nificant chiefly for their youthful promise of a maturity never attained. The democratic humanitarian spirit, with underlying hints of a coming social revolution, is found in the verses of EDWIN MARKHAM (1852– ), more rhetorician than poet, whose Man with the Hoe (1899), suggested by Millet's painting, is much his best work.

A far higher and larger spirit was WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY (1869-1910), the greatest American poet since Lanier, who felt to the full all the tendencies outlined above, and expressed them in poems of rare beauty and imaginative power. In Gloucester Moors and Other Poems (1901), the Road-Hymn for the Start thanks God for "the boon of the endless quest"; The Brute draws a terrible picture of the crushing, brutalizing effect of industrial materialism, but utters the belief that in the end the might of mechanical civilization will be used to uplift the spirit of man; An Ode in Time of Hesitation and On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines, whatever one thinks of their political wisdom, are noble in style and quivering with passion for the rights of "inferior " peoples. The Masque of Judgment (1900), which represents God as dying, self-slain, through His merciless severity against evil, itself an "effluence of the life that moves in Him," is a bold attack on the dualism in popular theology; it is also an expression of sympathy with the sufferings of humanity, put into the lips of the angel Raphael, who lives so long with sinning, sorrowing, aspiring man that he loses his interest in the calm courts of heaven. The masque lacks firmness of structure; but everywhere are individual passages of wonderful beauty, and for imaginative horror there are few

things in literature comparable to the description of the Monster Worm rearing his sinuous bulk out of the abyss and laying his hideous folds "upward the visioned hills to attack the throne of God Himself. The FireBringer (1904), a dramatic poem on the heroic defiance of Zeus by Prometheus, who brings fire to wretched man, is more firmly knit, but nowhere reaches the imaginative height of The Masque of Judgment. The Great Divide (1906), a prose drama of much power on the stage, by its contrast to the earlier work showed surprising versatility; its theme, however, the conflict between the rigid morality of Puritanic New England and the freer, more human standards of the West, expressed again the bold but not crude questioning spirit of the author. The Faith Healer (1909), another prose play, although less successful either for acting or reading, has subtlety and nobility in its portrait of a mind in revolt against social law and custom. Mr. Moody united in remarkable degree the older culture and the modern spirit, and American literature suffered a heavy loss by the premature death of so sensitive, imaginative, and lofty a nature.

The poetry of EDWIN A. ROBINSON (1869- ) is partly of the earlier and partly of the later school. Much of his subject-matter, and the careful finish of all his poems, link his work with the nineteenth-century poetry; but by his sympathy with all sorts and conditions of men, including criminals and failures, he aligns himself with the growing tendency to "gently scan your brother man, still gentler sister woman." In The Children of the Night (1896) this broad sympathy appears in Reuben Bright, Supremacy, and The Night Before,

which reveal the better side of "churls,"" sluggards," and murderers. The title-poem in Captain Craig (1902) is a subtle interpretation, half satirical, half pathetic, of the soul of an old "pensioner" who is part genius and part fraud; Isaac and Archibald is a charmingly delicate description of the friendly relations of two old men; The Book of Annandale is a picture of the innermost mind of a man who finds to his dismay that he is secretly glad of his wife's death because of "that other face" the memory of which "came between him and the coffin-lid." The refined intellectuality, with an undercurrent of passion, in Mr. Robinson's best poetry gives it quiet distinction and penetrating force.

JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY MARKS (1874has unusual talent for melody and phrase; and her successive volumes The Wayfarers (1898), The Singing Leaves (1903), The Singing Man (1911), Harvest Moon (1916)-show development from diffuse sweetness to condensed power and a richer music. Her gift is less for expressing thought than for conveying moods, especially sympathy for the oppressed and emotional faith in love and joy as the richest elements in life.

Interest in ordinary men and women and subtle realism in depicting their inner lives appear in the poems of ROBERT FROST (1875- ). A native of California, during many years. of study and teaching in New England he has entered deeply into the minds of New England country folk, and in North of Boston (1914) he has interpreted their shy, proud, stubborn, sensitive, heroic natures more truly and completely than was ever done before in verse. The blank pentameters in which most of the sketches are composed,

quiet, flexible, intentionally low in musical tone and near the borders of prose, form an admirable medium for expressing the thoughts and feelings of these selfrepressed natures. As a portrayer of New England country people he is a worthy successor to Lowell and Whittier; having less wit and humor than the former, and less idyllic charm than the latter, he yet excels them both in range of characters and in subtlety and inwardness of interpretation.

One of the most masculine of modern poets is EDGAR LEE MASTERS (1868- ), who in Spoon River Anthol ogy (1914-1915) gave American literature a new thing The work consists of what purport to be epitaphs, composed in a free kind of blank verse, and describing the lives and characters of persons who have died in a small Illinois community. The epitaphs are brutally realistic and saturated with pessimism. Spoon River deserves to be renamed "Abhorred Styx, the flood of deadly hate," or "Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep," for the village was crammed with more crime, lust, hypocrisy, meanness, and misery than could be found in equal space in the awful funnel of Dante's Inferno. But the overdose of pessimistic poison is made harmless by its excess; the reader soon reflects that the actual world, bad as it is, is no such sink of iniquity as Spoon River, and that if Illinois were truly represented by this imaginary spot, it might have produced a Satan but never an Abraham Lincoln. The Anthology is relieved in places by more cheerful and noble portraits; that of Anne Rutledge, Lincoln's first love, is the supreme thing in the book, full of haunting music and powerful imagination, by which this young

girl is linked with the life of a nation through the influence of her memory on the soul of Lincoln. After due allowance has been made for exaggeration, the fact remains that Mr. Masters is one of the most powerful and true satirists of modern times, pitilessly laying bare the ugly ulcers of the human soul and lashing the lecher, the sneak, and the brute with whips of steel. His humor, also, of a sort that mixes well with the satire, is genuine and strong. Songs and Satires (1916) is much poorer than the Anthology, and in parts pushes liberty into license, the besetting sin of individualism ancient or modern. His third book, The Great Valley (1916), though less powerful and original than the first, has greater range of subject and a saner tone; the strongest groups of poems are those on Chicago and Lincoln, in which local color and pride are combined with national and human significance, and those portraying passion intimately and frankly but without vulgarity. Toward the Gulf (1918) shows much the same merits and defects. If Mr. Masters has capacity for further growth, especially if he gains in ability to see life "whole " as well as steadily," he may become one of the greatest American poets, as he is already one of the most original and trenchant.

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Of less originality and power, but significant for their relation to the so-called New Poetry movement, are several recent poets who make much of freedom and unconventionality especially in the form of their verse and in the expression of thought and passion. NICHOLAS VACHEL LINDSAY (1879-. ) shares the modern sympathy for the outcast, as is shown by the title-poem and by The Drunkards in the Street in the volume