singers. Standing on that theory I offer this trilogy. Upon that theory I have tried to produce something that will interest the more sophisicated colored people as art first of all. I have left out dialect in the spelling as an irrelevant matter; and I have tried to leave out stupidity in the plot as no longer essential in attempting work tropical and strictly Afro-American. V. L.

REVIEWS

MR. MASTERS' NEW BOOK

Songs and Satires, by Edgar Lee Masters. Macmillan Co. This poet has been likened to Chaucer, and it may be that in nothing does the resemblance apply more than in his exuberance. Chaucer was no pruner and whittler; if the cost of parchment and copyists did not cut down his product in the fourteenth century, the multiplicity of books would not frighten him to-day. He would pour out his soul as freely and carelessly now as then, because of the overflowing of life from deep wells within him. And his public would have to take or leave what he might choose to give themthey could not dictate.

So Mr. Masters, now that he has found his public, refuses to coddle it. If Spoon River was his speech to the jury in the great court-room of life, this new book is informal talking and story-swapping after the court has adjourned. The excited galleries would like to have the speech go on, but there is a time for all things: another masterpiece tomorrow

Mr. Masters' New Book

maybe meantime let's talk about Helen of Troy, or Saint Peter, or the way God makes atoms and worlds, or Jim's rather plodding love affair, or my best beloved uncle, or any old queerness of this antic-loving planet. And talk he does -"very near singing," sometimes; and more entertainingly and with more variety than any other poet in seven counties -I mean countries.

Thus the new book is all kinds for all men-good, bad or indifferent, just as it happens. But if Helen of Troy is almost the worst poem which that long-suffering lady has ever had to endure, So we Grew together, and Silence, and Simon Surnamed Peter, and The Cocked Hat and William Marion Reedy, are fascinating, intriguing poems of beauty and passion; yes, and also, quite surprisingly, those three on legendary subjects-the two Lancelot ballads, which throw Tennyson's expurgated version into the discard by giving us the real Malory; and the finely intuitive Saint Francis and Lady Clare, which strips bare the impassioned soul of a nun, revealing her quaintly mediaeval, ecstatic religiosity.

Here, in short, is a big, all-round, profoundly imaginative poet. Not one of fine shades and nice selections, an exact student of his own art; but a real man and a generous lover of life, who is kindled to a singing flame by the mysterious harmonies and discords of the world. He lights up for us not only wide open spaces, but all sorts of odd tricks and dark corners; sometimes with a white fire of truth, and again, with smoky, earth-smelling, loud-crackling laughter.

And he speaks in our idiom. He is modern in our time just as Dante was in his, or Molière in his; like them at heart a haughty idealist, he also is bent upon pulling down the hollow shells of outworn systems which have thickened and darkened around the souls of men, and showing us how to build the new more democratic city toward which our steps are stumbling.

The absurdity and divinity of that morsel of dust and fire which we call a human being-what modern poet, what modern writer, expresses this with such uncanny intimacy as Mr. Masters? Was satire ever more searching than in A Cocked Hat-or, in a certain sense, more loving, as the best satire must be? Mr. Bryan's portrait-the majestic failure of his career-is painted for all time; and incidentally the facile ideals and weaknesses of the "typical American" are held up for his own sober second thought. And the same theme-the divinity and absurdity of man-is treated in a mood of serious sympathy in So We Grew Together and All Life in a Life, and in a mood of exaltation in The Cry, The Conversation and The Star.

There are those, strangely enough, who find in Spoon River a "shriveling of life," failing to see the fierce, whitehot idealism which vitalizes its bitter knowledge. Perhaps they may find it in this new volume. At any rate we may set down here for their benefit the book's concluding lines, from one of its most loftily beautiful poems, The Star. The passage is the prayer of "mad Frederick":

Give me to understand, O Star,

Your inner self, your eternal spirit,

Mr. Masters' New Book

That I may have you and not images of you,

So that I may know what has driven me through the world,
And may cure my soul.

For I know you are Eternal Love,

And I can never escape you.

And if I cannot escape you,
Then I must serve you.

And if I must serve you,

It must be to good and not ill.

You have brought me from the forest of pools

And the images of stars,

Here to the Hill's top.

Where now do I go?

And what shall I do?

H. M.

THE RADICALS

Others: an Anthology of the New Verse, edited by Alfred Kreymborg. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

One cannot review this collection without connecting it with the magazine Others from which it is taken, so I may as well say that for its editor I have nothing but praise, and I believe that its most radical experiments-the works of Mina Loy, Rodker, Sanborn, etc.,-should be published. I assume that even Miss Monroe, whose editorial ideal evidently is for poems of more artistic permanence than many in this volume are, will agree with me that every lover of art, no matter what his own tastes are, should encourage the more experimental work too. Besides we have here many things for which we can only be grateful.

Pound's Shop-girl is lovely; the beginning is as good as some of the Chinese masterpieces he has recreated for us. In Another Man's Wife he has caught a delicate charm in the

bloom; it is an expression of a rare and pure artistic refinement. Arensberg's June and The Swan stand up well beside these. Graceful as the tilting of a bird is the greater part of Peter Quince, in spite of some slight technical defects in the construction. Some of Miss Crapsey's Cinquains are lovely. Kreymborg's Convention and some of his Variations, are with us to stay, no matter what form poetry may take in the future. Eliot's Portrait of a Woman, though reminiscent of Henry James, is skilfully done, and haunts the reader. I like it better than his Love-song of J. Alfred Prufrock, as here the writer is less interested in futuristic effects, and is trying to express the drama to the best of his ability. Francis Gregg's Quest is somewhat commonplace, and Iris is a lifeless imitation of H. D., but Perché is lovely, and, like H. D.'s poem about the rose in In the Garden, which appeared in POETRY, is a step into a new style. Les Ombres de la Mer has this quality in a lesser degree. Horace Holley's You possesses it too.

Mary Aldis' Three Sisters is interesting as a study of temperaments, and it has a charm of wistfulness hard to define. R. C. Brown, too, is interesting. W. C. Williams is not represented by as good work as he has had in POETRY, but his workmanship is almost always careful, and the spirit of his poems is always sincere. This remark applies to Carl Sandburg as well. I like also Helen Hoyt's unique Coignes and Homage; this latter poem has a quality which is hard to describe. Perhaps the popular term "dear" comes nearest. Mr. Ficke's poem would have been better without the in