and Collected Poems by Rudyard Kipling. Thanks also are due Mr. Rudyard Kipling as well as A. P. WATT AND SON for "The Return" from The Five Nations and "An Astrologer's Song" from Rewards and Fairies by Rudyard Kipling. E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY for the selections from Counter-Attack and Picture Show by Siegfried Sassoon. THE EVENING POST (New York) — for a poem by Joseph Auslander. FOUR SEAS COMPANY for the quotations from The Charnel Rose and The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken, for the poem from War and Love by Richard Aldington. HARCOURT, BRACE & COMPANY for the selections from A Miscellany of American Poetry 1920, 1922, 1925, 1927, Canzoni and Carmina by T. A. Daly, Not Poppy by Virginia Moore, Selected Poems by W. H. Davies, Smoke and Steel by Carl Sandburg, The Inner Harbor by Wilbert Snow, Lilliput by Roberta T. 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A FOREWORD "Modern" is, perhaps, the most misleading adjective in the dictionary. There is no term more fluctuant and elusive, that shifts its meanings with greater rapidity, that turns its back so quickly upon those ardent champions who defended it most stubbornly. The present merges so swiftly into the past that today's definition of modernity may seem, after the shortest of intervals, an apology for some safely enshrined tradition. And yet, though one should not use hard and fast rules when measuring so fluid a thing as time, one must at least be arbitrary about the years when making an anthology. A "modern" compilation is no exception. Although it is difficult to draw a line between periods of literary activityand particularly of poetry-the task is made somewhat easier by the advent of Walt Whitman in America and the close of the Victorian Era in England. It would have been pleasant to divide the poetry of this dual collection into groups and distinct tendencies. Unfortunately, such a scheme would give the reader a series of impressions that would be contradictory and, in the final effect, false. One cannot draw a true picture of a period in the state of flux except by showing its fluid character. Since the chronological arrangement is, in spite of certain disadvantages, the only logical one, an arbitrary boundary has been fixed. Conceiving modern British poetry to begin after the fertile Tennyson-Browning-Rossetti-Swinburne epoch, the year 1840 is made to act as dividing-line; any poet born before that date is ruthlessly excluded. In the case of American poetry, the line has been moved back twenty years. Thus, by including work of a poet born in this country as early as 1819, a richer background has been given the poetry of our times. And, although some of the "interval" poets like Aldrich and Lanier could scarcely be considered "modern," it is curious to see how wide and how completely the circle has swung since Walt Whitman startled the world with Leaves of Grass. It is a happy circumstance that this volume should begin with the poetry of Whitman and Emily Dickinson (born 1830) whose work, printed for the first time after her death, was unknown as late as 1890 and unnoticed until several years later. For their lines radiated the new spirit — free in expression, unhampered in choice of subject, keen in psychology to which a countryful of writers has responded. No longer confined to London, Boston or New York as literary centers, the impulse to create is everywhere. There is scarcely a state, barely a township that has not produced its local laureate. The notes preceding the poems are intended to support and amplify this geographical as well as biographical range. It is instructive as well as interesting to see what effect, if any, climate and conditions exert on the creator's expression: how much the gaunt and granite hills of New Hampshire manifest themselves in the New England soliloquies of Robert Frost, or how the noisy energy of the Middle West booms and rattles through the high-pitched syllables of Vachel Lindsay. The notes, with their brief critical as well as bibliographical data, have also been prepared on the theory that poet and person have a definite relation to each other and the enjoyment of the one is enhanced by an acquaintance with the other. While emphasis has been placed upon the contribution of living writers, little stress has been laid upon the controversial subject of Form. It is the matter which concerns us more than the manner. Vers libre, that bugaboo of many critics, has produced a quantity of trivial and tiresome exhibitions. But so, the vers librists might well reply, has the sonnet. Any form, in the hands of the genuine artist, not only justifies but dignifies itself. Free verse (a misnomer, by the bye, for free verse instead of being "free" obeys certain well-known laws of rhythm, balance, return and cadence) is capable of many effects impossible of achievement in a strict, metrical pattern. Nor is free verse as one-dimensional |