'Ars Poetica' practically discards punctuation, but succeeds in being, majestically, what it insists all poems should be.

A poem should be equal to:
Not true

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf

For love

The leaning grasses and two lights above the

sea

A poem should not mean But be

The full-statured poems in this book are innumerable: 'Eleven,' 'Memorial Rain,' 'The Too-Late Born,' 'Le Secret Humain.' They completely compensate for an occasional irritation like 'Hearts' and Flowers'.'

But Archibald MacLeish is less interesting as an experimentalist in verse forms than as a mystic and metaphysician. The first three lines of his 'Prologue' say it all:

These alternate nights and days, these seasons
Somehow fail to convince me. It seems
I have the sense of infinity!

In another poem, he breaks off, bewildered:

No lamp has ever shown us where to look.

He is forever searching out the fourth dimension of the spirit. The Why is forever on his lips. The unknown troubles him. The first and final mystery of existence will not let him be. He interrogates the stones:

Do you think

Death is an answer then? Ah, to the How, the When, Ah, to the hardest word.

This absorption in metaphysics or poetaphysics surcharges much of his work with a meaning beyond the meaning. Not 'Einstein,' the longest and most ambitious metaphysical poem in Streets in the Moon. It is too abstract. Poetry is, and will always be, concrete.

In conclusion. If there is another young American poet who writes more melodiously and profoundly than Archibald MacLeish, we are unacquainted with the name. What do we care if he is indebted to T. S. Eliot for tricks of manner and method? He is improving upon his master. VIRGINIA MOORE

Constantinople Settings and Traits, by H. G. Dwight. New York: Harper & Bros. 1926. xxvi+553 pp. Illus. $4.00.

AFTER eleven years, Mr. Dwight's Constantinople Old and New, which the flood of war and post-war

books thrust into an undeserved backwash, comes, in its new and revised edition of Constan tinople Settings and Traits, as a great joy to this reader.

"To have gone deliberately to Constantinople, not in 1707 or in 1807, but in 1907, with the notion of turning out something between Loti's Vers Ispahan and Howell's Venetian Life, was quite inexcusable. Nevertheless,' explains Mr. Dwight, 'it happened.' But, appearing in 1915 under a name which the author did not choose, ‘it had a foreboding ring of irony then when the hurricane was already raging that was to sweep away the old Ottoman Empire.'

Thus, afresh to interpret this hurricane which blew in the new Turkey, and to show that all that emerged from it did not suddenly materialize from a magician's hat, that the seeds and soul of it existed in the old régime, this was one of the two prime reasons for a revision of the book. The other reason and the principal one, according to the author having to do with the kind of book it happens to be: not a guidebook, a history, an archæological treatise, but a character sketch of a great and famous city, a city which holds still the same charm for foreigners that it held in 1907, 1807, 1707.

One has only to dip into Mr. Dwight's book to be assured of this. Those who are familiar with his recent pieces in Harper's will find the same wit that shone forth in 'Impatience on a Monument' or 'Shoulder Straps' poking one's ribs with the pointed fact that the seven hills upon which Constantinople is said to have been built do not exist, that the so-called Turkish corner in the interiors of certain Occidental homes never originated any where but in the imagination of an upholsterer, that there is no such person as a Sultana, that the author does not like the minarets of Saint Sophia simply because they are ugly, and that in Turkey there is no Great Unwashed save among those who are not Turks.

But it is the H. G. Dwight of Stamboul Nights who transports one into a world where seal cutters make one's name in brass almost as quickly as one can write it; where scribes sit under trees ready to write one's letters; where pedlars come and go selling beads, perfumes, fezzes, and sweets; where men smoke hubble-bubbles in tipsy little coffee houses above the Marmora or squat motionless on their brown, narrow heels; and where as strong as the laws of the Medes and Persians are the traditions that no man but one of Iran shall drive a house builder's donkey, that only a Mohammedan Albanian of the South shall lay a pavement, or a Southern Albanian who is a Christian and wears an orange girdle shall lay railroad ties, that none save a landlubber from the hinterland of the Black Sea may row a caïque, or them of Konia peddle yo❜ourt.

And it is not only to Constantinople alone that Mr. Dwight carries one, but also to Scutari, the City of Gold, to printing houses where hand wood-block printing has been carried on by the same family for over two hundred years; or to

WE

are known as a musical nation and this generation has been called the most musical that ever lived.

Viewed in a broad way this is perhaps true. The country is certainly alive with things musical and never as in recent years has Music reached out in one form or another to capture so many millions of new devotees.

Men are taking a much greater interest in music-one of the most stimulating symptoms of our present musical growth. No longer need any boy hesitate to confess to a love for music in the fear of be

ing thought effeminate. Now many of our foremost men in business proclaim the inspirational benefits they have received from the study of music. A list of notable Americans who are also fine musicians would probably amaze the average reader. They are to be found in cities and towns all over the country. "Enlightened business men cannot ignore Music. That is the judgment of Mr. George Eastman, one of the notable figures in American business who has performed extraordinary service for musical education in this country. And the opinions of such men, based on their own experience and wide observations, are having a practical and far-reaching effect

on their fellow men-great numbers of whom have found that music in some ways is more necessary to them in underis to women. going the modern business strain than it

Parents are taking a much greater interest in music and are more impressed than ever before with the great cultural and mind-training benefits that the study of music alone can give. In organized bodies they are urging upon school authorities wherever necessary that the study of music along practical lines be made a part of their children's early training.

Music is in fact becoming recognized as one of the great forces in education. This is a matter of such importance not only to the individual but to the community and to the nation that it is receiving the support of progressive men and women everywhere. No less an educator than the late Doctor Charles Eliot maintained. throughout many years that Music, rightly taught, is the best mind trainer on the list and that we should have more of it in our schools the country over. And it was Woodrow Wilson who declared, "The man who disparages music as a luxury and non-essential is doing the nation an injury."