have meter and rhyme. "And no great poetic passage has ever been produced," says the great poet, "through labor and study." None can deny the truth of such an utterance. In the process of turning emotion into art, some loss has to be suffered. "The very mind which directs the hand, in formation is incapable of accounting to itself the origin, the gradation, the media of the process," says Shelley. What happens when we add to our weakness the cursed invention of form?

"They clamor to express an idea untrammelled by convention, and fail to remember that the only vehicle permitting such liberty is prose. Again he is suffering from the same malady. It is obvious that ideas untrammeled by convention can be expressed in poetry as well as prose.

He then goes on giving for a second time a long talk about rhythm and rhyme, saying that the free versifiers are rejecting a tool of enormous value when they refuse the aid of rhythm and that rhyme is employed to excellent advantage. The only argument for this is that these instrumentalities may do very well for the old school, but the new artists will not be imprisoned by form. They will not pour their ecstasies in the dusty iron cells where their life and character will be lost. Rhyme is but an ornament, a form of externalizing of rhythm. It is freedom of expression which creates great art, new rhythms with the expression of new moods. A new phrase-making ability must be created, a new wordmusic to express their thoughts. The exact decorative word must be found in the new art. Poets have been widening and deepening and freeing their prosody ever since there was a prosody to tinker with. In experimenting the modern poets are merely following tradition.

"In many respects the free versifiers resemble the ultraradicals in other fields; they see something in need of reform and would tear down the entire structure of poetry in order to reform it." Mr. Coblentz, we all know with what a misoneism anything new is received. The new art does not

destroy, nor does it care to reform. It simply adds to the old. Nothing that the vers librist might do will destroy the old formal verse.

We are living in a new age when the men of genius are solitarily egoist figures; would-be Nietzsches of the arts, recognizing no higher authority in modern time than themselves. Such men have been our D'Annunzios and Wagners. The expression of modern truth, therefore, is the expression that comes from the heat of our epoch with all its defects and its strengths, all its good and evil, all its science and all its spiritual sterility; these are the great formlessnesses, the dissipating molten matters of speech, the possibility of language.

In The New Era in American Poetry, Untermeyer says: "We are now in the midst of one of those tremendous spiritual upheavals when, as in every great crisis, the thought of man, grows more powerful and introspective, bursts forth in poetry. And the quality of that poetry is human, racy and vigorous; it is not only closer to the soil but nearer to the soul. The poets have shaken themselves free, first of all from the pontifical rhetoric, the tag-end moralizing of our literary doctors and doctrinnaires. And as they have rid themselves of the tradition of didacticism, they are going clear of the tradition of routine romanticism.

"The Imagists have their objection to the old rhythm in the fact that they 'echo old moods'- -as if there were any moods that are not old." When it suits him, Mr. Coblentz takes things literally. By "old moods," we mean strained expressions due to religious oppression, out of focus pictures of the true reality due to the narrowness and prejudice of the olden times. The poets are more sincere today; they fear neither lay nor religion in the creation of their art. They attempt to put man in the proper place in the picture. They are ironic, grotesque, ugly at times, because they have the feeling of the universality of life. Nothing checks our poets today; even morality is a splendid subject of ridicule. "It

was Whitman who came with a double challenge; he assailed the intolerable prurience of the Puritans and outraged the aesthetic formalists of his period by taking his themes hot from the rude and raucous tumble of life," says Untermeyer. A poet is only true to his art and his "vision" when he follows the subconscious dictates and writes in accordance with them.

Some poets may fail to justify their departure from custom; but those free spirits who know that only through departure there is advancement, only through change we make progress-that reproach will always be the greeting of men for ameliorating the world-will laugh and heroically go on with their work.

I have no doubt that the new poetry will associate itself for mutual sympathy and interpretation with every vital stream of social and philosophic thought, and that it is not an insane clamor for poetic anarchy, as Mr. Coblentz puts it. All great changes are a matter of slow growth and evolution. This poetic movement is as inevitable as any other movement in the human race.

THE TENNYSON COLLECTION IN THE WRENN

LIBRARY

BY FANNIE E. RATCHFORD

That the Wrenn Library, now in the University of Texas, possesses the best collection of Tennyson in this country, is a statement several times reiterated by Mr. Thomas J. Wise of London in his correspondence with Mr. Wrenn, the collector of the library. In reporting one noteworthy purchase made for Mr. Wrenn he wrote on December 1, 1905

Adding these to what you already possess I am convinced that you and I now possess the two finest, most complete collections of Tennyson in the world, you on your side of the Atlantic and I on my side. I do not forget that Mr. Spoor has the Lover's Tale and that Mr. Harris Arnold has The True and The False, but you have now so many pieces of which no other copy is owned in America, that neither Mr. Spoor nor Mr. Harris Arnold can approach you.

A few weeks later he repeats,

There is not the slightest doubt T. J. W. [Mr. Wise] and J. H. W. [Mr. Wrenn] are the two proud possessors of the two finest collections of Tennyson extant. You unquestionably rank ahead of both Mr. Harris Arnold and Pierpont Morgan. I am going to make fresh effort to fill up the few gaps that still remain in both our sets.

This magnificent collection of approximately one hundred items may best be described under three divisions: the various collections of poems valuable because of their association with the author rather than for their rarity; the separate pieces, most of them extremely rare by reason of either the small editions or the ephemeral form in which they were issued; and the "trial books," so rare as to rank among the "impossibles" of book collecting.

There is nothing remarkable in the statement that the Library contains a copy of every collection of poems issued

during the poet's lifetime, from the Poems by Two Brothers, 1827, to the Death of OEnowe and Other Poems, 1892; for these collections were issued in editions varying from 500 to 60,000 copies, as Tennyson's popularity with the reading public grew to phenomenal proportions, and such copies are, consequently, fairly common. The student or the casual visitor to the library would find little more than passing interest, on turning the leaves of the modest copy of Poems Chiefly Lyrical, 1830, in its original drab boards, to find the page 91 misnumbered 19; in tracing the textual changes of The Princess through the various editions; in looking upon the cancelled title page of Idylls of the Hearth, which gave place to Enoch Arden; or in hunting out the well-known misprints of In Memoriam, for all these misprints and changes have been described in high-school texts often enough to be familiar to all. But the most blasé could hardly suppress an amateurish thrill of pure delight in following the trail of the author's association over and through them all.

Here is the poet's own copy of Poems of 1842, each volume bearing on the fly page a holograph manuscript of a poem in Tennyson's characteristic script. In Volume I is a poem headed Elegies; in Volume II is a sonnet beginning, "When night hath climbed her peak of highest noon." Both of these were included in Poems of 1830, but neither was ever reprinted in any authorized edition of Tennyson's poems. In his Bibliography of Tennyson, Mr. Wise reproduced both of these manuscripts.

Even more interesting are the three association copies of the Idylls of the King. The first edition of 1859 bears upon the title page the presentation inscription in the author's own hand, "Joseph Wolff from A. Tennyson;" the fourth edition of 1862, the poet's personal copy, is without inscription except for his autograph on the title page, with the curious monograming of the A and T that characterizes Tennyson's signature; the ninth edition of 1869, freely marked with the author's corrections, is of especial interest as illustrating