plished too few of my plans, for I am not ambitious; but when I think of all the books I've read, and of all the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents and of the hopes I have had-all life, weighed in the scales of my own life, seems to me to be a preparation for something that never happens. And so the reveries end in the gray mood. One might read them and not be aware that they were about a great creative artist. Indeed, if the names had been suppressed one would say that a cultivated man, who had met many cultivated people, and who had formed some challenging judgments, was the subject of the memoir. "I saw God with his face pressed against the window," says William Blake; "that was when I was about six years of age." Mr. Yeats tells us nothing of his majestic visitants-though surely an archangel must have looked through his windows! How he rose to the poet within him, and how he made himself a national poet-these are what we look to the memoir to reveal, but the author has not chosen to let us feel the throb of such great experiences. Mr. Yeats had a fair place for his early upbringing— a beautiful county in the west of Ireland. His grandfather was a stormy old man who had been the captain and owner of a merchant ship. He was fortunate in his father, John B. Yeats, the painter, who has one of the most disinterested minds of his day. For him freedom in life and creation in art are all in all. A comrade to his son, he taught him to dislike all that was abstract and merely reflective in art. The poet joined one of the patriotic literary societies in Ireland. Once, reading aloud some poem to their company, he discovered that although it was written in vague abstract words such as one finds in a newspaper, it had power to move them to tears. It was a poem describing the shore of Ireland as seen by a returning emigrant. He thought that the poem moved them because it contained the actual thought of a man at a passionate moment of life, and so he became interested in the thought of a poetry that would be a personal utterance. It was his friendship with the Irish political leader John O'Leary that made him resolve to be one of the creators of a national literature for Ireland. He thought that the Irish and the Anglo-Irish might be brought together if the country had a national literature that would make Ireland beautiful in memory, and yet be freed from provincialism by an exacting criticism. He tells us of the difficulties and discouragements that grew up as he went on with his task. He seems to be unaware that his idea and his work have now a unique flowering. Besides his father and his grandfather, the two figures that are most notably shown are the Fenian leader John O'Leary and the courtly scholar Edward Dowden: O'Leary, whom the poet celebrated afterwards in a ballad; and, for a contrast, Professor Dowden with his dark romantic face and his ironic manner-Dowden, who might have been a poet if he had once yielded himself to life, but who became a critic instead. John B. Yeats said of him, "Talking to Dowden is like talking to a priest-one must be careful not to remind him of his sacrifice." The famous scholar was helpful to the young poet, but it was Dowden's poems that made him consider the whole question of lyric poetry. He says: I was about to learn that if a man is to write lyric poetry he must be shaped by nature and art to one of the half-a-dozen traditional poses, and be lover or saint, sage or sensualist, or mere mocker of all life; and that none but that stroke of luckless luck can open before him the accumulated expression of the world. P. C. CORRESPONDENCE A NOTE FROM MR. LINDSAY The following letter may assist the reader's understanding of our two poems by its author: Dear POETRY: The Soap-box is my only poem in this manner except The Kallyope Yell, written five years ago. From the words "Free speech" to the end it is to be given, like that poem, in collegeyell fashion, but more musically, with the rasp of the college yell left out and its energy retained. As for Samson-I attended a negro church with John Carpenter when I was last in Chicago, and some of the spirit of the sermons we heard went into Samson; and the process of conversion and repentance is, I hope, an honest and reverent record of what happened before us. There was not any rolling on the ground, but one woman was carried out in a cataleptic state. After coming home I heard a negro sermon on Jerusalem whose refrain every few minutes was, "Let Jerusalem be coming into your mind." Another day I heard, amid a general exhortation, this outburst: "There was a Russian revolution yesterday, and my Lord is riding high." I have used these phrases, I hope, in the same spirit that they were originally uttered. The fundamental difficulty of negro sermon poems of this type is that there is a profound seriousness of passion in the midst of things at which the outsider is fairly entitled to smile; and when a white man tries to render this seriousness and this humor at the same time, he is apt to be considered more of a humorist than a sermonizer. The negroes are perfectly willing to laugh a little on the way up to glory, and, unlike the white man, they do not have to stop going up while they laugh. I should say that onetenth of Samson has a humorous intention, but I will venture that the average reader will consider it nine-tenths humorous, through lack of familiarity with that amazing figure, the negro preacher, who is just as unique and readily at hand now as he was twenty-five years ago, when he was much more discussed and parodied. Vachel Lindsay THE POETRY THEATRE LEAGUE The following letter sets forth a new project which should interest all lovers of poetry. To the modern reader this art is too much an affair of the library; he needs to be reminded that it began as an art of song and speech. Mr. Brody and his associates are trying "to win back for poetry its place among the articulate arts." Dear POETRY: The Poetry Theatre League, 287 Fifth Avenue, New York, means to participate, in every way possible, with the renaissance now taking place in poetry, but its particular object is to establish a center for the public recitation of poetry. Just as Music is interpreted by artist-players, just as Drama is interpreted by actors and stage-directors, so Poetry is to be staged with costumes, scenic effects, or music, and interpreted by artist-reciters. In this way, by appealing to all the senses, we hope to reach an audience outside of and larger than the poetry-reading public, and thus extend the appreciation of poetry. Miss Hedwig Reicher, our Artistic Director and an actress of international reputation, has been experimenting in productions of this kind, and has demonstrated their aesthetic value and feasibility beyond a doubt. In addition, the activities of The Poetry Theatre League will include the production of poetic plays, the arrangement of lectures on poetry, and readings by poets of their own works. In this latter way we hope to be instrumental in presenting poets whom publishers are too timid to introduce to the public. We will also encourage and endeavor to organize poetry societies in universities and settlements, and supply them with programs and lecturers. The profits of the League will be devoted exclusively to prizes for the best poems appearing in American magazines, and for the best poetic plays submitted to us. Alter Brody THAT COWBOY POEM Editor of POETRY: I was greatly interested in High Chin Bob, published in the August POETRY. The original poem is entitled The Glory Trail; the author is Charles Badger Clark, Jr.; it was first published in the Pacific Monthly, April, 1911. I enclose a copy. Seattle, Wash. William H. Skaling EDITOR'S NOTE: On the whole, the cowboy version simplifies and improves Mr. Clark's poem, in our opinion; although, by a curious process of elimination, the revisers unconsciously deprived each double-stanza, except the last, of an entire rhythmic phrase-an entire line according to the author's way of printing the poem in short lines instead of long. The first stanza from the Pacific Monthly will serve, by comparison with our August number, to show how far the cowboy's idea of a folk poem differed from the author's: 'Way high up the Mogollons, A lion cleaned a yearlin's bones When on the picture who should ride, But High-Chin Bob, with sinful pride "Oh, glory be to me!" says he, GOOD-BYE TO EUNICE TIETJENS The poem printed below may serve to emphasize the goodwill of POETRY, and its editors and readers, toward the author of the Profiles, Eunice Tietjens, who now resigns |