The Janitor's Boy, and Other Poems

Marceau Nathalia Clara Ruth Crane
THE JANITOR’S BOY AND OTHER POEMS
By NATHALIA CRANE
NEW YORK THOMAS SELTZER 1924
Copyright, 1924, by THOMAS SELTZER, Inc. All Rights Reserved First Printing, May, 1924 Second Printing, May, 1924
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Foreword, by WILLIAM ROSE BENET Nathalia at Ten, by NUNNALLY JOHNSON Afterword, by EDMUND LEAMY
TO MY MOTHER


When I took the two poems from Nathalia’s mother, and promised to read them, I had seen none of the press notices of Miss Crane’s talent. Being only a quasi-journalist I seldom read the newspapers. I am extremely skeptical of infant prodigies, and the poems of Nathalia’s that I have since seen most quoted in newspaper articles about her are just what you would expect. They prove nothing except that she is a little girl with a lively fancy. Certain poems in this first collection, however, seem to me to prove something more.
Some long time ago in Scotland there was a little girl named Marjorie Fleming, and to-day a twelve-year-old, Helen Douglas Adam, the daughter of a Scotch parson and his wife of Dundee, is her successor overseas to the juvenile purple. Miss Adam has now been published both in England and America. Yet the best poems of hers that I have read do not seem to me to possess such individuality or such maturity of melody and diction as Miss Crane’s best poems. Then there is our own Hilda Conkling, whose mother is a distinguished American poet, and who writes in free verse and has published several volumes of poems. Hilda is a real poet. But she has never grappled with and conquered certain problems of poetic structure from which Miss Crane, by sheer instinct, seems to have wrested occasional victory.