RIPPLES

THAT LITTLE GIRL NEXT DOOR

Evening

That little girl next door,

She always wants me to play with her.

I don't get time to water my flowers any more,
I don't get time to take care of my flowers,

I don't get time to do anything.

She just makes me play with her all the time.

I won't play with her any more

When tomorrow morning comes

I won't play with her!

I'll say: "You go away, little girl,

I have to work;

I won't play with you ever any more

I have to take care of my flowers."

Morning

Mama, that little girl next door

Won't come out to play with me.

She has to work, she has to help her Mama.

I saw her wiping a cup

I don't think she ought to work so hard,

I think she ought to play with me.

I don't care if she rides my velocipede,

I don't care if she plays with

My spade and wheel-barrow.

She can play with Ol' Mister Nichols

And Amy Lowell, and Tum Tum.

She won't break them

She never breaks anything!

She can play with all my toys.
Mama, you go over

And tell that little girl next door
To come over to our house to live.
We won't make her work all the time,
We won't make her work ever at all,
We will tell her to play every morning.

COMMENT

MR. JEPSON'S SLAM

R. EDGAR JEPSON, a self-appointed London critic

Mof poetry author also of those epoch-making novels,

Happy Pollyooly, The Terrible Twins, Whittaker's Dukedom, etc.-has quite obliterated POETRY and all its works in the May number of the English Review. And Mr. Burton Rascoe, literary editor of the Chicago Tribune, has quite obliterated Mr. Jepson, "whoever he is," in his summary of the latter's article in the Tribune of May 25th. And Mr. Jepson's happy phrase, "plopp-eyed bungaroo," descriptively applied to the "Great-hearted Young Westerner on the make" (no doubt We, Us & Co.), which has been started by "B. L. T." on a rapid journey up and down the various "colyums," will soon be as common coin as a five-cent nickel. And the editor of POETRY has wiped Mr. Jepson off the map in an article recently sent to the editor of the English Review, who will publish it unless he feels too sorry for Mr. Jepson. All this being the case, it seems unnecessary for POETRY to do anything more; it may go on its way rejoicing, quite oblivious of its all-British critic.

Certain details of his arraignment, however, are amusing enough to give us pause. Like Mr. Rascoe, we "don't give a damn" that Mr. Jepson has no use for four of POETRY'S fourteen prize-winners (he doesn't mention the other ten!) -Messrs. Lindsay, Masters, Frost and Head. Neither are we moved by his scorn of Chicago as the "seat" of "a new

school of poetry, United States poetry," and, inferentially, his scorn of the new school so seated. The four prize-winners above mentioned, being abundantly able to take care of themselves, will go on with their poem-making in spite of Mr. Jepson's anathema; and Chicago the powerful will go on mirroring her new-flowering beauty in Lake Michigan, and her new-flowering soul in her poets and other artists, who will give a new glory to her fame that long ago crossed the world. Indeed, is not Spoon River already published in many languages, has not the sky-scraper traveled to many cities, and is not one of our young radicals designing the new capital of Australia? It is better to look forward than back, more stimulating for a city to have her art-history in the future than in the past. Chicago needs no apologists; rather should we say of her as Pericles said to his fellow-citizens when the beauty of their metropolis was in the making: "You must yourselves realize the power of Athens, and feed your eyes upon her from day to day until love of her fills your hearts."

What does give us pause is Mr. Jepson's praise rather than his blame. In all POETRY's history, covering five-anda-half years, the only events or persons he mentions at all are the four poets above listed and Mr. T. S. Eliot, and the only event or person he mentions with approval is our "discovery" of the last-named poet. (It should be explained that his article, being on Recent United States Poetry, does not take up the British side of our history.)

Perhaps I am ungrateful in having mixed feelings over this one item of praise. We should consider it honor enough, no doubt, to present, in the course of half a decade, one poet worthy of Mr. Jepson's laurel wreath. Why should I smile in thinking of it, and detect, moreover, a sympathetic smile on Mr. Eliot's lips, and the quiver of a wink in his left eye as he tries to wear the wreath gracefully? It is not that I don't admire the combination-Mr. Eliot deserves all the honors that are coming to him. But why is he the only American of all our tribe to win this tribute? If Mr. Jepson admires the fine ironies and sophisticated intuitions and decoratively balanced rhythms of Mr. Eliot, why is he so blind to Cloyd Head's delicate modern patterning of the human tragedy, so deaf to the sombre yet whimsical emotional and musical motives of Wallace Stevens? These men, as well as Mr. Eliot, are super-intellectuals; and quite as profoundly as he are they stirred to the heart by the beauty and the sorrow of life as it is today. Indeed, their art gives the effect of having more behind it-richer experience; and sympathies, if not deeper, at least broader in range. Can it be that Mr. Jepson is unconsciously prejudiced in Mr. Eliot's favor by the fact that he has left this barbaric land of plopp-eyed bungaroos, and gone into what seems to be-alas!-permanent exile in a country truly civilized? I pass over the probability that our critic's feeling has been stimulated, if not by personal acquaintance with his favorite, then by subtler atmospheric influences—the fact that Mr. Eliot is now very much "in the air" of influential