely elements in the humor and the tragedy of life. "The

New World," in contrast, contains by implication much of this, but is

constructed in nine sections which trace the progressive steps in the

poet's idealization of America. Always Celia's imagination leads far

in advance of his own. Again and again as he strives to follow, his

triumphant ascent reaches as its climax what to her is a lower round

in the ladder. Two passages suggest the theme in the abstract, though

the beauty of the poem lies chiefly in the far implications of definite

scenes and episodes. The first is a speech of Celia's:

It is my faith that God is our own dream

Of perfect understanding of the soul.

It is my passion that, alike through me

And every member of eternity,

The source of God is sending the same stream.

It is my peace that when my life is whole,

God's life shall be completed and supreme.

The second, with which this volume may well conclude, is in the poet's

own words:

In temporary pain

The age is bearing a new breed

Of men and women, patriots of the world

And one another. Boundaries in vain,

Birthrights and countries, would constrain

The old diversity of seed

To be diversity of soul.

O mighty patriots, maintain

Your loyalty!--till flags unfurled

For battle shall arraign

The traitors who unfurled them, shall remain

And shine over an army with no slain,

And men from every nation shall enroll

And women--in the hardihood of peace!

What can my anger do but cease?

Whom shall I fight and who shall be my enemy

When he is I and I am he?

Let me have done with that old God outside

Who watched with preference and answered prayer,

The Godhead that replied

Now here, now there,

Where heavy cannon were

Or coins of gold!

Let me receive communion with all men,

Acknowledging our one and only soul!

For not till then

Can God be God, till we ourselves are whole.

BOOK LIST

=_General References_=

The Younger American Poets. Jessie B. Rittenhouse, 1904.

Tendencies in Modern American Poetry. Amy Lowell, 1917.

The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century. W. L. Phelps,

1918. (Latter half, American Poetry.)

Convention and Revolt in Poetry. G. L. Lowes, 1919.

The New Era in American Poetry. L. Untermeyer, 1919.

=Collections=

A Little Book of Modern Verse. Edited by Jessie B. Rittenhouse.

Some Imagist Poets (three annual volumes in a completed series)

1915, 1916, 1917.

An Anthology of Magazine Verse (annual volumes in a continuing

series). Edited by W. S. Braithwaite, since 1915.

The Poetry of the Future. Edited by W. T. Schnittkin.

A Book of Princeton Verse. Edited by Alfred Noyes and Others.

=_Works of Individual Men_=

WITTER BYNNER. Ode to Harvard, 1907; Tiger, 1913; The Little King,

1914; Iphigenia in Tauris, 1915; The New World, 1915; Grenstone

Poems, 1917; Any Girl, 1917.

ROBERT FROST. A Boy's Will, 1913; North of Boston, 1914; Mountain

Interval, 1916.

RICHARD HOVEY. Plays (uniform edition), 1907-1908.

NICHOLAS VACHEL LINDSAY. General William Booth Enters into Heaven,

1913; Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty, 1914; The

Congo, 1914; The Art of the Moving Picture, 1915; A Handy Guide

for Beggars, 1916; The Chinese Nightingale, 1917.

AMY LOWELL. A Dome of Many-Colored Glass, 1912; Sword Blades and

Poppy Seed, 1914; Six French Poets, 1915; Men, Women and Ghosts,

1916; Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, 1917; Can Grande's

Castle, 1919.

EDGAR LEE MASTERS. Poems, 1898; Maximilian, 1900; The Spoon River

Anthology, 1915; Songs and Satires, 1916; The Great Valley, 1916;

Toward the Gulf, 1918.

WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY. Poems and Plays. 1912. 2 vols.

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON. The Children of the Night, 1897; Captain

Craig, 1902 and 1915; The Town down the River, 1910; The Man

against the Sky, 1916; Prose plays: Van Zorn, 1914; The Porcupine,

1915; Merlin, 1917.

=_Magazine Articles_=

The magazine articles on poetry are extremely numerous. From among

those since 1900 the following are of special interest:

1900-1904. Poetry and the Stage. H. W. Boynton. _Atlantic_, Vol.

XCII pp. 120-126. July, 1903.

Poetry of a Machine Age. G. S. Lee. _Atlantic_, Vol.

LXXXV, pp. 756-763. June, 1900.

1905-1909. Certain Vagaries of the Poets. _Atlantic_, Vol. C, pp.

431-432. September, 1907.

On the Slopes of Parnassus. A. Repplier. _Atlantic_, Vol.

CII, pp. 397-403. September, 1908.

Our Strepitous Poets. _Nation_, Vol. LXXXV, pp. 277-278.

Sept. 26, 1907.

Poetry and Elocution. F. B. Gummere. _Nation_, Vol.

LXXXIX, pp. 453-454. Nov. 11, 1909.

State of Pseudo-Poetry at the Present Time. J. A. Macy.

_Bookman_, Vol. XXVII, pp. 513-517. July, 1908.

1910-1914. Democracy and Poetry. _Nation_, XCIII, pp. 413-414. Nov.

2, 1911.

New Poetry. R. M. Alden. _Nation_, Vol. XCVI, pp. 386-387.

April 17, 1913.

1910-1914. New Poets and Old Poetry. B. Hooker. _Bookman_, Vol.

XXXI, pp. 480-486. July, 1910.

Taking Poetry too Seriously. _Nation_, Vol. XCVI, pp.

173-174. Feb. 20, 1913.

1915. Imagism, Another View. W. S. Braithwaite. _New

Republic_, Vol. III, pp. 154-155. June 12, 1915.

Limits to Imagism. C. Aiken. _New Republic_, Vol. III, pp.

204-205. June 26, 1915.

New Movement in Poetry. O. W. Firkins. _Nation_, Vol. CI,

pp. 458-461. Oct. 14, 1915.

Place of Imagism. C. Aiken. _New Republic_, Vol. III, pp.

75-76. May 22, 1915.

1916. New Manner in Modern Poetry. A. Lowell. _New Republic_,

Vol. VI, pp. 124-125. March 4, 1916.

New Naïveté. L. W. Smith. _Atlantic_, Vol. CXVII, pp.

487-492. April, 1916.

Poetry To-day. C. A. P. Comer. _Atlantic_, Vol. CXVII, pp.

493-498. April, 1916.

Poetry under the Fire Test. J. N. Hall. _New Republic_,

Vol. IX, pp. 93-96. Nov. 25, 1916.

1917. From Florence Coates to Amy Lowell: a Glance at

Modernity. O. W. Firkins. _Nation_, Vol. CIV, pp.

522-524. May 3, 1917.

Poetry, Education, and Slang. M. Eastman. _New Republic_,

Vol. IX, pp. 151-152, 182-184. Dec. 9, 16, 1916.

Singers and Satirists. O. W. Firkins. _Nation_, Vol. CIV,

pp. 157-158. Feb. 8, 1917.

Critical Notes on American Poets. E. Garnett. _Atlantic_,

Vol. CXX, pp. 366-373. Sept., 1917.

See also the periodicals _Poetry, a Magazine of Verse_

(see p. 497), as well as _The Poetry Journal_, _The

Poetry Review of America_, and _Poet Lore_, entire.

[Illustration:

CHRONOLOGICAL CHART III. LEADING PERIODICALS ESTABLISHED SINCE 1800

WHICH HAVE SERVED AS VEHICLES FOR AMERICAN WRITINGS

New York Evening Post, 1801-

The Portfolio, 1806-1827

North American Review, 1815-

Saturday Evening Post, 1821-

New York Mirror, 1823-1846

New York Review and Athenæum Magazine, 1826-1827

Casket, 1826-1840

Godey's Lady's Book, 1830-1898

New England Magazine, 1831-1835

Liberator, 1831-1865

Baltimore Saturday Visiter, 1833-?

Western Monthly Magazine, 1833-1836

Knickerbocker Magazine, 1833-1865

Southern Literary Messenger, 1834-1865

Western Messenger, 1835-1841

Gentleman's Magazine, 1837-1841

Democratic Review, 1837-1859

Dial (Boston), 1840-1844

Graham's Magazine, 1841-1859

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1841-

New York Tribune, 1841-

New Englander, 1843-1892

Littell's Living Age, 1844-

Broadway Journal, 1845

Home Journal, 1847-

Independent, 1848-

Congregationalist, 1849-

Harper's Magazine, 1850-

Putnam's Magazine, 1853-1858, 1868-1870, 1906-1910

Russell's Magazine, 1857-1860

Atlantic Monthly, 1857-

Saturday Press, 1858-1860

Round Table, 1864-1869

Every Saturday, 1865-1874

Nation, 1865-

Galaxy, 1866-1878

Overland Monthly, 1868-1875, 1883-

Lippincott's Magazine, 1868-1916

Scribner's Monthly, 1870-1881

Outlook, 1870-

Southern Magazine, 1871-1875

American Magazine, 1875-

Dial (Chicago-New York), 1880-

Critic, 1881-1906

Century Magazine, 1881-

Scribner's Magazine, 1886-

Poet-Lore, 1889-

Conservator, 1890-

Yale Review, 1892-

McClure's Magazine, 1893-

Everybody's Magazine, 1899-

Poetry Magazine, 1912-

New Republic, 1914-

]

INDEX TO LEADING NINETEENTH-CENTURY PERIODICALS

The following list of periodicals represents a small fraction of those

which were established and throve for longer or shorter periods in the

United States between 1800 and the present time. The basis of selection

has been to include only those which published a generous amount of

literature which is still remembered or those of which leading men of

letters were editors.

It was intended at first to make the list identical with the

periodicals mentioned in the text, but this proved not to be practical.

On some of the earlier ones it was not possible to secure exact data

concerning length of life, editors, and contributors. Some others

mentioned in the text were not of importance enough to justify

inclusion. Still others, though not mentioned in the text, were too

important to be omitted. The list as it stands, therefore, represents

the judgment of the author and would not coincide with that of any

other compiler of a list of equal length. It will serve, however, as a

fairly representative list and will, perhaps, move some other student

of American literature to what is greatly needed--a relatively complete

and compact "Who's Who" of American periodicals.

As yet such material is very meager and unsatisfactory. The great

number of magazines and the bewildering consolidations, changes

of editorship, title, form, period of publication, and place of

publication have apparently discouraged anyone's attempting a

definitive piece of work. On this account and with this explanation the

following brief appendix has been prepared.

AMERICAN MAGAZINE, THE, 1875----. A New York monthly.

Founded in 1875. From 1884 to 1888 the _Brooklyn Magazine_, then

resumed its own name, continuing without important developments till it

entered on its present régime in 1905. This came with the absorption of

_Leslie's_ and the assumption of control by Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln

Steffens, and Ida Tarbell, all former staff writers for _McClure's_.

In this latter period it has been specially successful in recognizing

younger authors. It has printed much by Bynner, O. Henry, Lindsay,

Whitlock, and Poole; by Eaton and Hamilton on the drama; by F. P. Dunne

("Mr. Dooley"), George Ade, and Irvin Cobb; and, among foreign authors,

by Wells, Bennett, Kipling, and Locke. It is popular in policy and

content.

ATLANTIC MONTHLY, THE, 1857----. A Boston monthly.

Founded in 1857, Francis H. Underwood the prime mover, with the

intention of setting new standards for a literary magazine of American

authorship. Lowell was first editor; the first notable essay series

Holmes's "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table"; the first popular serial

story, Mrs. Stowe's "Dred." The field has been consistently divided

among fiction, essay, and poetry, and the book reviewing has always

been scrupulous. The editors have been Lowell, James T. Fields, W. D.

Howells, T. B. Aldrich, Horace Scudder, W. H. Page, Bliss Perry, and

the present editor and chief owner, Ellery Sedgwick. Early important

contributors were Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, Lowell, Thoreau,

Whittier, Hawthorne, Wendell Phillips. Later issues have included

Lafcadio Hearn, Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, Agnes Repplier, Gerald

Stanley Lee, S. M. Crothers, William Vaughn Moody, Richard Hovey, and

most of the contributors to the best traditions in American literature.

(See "The Atlantic Monthly and its Makers," by M. A. De Wolfe Howe.)

BALTIMORE SATURDAY VISITER, 1833----(?). A Baltimore weekly.

Started by Lambert A. Wilmer, who continued with it for only six

months. In October of this year Poe's "MS. Found in a Bottle" was

published as the winner of a prize competition. This was Poe's one

contribution and the _Visiter's_ sole apparent title to fame.

BROADWAY JOURNAL, 1845. A New York weekly.

Founded by C. F. Briggs ("Harry Franco") in January, 1845. So named

according to the first editorial from "the first street in the first

city of the New World.... We shall attempt to make it entirely

original, and instead of the effete vapors of English magazines ...

give such thoughts as may be generated among us." Poe and Briggs were

associate editors in the spring, until in July, 1845, it went under the

sole charge of Poe, who bought it from Briggs for $50. During this year

it was Poe's chief vehicle, printing or reprinting some fifteen of his

prose tales and two poems. Its business failure took place at the end

of the first year. (See "Life of Poe," by George E. Woodberry.)

BROOKLYN DAILY EAGLE, 1841. A Brooklyn daily.

Isaac Van Anden, first editor and publisher. A democratic newspaper

with independent judgment. From 1844 (?) to 1848 Walt Whitman was its

editor. From 1885, until his recent death, it was under charge of St.

Clair McKelway, a brilliant writer and speaker and a constructive

educator.

BURTON'S GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE (see _Gentleman's Magazine_).

CASKET, THE (_Graham's Magazine_), 1826-1840. A Philadelphia

monthly.

Called _Atkinson's Casket_, 1831-1840. Was combined with _Gentleman's

Magazine_ and became _Graham's Magazine_.

CENTURY MAGAZINE, THE, 1881----. A New York monthly.

A continuation of the older _Scribner's Monthly_ (1870-1881) on the

assumption of control by Roswell Smith. R. W. Gilder was editor from

the second number, till his death in 1907. Its policy was to publish

articles, singly and in series, related to broad aspects of American

life, exposition and poetry playing a larger part in the earlier

years than of late. In travel it published Lowell's "Impressions of

Spain" and van Dyke's "Sicily"; in biography later portions of Hay and

Nicolay's "Lincoln," Jefferson's autobiography, and a Napoleon series.

Riis, Bryce, Darwin, Tolstoy, and Burroughs have contributed from their

own fields. Notable fiction series have been contributed by Howells,

Mark Twain, Crawford, Weir Mitchell, Garland, London, and Mrs. Wharton;

and verse by Emerson, Whitman, Gilder, Moody, Markham, and Cawein. (See

also _Scribner's Monthly_, p. 499.)

CONGREGATIONALIST AND CHRISTIAN WORLD, THE, 1849----. A Boston

weekly.

Founded in 1816 as the _Boston Recorder_ by Nathaniel Willis, father

of the more famous Nathaniel Parker Willis, and conducted by him until

1844. From then till about 1890 it was the sectarian organ of the

Congregationalists, playing a rôle similar to that of the _Independent_

and the _Christian Union_. In the latter part of the nineteenth century

it was under the editorship of W. A. Dunning, who was succeeded by the

present editor, Horace Bridgman. It has had a consistent career as a

religious weekly, changing with the times, but not modifying itself for

the sake of a secular circulation so frankly as the other two have done.

CONSERVATOR, THE, 1890. A Philadelphia monthly.

Founded in 1890 by Horace Traubel, an independent exponent of the

world movement in ethics. In 1892 W. H. Ketler, Joseph Gilbert, W.

Thornton Innes, and James A. Brown added to the editorial staff and

enlarged to contain articles of timely interest, a book-review section,

and a "Budget" for the reports of the ethical societies. The chief

contributors: Stanton Coit, William Salter, Robert Ingersoll, and M.

M. Mangasarian. The magazine gradually dropped its study of ethical

questions and became an exponent of "the Whitman argument," treated

by Bucke, Harned, Kennedy, Platt, and Helena Born. In 1890 Traubel

added extensive dramatic criticism and enlarged the book-review

department. Since 1898 the magazine has been an expression of Traubel's

radical theories. It contains a long editorial "Collect," which is an

uncompromising criticism of the times, a long poem by Traubel, and

reviews of current books of socialistic tendencies. During the Great

War it was frankly pacific, before the entrance of the United States.

CRITIC, THE, 1881-1906. A New York bi-weekly (1881-1882),

weekly (1883-1898), and monthly.

Founded as a "fortnightly review of literature, the fine arts, music,

and the drama." The best known of its editors were the latest--J. L.

and J. B. Gilder. After the first four years art and music notes were

dropped and book reviews were made the leading feature, original essays

giving place to extracts from other magazines. In 1900 the design was

stated to be "an illustrated monthly review of literature, art, and

life." From 1905 politics and technical science were dropped. In 1906

it was absorbed by _Putnam's_. Best-known contributors: E. C. Stedman,

Edith M. Thomas, R. W. Gilder, John Burroughs, E. E. Hale, F. B.

Sanborn, J. C. Harris, Brander Matthews.

DEMOCRATIC REVIEW, THE UNITED STATES, 1837-1859 (?). A

Washington and New York quarterly.

A note in Vol. XXXVIII stated that with Vol. XXXIX it would be issued

as a newspaper. At the outset it was the most successful political

magazine in the country. It was characterized by Carlyle as "_The Dial_

with a beard." It was at first partisan, until, with payment for its

articles, it became broader. Early contributors and best known were

Orestes Augustus Brownson, Bancroft, Whittier, Bryant, and Hawthorne.

DIAL, THE, 1840-1844. A Boston quarterly.

Founded as a quarterly organ for the group of Transcendentalists

centering about Emerson. Editors: 1840-1842, Margaret Fuller;

1842-1844, Emerson. The issues of 128 pages contained philosophical

essays, discussions of German and oriental thought, comments on

contemporary art and literature, book reviews, and poetry. The

circulation never reached 300 copies, and at the end of the fourth year

it was discontinued, the final debts being paid by Emerson. Leading

contributors were the editors: Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Theodore

Parker, George Ripley, C. P. Cranch, J. F. Clarke, and Ellery Channing.

There was a reprint by the Rowfant Club, Cleveland, in 1901-1902,

with the addition of a historical and biographical introduction. (See

introduction to the reprint of _The Dial_, Vol. II, George Willis

Cooke, 1902.)

DIAL, THE, 1881----. A Chicago (1881-1918) and New York

fortnightly.

Founded and edited for a third of a century by Francis F. Browne as a

literary review, and able to refer to itself on its thirtieth birthday

as "the only journal in America given up to the criticism of current

literature" and "the only literary periodical in the country not owned

or controlled by a book publishing house or a newspaper." After one or

two changes of control, following the death of its founder, _The Dial_

was transferred to New York in July, 1918, extending its editorial

policy to include, besides the literary features, discussions of

internationalism and of industrial and educational reconstruction.

EVERYBODY'S MAGAZINE, 1899----. A New York monthly.

Founded by John Wanamaker and for the first four years a miscellany

best characterized by the purchasers in 1903. The Ridgway-Thayer

Company on taking control announced their purpose to do away with the

"mawkish, morbid, and unreal," to repress questionable advertising,

and in general to transform the magazine. Since then _Everybody's_ has

attempted in content to satisfy all sorts of intellectual tastes and at

the same time to have a hand in the social and economic investigation

of the period. The most celebrated series, which multiplied the

circulation, was Thomas W. Lawson's "Frenzied Finance." Literary

contributors in recent years have included Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, O.

Henry, Frank Norris, Booth Tarkington, Ernest Poole, Dorothy Canfield,

and in poetry Margaret Widdemer, Witter Bynner, and others.

EVERY SATURDAY, 1865-1874. A Boston weekly.

A Ticknor and Field publication; one of the numerous "eclectic"

mid-century periodicals made up of selected materials chiefly from

English magazines. It is of interest partly as a type and partly

because Thomas Bailey Aldrich was editor for the nine years of its

life. In 1874 it was merged with _Littell's Living Age_(see p. 493).

GALAXY, THE, 1866-1878. A New York monthly.

"An illustrated magazine of entertaining reading." The first volume

illustrated the practice of the day in featuring English authors with a

leading serial by Anthony Trollope. The American contributors include

Bayard Taylor, Howells, Stedman, and William Winter. Later Charles

Reade was accompanied by Henry James, John Burroughs, E. R. Sill, and

Paul Hamilton Hayne. With contributors of this substantial secondary

rank, later still supplemented by Sidney Lanier and Joaquin Miller, the

_Galaxy_ completed and died with its twelfth year.

GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE, Burton's (1837-1841). A Philadelphia

monthly.

Founded by William E. Burton, the actor. Poe was an early, important

contributor and in the second year the editor. Although he and Burton

separated in 1839, the proprietor saw to it that Poe was reëmployed

when in 1841 George R. Graham bought out its circulation of 3500 and

merged it with _Atkinson's Casket_ as _Graham's Magazine_.

GODEY'S LADY'S BOOK, 1830-1898. A Philadelphia monthly.

Founded by Louis A. Godey, July, 1830, and managed by him as a monthly

until 1877. In 1837 it absorbed the Boston _Lady's Magazine_ and took

over its editor, Sarah J. Hale. Its chief distinction and highest

circulation (150,000) came under its first manager. It printed much

early work of Longfellow, Holmes, Poe, Bayard Taylor, Mrs. Sigourney,

and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In its last years it was renamed _Godey's

Magazine_. In 1898 it was absorbed by the _Puritan_.

GRAHAM'S MAGAZINE, 1841-1859. A Philadelphia monthly.

Founded by George R. Graham by combining his _Atkinson's Casket_

with his purchase of Burton's _Gentleman's Magazine_. Within a year,

largely through Poe's editorial work, the circulation rose from 5000

to 30,000. By 1850 it had reached a circulation of 135,000. Among the

later editors were R. W. Griswold, Bayard Taylor, and Charles Godfrey

Leland, and among the contributors, Cooper, Longfellow, Poe, Hawthorne,

Lowell, N. P. Willis, E. P. Whipple, the Cary sisters, William Gilmore

Simms, Richard Penn Smith, and Thomas Dunn English. In January, 1859,

_Graham's_ became the _American Monthly_ (see "Philadelphia Magazines

and their Contributors," A. H. Smyth, 1892, and the _Critic_, Vol. XXV,

p. 44).

HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE, 1850----. A New York monthly.

Founded by Harper Brothers in order "to place within the reach of

the great mass of the American people the unbounded treasures of the

periodical literature of the present day"; thus it was an "eclectic"

magazine, and in the early years it supplemented this borrowed

magazine material with serials by the most popular English novelists.

Within four years it had a circulation of 125,000. During the 1860's

it became more American in content, and in the 1870's it included a

notable series on the transformed South. In the last thirty years it

has drawn on the best-known American authors for single articles and

serials: Aldrich, Howells, Lowell, Wister, Mrs. Deland, Mark Twain,

James, Harte, Mrs. Wharton, Tarkington, Allen; and it has shared in

the publication of recent significant poetry by Cawein, Le Gallienne,

Untermeyer, Bynner, and the Misses Thomas, Teasdale, Widdemer, and

Lowell. (See "The House of Harper," J. H. Harper, 1912, and "The Making

of a Great Magazine," Harper & Brothers, 1889.)

HOME JOURNAL, THE, 1847----. A New York monthly.

Jointly founded and conducted by George P. Morris and N. P. Willis as

a continuation of their _National Press_ (founded 1845). Both remained

with it till death--Willis, the survivor, till 1865. "It was and is,"

wrote H. A. Beers in his Life of N. P. Willis (1885), "the organ of

'japonicadom,' the journal of society, and gazette of fashionable

literature, addressing itself with assiduous gallantry to 'the ladies.'"

INDEPENDENT, THE, 1848----. A New York weekly.

A periodical "Conducted by Pastors of Congregational Churches"; Leonard

Bacon, the first editor; Reverend George B. Cheever and Reverend Henry

Ward Beecher, contributing editors. Its purpose was to be a progressive

religious journal, particularly for Congregationalists, who protested

against conservatism in theology and proslavery politics. Eventually

it became an open forum for the liberally minded of all sects, being

carefully nonpartisan in politics. From 1870 to 1890 it printed

good verse, notably poems by Joaquin Miller and Sidney Lanier. The

religious and political viewpoints broadened out from 1873. By 1898 an

evident attempt was made to popularize the magazine. Since 1914 it has

absorbed the _Chautauquan_, the _Countryside_, and _Harper's Weekly_.

KNICKERBOCKER MAGAZINE, THE, 1833-1865. A New York monthly.

The first editor was Charles Fenno Hoffman. From 1839 to 1841 Irving

wrote monthly articles for a salary of $2000. Bryant, Whittier,

Longfellow, Holmes, Halleck, and most of the secondary writers

contributed. The second editor, from 1841 to 1861, was Lewis Gaylord

Clark. In its later years the magazine declined, chiefly because it was

carrying the tradition of polite and aimless literature into Civil-War

times. During its period it stood in the North for the same interests

that its contemporary, the _Southern Literary Messenger_, did in the

South (see "The Knickerbocker Gallery," 1855, and _Harper's Magazine_,

Vol. XLVIII, p. 587).

LIBERATOR, THE, 1831-1865. A Boston weekly.

The most famous and effective abolition journal, founded and edited

throughout by William Lloyd Garrison. It was proscribed in the South

and denounced in the North. Wendell Phillips and Henry Ward Beecher

praised it, but Mrs. Stowe criticized and Horace Greeley misrepresented

it. The financial straits it passed through were augmented by the

rivalry of other abolition papers. After the Emancipation Proclamation

and Lincoln's second Inaugural, announcement of discontinuance was

made. The last issue appeared December 29, 1865.

LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE, 1868-1916. A Philadelphia monthly.

One of three magazines founded near 1870--the others _Scribner's

Monthly_ and the _Galaxy_--that made an active market for American

writers. _Lippincott's_, "a magazine of literature, science, and

education," made an unpretentious start and throughout its career

published little prose of distinction. Its poetry, however, was

excellent. Bayard Taylor and Paul Hamilton Hayne appeared in the

first and following numbers. Margaret Preston, Emma Lazarus, Thomas

B. Read, George H. Boker, Thomas Dunn English, and Christopher P.

Cranch contributed frequently. Whitman, rare in the magazines, wrote

in prose, and, most important of all, Lanier found here a channel for

much of his verse from 1875 on. In later years a feature of many issues

was a complete short novel. In 1916 _Lippincott's_ was absorbed by

_Scribner's Magazine_.

LITTELL'S LIVING AGE, 1844----. A Boston monthly.

This is the longest-lived of the eclectic, or "scissors and paste-pot,"

magazines. It has been made up of reprints from foreign periodicals,

sometimes quoting from English apparent sources articles which had been

borrowed there from original American publications. In 1874 it absorbed

_Every Saturday_ (see p. 491) and in 1898 the _Eclectic Magazine_. It

still survives.

MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE, 1893----. A New York monthly.

S. S. McClure publisher and editor. Fiction and poetry have been

the dominant features. Contributors (fiction): Kipling, Stevenson,

Arnold Bennett, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Booth Tarkington, Robert

Chambers, O. Henry, Jack London; (verse): Wordsworth, Browning, Walt

Whitman (reprints), Kipling, Witter Bynner, Edgar Lee Masters, Hermann

Hagedorn, Louis Untermeyer. It was the first magazine to sell at the

popular price of fifteen cents. The nonliterary articles on affairs

of the day were prepared on assignment by expert writers such as Ida

Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, and Lincoln Steffens, years sometimes

being spent on a single series. In 1905 these three assumed control of

the _American_, but the policy has been continued to the present.

MIRROR, THE NEW YORK, 1823-1846. A New York weekly.

Founded by George P. Morris and Samuel Woodworth (remembered

respectively for "Woodman, Spare that Tree" and "The Old Oaken

Bucket"). In 1831 the _Mirror_ absorbed the _Boston American Monthly_

together with its editor, Nathaniel Parker Willis. In the next year

Willis wrote for it the first of his travel series, "Pencillings by the

Way," continuing with weekly letters for four years. In 1839 Hawthorne

became a contributor. In 1844-1845 Poe was subeditor and critic, his

most famous contribution being "The Raven," January, 1845. In 1845

the weekly became a daily--the _Evening Mirror_--and in 1846 it was

discontinued.

NATION, THE, 1865----. A New York weekly.

Publishers: Joseph H. Richards, 1865; Evening Post Publishing Co.,

1871; E. L. Godkin Co., 1874; _Evening Post_, 1881; _New York Evening

Post_, 1902; Nation Press, Inc., New York, 1915. Editors have changed

frequently, the most famous being the first, E. L. Godkin, who was

in the chair from 1865 to 1881. Oswald Garrison Villard, present

editor. It has been devoted to discussions of politics, art, and

literature and to reviews of the leading books in these fields.

Representative contributors have been Francis Parkman, T. R. Lounsbury,

B. L. Gildersleeve, J. R. Lowell, Carl Schurz, James Bryce, William

James, Paul Shorey, and Stuart Sherman. (See "Fifty Years of American

Idealism," edited by Gustav Pollak. 1915. Also the "Semicentenary

Number," 1915.)

NEW ENGLAND COURANT, THE, 1721-1727. A Boston weekly.

Founded by James Franklin and carried on by him and a group of friends

known as the Hell-Fire Club. The _Courant_ represents a violent and

somewhat coarse reaction against the domination of the New England

clergy. It was written after the manner of the _Spectator_ with

frequent paraphrased and a few quoted passages. After the imprisonment

of James the paper was carried on by the youthful Benjamin Franklin,

who had already contributed the fourteen "Do-Good Papers." The

_Courant_ gave evidence of much wit and enterprise, but quite lacked

the urbanity of its English model.

NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE, THE, 1831-1835. A Boston monthly.

Founded by Joseph T. Buckingham, former editor of the

_Polyanthus_,1805-1807 and 1812-1814, the _Ordeal_,1809, the _New

England Galaxy_,1817-1828, and the _Boston Courier,_, a daily,

1814-1848. The _New England Magazine_, superior to any of these, was

the project of Edwin, a son, who gave it distinction in a single year

of editorship before his death, at the age of twenty-two. The father

continued in charge for eighteen months, relinquishing it for the final

year to Charles Fenno Hoffman and Park Benjamin. These latter took

the magazine to New York in January, 1836, renaming it the _American

Monthly Magazine_. The younger Buckingham showed enterprise in

enlisting well-known contributors and acuteness in securing copy from

Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Hawthorne before they were widely

known. It was in the _New England_ that Holmes originated "The Autocrat

of the Breakfast Table" in two numbers of 1832, reviving the theme in

his first _Atlantic_ series twenty-five years later; and here also

Hawthorne printed many stories now in "Twice-Told Tales" and "Mosses

from an Old Manse." (See "The First _New England Magazine_ and its

Editor," by George Willis Cooke, _New England Magazine_ (N. S.), March,

1897.)

NEW YORK EVENING POST, THE, 1801----. A New York daily.

A Federal paper at first. Alexander Hamilton and John Jay aided in its

establishment. William Coleman, first editor. Bryant began to write for

the _Post_ in 1826. He was editor from 1829 to 1878.

NEW YORK REVIEW AND ATHENÆUM MAGAZINE, THE, (?)-1827. A New

York monthly.

A type of the short-lived magazine which rose and then combined with

or absorbed others in a succession of changes. This was first the

_Review_, then in March, 1826, it was merged with another periodical

into the _New York Literary Gazette or American Athenæum_, and a little

later it combined with Parson's old paper, the _United States Literary

Gazette_, to form the _United Stales Review and Literary Gazette_. It

is mentioned because of Bryant's contributions and his editorship from

1826 until its discontinuation.

NEW YORK TRIBUNE, THE, 1841----. A New York daily.

Started by Horace Greeley as a reform newspaper in support of President

Harrison. In 1847 Greeley enlisted the support of several of the Brook

Farm group--George Ripley, Margaret Fuller, Charles A. Dana, and George

William Curtis--and secured as later contributors Carl Schurz, John

Hay, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Bayard Taylor, Whitelaw Reid,

E. C. Stedman, and others. The _Tribune_ made much of its literary

side, not only in book reviews and discussions of contemporary art

and letters but in the inclusion of much significant verse. The

_Tribune_ was an important ally in securing the election of Lincoln and

supporting his policies. It has continued to be one of the leading New

York dailies, but its great days were concluded with the resignation of

Greeley in 1872.

NEW REPUBLIC, THE, 1914----. A New York weekly.

A "journal of opinion" founded with the assistance of Mr. Willard

Straight by Herbert Croly and associates. As its subtitle indicates,

it is chiefly concerned with problems of national and international

import, but, in addition to the articles by editors and contributors

on affairs of the day, it includes papers on the art, music, and

literature of the present and the recent past, occasional light essays,

discriminating book reviews, and verse. Representative contributors

have been John Graham Brooks, John Dewey, William Hard, Elizabeth

Shipley Sargent, Louis Untermeyer, Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington

Robinson, and, from England, Norman Angell, H. M. Brailsford, and H. G.

Wells.

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, THE, 1815----. A Boston and New York

quarterly.

Successor to the _Boston Monthly Anthology_, 1803-1811, being founded

by an editor, William Tudor, and several contributors who had been

members of the Anthology Club. After three years as a general literary

bimonthly it became a quarterly review. Among early contributors,

besides well-known leaders in political thinking, were George Ticknor,

George Bancroft, Bryant, and Longfellow. Until the founding of the

_Atlantic_ it was the leading organ of conservative thought in New

England. For the decade from 1864 it was under the joint editorship

of James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton. Since 1878 it has

been in New York, changing in editorship and periods of publication.

It became settled as a monthly under George Harvey. The more purely

literary American contributors of the last few years have been Howells,

Mabie, Matthews, Woodberry, Miss Repplier, Miss Teasdale, Miss Lowell,

Hagedorn, Robinson, Mackaye, and Ficke. (See _North American_, Vol. C,

p. 315, and Vol. CCI.)

OUTLOOK, THE, 1870----. A New York weekly.

Founded in 1870 as the _Christian Union_, an undenominational paper,

by Henry Ward Beecher. In 1876 he shared his duties as editor with

Lyman Abbott, present editor. In 1884 Hamilton Wright Mabie was added

as associate editor. Title was changed to _The Outlook_ in 1893.

Mabie secured contributions from men like James Bryce and Edward

Dowden, translations from the works of Daudet and François Coppée.

Recent American literary contributors: Ernest Poole, Vachel Lindsay,

Cawein, Oppenheim. New political impetus came with contributions from

Theodore Roosevelt, beginning 1909. The paper has had more or less of

ecclesiastical character all along, but at present may be characterized

as seeking to mold public opinion and interpret current events. One

number of each month is enlarged to contain special departments; called

Illustrated Magazine Number from 1896 to 1905.

PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE, THE, 1729-1821. A Philadelphia weekly.

The new name and new periodical founded by Benjamin Franklin when he

purchased Samuel Keimer's _Universal Instructor_ in October, 1729. The

news element was slight and unreliable, but the literary, Addisonian

essays gave the paper character at once. These gave way later to essays

more distinctly peculiar to Franklin's own point of view and kind of

humor. The book advertisements supplemented this essay material in

contributing to the broader culture of the readers. After Franklin's

personal withdrawal the traditions of the _Gazette_ were continued. In

1765 Franklin sold out to his partner David Hall. With the death of his

grandson, also David Hall, the paper passed into the hands of Atkinson

and Alexander and was renamed the _Saturday Evening Post_ (p. 498).

POETRY, 1912----. A Chicago monthly.

A magazine of verse. Harriet Monroe, editor. Ralph Fletcher Seymour

Co., Chicago, publishers. Advisory committee: H. B. Fuller, Edith

Wyatt, and H. C. Chatfield Taylor. It was guaranteed for five years

by endowment fund and contained no advertisements at the beginning.

It has been a vehicle for poetry from all parts of the world by poets

with or without fame. Now it contains book-list awards, reviews, and

poetry announcements and advertisements. The original staff is almost

unchanged. It seems to be on a sound financial footing.

POOR RICHARD'S ALMANAC, 1733-1748.

Founded by Benjamin Franklin. Its chief feature was its inclusion in

the reading matter of the proverbial sayings, the best of which were

combined in "The Way to Wealth." It was characterized by a French

critic of the day as "the first popular almanac which spoke the

language of reason." It was conducted by Franklin until 1748.

PORT FOLIO, THE, 1806-1827. A Philadelphia weekly and monthly.

Founded by Joseph Dennie as a weekly newspaper. From 1806 to 1809,

though continuing as a weekly, it assumed the character of a literary

magazine, and in the latter year became a monthly. Its most distinctive

period was in the first eleven years before the death of Dennie. While

he was editor the _Port Folio_ was a vehicle of "polite letters." It

was imitative in style and reminiscent in point of view, but it was

wholesome in its honesty about American matters and manners and exerted

a strong and healthy influence. The best-known contributors were the

editor, "Oliver Oldschool," John Quincy Adams, and Charles Brockden

Brown.

PUTNAM'S, 1853-1858, 1868-1870, 1906-1910. A New York monthly.