volumes are A Roadside Harp (1893) and Patrins (1897). Happy Ending appeared in 1909, and was reissued with additional poems in 1927. Though much of her work is poeticizing rather than poetry, there is no mistaking the high seriousness of her aim. Responding to the influence of the Cavalier poets whom she greatly admired, her best lines beat with a galloping courage. Aware of the poet's mission, she held her pen "in trust to Art, not serving shame or lust"; a militant faith was the very keynote of her writing. Contemporary life affected her but little; even her peasant songs (“In Leinster” for example) have a remoteness which escapes the impact of the present. Still, she was not a literary escapist; a mystic with vitality, her verse was vigorous even when she was most spiritual. "The Kings" and "The Wild Ride" are assured of a place as long as American anthologies are made. Miss Guiney died at Chipping-Campden, near Oxford, England, November 3, 1920. I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses, All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing. Let cowards and laggards fall back! But alert to the saddle The trail is through dolor and dread, over crags and morasses; Thought's self is a vanishing wing, and joy is a cobweb, A dipping of plumes, a tear, a shake of the bridle, I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses, All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses, All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing. We spur to a land of no name, outracing the storm-wind; Bliss Carman (William) Bliss Carman was born in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, April 15, 1861, of a long line of United Empire Loyalists who withdrew from Connecticut at the time of the Reyolutionary War. Carman was educated at the University of New Brunswick (1879-81), at Edinburgh (1882-3), and Harvard (1886-8). He took up his residence in the United States about 1889. In 1893, Carman issued his first book, Low Tide on Grand Pré: A Book of Lyrics. From the outset, it was evident that Carman possessed lyrical power: the ability to interpret the external world through personal intensity. A buoyancy, new to American literature, made his camaraderie with Nature frankly pagan in contrast to the moralizing tributes of his contemporaries. This freshness and whimsy made Carman the natural collaborator for Richard Hovey, and when their first joint Songs from Vagabondia appeared in 1894 Carman's fame was established. Even so devout a poet as Francis Thompson was enthusiastic about the book's irresponsibility: "These snatches," wrote Thompson, "have the spirit of a gypsy Omar Khayyám. They have always careless verve and often careless felicity; they are masculine and rough as roving songs should be." Although the three Vagabondia collections contain Carman's best poems, several of his other volumes (he published over twenty of them) vibrate with something of the same pulse. A physical gayety rises from Ballads of Lost Haven (1897), From the Book of Myths (1902) and Songs of the Sea Children (1904), songs for the open road, the windy beach, the mountaintop. Carman also wrote several volumes of essays and, in conjunction with Mary Perry King, devised poem-dances (Daughters of Dawn, 1913), suggesting Vachel Lindsay's later poem-games. Although the strength is diluted and the music thinned in the later collections, such as April Airs (1916) and Wild Garden (1929), some of the old magic persists; the spell is over-familiar but it is not quite powerless. Carman died in June, 1929, at New Canaan, Connecticut, and was buried in his native province of New Brunswick. A VAGABOND SONG There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood Touch of manner, hint of mood; And my heart is like a rhyme, With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time. The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry Of bugles going by. And my lonely spirit thrills To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills. There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir; When from every hill of flame She calls and calls each vagabond by name. EORGE SANTAYANA was born in Madrid, Spain, December 16, 1863, came to the G United States at the age of nine, and was educated at Harvard, where later he became instructor of philosophy the same year he received his Ph.D. This was in 1889. From 1889 to 1912 he remained at Harvard, becoming not merely one of the most noted professors in the history of the University, but one of the most notable minds in America. In 1914, he went abroad; since then he has been living in France, in England and in Italy. Santayana's first work was in verse, Sonnets and Poems (1894). It is a wise seriousness which is here proclaimed, although the idiom is as traditional as the figures are orthodox. The Sense of Beauty (1896), and The Life of Reason (1905), a study of the phases of human progress in five volumes, received far more attention than Santayana's verse. In the interval he achieved fame as a philosopher, and it was with an almost apologetic air that Santayana prefaced his collected Poems which, after a process of revision, appeared in 1923. "Of impassioned tenderness or Dionysiac frenzy I have nothing, nor even of that magic and pregnancy of phrase— really the creation of a fresh idiom-which marks the high lights of poetry. Even if my temperament had been naturally warmer, the fact that the English language (and I can write no other with assurance) was not my mother-tongue would of itself preclude any inspired use of it on my part; its roots do not quite reach to my center. I never drank in in childhood the homely cadences and ditties which in pure spontaneous poetry set the essential key." Yet, as Santayana himself maintained later on, the thoughts which prompted his verses could not have been transcribed in any other form. If the prosody is worn somewhat thin, it is because the poet-philosopher chose the classic mold in the belief that the innate freedom of poets to hazard new forms does not abolish the freedom to attempt the old ones. The moralizing is personal, even the rhetoric is justified. "Here is the hand of an apprentice, but of an apprentice in a great school." The tradition has, even in these experimental days, its defenders. One of the most persuasive of them, Robert Hillyer, writes, "In the shrewd, though perhaps too deprecatory, preface to his Collected Poems, George Santayana builds up the case for what is sometimes called the rhetorical style. He affirms the validity of the traditional, even the conventional, mode-not to the exclusion of more experimental patterns but as equally defensible with the newer forms. Such is his statement; his implication is clearly in favor of tradition. "To say that what was good once is good no longer is to give too much importance to chronology. Esthetic fashions may change, losing as much beauty at one end as they gain at the other, but innate taste continues to recognize its affinities, however remote, and need never change.' His poetry shows both the virtues and the defects inherent in such standards. Some of the sonnets are among the finest in the language; the 'Athletic Ode,' on the other hand, is a set piece wherein half-backs and Greek deities quite naturally eye each other askance. "Mr. Santayana's output in verse has not been large. Besides the sonnets and odes, he composed an epic drama, Lucifer, which deserves study for the frequent magnificence of its style and the intricacy of its thought. But for the common reader, the sonnets will be most easily acceptable. Many modern readers are as dogmatic in their rejection of the traditional style as professors are supposed to be in their rejection of the new. But if our ears and minds are not wholly closed to dignity and sumptuousness of phrasing, we shall not hesitate to place Mr. Santayana's sequence among the greatest in our literature. Had he composed it two or three hundred years ago no one would quibble; but that a contemporary should insist on Parnassus is almost as shocking as a preference for old Bohemia over new Czecho-Slovakia. Mr. Santayana is definitely behind the times. Perhaps he is also ahead of them.” Not even the most casual appraisal of Santayana's contribution to the period can be complete without a tribute to his prose. At seventy-two he made his début as novelist with The Last Puritan (1936). The quality of Santayana's thinking is heightened by his style, a style which is both firm and flexible, the gift of one of the unquestionable masters of English prose. |