not been mechanically forced into the image or vice-versa. I might say, impressionistically, that if we were to ignore the suggestion in them-which we cannot do, since the suggestion is intrinsic-we could still enjoy them as neat and powerfully short presentation. Here, to justify my paradox, is Wantlessness:

Out West

Where there is boundless freedom,
Where distances tire the mind,

I saw storm-drenched ponies,
Dejected, motionless,

With liberty to do,

But not knowing what.

As good as this and I really wish I could quote them— are Lime Light, Nakedness, The Prodigal Son; and that fine short song, The River.

Unfortunately there are others, and they are in greater quantity, in which, the image being unauthentic, the symbol is inevitably false. Enslaved, Walt Whitman, Amor Omnia Vincit, Love, Aftermath, The Answer, An Epitaph, A Character, Lights, show either obesity or leanness-two aspects of impotence. And others, which I would call the more personal poems of the book, mostly love poems, are full of stale grandiloquence and sentimentality-two other aspects of impotence.

Mr. O'Neil's brevity is lightness, delicacy and spontaneity; and the healthy exclusion of rhetoric, vagueness and excrescences of thought-old things that are ever so copious in this our too prosperous poetic era. But that brevity is also smallness of content.

Although naked, washed, cool-looking and perfumed, the book is slim and weak. Emanuel Carnevali

MR. BYNNER AT GRENSTONE

Grenstone Poems-A Sequence, by Witter Bynner. Fred. A. Stokes Co.

Although published later, Grenstone Poems is certainly in the main of earlier composition than The New World, which appeared in 1915, for it shows the author at a stage not so near as The New World to achieving for his utterance its own style and voice. Perhaps it is the impression of the book as a whole rather than any individual poem that seems most strongly echo-ish. And the effect is not unpleasant even when the derivation is most distinct, as in the pieces that inherit from A Shropshire Lad gifts of feeling and grace which they all but make their own. For the workmanship is delicate, and though the book as a whole would bear considerable cutting away, the poems themselves are always compact. God's Acre, which is short enough to quote, is typical of Grenstone quality:

Because we felt there could not be
A mowing in reality

So white and feathery-blown and gay
With blossoms of wild caraway,

I said to Celia, "Let us trace

The secret of this pleasant place!"
We knew some deeper beauty lay
Below the bloom of caraway,

And when we bent the white aside
We came to paupers who had died:
Rough wooden shingles row on row,

And God's name written there-John Doe.

H. H.

CORRESPONDENCE

OF PURITANS, PHILISTINES AND PESSIMISTS

Dear Editor: You hit the nail on the head in your editorial on Mr. Bourne's article, Traps for the Unwary in The Dial; only, you might have hit harder. For it is significant, in connection with Miss Lowell's Tendencies in American Poetry, which Mr. Bourne praises, that out of the six poets represented, Carl Sandburg, John Gould Fletcher, and H. D. were first published and introduced by POETRY; and Edgar Lee Masters and Robert Frost received in it their first appreciation. (But perhaps Mr. Bourne does not consider POETRY one of the "little magazines" he mentions so slightingly?) Indeed, Mr. Frost's The Code appeared in POETRY before his general American acclaim, and Mr. Pound's review of Mr. Frost preceded by some time the more heralded article by Mr. Garnett in The Atlantic.

What Miss Lowell's book accomplishes for these poets is a greater measure of publicity-to be valued, of course; and its chief merit is the outline given of the poet's personality, his history, etc. As criticism it clears up nothing, except that it escapes the Philistine and Puritan traps, although not in the measure proclaimed by Mr. Bourne, being tinged with both in given places. The book is based on a purely fictitious scheme of evolution, with no historical background, and only the critic's desire that the scheme should be so to make it so. Miss Lowell's book is enjoyable in many ways, but it can hardly be held up as a model of criticism, even negatively,

Of Puritans, Philistines and Pessimists

as Mr. Bourne would have us believe. Witness the Puritan point of view in her treatment of the sex motive in Edgar Lee Masters' work; so insistent as to be amusing.

Criticism, of course, that weighs and balances only after the event is, indeed, of little consequence to the artist. The only criticism that is of value to the artist and to his contemporaries is contemporaneous criticism, the kind that is perfectly able to navigate in an uncharted sea, take soundings, and proclaim new depths and new shores. We have too little of this in the United States; indeed, except in POETRY and the other "little magazines" I don't know where to look for it. Why should the critics cry out continually upon the need of this criticism instead of giving it to us? Who will deliver us from the "parlor pessimism" of Mr. Bourne and Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, whose article On Creating a Usable Past in a succeeding number of The Dial is of the same breed as Mr. Bourne's giving the critics and the professors the entire responsibility, and lamenting their bankruptcy? Incidentally, one cannot help being amused by Mr. Brooks' short-sighted, one-sided dig at Vachel Lindsay, who has succeeded in creating for himself not only a usable past, but a usable present as well; which is certainly something that Mr. Brooks has not been able to achieve for himself. I think that everything I have read of Mr. Brooks' criticism has amounted to an almost complete negation of our present, and an exceedingly doubtful hope for our future-hardly what one would call the most creative sort of a matrix!

A. C. H.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF 1842

Dear POETRY: Have you reflected that these days of the revival of poetry are not unlike those of seventy-five years ago, when America was waking up to the art, and anthologies were almost as numerous as now? Time has obscured many names then brilliant, and 'added to the lustre of others will it treat our decisions with similar scorn?

I have here a copy of Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America, published in 1842, in which Edgar Allan Poe is represented by three poems, Emerson by five, Longfellow by eleven, Whittier by twelve, Holmes by fifteen, and Bryant by twenty. At the same time, there are eighty-two other names, familiar only to the specialist in the history of American poetry. Lowell is represented by four poems and eight sonnets; and Charles Fenno Hoffman by fortyfive exercises in verse. Of course, much of what is now our great American inheritance was not written in 1842, but the selection is none the less significant. Edgar Allan Poe, three poems; and Lydia Sigourney seventeen!

Moreover, the epidemic of Annuals-from The Atlantic Souvenir through all the twenty years of Gems, Opals, Caskets, Wreaths (significant juxtaposition!), Amulets, Keepsakes, Brides, Nuns, and Fair Penitents-is somewhat similar to the outbreak that followed The Lyric Year of 1912. It makes my blood boil when I think of Griswold's grandfatherly patronage of Poe, and the harm he has done Poe's reputation in the minds of the children of darkness. But Poe could be trusted safely to emerge from the mass