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IF you look at the poets as they move in their procession before your eyes, you will see that each is dressed after the manner of his age—the Elizabethans in starched ruffs; the men of the Eighteenth Century in knee-breeches; the men of today in Homburg hats. And if you listen to their verses you will hear that each composes, too, after the manner of his age. For there have been fashions in poetry as there have been fashions in dress, and you can tell the period of a poem not only by the name and date of the poet but by the style and flavour of the poetry.” From this thought J. F. Roxburgh has written “a beginner’s introduction to English poetry” with the charming title, The Poetic Procession. His brief review of the poets from the Elizabethans to the men now writing is felicitous enough. But although I am sure his intention in the sentences quoted was not literal, the image of present-day poets in Homburg hats is very disconcerting. Don Marquis has probably worn one, thus inviting the visitation of insurance agents. But I am sure some of his poems have been written with the wind blowing through his hair. Such poems as “The Name,” in his Dreams and Dust, for example, or those “Premonitions” in his Poems and Portraits. It is as difficult to say, with Marquis, where the humourist stops in his poetry and the thinker steps in as to mark the same exit-entrance in the man’s prose. Sonnets to a Red-Haired Lady and Famous Love Affairs and a part of Poems and Portraits are supposed to belong to Marquis the jester; but, of the second-named book, which part? “The man who has laughed lest he should weep, the clown of the seven times broken heart” is Richard Le Gallienne’s apt characterisation of Marquis. I am not sure that “The Tom Cat” in Poems and Portraits is a bit less “serious” than such a poem as “Inhibition” in the same collection.

Sober-faced, we carry hidden within us something for which the poet has found one of those rare things in the language, the perfect phrase; it is

Perhaps we also are like the Tom-cat and, on our occasions, “chant the hate of a million years.”

I am as certain that Marquis admires and condones the Tom-cat as I am that he has sought the troubling and elusive “Name” which has variously seemed, as he tells us in his fine poem, to be Love, and Beauty, and God.

The Boston Evening Transcript spoke not long ago of “the unhurried ascent of John Hall Wheelock to the highest rank among contemporary American poets.” The statement seems to me free from any exaggeration; and it is encouraging to think that Mr. Wheelock is in a way to reach the height more conspicuously than did Edwin Arlington Robinson, of whom, until his unveiling a few years ago by fellow poets, the larger public seems to have remained in a lamentable ignorance. Mr. Wheelock’s Dust and Light (1919) and his The Black Panther (1922) have a beauty and sentience best illustrated by quotation. Here are some lines from “Earth,” in Dust and Light:

The thought is Emersonian, but with Emerson lyricism was a doubtful and an inconstant capture. Here is “The Lion-House,” from The Black Panther, a poem, I cannot but think, that any poet would be proud to sign:

The black and silver of cover and jacket on Elinor Wylie’s second book of poems, Black Armour, were not so much to match the title as to convey the colour impression of a number of readers who had studied the book in manuscript. The poems, grouped under the names of the parts of a suit of armour—Breastplate, Gauntlet, Helmet, Beaver Up, Plumes—perhaps require study, not in the sense of textual analysis (though they will repay that) but in the sense of returning to them several times, so that their compressed emotion may fully expand itself. I had almost said, explode itself. Indeed, it may sometimes produce nothing short of an explosion of feeling in the sensitive reader. I am thinking now of such works as “Now That Your Eyes Are Shut” (which opens the section called Plumes). I have heard the poem “Peregrine” called the best in the book, the dryly concise account of a

and whose career, the narration of which includes a dozen feats of rhyming, was summed up when

But “Fable,” with its effects in twenty-four lines as powerful as Coleridge’s in his Ancient Mariner, and “Lucifer Sings in Secret” are to me finer than “Peregrine” because more individual. I mean that I could imagine a later Browning writing “Peregrine,” but cannot imagine anyone but Elinor Wylie writing “Lucifer.” Much stress has been laid on Mrs. Wylie’s gift for bright, strange images in her poetry, and this is no small item in her genius; but the steeled emotion, the unearthly cry that is heard under the burnished and metallic surfaces, sometimes in not instantly intelligible words, is her voice as a poet. In “Now That Your Eyes Are Shut,” which I quote, there is one stanza that might have been written by a poet of a long-past century—I leave you to name him—but there are two stanzas, the most important, which I can imagine no one but Elinor Wylie writing:

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The title poem in Amanda Hall’s book, The Dancer in the Shrine, tempts to quotation, but there seems to me something unfair in reprinting it complete and to cut lines from it is to mutilate both what is taken and that which is left. There is a good deal of the life of the countryside in the book; Miss Hall’s New England is that of Thoreau but her lyrical gift is distinctly personal. A characteristic mood and treatment is shown in “I’ll Build My House of Sticks and Stones,” from which the following couplets are taken:

The pagan quality keeps its joyousness while transmuting it into something reverent and beautiful in such lines as “The Dancer in the Shrine.” The religious note, differently accented, may be found in the work of Alice Meynell, whose complete verse is now available in The Poems of Alice Meynell. Mrs. Meynell’s death has brought a sharp emphasis upon the rare character of her poetic gift. Alfred Noyes says she has left to the world a volume “containing only masterpieces,” but I like better the words of J. L. Garvin: “Not one of her poems but was the music of a thought as most of her essays were the fruit of perception.” Let me not quote “The Shepherdess,” so widely known and so self-expressive, but “Chimes” with its changing image and its “music of a thought” sung to perfection:

Mrs. Meynell was one of a group of contemporary Catholic poets of whom, it may be, Aline Kilmer is the most widely known and read in America. Of the others of that group I should like especially to mention two whose new books of verse have just appeared—Sister M. Madeleva, a nun in the congregation of the Holy Cross at Holy Rosary Academy, California, and Wilfred Rowland Childe, who is English. Sister M. Madeleva’s collection called Knights Errant contains verse highly spiritual in type, clear and strong in emotional expression, and admirable for the manner in which the author has adhered to subjects and thoughts strictly within the limits of her clearly defined experience. Mysticism is natural to these Catholic singers, and will be found strongly in Mr. Childe’s The Gothic Rose, a book of poems quite Gothic in spirit, sometimes wistful, sometimes marked with melancholy and obviously the outgrowth of a loving adoration. Although such poems as “The Dirge for Westminster” and “The Virgin of Flanders” are the body of The Gothic Rose, there is a range including an Oxford poem (“Idylle Oxonienne”), one or two classical subjects, such as “Daphne,” and the modern verse of “The Austrian River.”

Like Amanda Hall, Josephine Daskam Bacon is both novelist and poet, but it is as a poet that Mrs. Bacon will arrest our attention for her Truth o’ Women, which has been described as a Spoon River Anthology for women. The book consists of a group of “Epitaphs for Women” in free verse; this one being characteristic:

Forty of these “Epitaphs” are followed by a series of dramatic monologues under the general title, “Truth o’ Women.” The monologues are spoken by the mother of Joan of Arc, Lincoln’s mother, Dante’s wife, Milton’s daughters, the wife of Judas, one of Bluebeard’s wives, the mother of Mary and Martha and the wives of Columbus, Sir Isaac Newton, Cadmus, Adam, Shakespeare, Socrates, Pilate and Julius Cæsar.

No, evidently realism in poetry is not through! Look, here is “an epic of insignificance” called The Life and Death of Mrs. Tidmuss, by Wilfrid Blair. Pursuing the Spoon River comparison for Mrs. Bacon’s book, one is on the verge of calling Blair’s work a Main Street of England in verse. In subject matter it is more like John Masefield’s Widow in the Bye Street, I should say. We start with Selina as the young daughter of a greengrocer, see her as a slow and bashful girl leading a drab existence and wooed finally by Tom Tidmuss, who is interested in poultry-raising. He is a printer by trade. They plan to marry and get a cottage. Then, for the first time, Selina lives:

A year’s wait reaps the reward of her wedding day.

Thereafter births, deaths, a subdued drudgery, old age, the selling of the house and furniture and the going to live with her daughter, where she is not very happy. The poet concludes on a swift crescendo, maestoso:

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Of George Santayana as a poet I have incidentally spoken in Chapter 9, quoting one of his superb sonnets, but I think I neglected to call attention to the preface he has recently provided for his Poems. It is an omission that must be repaired. I can scarcely give an idea of the preface’s excellence as vigorous and beautiful prose, but aside from Santayana’s explanation that the subject of these poems is “simply my philosophy in the making,” it is just to quote this passage: “A Muse—not exactly an English Muse—actually visited me in my isolation; the same, or a ghost of the same, that visited Boethius or Alfred de Musset or Leopardi. It was literally impossible for me then not to re-echo her eloquence. When that compulsion ceased, I ceased to write verses. My emotion—for there was genuine emotion—faded into a sense that my lesson was learned and my troth plighted....” I cannot resist quoting from the closing poem, the lines on Art that count as a translation from Theophile Gautier but are actually so much more than that:

How W. E. Henley would have loved this! (But perhaps he saw it, and was not silent). Henley, whose Poems in my copy are the nineteenth edition—and my copy is far from new. Henley and Francis Thompson and Kipling go on; few of us need any urge or even any reminder to re-read them; their poetry gains its fresh recruits with every season of the young men, and old men have been known to resume their youth over the pages....

Youth! That is the cargo that sails on those perilous seas forlorn we looked upon from John Keats’s casements opening on the foam. What a frank title for a first book of verse is Robert Roe’s Here You Have Me! The title poem and a few others in the Whitmanesque tradition are followed by a group of poems derived from experiences as a sailor, verses that break free of any tradition known to me; and by poems ripened out of an intimate contact with the Arizona desert. I have liked some of these greatly, just as I like, for another reason, Vachel Lindsay’s Going-to-the-Sun, which is suitably fantastic. Some way must be devised for everyone to hear Lindsay recite or chant his verses, since in no other way can the reader possibly get more than half their effect. I think if all could hear him in a half dozen, the awakened instinct and quickened imagination in most of us would accomplish the rest. We should then be able merely to read him and feel the elixir.

In a later chapter of this book devoted to Christopher Morley there is mention of his poem, “Parson’s Pleasure,” which gives title to his new and by all odds best collection of verse. The remarkable change and growth in Morley as a prose writer has been attended by chemistries in the poet, and I expect the large popularity gained by his poems in Chimneysmoke will accrue without delay to the poems in Parson’s Pleasure. But are you familiar with the poetry of Franklin P. Adams? I only partly mean the F. P. A. of the daily breakfast table and occasional short lyric or bit of versification heading a newspaper column. I mean the author of Tobogganing on Parnassus, and Weights and Measures, and Overset, and So There! Light, satiric verse, most of it; but how finished and perfect in its form, how penetrating in its arrowy indirection! Whether he is penning the address of the passionate advertiser to his love or doing for Horace what Edward Fitzgerald did for a certain Persian singer, Mr. Adams is constantly curing the evils of civilisation, freeing those “baffled whims” Don Marquis tells about and generally making life more livable by making it more singable.

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Among studies of contemporary poets we have had none so valuable, I think, as Lloyd Morris’s The Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson. The first and most important inspiration that came to Mr. Morris was undoubtedly the divisions of his subject, so that he brings us to the consideration of a difficult master under the headings natural to the poet, his “Men,” his use of “History,” and “Legend,” his two prose “Plays,” and as the crown, his “Ideas” or intellectual content. It is hard to see how any reader of poetry can do without this lucid discussion and exposition of one who may well be, and is by competent critics adjudged to be, the greatest living American poet. A biographical note, following the careful bibliography of Mr. Robinson’s works by W. Van R. Whitall, rounds out the usefulness of the little volume.

The popularity of anthologies of verse is now proverbial, and I expect that there will be plenty of attention for the Anthology of American Verse which J. C. Squire, poet and editor of the London Mercury, has completed. The work shows the advantages gained by the onlooker’s standpoint, who can bring to bear a sense of perspective better than our own. The selection also shows Mr. Squire’s fine taste which, so far as I know, has no superior and very few equals among those whose knowledge of poetry would qualify them to be anthologists at all. Another collection of extreme importance but necessarily from a different angle has been completed by Margery Gordon and Marie B. King, and just published under the title Verse of Our Day. As the compilers had distinctly in mind school use of this book in a special edition, as well as the wide popular audience in an edition from which certain textbook features would be omitted, their aim was for inclusiveness and a highly representative quality above all else—though a rigid selection was inevitable, too. The result is a book presenting 347 poems, 225 by American poets and 122 by British. Ninety-two of the Americans and 42 of the British poets are modern—that is, they lie between Eugene Field and Amy Lowell on the one hand, between W. E. Henley and Alfred Noyes and John Masefield on the other. Biographies of the poets, reading lists and, in the school edition, certain guides to study have been included. The popularity of Verse of Our Day ought to be sure and of some permanence.

Henry van Dyke, assisted by Hardin Craig and Asa Don Dickinson, has edited A Book of British and American Verse rather from a standpoint like J. C. Squire’s. “This is not an attempt to make another historical anthology of English verse,” Dr. van Dyke explains. “I have looked only at the value and beauty of the poems themselves.” If some poets were unrepresented, it was not to be helped. “Those that seemed the best have been chosen out of many, not to illustrate a theory, but for their own sake, because they are good to read.” And for those who loved Roosevelt as well as for those who have the anthologist’s interest, there is Roosevelt as the Poets Saw Him, edited by Charles Hanson Towne and containing poems by Kipling, Edith Wharton, Richard Le Gallienne, William Watson, Edgar Lee Masters, Owen Wister, John Hay, Vachel Lindsay, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Bridges.

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Leaving aside all disputes on the score of the drama, one of the best moments of our contemporary literature came a few years ago when it was first known that J. M. Barrie had consented to the publication of his plays. And then when the published plays began to come along, the moment enlarged itself. Here was a man who was practically inventing something, a curious but felicitous compound of novel and drama, a mixture of narrative and dialogue, something that extended far beyond the irrepressible wit and satire of G. Bernard Shaw’s stage directions, priceless as those had been. There was a feeling, with good reason, that by this step Barrie had done more to instate himself with posterity than by anything heretofore. For about the plays themselves, as plays, the controversy is already active; but about the success of the plays as published I know of no dispute or objection. Dear Brutus is the eighth volume in a series which already included A Kiss for Cinderella, Alice Sit-by-the Fire, What Every Woman Knows, Quality Street, The Admirable Crichton and two collections of the shorter plays, Half Hours (“Pantaloon,” “The Twelve-Pound Look,” “Rosalind,” “The Will”) and Echoes of the War (“The Old Lady Shows Her Medals,” “The New Word,” “Barbara’s Wedding,” “A Well-Remembered Voice”). There are good things to come yet, including Peter Pan, and these are in preparation; but much of the best Barrie and best-agreed-to Barrie is now ready to go on the bookshelf (where it won’t stay put very well)—and the best of Barrie is good in any company. For example, The Admirable Crichton, which even the most critical have found strong words to praise. The printed version avoids the fault of the 1918 stage revival in which, as has been said, Barrie dulled or allowed some one else to dull the edge of his perfect satire. For a short and appreciative yet discriminating account of Barrie the playwright, one could not do better than read the chapter upon him in John W. Cunliffe’s English Literature During the Last Half Century (Macmillan: Revised Edition, 1923).

John Galsworthy, the subject of the first chapter of this book, will not, of course, be overlooked by anyone concerned in knowing the best plays of our time. His plays are to be had, complete at present, in five volumes (Plays: First Series; Plays: Second Series, etc.) and a supplementary volume, Six Short Plays. Or, with the exception of the six short plays, each may be had separately. Probably a consensus would select Loyalties, Justice, Strife, The Silver Box, The Pigeon and The Skin Game as his most important and representative dramas.

Arnold Bennett’s new play, Don Juan de Marana, represents one fulfilment of a threefold ambition. Don Juan, together with the legend of the Wandering Jew and the story of Tannhäuser, had attracted him for years as great subjects for drama. A good deal of preliminary work on the Wandering Jew theme was wasted by news that somebody else had written a play on the theme and obtained a production. “I put the Wandering Jew aside for ten years,” explains Bennett. “With regard to Tannhäuser, I am still wondering how to cure Elizabeth of her insipidity, and how to get into the heads of a twentieth century audience the surely obvious fact that music is not an essential ingredient of the tale.” Don Juan Tenorio proved impossible as the basis of a play, but finally Bennett came upon the other, later version of the Don Juan story. “And then I discovered what I wanted in a work on my own shelves, the plays of Dumas père in twenty-five volumes. I ought to have divined that since Dumas wrote plays on everything, he must have written a play on the Don Juan de Marana variation of the Don Juan legend.”

At last all of W. Somerset Maugham’s plays are available for the reader, some ten volumes that include not only The Circle, but Lady Frederick, The Explorer, Jack Straw, etc. It should perhaps be noted here that the play Rain is not a Maugham play, but an adaptation of Maugham’s tremendous short story, “Rain,” included in his book of South Sea tales, The Trembling of a Leaf.

John Dos Passos in his Rosinante to the Road Again, in the chapter on “Benavente’s Madrid,” has conveyed with clearness and much picturesqueness the style and point, the character and perfection of taste in a certain style (lo castizo) with which Jacinto Benavente’s dramas abound. It is this that from their Spanish viewpoint makes them of such distinction; but that would hardly account for their success outside Spain. Larger qualities—a gentle and deadly satire, a nervous vitality, wit—do that; and the visit of Señor Benavente to America a few months ago did much to attract attention to his work. Twelve of his plays, assembled in three volumes in the translations of John Garrett Underhill, are now accessible to the English reader. Benavente represents a more modern Spain than the Echegaray with whose drame passionel those who read plays are sufficiently familiar. He should be read for his own sake and as a Continental dramatist much more distinctly representative of something national, something Spanish in sensibility, than are the outstanding playwrights of other European lands—excepting Russia, no doubt. One can scarcely read Ibsen for Norway, or Strindberg for a little corner of the world; Tchekov is Russia but Andreiev is humanity. Jacinto Benavente, however, is Spain without the sacrifice of those elements which are of importance to a society in any country.

The impressive success of the Theatre Guild is known everywhere, and the Theatre Guild Library is very welcome for its addition of several of the finest of recent plays to the resources of the reading table. The series has been auspiciously begun with publication of Karel Capek’s R. U. R., Ernest Toller’s The Mass-Men, and Elmer L. Rice’s The Adding Machine. A particularly good pick of recent successes will be found in Contemporary American Plays, edited by Arthur H. Quinn and containing Jesse Lynch Williams’s “Why Marry?” Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones,” Rachel Crothers’s “Nice People,” Gilbert Emery’s “The Hero,” and George S. Kaufman’s and Marc Connelly’s “To the Ladies!”

Of recent books on the drama, Stark Young’s The Flower in Drama: Papers on the Theatre, has attracted wide attention and much deserved praise. Not much more than a year ago Mr. Young, previously a professor of English, began to write his papers on plays, actors, and the theatre in general in the New Republic. His articles and reviews attracted at once the attention of discriminating people interested in the theatre; their admiration was quickly developed by an attitude which showed a comprehending sympathy for what the younger men were trying to do and yet never lost sight of the drama as a developed art with certain inviolable principles. Moreover, he wrote with wit, precision and charm. There is no better reading of its sort, I think, than his “Dear Mr. Chaplin,” his “Circus,” or his “Letter to Duse,” all contained in this volume. Perhaps a note should explain the title, which is based on a sentence: “If one aims only at the beautiful, the flower is sure to appear”—a phrase drawn from Seami, 1363-1444, who, with his father, stood at the head of the No of Japan.