Meredith, Hardy and Bridges, Kipling, Newbolt and Noyes, Yeats, A. E. and Fiona McLeod, Masefield and Gibson, while the students made studies, embodied in typed papers that went the rounds of the class, of the younger men-each choosing her own poet-represented in the Georgian anthologies. Moreover, we take POETRY. II Katharine Lee Bates Editor of POETRY: A. C. H.'s criticisms in your May number are amusing but childish. They ignore the fact (or do they juggle with the truth?) that the "I" used by the school of poets criticised is a vicarious "I"-a pronoun representing a type and not a person. Alice Groff III To Sandburg: Maybe I am an I-am-it. But you and your You-are-it song Have cracked my ear so wide and deep That the blood of the world flows in Sing, Sing till the last dam falls, And old blood, new blood, owner and all Rush along in I-love. Alfred Kreymborg PRIZE ANNOUNCEMENT Never has POETRY undertaken a task so difficult as this awarding of a prize in its one-act play contest. In the first place, we have to admit that none of the submitted plays unites under a single title our own conditions of poetic beauty, actability, and a subject either American or of modern significance through "life unlocalized." Among the six plays, sifted out of nearly an hundred, which seem to the judges most worthy of consideration, the choice must involve a compromise in one direction or another. Only one of the six, The Lynching, is a straight treatment of a modern American theme. Another, The Daughter of the Sun, is a play of prehistoric legendary life and myth in Arizona or New Mexico. A third, The Garden, is a study of temperament, a symbolic presentation of life as it appears to the American young girl. The other three plays are all exotic. One, The Shadow, is placed "somewhere in the East," and the motive is frankly Buddhistic, though the judges think they find in it an allegoric treatment of the present international problem—man's hesitation between the pacifist and the militarist ideals. In the other two, though the scenes are laid in San Francisco and Pennsylvania, the characters are chiefly Chinese; and it is these two, strangely enough, which, because of their poetic or dramatic quality, have seemed to the judges the chief claimants for the prize. In their final decision the judges find themselves forced to choose between a pretty and dramatically competent play on a tenderly human subject, and a strange and fantastic work of original genius, which, whatever its dramatic value, and however diverting or repelling its story, has extraordinary poetic beauty, and presents symbolically a profound truth of our mysterious earthly existence. As to its actability, opinions differ. Two or three experienced producers in the art theatre movement think that a stage production would clarify and intensify its subtle poetic significance and beauty; but most of the judges doubt if it would "get across" to more than a fraction of the audience. They feel, however, that it is an outreaching experiment; that, whether it is wholly achieved or not, the fire and light in it may blaze new trails; that in this formative moment of our poetic drama, when the future looks large before us and nobody can tell what it will bring forth, the original creative impulse should be encouraged. POETRY has stood from the beginning for the original creative impulse, for the outreaching experiment. Its course is not safe and sane, perhaps, but it must continue in this spirit-it must place its stake on human genius, and follow with a certain loyalty the wayward torch of beauty, even though ignorant where it will lead. It is in this spirit that the judges award the prize of one hundred dollars, offered by an anonymous donor for a oneact poetic play, to MR. WALLACE STEVENS for Three Travellers Watch a Sunrise. The following plays receive honorable mention: The Sweetmeat Game, by Ruth Comfort Mitchell. The Daughter of the Sun, by Marian Keep Patton. The Garden, by Florence Kiper Frank. The Shadow, by Perry B. Corneau. The Lynching, by Miriam Allen de Ford. The prize-winning play will be printed in either the July or the August number of POETRY. One of the judges dissents from the above award. NOTES Mr. Vachel Lindsay, of Springfield, Illinois, is well known to readers of POETRY, which last autumn awarded to him the Helen Haire Levinson prize for The Chinese Nightingale. Mr. Lindsay's two most recent volumes are prose-The Art of the Moving Picture and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (Macmillan Co.). Mary Eleanor Roberts (Mrs. John B.), of Philadelphia, is the author of Cloth of Frieze (Lippincott, 1911). None of the other contributors has published a volume as yet. Miss Clara Shanafelt, of Canton, Ohio, was represented in the imagist number of the London Egoist, as well as other numbers, and she has appeared in other progressive magazines. Mr. H. Thompson Rich, of Rutherford, New Jersey, was recently graduated from Dartmouth and has published verse in one or two magazines. Miss Rosalind Mason is a young Chicago poet, a graduate of Bryn Mawr. Mr. Kleofas Jurgelionis is the editor of a Lithuanian paper printed in Chicago. Last year he published a translation of Macbeth into Lithuanian verse. Our readers will welcome two posthumous poems by the late Madison Cawein. ORIGINAL VERSE: In the Town: a Book of London Verses, by Douglas Goldring. Selwyn and Blount, London. On the Road: a Book of Travel Songs, by Douglas Goldring. Selwyn & Blount. Poems and Plays, by Percy Mackaye. 2 vols. Macmillan Co. The Fledging Bard and the Poetry Society, by George Reginald The Road to Everywhere, by Glenn Ward Dresbach. Press. Gorham Goblins and Pagodas, by John Gould Fletcher. Houghton Mifflin Co. A Song of the Guns, by Gilbert Frankau. Houghton Mifflin Co. Roads, by Grace Fallow Norton. Houghton Mifflin Co. The Victory, by Charles Keeler. Laurence J. Gomme. Seven Sonnets and Ode to the Merry Moment, by Hiram Powers Dilworth. Privately printed. Wintergreen, by Marvin Manam Sherrick. Badger. Selected Poems, by Aaron Schaffer. Poet-lore Co. Lyrics of War and Peace, by Wm. Dudley Foulke. Bobbs-Merrill Co. At the Edge of the World, by Caroline Stern. Gorham Press. Poems, by Najah E. Woodward. Poet-lore Co. Some Imagist Poets, 1916. Houghton Mifflin Co. PLAYS: Madonna Dianora, by Hugo Von Hoffmannsthal. Translated from the German by Harriet Betty Boas. Richard C. Badger. The Pageant of Yankton, by Joseph Mills Hanson. Garden Terrace Theatre, Yankton, S. Dakota. PROSE: Reveries over Childhood and Youth, by William Butler Yeats. Macmillan Co. Makar's Dream and Other Stories, by Vladimir Korolenko. Translated from the Russian, with an introduction, by Marian Fell. Duffield & Co. |