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In 1905

College in 1897, graduating with the class of 1901. she went abroad, studying archæology in Rome. After her return she essayed to teach, but her failing health compelled her to discontinue and though she became instructor in Poetics at Smith College in 1911, the burden was too great for her.

In 1913, after her breakdown, she began to write those brief lines which, like some of Emily Dickinson's, are so precise and poignant. She was particularly happy in her "Cinquains," a form that she originated. These five-line stanzas in the strictest possible structure (the lines having, respectively, two, four, six, eight and two syllables) doubtless owe something to the Japanese hokku, but Adelaide Crapsey saturated them with her own fragile loveliness.

She died at Saranac Lake, New York, on October 8, 1914. Her small volume Verse appeared in 1915, and a part of an unfinished Study in English Metrics was posthumously published in 1918.

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With faint dry sound,

Like steps of passing ghosts,

The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.

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Still dusk . . . as strange, as still . . .

A white moth flew. Why am I grown

So cold?

ON SEEING WEATHER-BEATEN TREES

Is it as plainly in our living shown,

By slant and twist, which way the wind hath blown?

Grace Hazard Conkling

Grace Hazard Conkling was born in 1878 in New York City. After graduating from Smith College in 1899, she studied music at the University of Heidelberg (1902-3) and Paris (1903-4). Since 1914 she has been a teacher of English at Smith College, where she has done much to create an alert interest in poetry.

Mrs. Conkling's Afternoons of April (1915) and Wilderness Songs (1920) are full of a graciousness that seldom grows cloying. There is fragrant whimsicality, a child-like freshness in poems like "The Whole Duty of Berkshire Brooks," and "Frost on a Window," which remind one of the manner of her daughter, Hilda, (see page 213).

FROST ON A WINDOW

This forest looks the way
Nightingales sound.

Tall larches lilt and sway
Above the glittering ground:
The wild white cherry spray
Scatters radiance round.

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The chuckle of the nightingale
Is like this elfin wood.

Even as his gleaming trills assail
The spirit's solitude,

These leaves of light, these branches frail
Are music's very mood.

The song of these fantastic trees,
The plumes of frost they wear,
Are for the poet's whim. who sees
Through a deceptive air,

And has an ear for melodies
When never a sound is there.

-117

Vachel Lindsay

(Nicholas) Vachel Lindsay was born in the house where he still lives in Springfield, Illinois, November 10, 1879. His home is next door to the Executive mansion of the State of Illinois; from the window where Lindsay does most of his writing, he saw many Governors come and go, including the martyred John P. Altgeld, whom he has celebrated in one of his finest poems. He graduated from the Springfield High School, attended Hiram College (1897-1900), studied at the Art Institute at Chicago (1900-3) and at the New York School of Art (1904). After two years of lecturing and settlement work, he took the first of his long tramps, walking through Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, preaching "the gospel of beauty," and formulating his unique plans for a communal art. (See Preface.) Like a true revivalist, he attempted to wake in the people he met a response to beauty; like Tommy Tucker, he sang, recited and chanted for his supper, distributing a little pamphlet entitled "Rhymes to be Traded for Bread." But the great audiences he was endeavoring to reach did not hear him, even though his collection General Booth Enters Into Heaven (1913) struck many a loud and racy note.

Lindsay broadened his effects, developed the chant and, the

following year, published his The Congo and Other Poems (1914), an infectious blend of Lindsay's three R's: Rhyme, Religion and Ragtime. In the title-poem and, in a lesser degree, the three companion chants, Lindsay struck his most powerful -and most popular-vein. These gave people (particularly when intoned aloud) that primitive joy in syncopated sound which is at the very base of song. The Chinese Nightingale (1917) begins with one of the most whimsical pieces Lindsay has ever devised. And if the subsequent The Golden Whales of California (1920) is less distinctive, it is principally because the author has written too much and too speedily to be self-critical. It is his peculiar appraisal of loveliness, the rollicking high spirits joined to a stubborn evangelism, that makes Lindsay so representative a product of his environment.

Besides his original poetry, Lindsay has embodied his experiences and meditations on the road in two prose volumes, A Handy Guide for Beggars (1916) and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (1914), as well as a prophetic study of the "silent drama," The Art of the Moving Picture (1915).

THE EAGLE THAT IS FORGOTTEN

[John P. Altgeld. Born December 30, 1847;
died March 12, 1902]

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Sleep softly .. eagle forgotten

under the

...

stone,

Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its

own.

"We have buried him now," thought your foes, and in secret rejoiced.

They made a brave show of their mourning, their hatred unvoiced.

1

Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan Company from General William Booth Enters into Heaven and Other Poems by Vachel Lindsay.

They had snarled at you, barked at you, foamed at you,

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The others that mourned you in silence and terror and

truth,

The widow bereft of her pittance, the boy without youth, The mocked and the scorned and the wounded, the lame

and the poor

That should have remembered forever, . . . remember

no more.

Where are those lovers of yours, on what name do they

call

The lost, that in armies wept over your funeral pall? They call on the names of a hundred high-valiant ones, A hundred white eagles have risen, the sons of your sons, The zeal in their wings is a zeal that your dreaming began,

The valor that wore out your soul in the service of man. Sleep softly, . . . eagle forgotten, .. under the stone, Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own. Sleep on, O brave hearted, O wise man, that kindled the flame

To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name, To live in mankind, far, far more than to live

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in a name.

TO A GOLDEN HAIRED GIRL IN A

LOUISIANA TOWN

You are a sunrise,

If a star should rise instead of the sun.
You are a moonrise,

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