Artist versus Amateur

artist, and with the universe of which these expressions are but reflections of unseen and unheard forces. An artist combines the power and responsibilities of the aristocrat with the feelings of an anarchist, he is the guardian of privilege and the destroyer of authority, the leveler of barriers and the creator of the superman, the leader and servant of humanity and... the Arch Enemy of the Amateur! The Artist is like all humanity, but the Amateur is not like the Artist. The Amateur must hang on for dear life to his precious soul and resist to the last gasp the incursions of any outside force in which he can trace the semblance of his own nature; for if anything gets in something may get out, and he won't be able to sort himself out afterwards. Hence the Amateur must be an Individualist; otherwise he is doomed to extinction.

ROBERT FROST'S QUALITY

It is not easy to define the exact quality of Robert Frost's poems, but a certain characteristic of The Home Stretch in the July Century is characteristic of them all: a sense, that is, of the significance of the apparently insignificant moments of life; he makes us feel these moments to be as important as they really are. It is very much like that light of permanence in which the "little Dutch masters" saw and painted their otherwise commonplace interiors. It is what Mr. Frost makes of his New England scenes and characters that counts. His imitators of which there begin to be some will never get more than a husk of externality; they might as well imitate Will Carleton's Farm Ballads.

This poet never takes the bloom off the thing he gives us. His precision is in giving us chemicals in a state of solution, of inter-action, before they have crystallized or formed a new substance. (This, by the way, is like Tchekoff.) He does not overstate, he does not "characterize." His specimens are

not pinned to the paper. It is hardly a delight in poetry, for the sake of poetry, that we get from him, but a sense of life. His is essentially the feeling of drama-in volume, that is, not on the surface. What we call "dramatic" today is often only a superficial nervous twitching. When Robert Frost gives us a man we get, as it were, the shadow of his bulk first; his spiritual features are only gradually revealed, as a rock might emerge from shadow; but the man is never cut off or away from his surroundings. A. C. H.

WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?

Rupert Brooke, whose collected Poems (John Lane) is so slight and yet so fine a monument to his short young life, has been honored signally by Yale university. The Henry Howland memorial prize of $1,500, every second year awarded to "the citizen of any country for marked distinction in literature, fine arts, or the science of government," has been awarded to Rupert Brooke. Exchange

It used to be a saying that the only good Indian was a dead Indian. Apparently that is the way it is with poets. Yet one can not help asking the ironical, fruitless question, "What good will this cash prize do Rupert Brooke? and how will it be conveyed to him?"

What Will He Do With It?

NOTES

Sir Rabindranath Tagore, whose English versions of his Bengali poems POETRY had the honor of being the first to present a year before the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to him, is now on his way to this country to give a few lectures under the management of the Pond Lyceum Bureau. The poet's own translations of his lyric and dramatic poems (Gitanjali, The Gardener, Chitra, etc.) are published by the Macmillan Co.

Mr. Ezra Pound will soon issue a new book of verse, Lustra, besides two works in prose-Noble Plays of Japan and This Generation.

Mr. Harold Monro, who appears in POETRY for the first time, was the editor of Poetry and Drama, the interesting English quarterly now suspended because of the war, and the founder of the Poetry Bookshop, London, which has published many of the younger English poets, as well as their anthology, Georgian Verse. Mr. Monro is the author of Judas, Before Dawn, Children of Love, and Trees, the last two being published by the Poetry Bookshop.

Mr. John Drinkwater, of Birmingham, England, another of the Georgians, is the author of Swords and Ploughshares, and Olton Pools will soon be published (Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., London). Mr. Witter Bynner's latest books are The New World and a free English version of Iphegenia in Tauris (Kennerley). Mr. William Griffith, of New York, will soon publish a book of poems. Also Mr. T. R. Eliot, an American poet resident abroad whom POETRY introduced over a year ago. Mr. Louis Untermeyer, the well known New York poet and critic, is the author of Challenge (Century Co.), and of the book of parodies reviewed in this number. Mr. Adolf Wolff, of New York, was introduced by Others with a group of free-verse poems called Prison Weeds. Mr. John S. Miller, Jr., is a young Chicagoan.

Mr. Ezra Pound writes of his Homage to Q. S. F. Christianus, "I am quite well aware that certain lines have no particular relation to the words or meaning of the original."

Miss Margarete Münsterberg informs us that the poem, The Dead Child, by the late Madison Cawein, printed in POETRY last June, was not original but a translation from the German of Konrad Ferdinand Meyer, the Swiss poet. No one is to blame as the poem was found and sent to us after the poet's death. Another version of the poem may be found in Miss Münsterberg's Harvest of German Verse.

BOOKS RECEIVED

ORIGINAL VERSE:

Songs of Wind and Wave, by Arthur L. Salmon. Wm. Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh.

Friendship Land and Other Poems, by Ada Kyle Lynch and Eleanore L. Hatch. W. A. Stambach, Chicago.

The Locust Flower and The Celibate, by Pauline Brooks Quinton. Sherman, French & Co.

The House on the Hill and Other Poems, by Frederick A. Wright. Sherman, French & Co.

Ballads and Lyrics, by Eldredge Denison. Sherman, French & Co. The Christmas Trail and Other Poems, by Shirley Harvey. Privately Printed, Concord, N. H.

The Convocation Ode, by Howard Mumford Jones. Privately Printed, Chicago.

Verse, by Elizabeth Gerberding. Walter N. Brunt Press, San Francisco.

Stories in Blank Verse, by Roby Datta. Das Gupta & Co., Calcutta. Poems, Pictures and Songs, by Roby Datta. Das Gupta & Co.

PLAYS:

Faust, a Play in Four Acts: anonymous. George C. Jackson Co., Akron, O.

PROSE:

The Book of the Dance, by Arnold Genthe. Mitchell Kennerley.

Mr. Reedy, who printed "The Spoon River Anthology," has made a new discovery. He writes in The Mirror: "But for the book

Sea and

Bay

A Narrative of New England

by

CHARLES WHARTON STORK (The John Lane Co.)

I doubt if I should have come through the period of the 'Bermuda high.' Reading this poem I could see the sea-the dark, silvercapped sea along the Maine coast, and hear its music. He can tell a story in round, flexible, blank verse without tiring his reader, and when he breaks his narrative with a lyric he achieves the true lyric quality-passages of splendor-the end. . . is a sense of rest and peace and of a great beauty."

Other critics, east and west, have made the same discovery.

Mr. W. G. Braithwaite in a two-column review in the Boston Transcript says: "A captivating link of episodes and situations which carry one along with deep interest.-Songs of a fine lyrical quality."

Review of Reviews: called a novel in verse.

"This admirable work, which might be

San Francisco Call: "A very courageous and a very fine thing."

New York Sun: "A remarkable power of appreciation of nature and human hopes and their interweaving-has variety with consistency and a sustained power of self-expression.”

Philadelphia Ledger: "Challenges the New England writers more than successfully on their own ground."