John Keats, to whom art was not the facing of life, but a beautiful embroidery upon the finely woven texture of his own imaginings, to gain a dozen realistic poems of the type of Crabbe? Yet, the realistic poet at his best is immensely stimulating, and brings us imperishable gifts, as Edgar Lee Masters has done in his "Spoon River Anthology", and Robert Frost, in his studies of New England life. Poetry is valuable in proportion as it deepens our sense of living. Whether that sense is deepened by calling our imaginations, or our intellects, or both, into play, is of little moment. The tendency now is to think of poetry as a food by which we are nourished, and not as a narcotic. The best poets in America to-day are encouraging us to face life, rather than showing us an escape from it.

"It is a very great pity that children, who are natural lovers of poetry, are given such an unpalatable dose of it in school. I remember that the first poem I was made to learn by heart, when I was scarcely able to read the lines, was Longfellow's 'The Builders'. The lesson contained in these humdrum verses is doubtless a valuable one, but not half so valuable as the incipient craving for poetry which it nearly succeeded in stifling in me. Children, who are all really barbarians, should be given the sort of poetry that semi-barbarous people make and enjoy - ballads full of primitive and even brutal feeling. If this were done, there would be joy and not disgust whenever a poem appears on the page of a school reader.

"The writing of poems should be considered as natural and simple as the writing of letters. Children should make up poems without the slightest embarrassment, and the time spent in school writing their own poems would be better spent than that consumed in learning arithmetic.

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Poetry is the most democratic of the arts, because no money is needed for
long special training in learning how to compose it. It is the best an-
tidote for the morbid repression that many of us have inherited from gen-
erations of Puritan ancestors. When everybody writes his own poems, two-
thirds of the misery of the world will flow away singing, like ice-locked
rivers when the spring sets in.

"What do I think of the effect of the war on poetry? I should say
that after the war has been over for several years we shall find that we
have a harvest of rich verse. Just now it is too soon to try to appraise
what has been written. Nothing finer has been done however than Mass-
field's 'August, 1914'. Among the younger Englishmen, Siegfried Sassoon
and Robert Nichols have given us tremendously vital work, and have shown
us the beauty that lurks in the terror and noise of war. And I remember
gratefully a most touching and unique poem by J. C. Squire addressed to a
dog whose master has died in battle. Among the women poets on the other
side of the water, Katharine Tynan has spoken of the war with exquisite
tenderness and simplicity. Of the many poems written by Americans that
rise with beautiful courage from our tumult, is a brief lyric entitled
'Reveille', in "These Times", by Louis Untermeyer. It is worth scores of
the louder and more blatant utterances that crowd our magazines and news-
papers. The same may be said of Vachel Lindsay's "Abraham Lincoln Walks
at Midnight". One of the earliest poems about the war produced in America
still remains, to my mind, an unforgettable piece of work, —Louise Driscoll's
'Metal Checks', which won the prize offered by 'Poetry, a Magazine of Verse',
in 1914. A poem by Carl Sandberg, called 'Our Prayer of Thanks', while not
a war poem, is one that every reader will feel deeply grateful for in a time
of stress.
I know of no poem filled with a more dauntless and unfl breaking courage".

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