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Once a lawyer, now a schoolteacher, Clement Wood is, however, primarily the poet and novelist. He was born in Alabama and lives now, most of the year, in New York City. Violent in his opinions, never hesitant in expressing them, hard-working, and filled with energy, he makes poetry a flowing and vital subject for discussion. Like Maxwell Bodenheim, his provocative discourses in poetic gatherings frequently cause a burst of adverse feeling. There is something pre-eminently masculine and dominating about his verses. They are powerful, vigorous and often undisciplined, yet they are often marked by a tone of satire which, being not so deep-rooted as Bodenheim's, is not so striking. He is greatly interested in various psychological problems, and it is this that has guided him in writing his two novels, the last of which is a serious attempt to analyze the Negro.
(With thanks to the forgotten wit who first found the thirteenth line)
A remarkably forceful critic and writer of crisp intellectual prose, Babette Deutsch, who is now married to Avrahm Yarmolinksy, is also a poet of unusual sensitiveness and skill. She was born in New York City and was graduated from Barnard College in 1917. The quick bird-like quality of her speech and action is shown in her poetry. It is vivid, alert, cerebrated, and yet at the same time filled with feminine subtlety and understanding.
Waitsburg, in the state of Washington, and Hawaii combined, form an unusual background. Genevieve Taggard, born in the former, went to Hawaii at the age of two, where she lived with her missionary mother and father for eighteen years on plantations with Portuguese, Porto Ricans, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, natives and Filipinos. Later, she was graduated from the University of California; and she considers it of first importance that she studied prosody there under Leonard Bacon. I met her when she was in New York, one of the editors of "The Measure." How can one say, tactfully, that a young lady is exceedingly beautiful? She married Robert Wolf, a writer, and they are now living and working in California. Her poem "Ice-Age" is, perhaps, her best. She is one of that group of young women poets in which Winifred Welles, Amanda Hall and Elinor Wylie are the increasingly important figures.
A roving figure in American letters is Christopher Morley. Poet, essayist, story-writer, columnist, and founder of the small but famous "Three Hours for Lunch Club," he is best discovered in one of the second hand bookshops in the neighborhood of Park Row, or just after he has chanced upon a new café. Morley is the chief exponent of the Coffee House tradition in American letters. His post-graduate work at Oxford has given him the genial manners, and nature has added the appearance, of an English country squire. He has many violent enthusiams and only a few strong prejudices. A bookish man in his conversation, a family-man in much of his light verse; yet, in spite of his strong leaning toward sentiment, a keen wit and one of the few poets who is at the same time both popular and authentic.
(1821 - 1921)
Born in New York City and living there now, having spent part of his life in Paris, Robert J. Roe, still under thirty years of age, has been lineman, factory hand, a sailor in sailing vessels, a soldier, a newspaper hack (according to his own phrase), and a rancher in Arizona. Perhaps it was during that last period, when he was alone for months at a time, that he gained the curious psychological detachment which marks so many of his verses; but his poems have appeared in many of the magazines, and his oddly phrased, penetrating "Sailor's Notebook" was an original and striking piece of work. Showing the influence of Whitman strongly, he adds to it a modern sense of rhythm and the peculiar charm that seems to have resulted from his desert and sea wanderings.
F.P.A was born in 1881. As a parodist, light-verse poet, columnist and a critic of letters and morals, he is well known in American journalistic and literary circles. A native of Chicago, he started his newspaper career there, but has since migrated to New York where he now conducts "The Conning Tower," a daily satirical column in the New York World. Often forbiddinly critical in print, he is, in person, shy and filled with boyish enthusiasms. With a genuine hatred for emotional theatricality, with a meticulous regard for the fine points of grammar and verse construction, with a keen eye for the pungent line in the daily news, and the odd event in passing life, he is one of the most unusual and most popular figures in contemporary journalism. I prefer to think of him in his apartment, surrounded by odd musical instruments which he is fond of collecting, than in his office at the World where he seems to be in continual vocal difficulty with a telephone operator
To something of the delicacy of Emily Dickinson, and some of the exotic imagination of William Blake, Elinor Wylie adds a peculiar warmth that is like the warmth of snow melting under concentrated sunlight. Her reputation has been quickly made and firmly established over a period of only a little more than a year. Her sparse lyrics are to be found in practically every magazine where verse is published. Her rooms near Washington Square are filled with poets, essayists, and novelists. Since Edna St. Vincent Millay, no Amiercan woman writer has so suddenly and brilliantly impressed her work and her personality on the public consciousness; and without visible effort, for this slender, pale woman is modest, withdrawn and shy. It is a quality of almost mystic vision that illumninates her work and gives it power and magic.
Zona Gale of Portage, Wisconsin, is better known for her Friendship Village stories and for her realistic novel and play, "Miss Lulu Bett," than for her poetry. Thd first time I met her was at one of the late rehearsals of that play, where she was sitting, quietly, and with poise, while one boy after another failed to give satisfaction in the juvenile part. I cannot imagine Zona Gale exasperated. Her career has been an unusual one and, in spite of her graceful acceptance of its events, spectacular. From a writer of sensational reviews on the New York Evening World, she became a creator of somewhat sentimental and popular stories. Then, after a period of years, was again found in the "best-seller" lists, hailed as a fine realistic novelist, and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the best play of 1920. Her interest in young writers is great. She has helped them materially as well as spiritually, and her life, which she divides between Portage and New York City, is filled with adventures in discovery and kindness.
Occasionally there is a popular lyricist, whose work yet flashes with genuine poetic feeling. Of these is Amelia Josephine Burr, who was born in New York City, was graduated there from Hunter College, has travelled widely and was recently married to the Reverent Carl H. Elmore of Englewood, New Jersey. Her novels, too, are filled with warmth and poetic feeling. Her adventures in the Orient have colored her work, and with energy and charm she succeeded in getting to know much concerning the natives and their customs wherever she went. Much of her verse must, of course, be classed as balladry, and it is as a balladist that she has gained a wide audience, but, especially in her later work, there is much more than graceful appeal.
Nacogdoches, Texas, is a fitting name for the home of a poet, and Mrs. Karle Wilson Baker writes me that twenty years of East Texas have made her a tree-worshipper and a "desultory but ardent" student of birds. She was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and studied for some two years at the University of Chicago. Bot her one book for children, "The Garden of the Plynck," and her many lyrics, show the same genius for deftness of pattern and delicacy of imagery. Her moods are many, and she has a faculty for portraying deep emotions with an airy touch.
With one volume of poems published in her native England and reprinted here under the title "Saturday Market," Charlotte Mew immediately received wide critical recognition last year. Her dramatic poems, with their simplicity and force, her carefully-constructed and yet poignant lyrics, were impressive even though their volume was slender. When I read this book, I wrote to a friend in England to see if he could secure a poem for me. Miss Mew replied, cordially, and this fine lyric was the result. She has the Englishwoman's distaste for revealment of biographical detail; but her strong, peentrating, strikingly original work speaks tellingly of her.
A southerner, yet strongly identified with Chicago because of his newspaper work there, John V.A. Weaver has become known as a poet, critic and short-story writer, in a remarkably short time. Young, agile, enthusiastic, his love poems in the "American Language" and his short stories reflect his active knowledge of youth, and, while they sometimes approach the sentimental, his sense of humor usually saves him from mawkishness. Although his present popularity lies in his ability to poetize the common speech, I have a feeling that the only enduring medium for his abilities must be words that are more the language and less the dialect.
A native of Oregon, a graduate of and a former teacher at the University of California, Mary Carolyn Davies, after a sojourn in Greenwich Village, wrote a novel about it. She also wrote children's poems, which together with the lightness of her other lyrics, have a charm that has an undoubted child appeal. Her verses belong in the group which, with varying individual traits, contains Margaret Widdemer, Sara Teasdale, Jessie Rittenhouse, Marguerite Wilkinson and Leonora Speyer. They are throroughly feminine, and without that curious mixture of masculine brittleness and feminine twist of phrase that characterizes the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie, and several less well known women poets. Miss Davies' lyrics are direct translations of mood and experience rather than poetic abstractions.
A Canadian, living in Chicago, and editing "The Wave," Vincent Starrett has at least one enthusiasm, and that is his admiration for Arthur Machen, the English novelist and essayist. Until I met them both in Chicago, I had frequently confused Vincent Starrett with Lew Sarett. Unfortunately I saw them at the same time, and have a fear that ultimately I shall again confuse them. Mr. Starrett was born in Toronto in 1886 and has been engaged in newspaper work practically all of his life. In 1914-15 he was war correspondent for the Chicago Daily News in Mexico. He has published books of essays, criticism and poetry, and has edited volumes in both the Modern Library and Everyman's Library.