The Radicals troduction. He has all of us, with our conventional ideas, for an audience, and does not need a special one. But I believe Mr. Ficke only feels really free when he has half a dozen or more chains around him. But there are many things in this collection that are not beautiful, even if one takes the word in its most modern sense. Skipwith Cannéll's preface of several pages is of some interest, but the poetry that one expects after so long a preface is not there. I may as well here express the startling opinion to which many poets will object, that repeating the Nietzsche which one has picked up from Bernard Shaw and newspaper gossip is not poetry. There was a real Nietzsche, and he has written much better poetry, though in prose form, than any of his "interpreters." The influence of Gauguin I could not find-unless it is in the spacing. Of Rodker's contributions, Twilight and Lunatic seem the best, but they lack depth. It is book-impressionism. When one compares The Dutch Dolls with that somewhat disagreeable but sincere bit of work, W. C. Williams' Ogre, for instance, one can see how superficial it is. Under the thin or thick veil of obscurity some of these poets are tempted toward a more or less delicate charlatanism, poor workmanship, vulgar smartness, etc.; then there are also the newest clichés, which save the writer real thinking; and one can only be grateful that poets do not more often and more fully take advantage of these opportunities. Some of the writers in this volume are over tempted. Robert Alden Sanborn is one of these. At the risk of being unfair to him I will take him as an example because I believe he is talented enough to be worth stirring up. The lotus "animate, winged for escape," though not new, is passable; "To the cupped hand of night" is lovely; but "Scooping green and pink stars out of the unknown abysses of space" is of the new clichés-it is in the air if you just reach out your finger for it, as much as any of the older ones. "The stem hinting of some old connection, forgotten scandal in the taciturn mud" is a dull, forced, and not clearly realized piece of writing-insincere. "Close as leaves fallen on wet grass" describes the situation there badly; it is taken almost bodily from Pound, and is brought in only for its "newness." The quality and workmanship in Mr. Bodenheim's poems in this collection are much better than in his earlier ones; yet even here the poet can not always resist using the most puzzling and shocking pigment instead of the simplest and most suitable, as—“A filled chest unable to open itself," in a poem otherwise very good. In this manner there is the temptation to make a commonplace main idea do, as all of Mina Loy's poems, interesting as they are as an experiment, will prove to anyone who penetrates her color-jargon. I think "Evening in which they hang up the crude little Japanese-lanterns of their thoughts on the ever-swaying strings of their minds," is not any better than the same thought expressed more directly. The art-value of ropedancing lies in the dance-rhythm only; in nothing else. The Radicals Taken as a whole, I think the volume interesting and stimulating. When one tries to realize clearly all the drudgery, toil and self-sacrifice involved in such pioneer editing, one must extend to Mr. Kreymborg hearty good wishes for success in his venture. Max Michelson THE BROOKE LETTERS Henry James's last gracious service was to introduce Rupert Brooke-that being, “young, happy, radiant, extraordinarily endowed and irresistibly attaching," whose life in England and whose death among the Greek Islands have lately received such wide celebration. Mr. James first met Brooke in that delectable tract, the Cambridge "backs," and wondered what so splendid a setting could do with "the added grace of such a person;" wondered, too, why the youth, pointed out as a poet, should need to be a poet: why should he specialize-why be anything but his own attractive self? Well, Brooke in his Letters from America is not a poet. He is a kind, humorous, intelligent young gentleman, somewhat puzzled in an alien field, trying to mix as far as may be, and hoping not to be unduly fastidious and difficult. His first encounter is of course with New York. He deals cautiously and forbearingly with its superficial aspects-its streets by day and by night. He lets off a set piece of his own on the town's electric signs, with such aids, mythological and philosophical, as are at the finger tips of a young uni versity man, and it is only from farthest Ontario that he gives his real impression in one word-New York is "hellish." He does better with Boston than with New York, and better with Quebec than with Boston. By the same token, he does better with the Canadian Rockies than with Eastern Canada, and better with Samoa than with the Canadian Rockies. He seems, in one phase, a child of nature, impatient with the repellent rawnesses of a new "civilization," and ever welcoming the simpler types and wider spaces that lie beyond. He treats the older Canada with an incisive, cursory disdain; one feels that, in noting its crudities and corruptions, he is but registering another deferred opinion on things upon our own side of the line. Niagara, the Saguenay, the mountains around Calgary, the Indians, the sea-enwrapped Samoans-such are the things that stir his nature and bring the poetical phrases to his pen. Better these than the bumptious sophistications of our new cities; but better still than these the ripe, settled time-worn ways of his own native village. Brooke, like James himself, misses in new lands the "moral interest." Ours is a new world indeed; virginal; "a godless place." There are "no ghosts of lovers in Canadian lanes." It is possible, at a pinch, to "do without gods." But-"one misses the dead." Caught between a citizen of Edmonton and one of Calgary, each boasting the growth of his own town in wealth and population, Brooke sends his thoughts back to Grantchester, which at Doomsday Book numbered four hundred The Brooke Letters souls, but has now declined to three hundred and fifty. "They seemed perplexed and angry." On the whole, a book not greatly important in itself; but welcome indeed as showing certain facets of a rich, vivid, attractive nature, and as helping to furnish forth a youth who, otherwise, would be none too heavily documented for the prized and permanent place he will hold in English letters. H. B. F. CORRESPONDENCE Dear Editor: Looking over the new number of POETRY this morning-when I ought to be at work-I notice that you again suggest, as several times before, that college faculties are not interested in the present-day poetic movements, and I feel moved to enter a quiet protest. I will leave Yale and Mount Holyoke and others to speak for themselves, but here at Wellesley, founded by an enthusiastic lover of poetry, the late Henry F. Durant, we have, since those early days when we listened to the voices of Longfellow and Matthew Arnold, reading their poems on our chapel platform, down to this very year, in which seven poets-Mr. Masefield, Mrs. Marks, Miss Lowell, Mr. Dole, Miss Converse, Mrs. Evans and Mr. Lindsay-have read to us, held current poetry in honor. I have, too, a senior one-hour-a-week course in twentieth century poetry, giving the first semester to English poets and the second to American. Taking our English semester, for example, we have discussed in the classroom |