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Born in 1895, an easterner and a graduate of Harvard in 1917, Robert Hillyer now teaches there as an instructor. During the war he was overseas with the French Ambulance in 1917 and later a Lieutenant of Ordinance in the A.E.F. As a versifier, he is a vigorous classicist, and his work shows a marked tendency to draw from Greek and Elizabethan springs of beauty.
Born in Washington, D.C., of a New England mother and Count Ferdinand von Storsh, a young Prussian officer who fought in the Union Army during the civil war, Leonora Speyer has led a wandering existence. Now, it is only occasionally in her Washington Square home that friends are permitted to hear her violin playing. Yet she once made a brilliant début with the Boston Symphony orchestra and for three years played over the country in concert. After her marriage she lived and travelled widely in Europe. It was not until 1915 that she started to write. Her short stories were unusual and successful; but she gave them up when she found that poetry was her favorite method of expression. Filled with emotional power and swinging rhythm, her first volume of verse and her later lyrics fully justify her decision.
Considered by many critics America's foremost poet, with the publication of his collected poems, the awarding to him of the Pulitzer Prize and the decreeing of a doctor's degree by Yale University, Edwin Arlington Robinson has achieved something of the popularity he has so richly deserved for years. He was born in 1869 in Head Tide, Maine. One of the few American poets to receive the direct patronage of a President, Robinson was given a post in the New York Custom House by Theodore Roosevelt, and held it from the year 1905 to 1910. It was natural that Roosevelt should have admired the strong, subtle, tender, ironical measures of Robinson's verse. In his concise, measured lines there is a deep faith and a quiet progression toward a fine vision. I remember the first time I went to see him in his Brooklyn room, sitting quietly in the midst of paintings by a friend of his, smoking, reading, working steadily. He is a quiet, brooding, unusual figure. Poetry, he has made his life work, and he plies his craft with a determination and a skill that one might expect to find in the work-room of a Benvenuto Cellini. His most distinguished volume, "The Man Against the Sky," appeared in 1916, yet there is no lapse of rigorous maintenance of his own standards in such later books as "The Three Taverns," or his dramatic poem, "Avon's Harvest."
Exhibiting his collection of Chinese jade in a room filled with Chinese paintings, the President of "The Poetry Society of America" is completely at home. He is an appreciator of the odd and the exotic, a characteristic which is often displayed in his verses. Witter Bynner was born in Brooklyn in 1881, was graduated from Harvard and started his literary life as an editor. He has published several volumes of poems, an excellent translation of "Iphigenia in Tauris," and several original plays. It was he who, collaborating with Arthur Davison Ficke, fooled the public with the free-verse hoax, "Spectra," and later followed it with "Pins for WIngs." He is a graceful speaker, has an unusual sense of humor, and a large amount of tact. This being a somewhat unusual combination in so excellent a poet, makes him a particularly able executive in his relations to organized temperament as represented by the notoriously quarrelsome "Poetry Society."
Translated from the Chinese of Tu Mu
by Witter Bynner
and Kiang Kang Hu
[1] Literally, Pleasure-Walk Cemetery (see Li Shang-yin's Look-Out Cemetery).
[2] In what is now Hu-Peh Province, this cliff on the Yang-tze eash of Han-kow was teh scene of a famous historical event in the time of the Three Kingdoms. A fleet from the Wêi Kingdom had come down the river to attach the Wu and Shu Kingdoms. The two generals, Chu-Kêl; Liang of the Shu Kingdom (See Tu Fu's The Eight-Sided Fortress) and Chou Yü of the Wu Kingdom (see Li Tuan's On Hearing Her Play the Harp) combined forces and destroyed this fleet by setting it afire. The King of Wêi, if he had won this battle, whould have been able to bear captive to his Copper-Bird Palace the two famously beautiful girls of Ch'iao, one of the them wife the King of Wu and the other the wife of General Chou Yü. These girls are celebrated in Chinese poetry, like Helen of Troy in European poetry, as a romantic source of war. In Tu Fu's poem, The Eight-Sided Fortress, is sung Chu-Kêl; Liang's grief that he had not conquired the Wu Kingdom; yet here are seen the Wu and Shu Kingdoms allied agains the Wêi Kingdom. Changes in the political and military alignment of nations have always been rapid.
[3] Along this river at Nan-King, girls are still singing in the flower boats and taverns.
[4] Composed for a favorite, by the Later King of the Ch'en Dynasty, who was afterward overthrown on account of his love of wine, women and song (see Li Shang-yin's The Palace of the Sui Emperor and Ch'eng Tien's On the Ma-huai Slope).
[5] There is stil a place in Yang-chou called Twenty-Four Bridges. It may have meant arches.
[6] The harlots' quarter.
[7] In the original two stars are named -- the Cowherd and the Spinning-girl (Ch'ien-niu and Chih-n¨): the reference being to a well-known story, the conclusion of which is that two sweethearts, having been changed into stars, are able to see each other across the Milky Way but are allowed to meet only once a year, on the seventh night of the Seventh-Month. Lafcadio Hearn has translated from the Japanese a long poem on this subject.
[8] The man who owned this garden, Shuh Ch'ung of the Chin Dynasty, was the richest man of his time. The last line of this poem alludes to one of many stories about him. A certain general coveted a favorite of his, a girl named Lu-Chu, whom Shih Ch'ung refused to surrender. Presently the general, charging him with treason, sent troops to seize the girl. But she would not come down from her high chamber; and, when they took Shih Ch'ung, she threw herself from the window to her death.
[9] It was a poetical belief that the cry of the wild-goose came never from pairs but only from the solitary.
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