Maxwell Bodenheim was born at Natchez, Mississippi, May 26, 1892. His education, with the exception of grammar school training, was achieved under the guidance of the U. S. Army, in which Bodenheim served a full enlistment of three years, beginning in 1910. For a while he studied law and art in Chicago, but his mind, fascinated by the new poetry, turned to literature. He wrote steadily for five years without having a single poem accepted. In 1918, his first volume appeared and even those who were puzzled or repelled by Bodenheim's complex idiom were forced to recognize its intense individuality.

Minna and Myself (1918) reveals, first of all, this poet's extreme sensitivity to words. Words, under his hands, have unexpected growths; placid nouns and sober adjectives bear fantastic fruit. Sometimes he packs his metaphors so close that they become inextricably mixed. Sometimes he spins his fantasies so thin that the cord of coherence snaps and the poem frays into ragged and unpatterned ravellings. But, at his best, Bodenheim is as clear-headed as he is colorful.

In Advice (1920), Bodenheim's manner-and his mannerisms -are intensified. There is scarcely a phrase that is not tricked out with more ornaments and associations than it can bear; whole poems sink beneath the weight of their profuse decorations. Yet, in spite of his verbal exaggerations, this poetry achieves a keen if too ornate delicacy. In the realm of the whimsical-grotesque, Bodenheim walks with a light and nimble footstep.

POET TO HIS LOVE

An old silver church in a forest

Is my love for you.

The trees around it

Are words that I have stolen from your heart.

An old silver bell, the last smile you gave,
Hangs at the top of my church.

It rings only when you come through the forest
And stand beside it.

And then, it has no need for ringing,

For your voice takes its place.

OLD AGE

In me is a little painted square

Bordered by old shops with gaudy awnings.

And before the shops sit smoking, open-bloused old men, Drinking sunlight.

The old men are my thoughts;

And I come to them each evening, in a creaking cart,
And quietly unload supplies.

We fill slim pipes and chat

And inhale scents from pale flowers in the centre of the

Strong men, tinkling women, and dripping, squealing children

Stroll past us, or into the shops.

They greet the shopkeepers and touch their hats or foreheads to me.

Some evening I shall not return to my people.

DEATH

I shall walk down the road;

I shall turn and feel upon my feet

The kisses of Death, like scented rain.

For Death is a black slave with little silver birds
Perched in a sleeping wreath upon his head.
He will tell me, his voice like jewels

Dropped into a satin bag,

How he has tip-toed after me down the road,

His heart made a dark whirlpool with longing for me Then he will graze me with his hands,

And I shall be one of the sleeping, silver birds Between the cold waves of his hair, as he tip-toes on.

Edwin Curran

Edwin Curran was born at Zanesville, Ohio, May 10, 1892, and was educated at St. Thomas' School in the city of his birth. After working as an unskilled laborer in various trades, he learned telegraphy in 1914 and has been employed ever since as an operator for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company.

In 1917 he printed a little paper-bound pamphlet of thirty pages (First Poems) with this naïve note: "Price of this book is 35 cents postpaid. Author is 25, unmarried, a beginner and needs publisher. If this volume meets expenses, another, possibly better, will be issued." Expecting to find poetry of an absurd simplicity, one is startled to find striking images, strange pictures and (in such poems as "Soldier's Epitaph" and "Sailing of Columbus ") lines like:

We climbed the slippery alleys of the sea

and many a lyric flash like:

The stars, like bells, flash down the silver sky
Ringing like chimes on frozen trees, or cry

Along the marble ground.

Second Poems (1920) has a similar beauty mixed with banality. Both booklets are a jumble of passion, platitude, bad

grammar and exaltation. Curran has absolutely no critical perceptions; he has little control over his music. For better or for worse, his mood controls him.

AUTUMN

The music of the autumn winds sings low,
Down by the ruins of the painted hills,
Where death lies flaming with a marvelous glow,
Upon the ash of rose and daffodils.

But I can find no melancholy here

To see the naked rocks and thinning trees;
Earth strips to grapple with the winter year—
I see her gnarled hills plan for victories!

I love the earth who goes to battle now,
To struggle with the wintry whipping storm
And bring the glorious spring out from the night.
I see earth's muscles bared, her battle brow,
And am not sad, but feel her marvelous charm
As splendidly she plunges in the fight.

THE PAINTED HILLS OF ARIZONA

The rainbows all lie crumpled on these hills,
The red dawns scattered on their colored sills.
These hills have caught the lightning in its flight,
Caught colors from the skies of day and night
And shine with shattered stars and suns; they hold
Dyed yellow, red and purple, blue and gold.

Red roses seem within their marble blown,
A painted garden chiseled in the stone;

The rose and violet trickling through their veins,
Where they drop brilliant curtains to the plains-
A ramp of rock and granite, jeweled and brightening,
Like some great colored wall of lightning!

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay, possibly the most gifted of the younger lyricists, was born February 22, 1892, at Rockland, Maine. After a childhood spent almost entirely in New England, she attended Vassar College, from which she was graduated in 1917. Since that time she has lived in New York City. Besides her keenly individual lyrics, Miss Millay has written a quantity of short stories under various pseudonyms, has translated several songs, and has been connected with the Provincetown Players both as playwright and performer.

Although the bulk of her poetry is not large, the quality of it approaches and sometimes attains greatness. Her first long poem, "Renascence," was the outstanding feature of The Lyric Year (1912), an anthology which revealed many new names. "Renascence " was written when Miss Millay was scarcely nineteen; it remains today one of the most remarkable poems of this generation. Beginning like a child's aimless verse it proceeds, with a calm lucidity, to an amazing climax. It is as if a child had, in the midst of its ingenuousness, uttered some terrific truth. The sheer cumulative power of this poem is curpassed only by its beauty.

Renascence, the name of Miss Millay's first volume, was published in 1917. It is full of the same passion as its title poem; here is a hunger for beauty so intense that no delight is great enough to give the soul peace. Such poems as "God's World and the unnamed sonnets vibrate with this rapture. Magic