T

HE author of "The Spoon River Anthology," Edgar Lee Masters, was recently characterized by John Cowper Powys, the Oxford critic, as "the aboriginal American poet." Mr. Powys declared that the author of the most amazing history of an American community ever written is the third great poet he has been able to discover in America, the other two being Edwin Arlington Robinson and Arthur D. Ficke. But Mr. Powys is by no means the "discoverer" of the talent of the Chicago lawyer-poet. Almost coincident with the publication in Reedy's Mirror of his 200 portraits-suggested by the tombstones in towns on the Spoon River, letters began to pour in upon the surprized author, and requests from publishers for the book rights. The "Spoon River Anthology," even before its publication in book form by the Macmillan Company, had become the storm-center of a heated controversy among the lovers of poetry and literature. Is it poetry? Is it prose? Is it literature? These are the questions that the remarkable "epic" of a little Illinois community (really a composite of three communities) has aroused. Some of those who have been willing to admit that the anthology is literature will not concede that it is poetry.

Mr. Masters himself, claiming that poetry is essentially a matter of spirit rather than body, claims that at least a part of his work is poetry. In a recent interview published in the New York Times, he recounted the origin of this unique work:

"I always had it in mind that I would write a novel about a small community, including every interest and every piece of machinery you find in the big world or metropolis, because you do not find human nature in the small community alone-you find it everywhere. Because, however, of the pressure of professional duties I never had time to write the novel. It came to me, I don't know how, last Spring to write a few sketches, and I thus began the Anthology, the first sketches being printed in Reedy's Mirror. I had contributed other poems, and Mr. Reedy complained that they were not interpreting American life adequately-that they lacked the American punch. So it came about that I wrote the first instalment of the Anthology, and was much gratified when Mr. Reedy wrote back, 'This is the stuff.' So, instead of writing a novel I began to weave my story into these sketches. The Anthology, as now finished, is the interwoven history of a whole community, a village, a city, or whatever you like to call it.

"Some of the sketches are very lyrical and others are not lyrical at all-almost prose. The Anthology includes 220 sketches, but it is supplemented by an

epic fragment, which is supposed to be written by one of the characters-Jonathan Swift Somers, who became a misanthrope through much study and penance and who died young and left this epic fragment. This fragment fills in a story which the sketches, being dramatic or

lyrical, cannot complete."

In reply to those critics who claim that the "Spoon River Anthology" is not poetry, Mr. Masters calls attention

Courtesy N. Y. Times.

AN ABORIGINAL AMERICAN POET

Edgar Lee Masters is the author of the greatly discussed "Spoon River Anthology," first published by William Marion Reedy in his Mirror, and about to appear in book form. Mr. Masters is a lawyer and a radical.

in a letter we take the liberty of quoting to the words of Carlyle: "What we want to get at is the thought the man had, if he had any; why should he twist it into a jingle if he could speak it out plainly? It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true passion of melody, and the very tones of him, according to Coleridge's remark, become musical by the greatness, depth and music of his thoughts, that we can give him the right to rhyme and sing." The author interprets his own work in this light:

"I desire to say that while many of the portraits in the Anthology are prose unless they are rescued by the virtue which Carlyle makes important; or unless rescued because the language is vivid, imaginative, passionate and inspiriting; or unless rescued because they constitute invention, or do with words what colors do on a canvas . . . . yet on the other hand, dozens of them are rhythmical, and many of them are metrical as well as rhythmical. And I invite your attention to this opinion of mine not to say that they are poetry,

even if both rhythmical and metrical, but to say that they are not prose in virtue of having neither rhythm nor meter.

"But I had a variety of things in mind in writing the Anthology. I meant to analyze character, to satirize society, to tell a story, to expose the machinery of life, to present to view a working model of the big world and put it in a window where the passerby could stop and see

it run.. And I had in mind, too, the creation of beauty, and the depiction of

Our sorrows

and hopes, our religious failures, successes and visions, our poor little lives, rounded by a sleep, in language and figures emotionally tuned to bring all of us closer together in understanding and affection.

"I am not asking any one to call the Anthology poetry. Indeed, the first twenty sketches or so which I wrote plainly show no attempt to conform to the rules of poetical production. But I believe that a careful consideration of the Anthology as a whole will show that a large part of it is poetry, provided I have ever written any poetry at all. And that I do not decide, and could not if I would, however strong my opinion might be. The world decides that."

Edgar Lee Master's first poems were published in Chicago in 1898, under the title of "A Book of Verses." In 1900 he wrote a drama in blank verse entitled "Maximilian," which was published by Richard C. Badger. In 1904 he published a volume of essays "The New Star Chamber." Other published works are "Blood of the Prophets" (1905) over the pseudonym "Doctor Wallace"; and two plays, "Althea" (1907) and "The Trifler" (1908). He has also contributed poems and essays on political and legal subjects to various periodicals.

Mr. Masters admitted to the inter

viewer for the Times that some of his greatest inspiration in writing the anthology, which has sifted him out of comparative obscurity as a writer to national fame, was derived largely from his work as counsel for the defense of the girl members of the waitresses' union who were arrested for disorderly conduct for picketing various Chicago restaurants during last year's strike. He is a good deal of a radical, tho he does not wear either the Socialist or Anarchist label, and was at one time a law partner of Clarence A. Darrow. According to an appreciation written by William Marion Reedy in the St. Louis Mirror, Mr. Masters, who was born in Garnett, Kansas, in 1868, spent his childhood in the heart of the "Lincoln country." No one can read the "Spoon River Anthology" without the conviction that its author knew the people he describes. Ezra Pound notes in the London Egoist a strange power in the very names of the folk portrayed.

HEN a tensed string vibrates it gives out not tone alone, which any one may hear, but

W

one

The Narrow Doors to Sorrow
Are secret, still, and low:

Swift tongues of dusk that spoil the sun
Before I even know.

I stare. I can but see.
The Narrow Doors to Sorrow
They stop the heart in me.

Oh, stranger than my midnights Of loneliness and strife The Doors that let the dark leap in Across my sunny life!

One of the secrets of Mrs. Wilcox's well-deserved popularity lies in the heartening message she always has for

us.

a number of overtones, My dancing feet are frozen. which only a trained and sensitive ear distinguishes. Yet these overtones, not the fundamental tone, so musicians tell us, determine the quality of the music. There are overtones in a poem as well as in a harp or a violin. Many can catch the fundamental tone of a poem who are deaf to its overtones. The overtones in music are, as we all know, produced not by the vibrations of the string as a whole but by the secondary vibrations of the different parts of the string. So in a poem the overtones are produced by an analogous cause. Every line, almost every phrase and word, has its overtone, and these determine the quality of the poem. The fundamental tone---the message of the poem as a whole, its story, its artistic scheme is usually caught at a first reading. But the overtones of a really fine poem have new revelations for us with each successive reading. Herein lies the secret of enduring charm in all art. For there are overtones in a painting and a work of sculpture as well as in music and poetry, and long contemplation alone, it may be, I will reveal them all to us.

What is more, there are overtones in objects of nature as well as in works of art in a flowing river, a floating There are cloud, a blossoming bush. overtones for the eye as well as for the ear, and for the inner eye as well as for the outer eye. Every life, indeed, every event, has its overtones, and the artist is one who not only catches them but is able to make us catch them as well. Nothing is more important to us than to be able to catch them, for without them life loses most of its significance and becomes barren and monotonous routine.

In his "Map of Life," Mr. Lecky tells us that happiness is determined by the little things of life. The author of the following poem in the Atlantic Monthly seems to have reached the same conclusion. Its chief charm lies in its fundamental tone; but it has beautiful overtones as well.

Nor is her optimism of the perfunctory sort that is always telling the world to cheer up without giving any reason for cheering up. What more could a poet or heartening note preacher either sound to-day than we have in this from the Cosmopolitan:

THIS IS MY TASK.

BY ELLA WHEELER WILCOX.
WHEN the whole world resounds
with rude alarms
Of warring arms,

WHEN

When God's good earth, from border unto border, Shows man's disorder,

Or high or low,

357

might

In grieving over wrongs I cannot right.
This is my task: Amid discordant strife
To keep a clean, sweet center in my life,
And tho the human orchestra may be
Playing all out of key,

To tune my soul to symphonies above
And sound the note of love.

This is my task.

When, in church pews, men worship God in words,

But meet their kind with swords: When fair Religion, stripped of holy passion,

Walks masked as Fashion,

Let me not wax indignant at the sight Or waste my strength bewailing her sad plight.

This is my task: To search in my own mind

Until the qualities of God I find:

To seek em in the heart of friend and foe

stray

The laurelled few o'er fields Elysian,
He joins his elders of the lyre and bay,
Led by the Mantuan.

We mourn him not, but sigh with Bedi

vere,

Such fireworks as we make, we two!
Because you hate me and I hate you.

Man's triumph over the forces of nature is a finer thing to celebrate than his gory triumph over his fellow beings. Our captains of industry have had the muckrakers after them. Here is a poem which we offer as compensa

tion. We glean it from The Survey:

POWER.

windows

M

iron railing,

With all the world about him in commotion.

The mighty water races on beneath him To storm the falls. From the unnumbered chimneys

Flutters the smoke in long wind-shredded

pennons.

The switching-engines, blowing clouds of

steam,

Tear back and forth, while over its granite arches

Thunders the night express, steady as fate, With pomp of banners and proud illumination.

On every hand is power visible, And yonder where the mills and powerhouses

there is a tendency to laugh it out of use; but the thing it represents will never disappear from real poetry. The very essence of great poetry, as of all true religion, is the soul's recognition of its relation to the universe. In the following, from The Nautilus, we find the cosmic note struck strongly :

359

Thy long, long ages have been piled and told

In centuries by thousands,-sea and sky.

Old am I? Whence? How cometh it to be

That my gray hairs and body's wrinkled lines

Should seem the whole? This is the reckoning: grief, fear, misery, And loss of youth's dear joy as it declines.

But, gracious Universe, whose ultimate

Seems death, and what beyond we do not know,

Still thou art here!

And in thy enfolding arms I gladly wait What thou hast for me, come it fast or slow.

And thou hast all! Within thy bosom's might

Dwell the eternities of my “to be”;
Say I am old?

An infant soul am I-a ray of light-
A glistening drop in life's immortal sea.

Aye, I am young, so young! My mind doth blend

Itself with God, whose vibrant beauty glows Endlessly fair.

end!

Young as the rose am I, young as the rose.

Ο

NE week the little town of Almont

was white with snow; the steep slide of Gidding's Hill was still the rendezvous of the town girls and young

men.

The next week found the snow gone, patches of green grass, budding trees spilling sap that made drops on the sidewalks like the beginning of rain, and old men comfortably lounging in chairs or on benches against the buildings on the sunny side of Main Street.

But it was not this spring awakening that excited Addie Erb's girl, Lottie. Many springs had come in just this way; she might have counted as many as twenty-five had she possessed a memory. No, the sudden awakening that made her mouth gape wider than usual and her eyes become fevered with excitement was the awakening that had suddenly come to the big brick house on the hill-Orin Crisman's house.

Ever since the middle of winter an oillamp had gleamed faintly from one of the chamber windows, intensifying by its pale, star-like glimmer the utter gloom and loneliness that seemed to enshroud the rest of that big house; and every day or so had found Dr. Greenshield's buggy standing in the drive.

In just such a way had a lamp, perhaps the same one, stood for many winters in the window of the front parlor, sending out its feeble light. It had been there for one purpose. If it had been articulate, it would have said, repeating the formula over and over again:

"This is the way home, John; this is the way home, George. This way, George; this way. John. Steady, boys; drive with a tight rein; you are Orin Crisman's sons."

No such lamp had beckoned to George and John for twenty years. George was farming in the Canadian Northwest, and John-John was God knows where. The nearest of Orin Crisman's direct kin, as concerned distance, was his grandchild, George's girl, at school in Detroit.

the post-office late every afternoon waiting for the distribution of the mail. Grandma Crisman, as far as any one knew, and any one knew everything in the village of Almont, had not stirred foot out of that big house during winter months for more than ten years. And this winter, with Orin Crisman sick, the big house on the hill had been as tho hermetically sealed, as viewed from the front. Only the back door, on the narrow porch of which was the well-pump, had opened and shut for months, to let hiredman Jim or hired-girl Mary in and out.

So to Lottie, on this sunny morning in spring, the throwing wide of the big front door and the activity about the place meant only one thing: Orin Crisman, who years before had inspected with his own hands every brick that had gone into his "grand" house, was dead.

Sometime during the late night or early morning Addie Erb had been awakened by the passing of a buggy, the spokes of which, being dry and loose, had rattled. She knew that rattle, and when dawn came, and mother and daughter arose from the bed they shared, she had said:

"I heard Undertaker Hopkins's buggy go by in the night; some one is dead." And then came confirmation of the

death. Lottie, looking through the window, saw the big house awaken. And as she watched, Jije Hopkins, undertaker and proprietor of the town's only furniture store, dressed in a somber black suit, went by in a wagon loaded with funeral chairs. He was dead; Orin Crisman was dead. "Ma, oh, Ma, old Crisman has died!"

A

LL day they watched-the old, dullwitted woman and her queer daughter. People passed in and out of the big house; strips of carpet were taken out to the lawn and brushed by hired-man Jim; water was dashed against the outside of the front windows. The old phaëton, the pride of Orin Crisman, was rolled into one of the open sheds, to make room for the teams of the country relatives. Orin Crisman's second cousin Hattie-she of the goiter

-and her husband arrived from Orion County behind the old mare Kitty; Cousin Hugh and his woman and two children drove in from Utica Township.

Night came. Lottie went to the postoffice. The depot bus drew up, and old Mike, clambering clumsily down from its top, limped in with the mail-pouch. Puffing and wheezing, he squirmed his way through the crowd. Some one said:

"Sa-ay, Mike, who's your passengers?" And old Mike, pointing back over his shoulder with one hand, thumb extended outward, said:

"George Crisman's girl and a fellow

from Detroit."

Then Addie Erb's girl Lottie, walking out to the sidewalk to get a closer look at old Crisman's grandchild, saw Pastor Lucus of the Congregational Church take her hand and heard him say:

"God keep you, George Crisman's girl! I knew your father."

Hurrying home in the dusk, Lottie ran across the patch of grass in front of the paint-bare little cottage, crying as she ran: "Ma, oh, Ma, George Crisman's girl

has come to the funeral!"

All evening, late into the night, they talked of the funeral. They talked about it during the meager supper; they went together to the well in the yard of their nearest neighbor and talked as they drew the water; they talked in bed, squeezing each other's arms when words failed, pressing closer together.

seemed wonderful to Addie Erb and her girl Lottie.

And now for the first time they were sure of seeing the interior of the big house. No one would turn them away; this they knew from many years of funeral-going. They would sit in the big house the windows of which looked down. so "grand" upon their little cottage. There would be singing; Pastor Lucus would tell what a fine, good man Orin Crisman had been. They would get a chance to look at the dead man, so still and waxen, in his coffin; perhaps they would be lucky enough to get chairs where they could see into the back parlor, where the mourners would be.

Morning came. Marcus Pratt, up with the sun, drove past in his hooded delivery cart; he would be the first to arrive at his grocery store. Jim East, still drowsy with sleep, worked the handle of the wheezing pump in his back yard across the street, sucking up water for his horses; one of the babies in Joe Jelsh's house wailed.

Addie Erb and her girl Lottie slid out of bed and into slatternly wrappers; they threw open the back door of the cottage; stood blinking at the sun, sleepily rubbed their eyes; and then went about the accustomed early morning tasks, glancing every few moments at the house on the hill. Things sizzled in a greasy frying-pan on the stove; blue smoke, rising when Lottie lifted a lid and poked at the green wood in the fire-box, made her eyes water and set Addie Erb to wheezing.

TH

HE morning slowly wore away. A few people passed in and out of the big house on the hill; hired-man Jim raked leaves in the front yard. "Ma, oh, Ma, there goes the Jersey girls!"

And Addie Erb, joining Lottie at the window, saw Sarah and Allie Jersey, old

maids both, step side by side down from

the porch of their yellow-painted house and slowly climb the hill.

"You watch, Lottie, while I get ready." "Yes, Ma; and then you watch for me." And while Addie Erb was putting on her shiny, black-silk dress, ages old and dusty from wear, Lottie stood at the window, her mouth gaping wider and

wider.

Erb.

"So 's to know just when," added Lottie.

Then they breathed deep sighs, and longed for the morning to come.

"We must get ready early, to be sure." "Yes, Ma. It will be elegant."

People were walking or driving up to the big house on the hill from every direction-people dressed in their best Sunday clothes, somber, dull-colored clothes; clothes that wore for years, and sufficed for church, for funerals, for weddings. "Ma, hurry up, Ma!"

Then Addie Erb stood at the window, putting on her old black bonnet, faded, gray with age; she played nervously with her darned cotton gloves, two fingers of which were worn through at the tips.

"Drat them gloves! Lottie-you, Lot

tie, bring me needle and black thread. There goes them Sessions girls. Ain't they grand! Did you ever! That Hawsner girl's got on white shoes. There's old Aunt Judie-old scarecrow! She's ninety-five if she's a day; she's an old witch, that's what she is. Who 'd 'a' thought that him that's dead is her nephew! You Lottie, hurry up!"

"Ma, oh, Ma, there's three buttons off my shoes!"

O°

"You Lottie, never mind; come on!" UT of the house they went, up Pleasant Street, past the Jersey home and the Sessions house and the house of Marcus Pratt. They walked in single file, Lottie, round-shouldered, drooped, trudging along behind Addie Erb, shrunken-chested and bent.

Old Mother Lowell, too feeble to go out anywhere, from her easy-chair on the porch, saw them pass, and cackled.

A few stragglers were still slowly climbing the hill.

"There's Addie Erb and her girl Lottie," said one.

"Queer pair," said another. "Sort of vultures, they be, if you can say such things about creatures that don't actually

eat the dead. There ain't been a funeral in this town since I can remember that ain't brought them out. Why, two or three years ago they went to the funeral of that tramp who was killed by the cars, and they mourned just like they did when Lottie's pa was buried, fifteen years ago. They've been queer ever since Jonas Erb

died."

And another said:

"They're never known to go into people's houses unless there's a funeral."

"Curious for them to be going to Orin Crisman's house," said still another. "Whatever has got into them? Orin Crisman's house is no place for them."

Up the hill they climbed, Addie Erb and her girl Lottie; up the front steps, walking slow, hands folded at their waists,

heads bent.

Some one whispered: "You, Lottie!"

Some one else tittered.

The two simple souls drew closer together. Such a greeting they had never received before; they did not understand.

Pastor Lucus, seeing them on the porch, came to the door. "Why, Addie-"

A quavering voice interrupted: "Let them come in, Pastor Lucus; let them come in. Come in, Addie, come in, Lottie. No one shall be turned away on this day; no one can say so-no, not any one. He he he! she remembered her old grandpa's house, she did; fine girl she is my George's girl. Come in, come in. Orin Crisman invites you to the wedding George's girl's wedding."

They stared at the old man like startled children. Then they turned and went down the steps, along the winding brick sidewalk, down the street, back to their paint-bare cottage.