firian age is the excessive attention bestowed upon questions of form rather than content. One finds, for example, a meticulous care devoted to novel and strange experiments in versification, startling devices in attracting and holding the attention, and an amazing amount of skill and workmanship lavished on a simple and fatuous thought. Aside from the fact already mentioned that the Mexican literary man is speaking to his own group, and is, because of that, courting the judgment of experts, there is, to my mind, the influence of the same repression to help to account for this all-absorbing attention to externals. The sense of workmanship of the artist balked in the choice of his subjects and in his treatment of them finds an outlet in precisely such an all-absorbing meticulousness to mere form. Men like Najera and Tablada, who have been the most outstanding figures in this manner of writing, sought their inspiration in a world where other but similar causes have operated to produce the same result; namely, the France of the last days of the nineteenth and the first days of the twentieth century.

The last great voice in the Porfirian age, Amado Nervo, concludes this cycle of expressions made possible by Porfirian politics. In addition to the melancholy of his contemporaries, the extreme attention to form of his masters and his contemporaries, he contributes a semi-religious note of resignation, the last refuge of a world without hope, without ideals, ashamed to be cynical and afraid to be convincing, yet full of passion, of the longing for life and for beauty. The best advice that Nervo could give to his contemporaries was the lesson that he had learned from his sister, the Running Water (La Hermana Agua): "Be resigned, be pure," "Ser docile, ser cristalina: esta es la ley y los profetas."

THE POETICAL WAR

BY STANTON A. COBLENTZ

O Poet, then, forbear

The loosely sandalled verse,
Choose rather thou to wear

The buskin-straight and terse.

Leave to the tyro's hand

The limp and shapeless style,

See that thy form demand
The labor of the file.

-Austin Dobson.

The poetical war is on. The flag of rebellion is waving; the battle rages between the old school of poets and the new. For several years the conflict has been at its height, and as yet there is no sign of the end. The radicals and the revolutionists are loud in their demands for liberty; they cry that they have been imprisoned in rules; they insist that we must win independence of convention, or that poetry will die. The most ancient strongholds of poetry are assailed by them; already the outer fortifications have been crumpled to earth, battered down by salvos of alleged verse.

In a word, free verse has been announcing itself as poetry. And while modest enough not to claim to be the only poetry, it ascribes numerous virtues to itself alone. Release from artificial restrictions is its loudest battle cry; it seeks emancipation from the trammels of rhyme and of meter; it plans to throw established rules to the four winds, in favor of rules of its own making; it desires to create beauty without respect to the recognized principles of beauty, to compose poetry in disregard of the traditional poetic essentials. All this is a laudable aim, providing it succeeds-but can it succeed? Like other rebels, the poetic insurrectionists are to be judged by their success; and if they can establish that theirs are the true poetic essentials, while the principles that

governed Milton, Shelley, and Tennyson are defective, then the laurels of victory will be theirs, and the Gray's "Elegy" and the "Prometheus Unbound" of the future will be composed in free verse.

At the outset, I do not deny that the free versifiers have produced something in the way of literature. But not all literature is poetry. And therein, it seems to me, the poetic radicals are guilty of a basic misconception.

If Mark Twain, as a bit of whimsical humor, had chopped one of his prose articles into fantastic form, commenced each line with a capital letter, and labelled the whole poetry, he would have been attempting in jest what some of the writers of today are undertaking seriously. And if he had declared that in so doing he was guided by rules known only to himself, and that the ear which could take pleasure in Swinburne and Shelley was not always delicate enough to value him correctly, he would have been foreshadowing the attitude of the free versifiers. The difference is that he would have been greeted with laughter, whereas the free versifiers are sometimes accorded more sober approval.

Yet Mark Twain's work might have been literature. The joke would have consisted in calling it poetry.

Now whether they realize it or not, the vers librists are perpetrating a tremendous joke. There is nothing they cannot stamp as poetry, so long as they give it a “jagged appearance"; they have taken singularity of form as the chief poetical criterion, and there are many who accept this criterion without even a smile. I confess that it does not make all the difference in the world what a thing is called; that literature will not come to an end if we entitle prose poetry, and that the songs of Burns and the sonnets of Keats will survive unaffected even by the "polyphonic prose" of Amy Lowell and the Imagistic ebullitions of Ezra Pound. Yet if a hoax is being perpetrated, I believe in exposing that hoax; and if a group of poetic charlatans are drawing attention. to themselves by juggling cleverly with words, I consider it right to say that they are charlatans. And it seems that a

whole school of poets is imitating on a larger scale the "Spectric Poems" of Mr. Bynner and Mr. Ficke, which were issued as a joke, and seriously commended by the critics.

Of course, the free verse writers will object to this. They will say that theirs is a perfectly legitimate attempt to create something new in poetry; that the mere incident of a difference in method should not cause their ostracism in the poetical community; and that it is most unjust to call them charlatans. They will resent the insinuation that they are even unconsciously the perpetrators of a hoax, and will complain that, like all great reformers, they are being abused and misunderstood; and because they are abused and misunderstood, they will argue that they are great reformers.

In order to answer this plea, we must consider the nature of poetry in general and of free verse in particular, and seek to determine whether the two may be one and the same.

To begin with, it would be easy to dogmatize, and to say that poetry is metrical expression. But all who have the power of appreciating what is best in poetry must realize that this definition has not an unlimited application. If it had, many of our ephemeral outbursts of newspaper wit would be poetry, and "Mary's Little Lamb" would be as much a poem as Wordsworth's "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways," which is written in the same meter. On the other hand, no one can doubt that Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" is as true a poem as was ever composed, although it is irregular in form; or even that Matthew Arnold's "Philomela" is a poem, although it lacks both strict regularity and consistent rhyme.

Perhaps no better definition of poetry has ever been made than the famous statement of Wodsworth that it is "emotion recollected in tranquillity." And yet I believe that something has been added to this definition by 'ofessor G. H. Palmer, in his interesting book on Formative ypes in English Poetry, wherein he declares that poetry is a "fragment of reality seen through a temperament, or the conscious transmission of an emotional experience to another

imaginative mind," and that the test of poetry is "if it is beautiful or ugly, not if it is false or true." The definition has been further analyzed and explained by Professor J. L. Lowes, in the admirable volume entitled Convention and Revolt in Poetry, in which he states that the end of art is "to stir us with the sense of an imperishable beauty," and that this can be accomplished only when "emotion recollected in tranquillity" has "touched the springs of the imagination." Or, to put it more briefly, Professor Lowes declares that poetic truth is "illusion tinged with emotion."

And by illusion is not to be understood anything that is false. This word merely signifies that an illusion makes true for the reader what is true for the poet; in other words, that the reader is transplanted into the poet's place, and accepts the poet's thoughts as his own.

If the above analyses be correct, the elements essential to poetry are first, beauty, and second, illusion, produced by imaginative or emotional means. The beauty is perhaps subservient to the illusion; its object is to reinforce the illusion; to make the illusion possible; to create such an atmosphere that the emotions and the imaginings of others will be accepted as our own. The fundamental difference between poetry and prose is perhaps that poetry concerns itself in a far larger degree with making true for the reader what originally was true for the author alone; but this initial difference gives rise to another and no less important distinction, which is that the poet must have the use of every possible tool to convey to others what for him is truth. And therein lies the justification of rhyme and rhythm.

To give my own definition of poetry would be beside the point. Definitions at best are arbitrary; they are rarely all-inclusive; and while intended to explain the truth, they often foscure it. But it will be impossible to proceed without aumitting that in every definition of poetry the elements of beauty and of illusion must be included. As regards the first, there will be scarcely any dispute; even the free versifiers at times aim to create things of beauty, although their