Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1913

Transcriber’s Note
Table of Contents added by Transcriber.
Including the Magazines and the Poets A Review
BY WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE Author of “The House of Falling Leaves,” “The Book of Elizabethan Verse,” etc.

ISSUED BY W. S. B. CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
COPYRIGHT 1913, BY WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
Thomas Todd Co., Printers 14 Beacon Street, Boston, Mass.
TO THE POETS OF AMERICA SINGING TODAY THE SOUL OF THEIR COUNTRY TRUTH, BEAUTY, BROTHERHOOD THEIR NAMES ARE TORCHES
Poetry is one of the realities that persist. The façade and dome of palace and temple, the monuments of heroes and saints, crumble before the ruining breath of time, while the Psalms last. So when another year passes and we sum up our achievements, there is no achievement more vital in registering the soul of a people than its poetry. But in all things that men do, their relationship is objective except those things in which art, religion, love, and nature express their influence through the private thoughts and feelings of men. These four things are the realities, all the others are symbols. And the essence of art, as well as religion and love and nature, is a conscious and mysterious thing, called Poetry. And men will find, if they will only stop to look, that at the bottom of all this poetry, no matter what the theme or the particular artistic shaping, there is something with which they are familiar, because in their own souls there has been an unceasing mystery which they find named in the magic utterance of some lonely and neglected maker of verses.
The poetry in the magazines for this past year has been of a general high standard. The long poems have been well sustained, and there has been a larger quantity of pure lyric pieces than in the past two or three years. The influence of Masefield has shown itself in American verse, notably in the two long poems by Harry Kemp, “The Harvest Hand” and “The Factory.” One of the noblest poems of the year is Henry van Dyke’s “Daybreak in the Grand Cañon of Arizona,” which breathes a fine national spirit, full of reverence for the greatness with which the American destiny is symbolized in the natural grandeur of our country. Mr. Markham has a long narrative in “The Shoes of Happiness,” full of his visionary and spiritual promptings. And in “The Vision of Gettysburg” Mr. Robert Underwood Johnson reflects also the national spirit with particular significance.