In fact one might name nearly a hundred writers who have given pleasure with this or that matter in rhyme. But it is one thing to take pleasure in a man's work and another to respect him as a great artist.
Ezra Pound
REVIEWS
The Lyric Year, Mr. Kennerley's new annual, contains among its hundred contributions nearly a score of live poems, among which a few excite the kind of keen emotion which only art of real distinction can arouse.
Among the live poems the present reviewer would count none of the prize-winners, not even Mr. Sterling's, the best of the three, whose rather stiff formalities in praise of Browning are, however, lit now and then by shining lines, as—
Drew as a bubble from old infamies.... The shy and many-colored soul of man.
The other two prize-poems must have been measured by some academic foot-rule dug up from the eighteenth century. Orrick Johns' Second Avenue is a Grays Elegy essay of prosy moralizing, without a finely poetic line in it, or any originality of meaning or cadence. And the second prize went to an ode still more hopelessly academic. Indeed, To a Thrush, by Thomas Augustine Daly, is one of the most stilted poems in the volume, a far-away echo of echoes, full of the approved "poetic" words—throstle, pregnant, vernal, cerulean, teen, chrysmal, even paraclete—and quite guiltless of inspiration.