not at second-hand, through the English work of two poets of genius, Synge and Yeats. These great men, fortified and inspired by the simplicity and clarity of primitive Celtic song, had little patience with the "over-appareled" art of Tennyson and his imitators. They found it stiffened by rhetoric, by a too conscious morality leading to pulpit eloquence, and by second-hand bookish inspirations; and its movement they found hampered, thwarted of freedom, by a too slavish acceptance of ready-made schemes of metre and rhyme. The surprises and irregularities, found in all great art because they are inherent in human feeling, were being ruled out of English poetry, which consequently was stiffening into forms too fixed and becoming more and more remote from life. As Mr. Yeats said in Chicago:

"We were weary of all this. We wanted to get rid not only of rhetoric but of poetic diction. We tried to strip away everything that was artificial, to get a style like speech, as simple as the simplest prose, like a cry of the heart."

It is scarcely too much to say that "the new poetry"-if we may be allowed the phrase-began with these two great Irish masters. Think what a contrast to even the simplest lyrics of Tennyson the pattern of their songs presents, and what a contrast their direct outright human feeling presents to the somewhat culture-developed optimism of Browning, and the science-inspired pessimism of Arnold. Compared with these Irishmen the best of their predecessors seem literary. This statement does not imply any measure of ultimate values, for it is still too early to estimate them. One may, for example, believe Synge to be the greatest poet-playwright in English since Shakespeare, and one of the great poets of the world; but a few more decades must pass before such ranking can have authority.

At the same time other currents were influencing progressive minds toward even greater freedom of form. Strangely enough, Whitman's influence was felt first in France. It reached England, and finally America, indirectly from Paris, where the poets, stimulated by translations of the great American, especially Bazalgette's, and by the ever-adventurous quality of French scholarship, have been experimenting with free verse ever since Mallarmé. The great Irish poets felt the French influence-it was part of the education which made them realize that English poetry had be

come narrow, rigid, and insular. Yeats has held usually, though never slavishly, to rhyme and a certain regularity of metrical form-in which, however, he makes his own tunes; but Synge wrote his plays in that wide borderland between prose and verse, in a form which, whatever one calls it, is essentially poetry, for it has passion, glamour, magic, rhythm, and glorious imaginative life. This borderland between prose and verse is being explored now as never before in English; except, perhaps in the King James translation of the Bible. The modern "vers-libertines," as they have been wittily called, are doing pioneer work in an heroic effort to get rid of obstacles that have hampered the poet and separated him from his audience. They are trying to make the modern manifestations of poetry less a matter of rules and formulæ, and more a thing of the spirit, and of organic as against imposed rhythm. In this enthusiastic labor they are following not only a strong inward impulse, not only the love of freedom which Chaucer followed-and Spenser and Shakespeare, Shelley and Coleridge and all the masters-but they are moved also by influences from afar. They have studied the French symbolistes of the 'nineties, and the most recent Parisian vers-libristes. Moreover, some of them have listened to the pure lyricism of the Provençal troubadours, have examined the more elaborate mechanism of early Italian sonneteers and canzonists, have read Greek poetry from a new angle of vision; and last, but perhaps most important of all, have bowed to winds from the East.

In the nineteenth century the western world-the western æsthetic world-discovered the orient. Someone has said that when Perry knocked at the gates of Japan, these opened, not to let us in, but to let the Japanese out. Japanese graphic art, especially, began almost at once to kindle progressive minds. Whistler, of course, was the first great creative artist to feel the influence of their instinct for balance and proportion, for subtle harmonies of color and line, for the integrity of beauty in art as opposed to the moralizing and sentimental tendencies which had been intruding more and more.

Poetry was slower than the graphic arts to feel the oriental influence, because of the barrier of language. But European scholarship had long dabbled with Indian, Persian and Sanskrit literatures, and Fitzgerald even won over the crowd to some remote suspicion

of their beauty by meeting Omar half-way, and making a great poem out of the marriage, not only of two minds, but of two literary traditions. Then a few airs from Japan blew in-a few translations of hokku and other forms-which showed the stark simplicity and crystal clarity of the art among Japanese poets. And of late the search has gone further: we begin to discover a whole royal line of Chinese poets of a thousand or more years ago; and we are trying to search out the secrets of their delicate and beautiful art. The task is difficult, because our poets, ignorant of Chinese, have to get at these masters through the literal translations of scholars. But even by this round-about way, poets like Allen Upward, Ezra Pound, Helen Waddell and a few others, give us something of the rare flavor, the special exquisite perfume, of the original. And of late the Indian influence has been emphasized by the great Bengali poet and sage, Rabindranath Tagore, whose mastery of English makes him a poet in two languages.

This oriental influence is to be welcomed because it flows from deep original streams of poetic art. We should not be afraid to learn from it; and in much of the work of the imagists, and other radical groups, we find a more or less conscious, and more or less effective, yielding to that influence. We find something of the oriental directness of vision and simplicity of diction, also now and then a hint of the unobtrusive oriental perfection of form and delicacy of feeling.

All these influences, which tend to make the art of poetry, especially poetry in English, less provincial, more cosmopolitan, are by no means a defiance of the classic tradition. On the contrary, they are an endeavor to return to it at its great original sources, and to sweep away artificial laws-the obiter dicta of secondary mindswhich have encumbered it. There is more of the great authentic classic tradition, for example, in the Spoon River Anthology than in the Idylls of the King, Balaustian's Adventure, and Sohrab and Rustum combined. And the free rhythms of Whitman, Mallarmé, Pound, Sandburg and others, in their inspired passages, are more truly in line with the biblical, the Greek, the Anglo-Saxon, and even the Shakespearean tradition, than all the exact iambics of Dryden and Pope, the patterned alexandrines of Racine, or the closely woven metrics of Tennyson and Swinburne.

Whither the new movement is leading no one can tell with

exactness, nor which of its present manifestations in England and America will prove permanently valuable. But we may be sure that the movement is toward greater freedom of spirit and form, and a more enlightened recognition of the international scope, the cosmopolitanism, of the great art of poetry, of which the English language, proud as its record is, offers but a single phase. As part of such a movement, even the most extravagant experiments, the most radical innovations, are valuable, for the moment at least, as an assault against prejudice. And some of the radicals of today will be, no doubt, the masters of tomorrow-a phenomenon common in the history of the arts.

It remains only to explain the plan of this anthology, its inclusions and omissions.

It has seemed best to include no poems published before 1900, even though, as in a few cases, the poets were moved by the new impulses. For example, those two intensely modern, nobly impassioned, lyric poets, Emily Dickinson and the Shropshire Lad (Alfred Edward Housman)-the one dead, the other fortunately still living-both belong, by date of publication, to the 'nineties. The work of poets already, as it were, enshrined by fame and death has also not been quoted: poets whose works are already, in a certain sense, classics, and whose books are treasured by all lovers of the art-like Synge and Moody and Riley, too early gone from us.

Certain other omissions are more difficult to explain, because they may be thought to imply a lack of consideration which we do not feel. The present Laureate, Robert Bridges, even in the late 'eighties and early 'nineties, was led by his own personal taste, especially in his Shorter Poems, toward austere simplicity of subject, diction and style. But his most representative poems were written before 1900. Rudyard Kipling has been inspired at times by the modern muse, but his best poems also antedate 1900. This is true also of Louise Imogen Guiney and Bliss Carman, though most of their work, like that of Arthur Symons and the late Stephen Phillips and Anna Hempstead Branch, belongs, by its affinities, to the earlier period.

On the other hand, we have tried to be hospitable to the adventurous, the experimental, because these are the qualities of

pioneers, who look forward, not backward, and who may lead on, further than we can see as yet, to new domains of the ever-conquering spirit of beauty.

NOTE. A word about the typography of this volume. No rigid system of lineation, indention, etc., has been imposed upon the poets who very kindly lend us their work. For example, sonnets are printed with or without indention according to the individual preference of the poet; also other rhymed forms, such as quatrains rhyming alternately; as well as various forms of free verse. Punctuation and spelling are more uniform, although a certain liberty has been conceded in words like gray or grey, the color of which seems to vary with the spelling, and in the use of dots, dashes, commas, colons, etc.