Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1914

AND YEAR BOOK OF AMERICAN POETRY EDITED BY WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
NEW YORK LAURENCE J. GOMME 1914 Copyright, 1914, by WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE Published December, 1914 Second Edition January, 1916 VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK

TO LOUIS V. LEDOUX AND EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON Palmam qui meruit ferat




The modern idea seems to be that poetry has no relation to life. Life in the modern sense is action, progress, success. Poetry has been conceded special themes: it can deal with passion,—the strange and unnatural and unreal physical attraction of the sexes—with nature, with the symbols of mythology, and with the characteristic sentimental heroism of history and events. With reality, it must have nothing to do. It is supposed, by the modern world of Anglo-Saxon literalness, to create an atmosphere of illusion, which one must avoid to keep one’s emotions from going astray in a civilization that needs the hardest kind of common sense. It is paradoxical that the English-speaking people who have given the world the greatest poets, should take this false attitude while in possession of the greatest spiritual and imaginative legacy of life and experience, bequeathed them from one generation to another during the last four hundred years.
Escaping the illusion, this modern world has become the prisoner of delusion. For, if poetry deals with anything, it deals with reality. No matter how remote the setting, how subtle the communication, the one hard fact about true poetry, is its reality. The poet at the core and centre of life, surrounded with his dreams, his clairvoyant madness imbibed from the full draught of experience, his intensity of emotion, his childlike tenderness of sympathy, his quickening ecstasy of unashamed and unrestrained feeling, is considered the abnormal product of modern civilization; while in truth he is alone the one normal type of modern mankind, because he alone is in absolute harmony and understanding with the real and common impulse of human destiny.