John V. A. Weaver came to New York from Chicago shortly after In American appeared, a first volume of poems in which current slang, the language of the ordinary American in the street, was celebrated with remarkable cleverness and made the medium for poetic ejaculation and dramatic monologue. It was a brilliant performance. Wallace Irwin had written his Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum years before, but the idiom has changed since then. New expressions of great pungency were utilized by Weaver, but a quality in which he outdistanced Irwin or any former writer in American slang was the spiritual alertness of his interest in American life. Weaver is still quite young, but he is more sensitive to the tragedy of common people than our other best slang writers. He is not so successful as a humorist, but there is more depth and delicacy in his discernment. This is illustrated, I think, in the poem I quote, which has not yet appeared in a book.

Weaver has held creditably the position of literary editor of the Brooklyn Eagle. He has published one trivial and amusing story in bookform, Margie Wins the Game, which is of no great account, but the work he may do in poetry will, I think, be of some account.

LEGEND

I WONDER Where it could of went to;
I know I seen it just as plain:

A beautiful, big fairy city

Shinin' through the rain.

Rain it was, not snow-in winter!

Special-order April weather

Ticklin' at our two faces

Pressed up close together.

Not a single soul was near us
Standin' out there on the bow;
When we passed another ferry
He says, sudden, "Now!"

Then I looked where he was pointin'. .
I seen a magic city rise. . .

Gleamin' windows, like when fields is
Full of fire-flies.

Towers and palaces in the clouds, like,
Real as real, but nice and blurred.
"Oh!", I starts in-but he wispers
"Hush! Don't say a word!

"Don't look long, and don't ast questions,

Elset you make the fairies sore.

They won't let you even see it

Never any more.

"Don't you try to ever go there—
It's to dream of, not to find.
Lovely things like that is always
Mostly in your mind.”

Somethin' made me say, "It's Jersey!".

Somethin' mean.

...

He hollers, "Hell!

Now you done it, sure as shootin',

Now you bust the spell!"

Sure enough, the towers and castles
Went like lightnin' out of sight. . . .
Nothin' there but filthy Jersey

On a drizzly night.

Babette Deutsch (1895- )

Only recently has Babette Deutsch (Mrs. Avrahm Yarmolinsky) begun to come into her own in poetry. She published her first book in 1919, entitled Banners. It exhibited great technical skill as well as a keen intellect, and a powerful emotional quality. "Tuppence Coloured" is in one of her lighter moods. She and her husband have edited anthologies of Modern German and Modern Russian Poetry.

E

"TUPPENCE COLOURED" *

WHEN days were vaster and the dark more tragic
Than nights or days these years can ever be,
We knew the secret of a living magic

Whose colour cried more keen than ecstasy.

When we had quit the islands of adventure,
And Guinea and Peking began to pall,

When Jason had been freed from our indenture
And Spain was less than Troy upon the fall,

We knew another idle deep enchantment
More rich than gold and sharper than the blade;
Ag to soothe Promethean resentment,

mission of the "Literary Review," of the New York

The tongue between the teeth, the brush poised, drip

ping,

Heedless of havoc in our painty wake,

We sighed with passion, drunk with marvel, dipping The pointed camel's-hair in "crimson lake."

Richer than rubies, redder than the sunset
Flaming on gusty clouds like hearts of fire,
More terrible than tigers in their onset,
Prouder than leopards seeking their desire;

Colour of blood, colour of sacrifices,
Colour of battle, and the running of
The waters under boughs of tropic spices,
Colour of wrath and death, colour of love.

The glow is gone that cannot be rekindled.
These hours are green and gold, or only gray.
The nights are longer, but the days have dwindled;
Instant Cassandras now have more to say.

Yet when I grope for syllables of splendour
Lost in a darkness even bats forsake,

I break the sword of youth in fierce surrender
To drown it fathomless in crimson lake.

Stephen Vincent Benét was born at South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, younger son of Colonel James Walker Benet of the United States Army-now retired. He has lived at Watervliet, N. Y., Buffalo, N. Y., San Francisco, California, and Augusta, Georgia. His schooling was in Augusta, and before he had entered the class of 1919 at Yale University he had published his first small volume of poems, Five Men and Pompey. These were historical miniatures of Ancient Rome. While still an undergraduate his second book was published, Young Adventure, and after graduation appeared his third book of poems, Heavens and Earth. In the next year came his first novel, The Beginning of Wisdom. His second novel, Young Peoples' Pride, was published in 1922, and his third, Jean Huguenot, in 1923. He has contributed short stories and poems to the leading magazines.

An omnivorous reader, with an early love especially of poetry, and a native gift for metaphor, Stephen Benet's work has always displayed exuberant vitality. He has now shaken off the earlier influences that were apparent in his poetry, despite the startling originality of some of it, and should have before him, at the age of twenty-six, a splendid literary career. As a prose writer he has already proved his ability.

I have selected here, from his latest volume of poems, one that seems particularly applicable to this book and is also one of the most technically perfect and originally imagined poems of his earlier period. It was written while he was still at Yale and appeared in The Yale Review.