enable the reader to approach their work with confidence, understanding and sympathy. I should like to believe that this book will enable readers to find in poetry a new solace, recreation and inspiration, just the things which they might expect to find in music, or in a beautiful friendship.

Unfortunately the approach to poetry is not always made easy for the reader. Every day in the year more false things than true are said about it. Poets are frequently misunderstood and misrepresented by creditable persons who are quite unconscious of their own polite mendacity. Superstitions flourish like weeds in a field or wild vines in a jungle. A dense clutter of nonsense, spurious scholarship, pedantry and fatuity must be cut away in the beautiful grove so that men and women may see the big trees. And because this thicket chokes the way many people who might otherwise come to know the full sweetness and power of poetry are held back from the enjoyment of it.

The most common of these superstitions is the belief that poetry "just comes" to any one at any time, to society queen or labor leader, and that anyone to whom it "just comes" can write it. We may know that children can learn to make music only by long hours of practice. We may realize that the painter must know how to use paint and brush and canvas before he can achieve a masterpiece. But it is commonly supposed that very little emotional or intellectual labor is involved in the making of a poem and that no discipline is required for the maker. Poetry is sometimes thought to be a painless twilight sleep out of which beauty is accidentally born.

But perhaps in all the universe there are no accidents. Perhaps the chain of cause and effect is linked together in little things and in great things always. And perhaps that which seems to be accidental is really the result or fruition of causes that were the result of other causes. However that may be, biographies of great poets tell us of their labor and of their much practicing. The best poets of to-day labor as did their peers in days gone by. Robert Frost, to be sure, writes rapidly and seldom revises his successful poems. But for years he wrote

poems that served only as practice work and were never offered to the world. Witter Bynner worked for seven or eight years on "The New World" before he gave it to the public, and it was revised seventeen or eighteen times. Vachel Lindsay writes his social or choral poetry very slowly and is grateful for the criticism of his friends. He has rewritten some of his poems as many as forty or fifty times. The poet is truly what Lord Dunsany calls him, "an artificer in ideas" and "the chief of workers."

Moreover he is an artificer in rhythms and rhymes and in the qualities and associations of words, a student of sound as combined with sense. The idea, the mood, which is the raw material of a poem, may "just come" to any person at any time. A poem may be born of a bit of color, a scent, a vague whim or impression. But this raw material of poetry belongs to all men and women and, if it were the sum total of poetry, all poets would be as great as Shakespeare. But in order that this raw material may be made, or in order that it may grow into poems-perfect and unalterable works of beauty-the artist-poet must cleanse it of all that is irrelevant and superfluous, must give it its own luster and completeness. In such measure as he is a true artist the poems will be strong, compelling, and even apparently artless, to many generations of readers. The poet pays the price of the reader's satisfaction. And the paying of that price is his privilege and joy. That is why only a few of us, those who give themselves up to their great task with devotion, can learn to make great poems. And I once heard Edwin Markham say that poems which "just come" to the ordinary person out of the circumambient ether should usually be returned whence they came!

But nearly all of us, all, surely, who are capable of warm, quick sympathy and who love beauty, can learn to understand and feel poetry. Sympathy is the one personal quality without which no one can go far in the love and understanding of the arts, and with which anyone can go very far indeed. The inflexible soul will never be touched by the beauty of any masterpiece. Without the capacity for sharing other people's moods, their love,

joy, irony, rancor, sorrow and enthusiasm, their acrid dislikes and their reasons for laughter, their pleasure in color, texture, form, scent and movement, none of us can get much from poetry. For without this capacity none of us can get much out of life. And poetry is simply the sharing of life in patterns of rhythmical words. But no person capable of sympathy and the love of beauty need be frightened away from poetry by the abracadabra of critics. For poetry is not, after all, an intricate puzzle game for sophisticated intellects. It is, like music, like sculpture, a natural, joyous, life-sharing art, concerned with feelings that we all share and appealing to sympathies engendered and fostered by the imagination.

Poetry is everybody's wonderland. It is for the business man, tired or rested, and for his wife. It is for rich employers (for the fortification of their souls!) and for poor employees (for the comfort of their hearts!). It is only required of us that we desire to perceive and enjoy and understand what is beautiful.

But many persons erroneously suppose that they have found beauty when they have taken pleasure in what is merely pretty, and this is unfortunate, for it makes it necessary to differentiate between what is pretty and what is beautiful. Yet one might spend a whole day or many days at this labor, giving concrete illustrations, and still fail to show the lover of prettiness why he is not a lover of beauty. But the lover of beauty would know without explanation. Therefore it is necessary to say here only this—that to the lover of prettiness love is a little frosted cake, joy a luscious bonbon, sorrow a dose of bitter medicine. Prettiness is ephemeral. But beauty is powerful and memorable. Prettiness is external to us and has no more effect upon our lives than a pebble thrown into a stream has upon the swirl of waters. But beauty changes us. The current of our lives runs swifter and clearer for it, perhaps, or deeper, or with a richer music. Prettiness is pleasant and negligible, a light coquette. But beauty is strong, profound, austere, a great maternal force. And those who desire what is pretty will seek out the lightest of literature. But those who desire beauty will find poetry.

If he really wishes to seek beauty in poetry, the greatest difficulty for the new reader of contemporary verse will be found in the fact that it is not "just like" the poetry to which he has been accustomed. Many persons like the poetry of Tennyson and Longfellow, or of Swinburne and Keats, chiefly because they have been accustomed to it. A particular kind of poetry means poetry to them. They have taken it habitually and for granted as they have taken coffee for breakfast. And the best contemporary poetry is no more like the poetry of Tennyson and Longfellow than the fragrance of nectar is like the fragrance of the matutinal coffee. The strange flavor of it is alarming at the first taste, and timorous persons, afraid of the new beauty, run away without taking enough of a taste to know what it really is like.

To reassure such persons it is only necessary to say that what was good and beautiful in the work of Tennyson is as good and beautiful to-day as it ever was, but that it is not necessary, or desirable, for all poetry to be like Tennyson's in spirit and manner. They may have coffee for breakfast-and nectar also! And no modern poet worthy of the name would have it otherwise. For the best poetry of our times has grown out of the life of our times, which life, in turn, grew out of the life that preceded it. And the love of the elder singers is the best preparation for the love of the younger choir, although the new choristers do not sing the same songs in just the same way. If contemporary poets were content to go on imitating their great predecessors, they would be frustrating all the natural processes of growth in life and art. They would be untrue to all great traditions, (to which ultra-conservatives would hold them too inflexibly). They would be making a plant of dead wax to mimic a living tree, instead of giving us a living, branching, blossoming reality, the inevitable result of life and growth. The poets of to-day are true to the memory of their great predecessors, not when they imitate them in thought and feeling and manner, halting beside the past that is gone and making graven images of it; but when, living fully in their own times, as well as in the