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William Ellery Leonard was born at Plainfield, New Jersey, January 25, 1876. He received his A.M. at Harvard in 1899 and completed his studies at the Universities of Göttingen and Bonn. After traveling for several years throughout Europe, he became a teacher and has been professor of English in the University of Wisconsin since 1906.

The Vaunt of Man (1912) is Leonard's most representative volume. Traditional in form and material, it is anything but conservative in spirit. Leonard's insurrectionary fervor speaks sonorously in the simplest of his quatrains and the strictest of his sonnets. This protesting passion is given an even wider sweep in The Lynching Bee (1920), the title-poem being a terrific indictment in which the poet's outrage speaks with a new ironism.

Besides his original poetry, Leonard has published several volumes of translations from the Greek and Latin as well as a series of paraphrases of the fables of Æsop.

THE IMAGE OF DELIGHT

O how came I that loved stars, moon, and flame,
And unimaginable wind and sea,

All inner shrines and temples of the free,
Legends and hopes and golden books of fame;
I that upon the mountain carved my name
With cliffs and clouds and eagles over me,
O how came I to stoop to loving thee-
I that had never stooped before to shame?

O'twas not thee! Too eager of a white
Far beauty and a voice to answer mine,
Myself I built an image of delight,
Which all one purple day I deemed divine-

And when it vanished in the fiery night,
I lost not thee, nor any shape of thine.

TO THE VICTOR

Man's mind is larger than his brow of tears;
This hour is not my all of time; this place
My all of earth; nor this obscene disgrace
My all of life; and thy complacent sneers
Shall not pronounce my doom to my compeers
While the Hereafter lights me in the face,
And from the Past, as from the mountain's base,
Rise, as I rise, the long tumultuous cheers.

And who slays me must overcome a world:
Heroes at arms, and virgins who became
Mothers of children, prophecy and song;
Walls of old cities with their flags unfurled;
Peaks, headlands, ocean and its isles of fame-
And sun and moon and all that made me strong!

Sarah N. Cleghorn

Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn was born at Norfolk, Virginia February 4, 1876. She came North early in her youth and was graduated from Burr and Burton Seminary in Manchester, Vermont (in 1895), in which town, after a year at Radcliffe, she has lived ever since.

An ardent worker for lost causes, Miss Cleghorn's fiery spirit shines through Portraits and Protests (1917), the first half of which is coolly descriptive and the second half, hotly insurrectionary verse.

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THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

The unfit die: the fit both live and thrive." Alas, who say so?-They who do survive.

So when her bonfires lighted hill and plain, Did Bloody Mary think on Lady Jane.

So Russia thought of Finland, while her heel Fell heavier on the prostrate commonweal.

So Booth of Lincoln thought: and so the High Priests let Barabbas live, and Jesus die.

THE INCENTIVE

I saw a sickly cellar plant

Droop on its feeble stem, for want
Of sun and wind and rain and dew—
Of freedom!-Then a man came through
The cellar, and I heard him say,

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Poor, foolish plant, by all means stay
Contented here: for-know you not?-
This stagnant dampness, mould and rot
Are your incentive to grow tall

And reach that sunbeam on the wall."
-Even as he spoke, the sun's one spark
Withdrew, and left the dusk more dark.

Carl (August) Sandburg was born of Swedish stock at Galesburg, Illinois, January 6, 1878. His schooling was haphazard; at thirteen he went to work on a milk wagon. During the next six years he was, in rapid succession, porter in a barber shop, scene-shifter in a cheap theatre, truck-handler in a brickyard, turner apprentice in a pottery, dish-washer in Denver and Omaha hotels, harvest hand in Kansas wheat fields. These tasks equipped him, as no amount of learning could have done, to be the laureate of industrial America. When war with Spain was declared in 1898, Sandburg, avid for fresh adventure, enlisted in Company C., Sixth Illinois Volunteers.

On his return from the campaign in Porto Rico, Sandburg entered Lombard College in Galesburg and, for the first time, began to think in terms of literature. He had already seen a great deal of the world from the roaring alleys of great cities as well as from the underside of box-cars; he had loafed, fought and expressed himself richly. So, what with the fact that the "terrible Swede," as captain of the basket-ball team, won a series of new victories, it is little wonder that he was idolized by his class-mates and elected editor-in-chief of the college paper.

After leaving college he did all manner of things to earn a living. He was advertising manager for a department store and worked as district organizer for the Social-Democratic party of Wisconsin. He became a salesman, a pamphleteer, a newspaperman. On the staff of a business magazine, he became a "safety first expert; his articles on accident prevention bringing him before manufacturers' conventions where he talked about machinery safeguards and methods found successful in reducing injuries in factory organizations.

In 1904, Sandburg published the proverbial "slender sheaf"; a tiny pamphlet of twenty-two poems, uneven in quality but strangely like the work of the mature Sandburg in feeling. What is more, these experiments anticipated the very inflection of the later poems, with their spiritual kinship to Henley, Lincoln and Whitman; several of these early experiments (with

the exception of the rhymed verses) might be placed, without seeming incongruous, in the most recent collection of Sandburg's pieces. The idiom of Smoke and Steel (1920) is more intensified, but it is the same idiom as that of 'Milville" (1903), which begins:

Down in southern New Jersey they make glass.

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By day and by night, the fires burn on in Milville and bid the sand let in the light.

Meanwhile the newspaperman was having a hard struggle to keep the poet alive. Until he was thirty-six years old, Sandburg was totally unknown to the literary world. In 1914 a group of his poems appeared in Poetry; A Magazine of Verse; later the same year one of the group (the now famous "Chicago") was awarded the Levinson prize of two hundred dollars. A little more than a year later his first, full-fledged book was published, and Sandburg-tardily but triumphantlyhad arrived.

Chicago Poems (1916) is full of ferment; it seethes with a direct poetry surcharged with tremendous energy. Here is an almost animal exultation that is also an exaltation. Sandburg's

speech is simple and powerful; he uses slang as freely (and beautifully) as his predecessors used the now archaic tongue of their times. (See Preface.) Immediately the cries of protest were heard: Sandburg was coarse and brutal; his work ugly and distorted; his language unrefined, unfit for poetry. His detractors forgot that Sandburg was only brutal when dealing with brutality; that beneath his toughness, he was one of the tenderest of living poets; that, when he used colloquialisms and a richly metaphorical slang, he was searching for new poetic values in " limber, lasting, fierce words "-unconsciously answering Whitman who asked, "Do you suppose the liberties and brawn of These States have to do only with delicate lady-words? With gloved gentleman-words?"

Cornhuskers (1918) is another step forward; it is fully as sweeping as its forerunner and far more sensitive. The gain

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