The New York herald., 1922-04-16

fred Noyes. Frederick A. Stokes
Company.
rN this new volume, Watchers of
the Sky by Alfred Noyes am
reminded how rapidly we pass
into the past. Ever since he first de-
lighted us with his adventurous, dar-
ing and defiant Drake" and those
sumptuous and richly lifted lyrics
like "Come Down to Kew in Lilac
Time" he has been to us not a poet
for youth but poet of youth.
This quality of youth in poetry is
far rarer than is generally believed,
and it is quality which Mr.. Noyes
possesses in abundant measure, par
ticularly when we compare him to
the proudly proclaimed younger
poets. Indeed. / am very frequently
. inclined to Believe that the so-called
younger poets" as poets are not
young at all. that whatever other
qualities they may have this one they
have not. None of our contemporary
poets. for instance, is young in the
!. carefree, rollicking fashion in which
Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman
were young in the Songs from
Vagabondia" thirty years ago. And
yet Taine has said in his discussion
, of Musset that youth is the greatest
gift which poet can bring to an old
civilization.
do not mean to imply that this is
the greatest quality of poetry by
any means, and / am we'll aware
that there are great poetic ages in
which the spirit of youth is en-
tirely wanting There is little of it
in the age of Pericles: there is
almost none in the great French
century of Louis XVI. Boileau and
Racine never wrote a line of it, nor
did Lafontaine. even when he de-
vised his Fable~ supposedly for
children. 1t is in the age of
Pope and Dryden. Shelley, who fell
upon the thorns of life and bled, was
never really young. Byron put
but little of it into his verse though
his letters are full of it. Words
worth left US almost no record of
that blissful time in his own life
which he reports to us as having
been very Heaven" Indeed, above
many ages in poetry we might write
as epigraph:
: That time of year thou mayest
in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none.
or few. do hang
Upon those boughs which shake
against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late
the sweet birds sang.
H.
There are, however. individual
poets who are richly endowed with
this quality. Anacreon wrote the
poetry of youth until past 80. Sap
pho wrote it. and so did Catullus.
So did the unknown author of "Au-
cassin and Nicoiette," and in certain
ages, such as the spacious time of
great Elizabeth" and the heyday of
the French Romantics, We find it
quite generally.
I am sure that my younger friends
like Edmund Wilson. Jr.. John Peale
Bishop and Scott Fitzgerald would
tell me that the new school is bring
ing back the spirit of youth into
poetry. l confess / cannot find it
except in an occasional bird song
of the late Francis Ledwidge and
now and then hiding coyly and shyly
behind certain of the magical verses
of Walter de la Mare. Strangely
enough, these are not leaders in the
movement, and | am forced again to
wonder whether the younger poets
give us the poetry of youth at ali
and whether in their haste to re-
juvenate poetry they have not for
gotten to introduce that rather cap
ital quality the spirit of youth itself.
Where is t1.e spirit of youth in Amy
Lowell or in that ablest and most