Brooke in England, Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters and Sara Teasdale in the United States. Rabindranath Tagore, well known in India for his poetry in the Bengali language, was not known at all as a poet of the English tongue until the first of his English poems to appear in print were published in Poetry, A Magazine of Verse, soon after the founding of that famous little magazine.

We all know that nothing grows where nothing has been planted. This is only another way of saying that great changes in the thought and emotion of a great people are not fortuitous. There have been three good and sufficient reasons for the strong and steady growth of popular interest in poetry in the past ten years.

In the first place we American people are coming into our own æsthetic self-hood and consciousness. For several generations we were occupied with the conquest of the continent and the development of our material resources. This made necessary an extraordinary progress in the use of the practical intellect, but gave us little leisure for the enjoyment of beauty. For a long time after the colonial period our people were drilled for efficiency in practical life. We worshipped utility and morals. Most of us supposed that the arts were "handmaids" to ethics or philosophy or reform. But in the past decade we have outgrown the "handmaid" theory of art. We have come to believe that Art is a real princess, to be loved for the sake of her beauty and served for the sake of life and mankind. We have rejoiced, as never before, in music. We have begun to dream dreams of "the city beautiful" and of a distinctive national architecture. We have re-discovered the dance. We have re-discovered folklore and fairyland. We have begun to express ourselves, our peculiar national consciousness, our times, our life, in patterns of beauty.

Another reason for the growth of interest in poetry is to be found in the fact that a number of unselfish men and women have been working for poetry as for a cause. Critics, editors and professors, convinced of the importance of poetry as the word of

the people and the echo of the gods, have given themselves up to the work of winning attention and sympathy for poets.

The first of these altruistic pioneers was Jessie B. Rittenhouse, who began working for poetry in Boston in 1900. When her "Younger American Poets" was published in 1904, Elsa Barker, a poet friend, wrote and congratulated her on being "all alone in a great green field." And from that time to this Miss Rittenhouse has been working with unabated enthusiasm as an interpreter of the contemporary poet. She has written numerous tolerant and discriminating reviews, given many lectures before women's clubs and in universities, and has made excellent anthologies. "The Little Book of Modern American Verse" is a small and choice anthology from which no friend of contemporary poetry is willing to be separated for very long at a time. Miss Rittenhouse is generally considered conservative in taste, but it should be stated that she has been among the first to welcome the greatest of modern innovators, the most important poets who are bringing into American poetry a new spirit and new forms. Many young poets have cause to be grateful for her recognition.

Another faithful worker for the cause of poetry is Edward J. Wheeler, for many years editor of Current Opinion, a magazine that has done much to introduce the work of new poets to the public. And in 1909 Mr. Wheeler and Miss Rittenhouse, aided and abetted by a number of poets in and near New York, founded The Poetry Society of America, the leading organization of poets and patrons of poetry in this country. To this society, which has grown very rapidly, nearly all poets of established reputation belong, and many young singers from all the states in the Union. The meetings are held once a month, during the winter season, in the beautiful old National Arts Club in Gramercy Park, New York. At these meetings poems submitted by members are read and polemically discussed. The society is known from coast to coast and the monthly bulletins furnish news of poets and poetry to all parts of the country. Smaller societies organized in universities and as departments of women's clubs are now

affiliated with the parent organization and are working together for the advancement of poetry as an art.

Still another pioneer who has helped to lead people out of the wilderness and into the old wonderland is William Stanley Braithwaite of The Boston Transcript, known from coast to coast as a compiler of anthologies. Every year Mr. Braithwaite selects from the magazines the poems which he considers "poems of distinction" and classifies them, including in his annual anthology those he likes best. The first anthology was published in 1913, as the natural result of the making of an annual summary of poetic achievement for The Boston Transcript. But Mr. Braithwaite had been working in the good cause of poetry long before that.

None of the workers for poetry in this country, however, has done more than Harriet Monroe, poet, critic, editor. She has done a thing unprecedented. She has given poets a place of their own where theories of craftsmanship may be discussed and where poems created in the new spirit and the new form of new times may be presented to an ever-increasing public. Poetry, A Magazine of Verse, was the first of our "poetry magazines" and it was founded in 1912. To insure its continuance and to make it independent of advertisers, Miss Monroe collected an endowment fund which enabled her to carry the magazine safely and creditably through the first few years of its life. "Creditably" is not a strong enough adverb. It would be rather better to say "triumphantly." For Miss Monroe has achieved a genuine success and reigns in Chicago as "the autocrat of all the poetries." She "discovered Sir Rabindranath Tagore. She made Vachel Lindsay famous. She was chief sponsor for Carl Sandburg. She contributed largely to the success of Edgar Lee Masters, who was "discovered" by William Marion Reedy, one of our ablest critics. As an editor, Miss Monroe has shown a rarely catholic taste. She has accepted and published free verse rhapsodies, polyphonic prose, classical sonnets and substantial blank verse. And few indeed are the poets of distinction in any school, in England or in this country,

who have not been contributors to Poetry, A Magazine of Verse.' For this reason the little room in Cass Street, Chicago, where the magazine is edited, has already possessed itself of an atmosphere of romance.

Naturally enough Miss Monroe's experiment was imitated. Other "poetry magazines" were founded. Few, unfortunately, survive. Of these only one is widely known. That is Contemporary Verse, published in Philadelphia and ably edited by Charles Wharton Stork. Mr. Stork is a conservative and less hospitable to poetic experiment than Miss Monroe. Therefore the poetry which appears in his magazine has won the praise of good conservative critics like William Dean Howells. A very large amount of good poetry is published in Contemporary Verse and the magazine deserves attention and interest.

More recent arrivals in the field are The Lyric and Youth. The Lyric is the organ of The Lyric Society, an organization that works for the advancement of poetry and tries to make American poets better known to the American public. Samuel Roth is Editor of The Lyric. Youth has been founded and is edited by a group of young poets at Harvard University, assisted by corresponding editors in other parts of the world. Youth aims to be international in scope and interest.

These editors and authors, faithful workers for the advancement of poetry, could have done little or nothing to interest readers, however, if poetry written by contemporary poets had been poor. By clever advertising a market man may secure purchasers for a stock of green peaches. But no amount of advertising will lure purchasers again when they have been disappointed. And this brings us to a consideration of the third reason for the revival of interest in poetry, and it is by far the most important reason,-the fact that American poets are giving us more good poetry to-day than has ever been produced by American poets in any other period of our history. True, we have no Poe, no Whitman, no Lanier, no Emerson. We have no single colossal genius that we all recognize. But we have many strong, fine talents. And in this book I shall hope to