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The return to poetry must not be deferred longer. And first let me speak of John Farrar’s book of verse, The Middle Twenties, which is more than usually interesting because it is the first collection of his serious work in a half dozen years. There has been none since his book, Forgotten Shrines. I do not forget Songs for Parents, but that is somewhat of a piece with his book of plays for children, The Magic Sea Shell, and it is likely it would continue popular for this reason alone. His work as an editor and an anthologist, with many other activities, have tended to obscure Farrar the poet, and have certainly taken time and energy the poet could ill spare. But I know that much of the hardest work Mr. Farrar has done these past few years has been upon the verse in The Middle Twenties. The result ought to satisfy him, though probably it won’t; he is not easily pleased with his own work. But all the poems in The Middle Twenties keep to a high level and the volume has more than variety, it has positive and effective contrast. Whether he is most successful in the “Amaryllis” group, gay and rollicking, or in the savage pain and passion of “The Squaw” is for the reader’s own decision. But from the flaming “Ego,” the opening poem, to the fine understanding of such work as “War Women” the book affords a range of subject, treatment, and emotional feeling which leaves no reader indifferent.
Nellie Burget Miller’s In Earthen Bowls explains its title in these lines which open the book:
So here we have our treasure in an earthen bowl,
Distorted, marred, and set to common use:
And some will never see beyond the form of clay,
And some will stoop to peer within and softly say,
“There is a wondrous radiance prisoned there,
And I heard the stir of an angel’s wing.”
Such a volume makes its candid appeal to the audience—very large—which asks insistently for poems of a simple sincerity and a direct relation to daily lives. Their lives are the earthen bowls in which they want to be able to see the suggestion of something radiant and feel the stir of something divine. In the fifty-seven poems in her book, Mrs. Miller has not tried to build an imaginary world, but has appealed to the love of nature, and to the feelings of happiness and grief, for her lyrical expression. The evidence of her success has been recorded in several ways. She has, for one thing, been made the chairman of the literary division of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs. She has also been chosen poet laureate of her State, Colorado.
Essentially the same qualities of mood and appeal characterize Martha Haskell Clark’s book, The Home Road. Mrs. Clark has been a contributor of verse to Harper’s and Scribner’s magazines and to several of the enormously popular women’s magazines, so-called. Her poems are concerned, as her title indicates, chiefly with the longing, often wistful and sometimes delightful, for an old home or fireside, old friends and holidays and memories. The language is as simple as the feeling. Curtis Hidden Page, professor of English at Dartmouth and compiler of English Poets of the Nineteenth Century, writes the preface to The Home Road.
Here is an anthology of recitations! Grace Gaige’s Recitations—Old and New for Boys and Girls seems to me of more than ordinary interest, because the author is the buyer of books for one of the largest stores in the world. It is a store of so widespread a reputation that one thinks of it as constantly creating book readers from the mere fact of its having a book department. And certainly Miss Gaige is in an unequaled position to know what, in the way of a book, people want. Well, she does. And having found no present-day book that quite met the problem, she has made one. Her Recitations—Old and New for Boys and Girls has a foreword by Christopher Morley and contains poems dealing with every imaginable subject. They are divided into sections in a natural grouping: poems about and for children, poems about fairies, about birds and other animals, about flowers and seasons; humorous poems, patriotic poems, holiday poems—I can’t remember them all. But despite the classification, the range is so great that over 200 poems had to go under “Miscellaneous.” You are sure to find it there, if nowhere else!
How were they chosen? With just three things in mind, (1) their interest, (2) their proved popularity, and (3) their special fitness for recitation. The triple crown of the collection is the threefold index, of authors, of titles, and of first lines. And although people want poems for recitation, and though these poems are for recitation, there is nothing to debar this mammoth anthology as a book for reading. As such, it will be found a work of the utmost satisfaction.
A book that particularly deserves inclusion in this chapter is the new illustrated edition of Jay William Hudson’s novel, Abbé Pierre. The great success of this charming story is of the kind that goes steadily on, year after year; and while our present-day taste is rather against the illustration of novels, a book of this character (like David Harum) can be greatly enhanced by the right pictures. Mr. Hudson has got exactly the thing, I think, in the sixteen pencil drawings and the endpapers by Mr. Edwin Avery Park. This artist will also become familiar to readers by his work in collaboration with Maitland Belknap in Princeton Sketches. Mr. Park traveled in the parts of France where the scenes of Abbé Pierre are laid and has caught both the spirit and character of place and tale. His drawings have been rather carefully reproduced as half-tones, and with other details of the book’s new dress, make a volume of a sort in entire keeping with the novel’s quality.