Kentucky Poems

The Author's thanks are due to Mr. R. H. RUSSELL, of New York, for kind permission to reprint from Shapes and Shadows four of the poems published in this volume.
MADISON CAWEIN
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
EDMUND GOSSE
NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & CO. 1903
NOTE
The poems included in this volume have been selected from the following volumes of the author: Moods and Memories , Red Leaves and Roses , Poems of Nature and Love , Intimations of the Beautiful , Days and Dreams , Undertones , Idyllic Monologues , The Garden of Dreams , Shapes and Shadows , Myth and Romance , and Weeds by the Wall . None of the longer poems have been included in this selection.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Since the disappearance of the latest survivors of that graceful and somewhat academic school of poets who ruled American literature so long from the shores of Massachusetts, serious poetry in the United States seems to have been passing through a crisis of languor. Perhaps there is no country on the civilised globe where, in theory, verse is treated with more respect and, in practice, with a greater lack of grave consideration than America. No conjecture as to the reason of this must be attempted here, further than to suggest that the extreme value set upon sharpness, ingenuity and rapid mobility is obviously calculated to depreciate and to condemn the quiet practice of the most meditative of the arts. Hence we find that it is what is called 'humorous' verse which is mainly in fashion on the western side of the Atlantic. Those rhymes are most warmly welcomed which play the most preposterous tricks with language, which dazzle by the most mountebank swiftness of turn, and which depend most for their effect upon paradox and the negation of sober thought. It is probable that the diseased craving for what is 'smart,' 'snappy' and wide-awake, and the impulse to see everything foreshortened and topsy-turvy, must wear themselves out before cooler and more graceful tastes again prevail in imaginative literature.