that new matter means new form, and that the imposing of restrictions upon the poet may crush his poetry. To a certain extent the history of literature justifies this attitude.

Similarly, the radical holds that no subject-matter and no method should be imposed upon the poet. His world of art is a new world. Each creation is a new creation and subject only to laws of its own. Is not this the meaning of the following sentences by Mr. Fletcher: [Miss Lowell's] "work cannot be judged as a fixed and finished product, but as an ever-growing approach to a new and more intensely vital life-perspective. It reconstructs humanity for us in a new way; it is radically different from all that preceded it; and therefore cannot be judged by past standards; for its importance the future alone will be answerable."

The radical poet demands, then, absolute freedom from the demands of morality, the wishes of the public, and the precepts of criticism.

If I had to choose between poetry as a criticism of life and poetry as a creation of life, I am sure that I should choose creation. If any one has the right to create a world of his own, it is the poet. If any one has the right to experiment unrestrained with the materials of life, it is the poet. It is only through free experiment that progress is possible. Moreover, the composition of a work of art is not like the building of a house according to specifications. The artist surrenders himself (within limits) to his materials and emotions, unaware where they may lead him. To restrict him would make impossible the spontaneous or the really new. The creation of an ideal world which satisfies the deepest needs of the poet's nature is the business of the true poet.

But a little thought shows that the poet cannot absolutely escape from the limitations of the world. He is writing for some one, and he knows it. It may be for his wife, or for a group of admirers, or for the editor of a magazine, or for some imagined sympathetic reader, or for a certain larger group that may be called the public. In any case, the mood in which he works and the final outcome of his effort—the poem itself—are conditioned by the fact that writing poetry is a social act, and there is nothing to compel one to believe

that he should write for one group or individual rather than another; there is certainly nothing to compel him to write for poets rather than for humanity.

Moreover, really creative poetry is, as a rule, a criticism of life. It is a criticism of life because it is creation, because it holds up the ideal—at least the different-beside the commonplace or real, and we judge the commonplace or real by it. In fact, there is a more or less conscious judgment of a better and worse in life by the poet himself. To a very important degree, the poet creates for us and for himself the ideal toward which we reach or which we reject. Milton, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, all are, in this sense, critics of life. The "Ode to a Nightingale," personal and aesthetic in its appeal as it is, presents to the reader a better and a worse in human life. An English poet, Sir Henry Newbolt, has shown such clear consciousness of the double function of poetry that I shall quote from his article on "Futurism and Form" which appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1914.

"Good poetry, poetry in the full sense of the word, is the masterly expression of rare, difficult, and complex states of consciousness, of intuitions in which the highest thought is fused with simple perceptions, until both together become a new emotion. And of all the possible emotions, the strongest and most binding is felt when the poet's consciousness of the world is tinged with man's universal longing for a world more perfect; for when the life which he creates is nearest to the life which we ourselves live, then the eternal contrast is most visible and most poignant."

In spite of Sir Henry Newbolt, a retort from the radical is obvious. We do not read Paradise Lost, I am told, because it justifies the ways of God to man, nor The Idylls of the King because they portray the war of soul and sense. Nor do we refuse to read Don Juan because it makes virtue seem inferior to vice nor Dolores because in it vice is clothed with beauty. Now to a certain extent we do these very things, and I am sure that part of the beauty of Paradise Lost is in the lofty idealism of the poet; that part of the beauty of Don Juan is in its scorn of hypocrisy; and that the beauty of The Spoon River Anthology (and it is not wholly without beauty) is very largely

in the exaltation of plain and genuine over sham virtue. Some of the poems of Mr. Carl Sandburg, unconventional in form though they are, represent genuine poetic creations; and for that reason they criticise life, make more evident to us the values of life that concern every intelligent human being.

But too much of the new poetry is creative in the sense that it is merely an addition to life which has no relation to it but that of juxtaposition. It does not express the wisdom of the ages; it cares nothing for the logic of common sense; it does not value the profound emotions of the human heart-the indignant sense of outrage and injustice, the joy of patriotic surrender to a great cause, the passionate love of children. At least it does not powerfully stimulate these emotions and it deliberately avoids doing so. The deeper feelings may possibly be used to fill in the background of the poetic picture, or they may be a kind of bridge over which the aesthetic emotion crosses to the reader, or a scaffolding which makes the completed poem possible but must not mar its perfect aspect; they are the toilers underground for the queenly lady whom we must worship. If one can produce the desired emotional effect by purely poetic means that is, without thought or appeal to fundamental emotions-and only by the use of sounds and their relations and images and their relations, let him do so and produce pure poetry. As for the criticism of such poetry-well, really it can be interpreted only in terms of itself. As a matter of fact, we find it interpreted by its sponsors largely in terms of that which is nearest akin-the other arts and scarcely at all in terms of life, to which it is not related. Theoretically I see no objection to this attitude. It has resulted in some pretty poems. I am tempted to quote one of them. Perhaps the following by Mr. Bodenheim, which Miss Monroe and Mrs. Henderson thought worth including in their anthology, will do:

THE REAR-PORCHES OF AN APARTMENT-BUILDING
A sky that has never known sun, moon or stars,
A sky that is like a dead, kind face,

Would have the color of your eyes,

O servant-girl, singing of pear-trees in the sun,
And scraping the yellow fruit you once picked
When your lavender-white eyes were alive.

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On the porch above you are two women,

Whose faces have the color of brown earth that has never felt rain.
The still wet basins of ponds that have been drained

Are their eyes.

They knit gray rosettes and nibbble cakes

And on the top-porch are three children
Gravely kissing each others' foreheads-
And an ample nurse with a huge red fan

The passing of the afternoon to them

Is but the lengthening of blue-black shadows on brick walls.

In this poem I find that use of tragic emotion to fill in the background of the picture to which I have already referred. The emotion is barely suggested it is true; the author would scorn to give it a name. It is there merely to intensify the aesthetic effect. And the total effect is one of hardness.

This is all very well. If any one wants pure poetry, let him have it. What I want to know is whether or not I ought to like poetry that is not pure, poetry that throws vast shafts of light into the depths of life to reveal its mightier significance, and if I do like it, whether I should regard myself as one of the "great unwashed," who judge by inferior standards. I shall not try to answer my own question, but I will suggest an excuse for myself. In this time when our total energy is needed to preserve all that we believe worth while in the world, when all values, even the most fundamental, waver before our eyes as if about to disappear, many desire poetry that is creative in the sense of giving value to our working and our planning and our fighting. If poetry, to be pure, must abandon the fundamentally human, heaven save us from pure poetry.

JULIUS W. PRATT

United States Naval Academy

We have long been accustomed to look to the novelists, and particularly, in this country, to the short story writers, for the portrayal and analysis of local human types and local manners. In the last few years, however, the poets have been persistently encroaching on this territory and have perhaps struck deeper into the mysteries of provincial psychology than have most of their predecessors in fiction. Certainly the life of the small middle western town has been placed in a new light by Edgar Lee Masters, while not one of an able group of story tellers has drawn more vividly either the psychology or the landscape of rural New England than has Robert Frost, the poet of North of Boston.

Less significant than the work of either of these men, but still interesting and in some points illuminating, is this volume of Kentucky poems, Old Christmas, and Other Kentucky Tales in Verse, by William Aspenwall Bradley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $1.25 net). Although by his own confession the author was a resident of the Cumberland Mountain country for only six months, he appears to have gained some very accurate impressions of the Southern mountaineer with whom we have been acquainted through the stories of John Fox, Jr., and Miss Murfree (“Charles Egbert Craddock").

The volume may necessitate in some readers a modification of romantic conceptions of mountaineer life. Not that the book is unromantic-by no means; but the romance is less colored with heroics than in some interpretations. That the mountaineer is a moonshiner and sometimes a feudist is common knowledge and is not too seriously held against him. Both sins are taken as manifestations of a high, romantic selfdependence and add to his literary if not to his social value. But there are other vices which are less susceptible of decorative use, and these the usual romantic picture has generally omitted. That the mountaineer of the distant fastnesses is

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