THE ARGUMENT OF HIS BOOK

I sing of Brooks, of Blossomes, Birds, and Bowers:
Of April, May, of June, and July-Flowers.

I sing of May-poles, Hock-carts, Wassails, Wakes,
Of Bride-grooms, Brides, and of their Bridall-cakes.
I write of Youth, of Love, and have Accesse
By these, to sing of cleanly-Wantonnesse.

I sing of Dewes, of Raines, and piece by piece
Of Balme, of Oyle, of Spice, and Amber-Greece.
I sing of Times trans-shifting; and I write
How Roses first came Red, and Lillies White.
I write of Groves, of Twilights, and I sing
The Court of Mab, and of the Fairie-King.
I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall)
Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.

-Robert Herrick

THEMES FOR POEMS

Not by any means!

How shall a poet choose his theme? Shall he study the encyclopædia as Agamemnon did in the "Peterkin Papers," all for the sake of an education? Shall he "write a poem about the beautiful sunset" at the suggestion of some woman like the one who "quacked" beside Rupert Brooke in the wood and was properly cursed for it? Shall he learn the fashion of the moment and then try to do better with it than other poets have done? Should he even listen to the King as Dryden once did? If he be a real poet, he will accept dry and stuffy learning only that he may assimilate it and then forget it, as he would accept plain food. He will treat trite suggestions from prosaically effusive ladies with the rich red wrath that is appropriate to them. He will be so completely absorbed in his own intellectual and spiritual interests that changing fashions of thought and form will mean little to him as affecting himself. And as for Kings-he will be the one to make suggestions! He will know, as Padraic Colum knows, that

Intensity of feeling can only come from personal, from novel experience. Without personal, without novel experience, we may say that there will be no liveliness of movement in the poem.

He will agree with Emerson that

If your subject do not appear to you the flower of the world at this moment, you have not rightly chosen it. And he will follow the advice given by Mr. Yeats:

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,

The holy tree is growing there.

From that holy tree of life will drop down before his vision the bright fruit of his living thought, his magnetic feeling. Of that he will make his poems.

According to his temperament, and consciously or unconsciously, he is likely to take either one of two attitudes toward the choice of his themes. If he be temperamentally conservative, a lover of the great traditions of the past, a believer in law; if he must build up in his mind a thick wall between arts and fine arts, between the secular and the sacred; if he worships what is remotely and purely transcendent, then he is likely to think that certain themes are more appropriately used in poetry than others ever could be. He will like to write of stars and flowers and love and death, of Helen's eyes and Troy's towers, of arms and the man, of conventional religious experiences and attitudes. But if he be a libertarian, or even a liberal, giving room to the present and the future in his eternity; if he believes that arts become fine arts by becoming fine; if he thinks of all secular things as of sacraments, and therefore finds them sacred; if his God is intimately immanent, then, like Peter of old, he will call nothing common or unclean, and like Whitman he will be the poet of the body as of the soul. He will assert, perhaps he will even prove, that all themes are themes for poems when genius kindles to them. And it is the greater genius, I think, that claims the world and all things in it, for poetry, knowing that a rusty nail in a carpenter's pocket shares a planet's ordered flight through space and obeys the law that draws us nearer to the sun or holds us away from Betelguese.

An ever increasing number of modern poets belong to this second group. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who has not yet lost her prestige among women of genius believed that we should have new forms as well as new thoughts in poetry and that if poets are not able to create them with power and glory and honor, then indeed poetry is grown weary and decrepit before its time. She was convinced that the poet should look always toward life and find his themes in all reality. She knew that poetry is everywhere -for the poet. Nor was this mental attitude due to any insecurity in culture of the kind that reactionaries complain of in our contemporary poets, for Mrs. Browning read her Greeks as few modernists can. Her opinion was the result of a ripe culture that understands the present and the future through the past and praises what is new because it has fathomed the old. In a similar way Emerson says that

The test or measure of poetic genius is the power to read the poetry of affairs, to fuse the circumstance of to-day; not to use Scott's antique superstitions, or Shakespeare's.

He says:

This contemporary insight is transubstantiation, the conversion of daily bread into the holiest symbols.

And he regrets that the American life storming around him should be slow to find a tongue.

Whitman is even more emphatic, and more vivid, in his reiteration of the idea that the world belongs to the poet to be used in poems as he pleases. And he calls on the Muse to migrate from Greece and Ionia, from Jeru