Bears witness men have passed, makes promises
That men will come. If I lived by a road-

Out here the stars are always near at hand.
The air is stirless, fearing the least noise.
I wonder that my heart can beat so loud;
I long to free my senses with a shriek.

And this description of the deserted soddy is the poet's final word:

Down the steep slope,

With the brown bunchgrass swishing round your knees.

The rusty stovepipe rises through a beard

Of starveling herbage. A mat of tumble-weeds

In the doorway is o'erhung with bluestem blades;
They blot the path to the well. The garden place
Bristles with ragweed; at one corner spire

Red and white hollyhocks, and the dying souls
Of damask roses drench the sultry noon.

ART VERSUS FORMULAE

Agnes Lee Freer

Poems of Charles Warren Stoddard, collected by Ina Coolbrith. John Lane Co.

First Offering: Sonnets and Lyrics, by Samuel Roth. Lyric Pub. Co.

Gardens Overseas and Other Poems, by Thomas Walsh. John Lane Co.

Beggar and King, by Richard Butler Glaenzer. Yale Univ. Press.

Ships in Port, by Lewis Worthington Smith. G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Mr. Stoddard's verse probably gave pleasure to him and to his many friends during his lifetime. It is now a record

of the man for them, and as such is treasured. Mr. Stod-
dard himself, it is said, did not overestimate its value. It
belongs to the period of the eighteen-seventies and eighties—
a period which seems now to have been singularly complacent
and colorless so far as poetry is concerned. (Of course one
excepts Whitman, who was then living, but whose work had
long passed the stage of gestation.) The most spontaneous
thing in the book is the little poem called Wind and Wave:
Oh, when I hear at sea
The water on our lee,

I fancy that I hear the wind
That combs my hemlock tree:

But when beneath that tree
I listen eagerly,

I seem to hear the rushing wave

I heard far out at sea.

And I can not forbear quoting from the preface this memorial poem by Joaquin Miller, for the charm of its fresh. nonchalant directness:

Say, Charlie, our Charlie, say,

What of the night? A-lo-ha! Hail!
What noonful sea?

What restful sail?

Where tent you, Bedouin, today?

O generous green leaves of our tree,
What fruitful first young buoyant year!
But bleak winds blow; the leaves are sere,

And listless rustle two or three.

Say, Charlie, where is Bret, and Twain?

Shy Prentice, and the former few?

You spoke, and spoke as one who knew-
Now, Charlie, speak us once again!

The night-wolf prowls-we guess, we grope,
But day is night and night despair;
And doubt seems some unuttered prayer,
And hope seems hoping against hope.

But, Charlie, you had faith, and you,
Gentlest of all God's gentlemen,

You said you knew and surely knew

Now speak, and speak as spoke you then.

The author of First Offerings, Mr. Samuel Roth, is still very young, to judge from the title and internal evidence. He is at present locked in an academic chrysalis-using words and phrases of stock poetic parlance that are, so far as poetry is concerned, quite meaningless. He is using false counters; cloaking his feeling with abstractions, words like valor, despair, eternity, immortality, and corresponding phrases that sound so well to youth and convey so little. Of course the poet may wake up; one never can tell. It is quite impossible to predict what his future development may be at this stage. He comes nearest to personal expression in A Song of Earth, which is unfortunately marred by the line, "Earth than which there is no purer joy!"

Both Mr. Walsh and Mr. Glaenzer write as if they belonged to the same poetic stock and generation as Mr. Stod- · dard. Their verse does not seem to touch reality at any point. It is impersonal verse; one can read it through without knowing any more of the author than when one began. "In art," Tagore says, "man reveals himself and not his objects. His objects have their place in books of information and science, where he has completely to conceal himself." Much poetry is like a sort of pseudo-science in this respect. It is as unreal as if the poet had used chemical symbols for emotional reactions; as personally inexpressive as a geography which describes boundaries and countries but gives nothing of the soul of landscape. We know that both Mr. Walsh

and Mr. Glaenzer have enjoyed their landscapes, but they have not transmuted this enjoyment in such a way as to make us feel it. Mr. Roth says "H 2 O" when he means "water!"

Mr. Smith's verse is even farther removed from reality than that of the preceding authors. It is conventional magazine verse, fluent, rhythmical, facile. The magazine poet has his reward on earth; he does not have to wait for it in heaven, so he can probably afford to ignore adverse criticism. Mr. Smith is at his best in poems approaching the ballad form, as in Aglavaine, published in Poetry.

A. C. H.

VERSES BOND AND FREE

Elegy in Autumn, by Clinton Scollard. Fred. Fairchild Sherman, New York.

Writing an elegy may be a pious task, and it is in that spirit that Mr. Scollard has paid due tribute to his friend and fellow-poet Frank Dempster Sherman, of happy memory.

Youth has its visions and its fervors; yours

Were lovingly enlinked with Poesy;

You dreamed the dream that many an one allures.
The vernal dream where life is harmony.

And so on the proper poetic things are said in the proper poetic way through two dozen stanzas, until we come in the last one to the amaranth and the asphodel and know that he task is done.

But what has this to do with poetry?

H. M.

Common Men and Women, by Harold W. Gammans. Four Seas Co.

Certain books of alleged free verse floor me, I confess. I wish I could penetrate the rhythmic secret which enables the poet to cut his meditations into lines, or the imaginative secret which enables him to call the result a poem. Here, for example, is Saving a Nickel, which begins:

A walk of a mile or two

Would save five cents

And ends, after an encounter with a tramp:

I gave him a quarter

Though I was walking to save five cents.

Perhaps Lady Ocean represents a closer encounter with It ends with this pleasing image:

the muse.

I'd say you were asleep

But your white toes

Keep gripping at the sand.

"Fail? Work. Fail!" says the poet, only he puts it in three lines. Well, failure may be heroic!

H. M.

In the Red Years, by Gervé Baronti. Four Seas Co.

Not being able to see a gleam in this book, beyond the clever frontispiece drawing, I passed it on to another, with this result:

The author expresses feelings which he thinks he ought to feelnever genuine. The "radical" verses at the start are nothing but rhetoric, How I Love, etc., nothing but journalistic description. Morning Song is perhaps the best, but poor enough.

Evidently Mr. Baronti is not appreciated in this office.

H. M.