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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: I was sorry to leave you, Because I knew you needed me. But are there no women who are sorry to die Because they need their husbands? I wanted, dying, to be one of them! 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: She had a ring, and roses in her cheek. A year’s wait reaps the reward of her wedding day. She had no wedding bells. Her well-oiled sire Led her in tribal veilings up the aisle To where a curate, impatient for his hire, Hovered, and Tom in his stiff Sunday style. Things went through quick. It mattered not. She moved In a mazed phantasmagoria all the while. 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_: Death sets free: it is Life that holds in thrall ... Blow up, O trumpets of eternity! Shout, souls of God, from starry sea to sea! Stars, clash your shining shields--a soul is free! iii 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: All things are doubly fair If patience fashion them And care-- Verse, enamel, marble, gem.... --All things return to dust Save beauties fashioned well. The bust Outlasts the citadel. The gods, too, die, alas! But deathless and more strong Than brass Remains the sovereign song. 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. iv 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. v 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