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Hilda (Doolittle) Aldington, one of the early imagist poets, and the wife of Richard Aldington, the English writer, is the daughter of an American professor, was born in Pennsylvania, and is a graduate of Bryn Mawr. She lives, for the most part, in England, though she often visits Greece, from which she draws much of the special beauty of her work. A true imagist, in technique and spirit, her vivid verses bear the mark of an inherited inspiration. When she was in America last year, I found her to be one of the few people who seem bodily a perfect expression of the spiritual quality of their writing. Tall, dark, nervous, slender, with quick hands and deep restless eyes, she has that same delicate firm quality that makes her work almost a perfect modern translation of the mood of Greek Art and Culture.
No one person in America has done more over a long period for spreading an interest in poetry and the writers of poetry than Jessie B. Rittenhouse. As a lecturer, as a maker of anthologies, as a critic and as a poet, she has long been a notable figure in America. I remember the first of her "Poet's Parties" I ever attended. There were Edith M. Thomas, Clinton Scollard, Witter Bynner, John Hall Wheelock, Edwin Markham and many more -- the old guard of "The Poetry Society," so to speak. Yet she has endeavored to encourage the young writer, too, and her advice and assistance has aided many who would otherwise have been discouraged. Her love songs and other lyrics have always been popular, and, although they are perhaps not so important as her anthologies, they have a special and quiet grace. Born in the East, at one time a teacher and later a competent newspaper woman, she has brought to the development of American poetry a conservative enthusiasm which has peculiarly aided the knowledge of native writing.
Assisting Harriet Monroe in the editing of "Poetry," Marion Strobel writes criticism, short stories, and verse in her spare hours. She is a young woman of varied interests, plays a better game of golf than most, dances, swims, rides and takes her part in the normal social life of Chicago with more than ordinary verve. Yet she has not collected her poems in a volume. Just as the young men of today who write poetry do not adopt the long hair and open collar of the 'nineties, so the ladies do not languish in scented boudoirs. The new group of women poets is active, vivid, normal and keen. Marion Strobel is one of the most active of them all.
Few people in America understand native rhythms as does Mary Austin. Born in Illinois, she has divided her life between the Far West and the East, making it her special effort to understand the country as a whole. She has written plays, essays, novels and studies of American life. Her work among the Indians has given her not only an unusual mastery of subtle cadences in prose and poetry; but a certain mystic sense of the trend of national feeling that approaches the visionary. A commanding presence, an intuitive understanding and a discriminating tolerance makes Mrs. Austin a truly vital force in American life and literature.
Joseph Andrew Galahad died in Oregon in April of this year. He was a young man who started life as a soldier in the ranks of the U.S. Army. Shortly after he finished his enlistment he sickened with tuberculosis. At this time he began reading poetry and, gradually, began writing it. Several editors in the East became very interested in his work and it was the encouragement of acceptance, and the enjoyment of writing that made it possible for him to struggle through three years of bitterness, during which time he produced a large volume of poetry, some of which shows a finess and strength in the midst of a mass of cruder stuffs. His work appeared in many places, in "Life," in "The North American Review," "Poetry," "Contemporary Verse," etc. Those of us who corresponded with him, and knew his spirit, respected him mightily. His influence was becoming wider at the time of his death. It was the influence of a brave and a creative spirit, fighting against a trying and an inevitable fate.
Over a dinner-table in Buffalo, I met a tall reserved woman, who seemed, perhaps, a trifle withdrawn. She talked of books and plays with intelligence; but with detachment. Then, later in the evening, when the conversation turned to poetry, she became animated and keenly a part of it. Florence Kilpatrick Mixter, the wife of a prominent American business man, occupied with her family and social duties, a club woman and an active participant in various charitable enterprises, has yet found opportunity to contribute her fragile verses to many of the magazines and to publish a collected volume.
The founder of "Voices," an English monthly magazine primarily for young writers, Thomas Moult is a poet (one of the Georgians), a novelist and a critic of many moods. He writes music criticism for the Manchester Guardian, theatre criticism for the Athenæum and book criticism for various English periodicals. His first novel, "Snow Over Elden," was given the highest type of critical praise in London, and his collected poems were well received. His is a delicate fancy in verse and a quiet handling of homely beauty in prose. Not a one-sided, nor yet a two-sided gentleman. In some ways he seems almost to be a British counterpart of our Mr. Heywood Broun; since ever Saturday for the Northcliffe appers, Moult writes an article either on cricket or football!
William Hervey Allen, Jr., was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1889. An infantryman during the war, both in Mexico and in France, he was wounded in action. He is now an Instructor of English at the High School of Charleston, South Carolina, and becoming interested in the legend and temper of the South. His verse has been published widely and collected in several volumes. "Blindman," a war poem, attracted attention, and his first book, "Wampum and Old Gold," was considered by many critics the most noteworthy production in "The Yale Series of Younger Poets." Conservative and melodious in his technique, he is yet modern in feeling and content.
To a Metaphysician
Notably eastern in his education and tendencies, John Hall Wheelock was born on Long Island, was graduated from Harvard where he was class poet, and later studied in the universities of Göttingen, Berlin and Vienna. Since then he has been on the staff of one of the large New York publishers. His verses are musical, sweeping and often vociferous, though in his later moods he has lapsed into quieter measures. An almost passionate love of life and beauty is apparent, contrasting with his tall, brooding, silent figure.
What of good and evil,
Hell and Heaven above --,
Trample them with love!
Ride over them with love!
A native of Illinois, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, who lives now in El Paso, Texas, and has lived practically all of his life in the West, Glen Ward Dresbach is that rarest of persons, a businessman and poet. His present connection is with a packing company. He was at one time in governmental service in the Canal Zone. He has worked in mines. From this vigorous background we might expect the swinging rhythms of a Sandburg: but instead of that we find that Dresbach has a positive aversion to free verse, writes conventional lyrics with technical care, and long narrative and dramatic poems which have none of the vagaries in metre characteristic of much poetry which has come to us from the West.
With her wiry energy and her frail determination, Lola Ridge has crystallized her power of Celtic imagination and made herself a poet when she had formerly been a writer for the popular magazines. She was born in Dublin, but spent most of her life in Australia and New Zealand. It is curious that so assorted an environment should have produced a poem so thoroughly of New York as "The Ghetto," though it is, perhaps, her very understanding of the alien that gives this, her best performance, its peculiar vividness. She has been occupied in various ways during recent years, but has now settled as head of the American offices of "Broom."
One of our few critics of poetry, and an expert parodist, Louis Untermeyer is a serious and acknowledged poet as well. He was born in New York City in 1885, studied to be a professional musician, and ended by entering his father's jewelry manufacturing establishment. I have never discussed the designing of jewelry with him, largely because he has always been so busily talking of poets or poetry. A brilliant analytical mind, a zealous interest in social problems, and a growing ability to handle his lyrical medium characterize this forceful, able, astute man of letters. His anthologies, particularly "Modern American Poetry," are fine examples of taste in selection and penetration in presenting biographical and critical facts. Strongly race-conscious, he yet has a broad understanding of the psychological problems of the Jew. More forceful than most critics, and a more honest workman than most poets, he is conspicuously a healthy influence in a American poetry.
Of Scotch parentage, but born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1880, Daniel Henderson began his literary career there by writing short stories and poems for various publications. Coming to New York City, he joined the staff of McClure's Magazine, where he remained until recently, when he left that publication to take up work with the New York Evening Post. His children's books, his verses, and his "Greatheart: The Life Story of Theodore Rooseveldt," are well known. His touch is light and his lyrics, occasionally dangerously pretty, are nevertheless melodious.
When she was seventeen, Jean Starr Untermeyer came to New York City from her birthplace in Zanesville, Ohio, to attend boarding school. In 1907 she married Louis Untermeyer, the poet and critic. She is much interest both in music and in poetry, and her careful lyrics, both in regular and free rhythms, show keen intellectual integrity and a passion for the judicously selected phrase. More colorful and whimsical than most of the younger women poets, she allows her rich imagination to play without repression over the varying moods of ripening womanhood.
Xenia, Ohio, is the "Prairie Town" of Helen Santmyer, who was graduated from Wellesley College in 1918, and is returning there now to teach as an assistant in the English Literature Department. For a time she was secretary to the editor of a magazine in New York City, then she went back to school teaching in her native town. This one sonnet is all that I have seen of her work; but it seems to me one of the most satisfactory poems I have been fortunate enough to secure.
There is no man writing today more characteristic of a certain type of American thought and rhythm than Carl Sandburg. To call him the poet of the proletariat would be absurd. Yet, in that phrase would lie something of the truth. Born in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1878, with Swedish ancestry, his life has been a succession of occupations which have brought him close to the soil of America. He has been dish-washer and scene-shifter, harvester and porter, and soldier in the Spanish-American war. This was before he entered Lombard College, where he became editor-in-chief of the undergraduate newspaper. It was from those earlier days, rather than from later ones as advertising man, newspaperman or political organizer, that he learned the love of the hobo, the intimate sounds of the railway yards, the fierce brutal coarseness and ugliness together with the tender wisdom of massed humanity. His success was long in coming; but his poems appearing in "Poetry" in 1914 attracted wide attention and his "Chicago Poems" clinched the matter. Sandburg himself, an impressive slouching figure with white hair and deep eyes, can best teach an appreciation of his own poetry by his reading of it. Of all his work, "Cool Tombs" and the recent "The WIndy City" are my favorites. I shall not quarrel with those who say that his work is prose rather than poetry. Sandburg, the noblest inheritor of the tradition of Whitman, the strongest intrepreter of the emotional core of America, is above a matter of definition. At his worst, he is sometimes impossible to understand; at his best he is so vital, so rich, so broad in his approach to life, that he stands as the people's great visionary.
Take any streetful of poeple buying clothes and groceries,
cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing
tin horns . . . tell me if the lovers are losers . . .
tell me if any get more than the lovers . . . in the
dust . . . in the cool tombs.