The Joyful Heart

s more debtors to poetry

Waldo

. What does this spirit need? Next to contact with true religion, it most needs contact with true poetry. It needs to abso

Here is the whole story of the American poetry-lover. His enthusiasm first reached a high point about the middle of the nineteenth century. A generation later it fell into a swift decline. But three or four years ago it began to revive so ra

w do they account for the flourishing condition of some of our other arts? If we are hopelessly materialistic, why should American painters and sculptors have such a high world-standing? And why should their strongest, most original, most significant work be precisely in the sphere of poetic, suggestive landscape, and ideal sculpture? The answer is self-evident. It is no utterly prosaic age, and people that founded our

ant for the sake of argument that any decline of contemporary poets is bound to effect poetry-lovers in some mysteriously disastrous way. And let us recall the situation back there in the seventies when the ebb of poetic appreciation first set in. At that time Whittier, Holmes, Emerson, and Whitman had only just topped the crest of the hill of accomplishment, and the last-named was

rtistic expression. It is almost impossible for the artist to accomplish anything amid the destructive atmosphere exhaled by the ignorant, the stupid, the indifferent, the callous, or the actively hostile. It follows tha

s. So far I agree; but not with their reason. For they say that poetry declined because cities are such dreadfully unpoetic things; because they have become synonymous only with riveting-machines and the kind of building that the Germans call the "heaven-scratcher," with elevated railways, "sand

GON

E

they say, is about as poetic

ht through the city's veneer of ugly commonplace to the beauty shimmering beneath. In his eyes the sinewy, heroic forms of the builders, clinging high on their frail scaffoldings and nonchalantly hurling red-hot rivets through space, are so many young gods at play wit

f the Lord with its eigh

for example, might see it if he had a dash of Tennyson's technical equipment, of Arnold's sculpturesque polish and restraint, of Lanier's instinct for sensuous beauty. What "songs greater than before known" might such a poet not sing as he wandered close to precious records of the Anglo-Saxon culture of the race amid the stately colonial peace and simplicity of St. Mark's church-yard, with the vividly colored life of all southeastern Europe surging abou

m, and find them wanting. Why? Because they have sought, like radiographers, far beneath the surface; whereas the real trouble has been only

ie Queene," or fumble again at the combination lock which seems to guard the meaning of the second part of "Faust." And we find these occupations so invigorating and joyful that we model and cast an iron resolution to the effect that this winter, whatever betide, we will read a little poetry every day, or every week, as the case may be. On that we plunge back into the beautiful, poetic, inspiring city, and adhere to our poetry-rea

ning in his bedroom after the toils of the day. The first part of the trip ran in the country. "Afoot and light-hearted" he took to the open road every morning, and reveled every evening in such things as "Manahatta," "The Song of Joys," and

thy brain with Boston and New York ... thou shalt find no radiance of meaning in the lonely wastes of the pine woods." The trouble was this: that the modern type of city, when it started into being, back in the seventies, began to take from men, and to use up, that margin of nervous energy, that exuberant overplus of vitality of which so much ha

n!), yet the appreciation of poetry above that of the sister arts demands this bloom on the cheek of existence. For poetry, with quite as much of emotional demand as the others, combines a c

nd falls, like the column of mercury in a barometer, with the varying levels of their physical overplus

se. This process has kept on so furiously that the bodies of most of us have never been able to catch up. No large number have yet succeeded in readjusting themselves completely to the new pace of the city. And this continues to exact from mos

ogress has arrived with no such stunning abruptness as to outdistance our powers of readjustment. When we go from city to country we recede to a rate of living with which our nervous syst

ral, are every instant laying waste our conscious or unconscious powers? How are we to give the life of the spirit its due of poetry when our precious margin is forever leaking away through lowered vitality and even sickness due to lack of sle

f excitement over whatever is just happening, like a cub reporter on the way to his first fire, or a neur?sthete-if one may coin a word-who perceives a spider on her collarette. This habit of mind soon grows stereotyped, and is, of course, immensely stimulated by the multitudinous editions of our innumerable newspapers. The city gets one to living so intensely in the pr

, who was considerably more than a century ahead of his age, wrote to Schiller

ctions; and the great weakness of the reading public for newspapers and romances comes just from the fact that the former always, and the latter generally, brings distraction into the distraction. Indeed, I believe that I have noticed a sort of dislike of poetic productions-or at least in so fa

hem must it not be inducing to-day? For the appreciation of poetry cannot live under the same roof with the journalistic spirit. The art needs long, quiet vistas backward and

ally fled from the city for as long a summer outing as possible. More and more people learned the delightful sport of turning an abandoned farm into a year-round country estate. The man who was tied t

lized persons, whenever they returned to the city, were better able to stand-and adjust themselves to-the severe urban pace, than were the fagged city people. It was largely by the impact of this new vitality tha

here. And men like Masefield, Noyes, and Tagore begin to vie in popularity with the moderately popular novelists. Moreover this is only the beginning. Aviation has come and is reminding us of the ancient prophecy of H. G. Wells that the suburbs of a city like New York will now soon extend from Washington to Albany. Urban centers are being diffused fast; but social-mindedness is being diffused faster. Men are wishing more and more to share with each brother man the brimming cup of