awakened Keats; and it was Keats who seems to have been the inspiration of Amy Lowell. We quote Masefield's own account of his first reading of Chaucer, who gave him his first conception of what poetry might mean to him: “I did not begin to read poetry with passion and system until 1896. I was living then in Yonkers, N. Y. (at 8 Maple Street), Chaucer was the poet, and the Parliament of Fowls the poem, of my conversion. I read the Parliament all through one Sunday afternoon, with the feeling that I had been kept out of my inheritance and had then suddenly entered upon it, and had found it a new world of wonder and delight. I had never realized, until then, what poetry could be."

Although the influence of Shakespeare, Kipling, and other poets is to be seen in his work, the influence of Chaucer is the strongest to be found there. His later poems are less full of a rather lurid realism than The Everlasting Mercy. Masefield is perhaps no longer to be classed with the radical poets; certainly no tag describes his later verse, which is in harmony with the best traditions of English poetry. His subject matter and his diction are new, but the metrical forms which he employs are in the main the older forms used by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Scott. Though he has written some excellent lyrics and many good Shakespearean sonnets, his best poems are probably his narrative poems, Dauber, The Widow in the Bye Street, Reynard the Fox, Enslaved, and Right Royal. The poem which we quote, although more characteristic of the earlier Masefield, furnishes an excellent illustration of the difference in spirit and subject between the new and the older poets. This poem is pre

fixed to Masefield's Collected Poems as indicating his poetic aims.

A CONSECRATION

Not of the princes and prelates with periwigged charioteers
Riding triumphantly laurelled to lap the fat of the years,-
Rather the scorned-the rejected—the men hemmed in with
the spears;

The men of the tattered battalion which fights till it dies,
Dazed with the dust of the battle, the din and the cries,
The men with the broken heads and the blood running into
their eyes.

Not the be-medalled Commander, beloved of the throne, Riding cock-horse to parade when the bugles are blown, But the lads who carried the koppie and cannot be known.

Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the road, The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with the goad,

The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load.

The sailor, the stoker of steamers, the man with the clout,

The chantyman bent at the halliards putting a tune to the

shout,

The drowsy man at the wheel and the tired lookout.

Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and mirth,
The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth;—

Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth!

THEIRS be the music, the colour, the glory, the gold;

MINE be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould.

Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold

Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told. ΑΜΕΝ.

John Masefield (1878-)

In the following poem Wilfrid Wilson Gibson suggests the change in his own poetic ideals which corresponds in general to that we note in passing from the Victorian poets to those of the present time.

PRELUDE

As one, at midnight, wakened by the call
Of golden-plovers in their seaward flight,
Who lies and listens, as the clear notes fall
Through tingling silence of the frosty night—
Who lies and listens, till the last note fails,
And then, in fancy, faring with the flock
Far over slumbering hills and dreaming dales,
Soon hears the surges break on reef and rock;
And, hearkening, till all sense of self is drowned
Within the mightier music of the deep,
No more remembers the sweet piping sound
That startled him from dull, undreaming sleep;
So I, first waking from oblivion, heard,
With heart that kindled to the call of song,
The voice of young life, fluting like a bird,
And echoed that light lilting; till, ere long,
Lured onward by that happy singing-flight,
I caught the stormy summons of the sea,
And dared the restless deeps that, day and night,
Surge with the life-song of humanity.

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878-)

In America the break with the older poetic tradition is more marked than in England; we have few living poets who can be classed as conservative. The only older American poets who exert any appreciable influence on contemporary poetry are Poe and Whitman, neither of whom was a New Englander. Contemporary American poets endorse Poe's oft-affirmed conviction that the business of poetry is not morality but beauty. Whitman's influence, as we have already suggested, is much greater. In his use of free verse, in his American themes, and in his hatred of conventional poetic diction Whitman was clearly a forerunner of the new poets. Whitman's "Poets to to Come" seems almost prophetic:

Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,
But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater
than before known,

Arouse! for you must justify me.

Poets and critics of today, even those who were born in New England, have little sympathy with the older poets of that section. The poems of Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, and Lowell, we are reminded, were often vitiated by their provincialism, their prudish reticence, their incessant moralizing. Even the conservative Edmund Clarence Stedman, after compiling his American Anthology, said to a friend that what this country needed was some "adult male verse." Louis Untermeyer, a contemporary poet and critic, refers to the work of the older New England poets as "poems of the insistently didactic type, -where all things in and out of nature, from a cham

bered nautilus to a village blacksmith, are used to point a specious and usually irrelevant moral." A contemporary American poet has cleverly expressed the attitude of his fellows in a Shakespearean sonnet.

CERTAIN AMERICAN POETS

They cowered inert before the study fire
While mighty winds were ranging wide and free,
Urging their torpid fancies to aspire

With "Euhoe! Bacchus! Have a cup of tea."

They tripped demure from church to lecture-hall,
Shunning the snare of farthingales and curls,
Woman they thought half angel and half doll,
The Muses' temple a boarding-school for girls.

Quaffing Pierian draughts from Boston pump,
They toiled to prove their homiletic art

Could match with nasal twang and pulpit thump
In maxims glib of meeting-house and mart.

Serenely their ovine admirers graze.
Apollo wears frock-coats, the Muses stays.

Odell Shepard (1884-)

It is true that Longfellow thought it "exquisite to read good novels in bed with wax lights in silver candlesticks." It is true also that after reading Frémont's account of a journey through the Rockies, he wrote in his journal: "What a wild life, and what a fresh kind of existence! But ah, the discomforts!" And yet the sonnet we have quoted is not wholly just even to Longfellow, the pet aversion of the American poets of today. It is a char