Shakespeare torture over doing always the wrong thing while seeing the right, self-disgust that his lady's other lovers can outplay him, that any fool can seize the moment for action better than he. Perhaps nowhere else, in English personal poetry, does one feel so sure of the poet's absolute uncompromising sincerity. In Shakespeare's sonnets a wide range of human experience is transmuted into the subtlest music ever wrough+ out of English words; and so, for one who knows and loves them, they reach the heart of any mood, like a dear friend's voice. Seek them as a relief from petty cares and they soothe like running waters; go to them in grief and they are elegies, in joy and they chime like bells, in triumph and they sing paeans. Remorse, despair, pity, love, worshipthe most diverse emotions-all find their answer here. It is as though the poem had been sung for the special mood we bring to it, so intimately, so healingly, does it touch each wound and fill the chambers of the soul with beauty. The sonnets record a period of passionate experience in a life whose serenity is elsewhere its strongest note. They are the forty days of struggle in the wilderness, and they bring, not bitterness or violence, but surer vision and deeper sympathy. They lead from the comedies to the tragedies, from Much Ado About Nothing to Macbeth and King Lear. It is my feeling that from the time of the sonnets to his death-about fifteen years-the poet steeled himself against devastating emotional excitement and took refuge in his imagination. One thing seemed about as important as an other in the actual world; he felt something of that illumined apathy which Browning ascribes to the resurrected Lazarus. The people around him became part of the dream, gaining color and significance but losing substantiality. Gradually his serenity regained its poise: we have the proof of this in The Tempest, and we should have had more in that unwritten greatest play of all had he lived to grow old in Stratford. One of Shakespeare's love lyrics-perhaps the most magical-has long seemed to me expressive of a larger meaning. Let us listen to its haunting music: Take-oh, take those lips away That so sweetly were forsworn; Bring again— Seals of love, but sealed in vain, I do not know what lady first heard that madrigal. To inspire it was worth a life of care, and we may well hope that this high service to the world may have shortened the purgatorial pains she had to suffer for her perfidy. But perhaps we should think of her as a symbol of something less tangible, a symbol of life itself. Surely it was thus that Shakespeare knew and loved his world. Tantalizing mistress, what vow could bind her to his soul forever? Elusive and unconquerable, her trustful eyes could turn from him, her smile could pass to another before it had time to fade, her oaths were broken even in the uttering. Royal and bountiful she is, Shakespeare beautiful and strong; but unremembering and insecure. For a time her treasures crown him and all her raptures fall about his soul. But even in the moment of ecstasy he knows the vanity of their sensuous joys. Then above all he feels the infinite summons. The world and its accepted values fade off into nothingness, time loses its brief space in the eternal years, knowledge is drawn up like a curtain before the unfathomable mystery, and all our human pride becomes the shadow of a dream. Before that inescapable vision that are life and song and fame? Bubbles to be blown for a toy, to rise and gleam and vanish and be thought of no more. And so, deeper than his love of life was his indifference to it, wider than his knowledge of the world was his recklessness of its applause. Flowers or ashes-he cared not; kisses or broken vows he could live and love for either. Thus in his personality there is something selfless and inscrutable which from age to age has fascinated the world. We feel him vast, impartial, beneficent, like light and air. We return to the old simile and liken him to the ocean for universality and strength and poise. And we feel in his presence, as before these natural forces, that he tells not all, he gives not all. We take from him Hamlet, Lear, The Tempest unsatisfied, wondering what he could have done if he had ever put forth his utmost power. We diagram his greatness, we explain it in terms of earth and in terms of heaven. We theorize and define and dream, but the heart of his mystery still eludes us. We are baffled by his impenetrability, and we cast him from our hearts into the outer darkness of in tellectual admiration, and clasp once more the familiar idols -those lesser heroes whose limitations make them kin to us. And he knows that we are faithless, that we take him for what he is not, that our hearts are cold to him. He had foreseen it all-that fame is but a breath, that immortality is but light across a grave. He was not deceived, and his love can never change with the altering of ours. For the centre of his soul, as of all great souls, is love. Still out of the deeps of time his voice seems calling to the approaching It is over three years since I set out to write Status Rerum (number one), as a brief summary of the state of affairs in contemporary poetry. It appeared in POETRY as a summary of affairs in England, for my remarks about American verse were at that time deemed by our editor either impolite or imprudent. My opinion of the work of nearly all the older living American poets, save Bliss Carman, has no whit changed; to them and to their generation of editors we owe nothing which would look polite in print. Perhaps I may Status Rerum-The Second now be permitted to say this, because it may be a sort of surety for my candor, seeing that I am about to present a more pleasing schedule. During three years of varying irritation and consolation I have seen POETRY print a certain amount of rubbish and a very considerable amount of the best work now done in English. I do not think that our editors have missed much that was really worth printing. I dare say there is not enough really good poetry actually written per month to fill completely all the space in this magazine. It has published the best current work of Mr. Yeats and of Ford Madox Hueffer, the only two older poets whose writing has any lively significance. It has published Padraic Colum, Allen Upward, "H. D.," T. S. Eliot, Aldington at his best, Orrick Johns, Frost, Carlos Williams, Bodenheim, Sandburg, myself, Rodker, etc. The St. Louis Mirror scored in getting the Spoon River Anthology-that is the one big hole in our record, and POETRY was not slow to recognize the merit of that work. The best English work that we have missed has been a few short poems by Harold Monro and a few by Mrs. Anna Wickham. Imagism, before it went off into froth, and before stray editors used to write to me to complain that their mail was full of imitations of "imagism, vorticism, vers libre, etc., with no body to it"-the early imagism-had its first breath of air in these pages. At present its chief defects are sloppiness, lack of cohesion, lack of organic centre in individual |