made progress, standardized "success"-that we can understand and appreciate its quality. As The Literary Review (N. Y. Post) said, in an editorial in January, 1922: "We could not go on with sentimental novels and spineless lyrics forever. The artists had to refocus the instrument and look at reality again. And what the honest saw was not beautiful as Tennyson knew beauty, not grand, not even very pleasant. It is their task to make beauty out of it, beauty of a new kind probably, because it will accompany new truth; but they must have time. The 'new' literature deserves criticism, but it also deserves respect." For the rest, I leave the casual reader, as well as the student, to discover the awakened vigor and energy in this, one of the few great poetic periods in native litera ture. Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson, whose work is one of the most original contributions to recent poetry, was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, December 10, 1830. She was a physical as well as a spiritual hermit, actually spending most of her life without setting foot beyond her doorstep. She wrote her short, introspective verses without thought of publication, and it was not until 1890, four years after her death, that the first volume of her posthumous poetry appeared with an introduction by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. "She habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from all but a very few friends," writes Higginson, "and it was with great difficulty that she was persuaded to print, during her lifetime, three or four poems." Yet she wrote almost five hundred of these direct and spontaneous illuminations, sending many of them in letters to friends, or (written on chance slips of paper and delivered without further comment) to her sister Sue. Slowly the peculiar, Blake-like quality of her thought won a widening circle of readers; Poems (1890) was followed by Poems-Second Series (1892) and Poems-Third Series (1896), the contents being collected and edited by her two friends, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. Several years later, a further generous volume was assembled by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, entitled The Single Hound (1914). The sharp quality of her work, with its cool precision and clear imagery, makes her akin, at least in technique, to the later Imagists. (See Preface.) But a passionate and almost mystical warmth brings her closer to the great ones of her time. "An epigrammatic Walt Whitman," some one has called her, a characterization which, while enthusiastic to the point of exaggeration, expresses the direction if not the execution of her art. Technically, Emily Dickinson's work is strikingly uneven; many of her poems are no more than rough sketches, awkwardly filled in; even some of her finest lines are marred by the intrusion of merely trivial conceits or forced "thought-rhymes." But the best of her work is incomparable in its strange cadence and quiet intensity. Her verses are like a box of many jewels, sparkling with an unexpected brilliancy. Emily Dickinson died, in the same place she was born, at Amherst, May 15, 1886. CHARTLESS! I never saw a moor, I never saw the sea; Yet now I know how the heather looks, I never spoke with God, INDIAN SUMMER These are the days when birds come back, To take a backward look. These are the days when skies put on Oh, fraud that can not cheat the bee, Induces my belief, Till ranks of seeds their witness bear, Oh, sacrament of summer days, Thy sacred emblems to partake, SUSPENSE Elysium is as far as to The very nearest room, If in that room a friend await Felicity or doom. What fortitude the soul contains, That it can so endure The accent of a coming foot, The opening of a door. A CEMETERY This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies, And Lads and Girls; Was laughter and ability and sighing, And frocks and curls. This passive place a Summer's nimble mansion, Where Bloom and Bees Fulfilled their Oriental Circuit, Then ceased like these. BECLOUDED The sky is low, the clouds are mean, A travelling flake of snow |