"Some time ago you asked me," said Mr. Robinson, "how I accounted for our difficulty in making a correct estimate of the poetry of one's own time. The question is a difficult one. I don't even say that it has an answer. But the solution of the thing seems to me to be related to what I said about the quality of finality that seems to exist in all real poetry. Finality seems always to have had a way of not obtruding itself to any great extent."
LET POETRY BE FREE
JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY
Mrs. Lionel Marks—or Josephine Preston Peabody, to call her by the name which she has made famous—is a poet whose tendency has always been toward democracy. From The Singing Leaves, her first book of lyrics, to The Piper (the dramatic poem which received the Stratford-on-Avon prize in 1910), and The Wolf of Gubbio, the poetic representation of events in St. Francis's life in her latest published book, she has chosen for her theme not fantastic and rare aspects of nature, nor the new answers of her own emotions, but things that are common to all normal mankind—such as love and religion. Also, without seeming to preach, she is always expressing her love for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, and although she never dwells upon the overworked term, she is as devoted an adherent of the brotherhood of man as was William Morris.
Therefore I was eager to learn whether or not she held the opinion—often expressed during the past months—that poetry is becoming more democratic, less an art practised and appreciated by the chosen few. Also I wanted to know if she saw signs of this democratization of poetry in the development of free verse, or vers libre, as those who write it prefer to say, in the apparently growing tendency of poets to give up the use of rhyme and rhythm.
"Certainly, poetry is steadily growing more democratic," said Mrs. Marks. "More people are writing poetry to-day than fifty years ago, and the appreciation of poetry is more general. Most poets of genuine calling are writing now with the world in mind as an audience, not merely for the entertainment of a little literary cult.
"But I do not think that the vers libre fad has any connection with this tendency, or with the development of poetry at all. Indeed, I do not think that the cult is growing; we hear more of it in the United States than we did a year or two ago, but that is chiefly because London and Paris have outworn its novelty, so the vers libristes concentrate their energies on Chicago and New York.