Selected Poems from the Monthly

"To mark the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Harvard Monthly" a committee has made a selection from the poems published in that periodical, and this the Graduate Council has caused to be printed in a form pleasant to the eye and appropriate to the occasion.

The selection may be taken, I assume, to indicate fairly well what has been the achievement and what the poetical tendencies among Harvard undergraduates during the last twenty-five years. The volume contains excellent verse by outsiders--for so I should count Bliss Carmen and Edward Arlington Robinson,--and by editors after graduation. What seems to me significant is the work actually done in student years; and to this I take leave to confine my comments. One would not, perhaps, measure undergraduate work by standards so exacting as those which may properly be used in the estimation of general literature; but one must at least look here for evidence of genuine feeling and for some sensitiveness to the relations between that feeling and literary form.

The volume is unusually good for a collection of student-verse. The frequency with which touches of real distinction appear is notable; and while one is now and again tolerably certain who is the favorite poet of the maker of these verses, the book shows far more originality than any reader, even if not over critical, would be likely to expect. Lines like these, for instance, taken from various poems scattered through the volume, show poetic sincerity and often no inconsiderable felicity of phrase:

"His tender mouth made stern in sad despite." (p. 13).

"One sweep of wind-plumed wave." (p. 26).

"Makes every dim pearl seem a star, Dawn-drowned." (p. 31).

"Of the ship's captain, over-matched, and rolled.

Wave-whelmed in thund'rous dark." (p. 43).

"And, lying with gripped hands and grating breath." (p. 61).

"The dark has vision that no day can see,

And pain has bliss that peace can never find." (p. 74).

Some of the poems, moreover, have the same quality throughout: as "Spring Song," by Hugh McCulloch; "The Serf's Secret," by William Vaughn Moody; "Frustra," by Henry Milnor Rideout; "Epicureans," by Warren Seymour Archibald; the second of Hermann Hagedorn's "Songs of Sunlight"; and the really beautiful first of Joseph Trumbull Stickney's sonnets "To F. L. P.," unusual in thought as well as finished in expression. Several of the longer poems, although somewhat conventional in content, are unusually good for undergraduate work, such as "A. Journey Long Ago," by Alanson Bigelow Houghton; Henry Sheldon Sanford's "Ode to Death"; and Julian Helburn's "Ballade."

It would not be fair to make too serious generalizations from a book of selections of this sort; but one can hardly fail to notice the difference in flavor as the collection goes on. The earlier verses have in general a more scholastic quality and a higher general average of literary quality; the work of more recent years is marked by a greater freedom from conventional modes, and so has a stronger flavor of conviction. The contrast between the two poems by Mr. Houghton which open the book and the "Road Song" of Langdon Warner, or Mr. Wheelock's "Sunday Evening on the Common" shows this most clearly. The tendency is a healthy one. It begets the hope that progress is toward the combining of individual and original emotion with the art of adequate expression.

As a whole the Monthly is to be congratulated upon the book, both on account of the way in which the selections have been made and the good quality of the material which was available