Color of lilac, Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England, Roots of lilac under all the soil of New England, Because my roots are in it, Because my leaves are of it, Because my flowers are for it, Because it is my country And I speak to it of itself And sing of it with my own voice Ridgely Torrence (Frederic) Ridgely Torrence was born at Xenia, Ohio, November 27, 1875, and was educated at Miami and Princeton University. For several years he was librarian of the Astor Library in New York City (1897-1901), later assuming an editorial position on the Cosmopolitan Magazine. At present he is the poetry editor of The New Republic. His first volume, The House of a Hundred Lights (1900), bears the grave subtitle “A Psalm of Experience after Reading a Couplet of Bidpai" and is a half-whimsical, half-searching hodge-podge of philosophy, love lyrics, artlessness and impudence. The influence of Omar Khayyám and Richard Hovey is apparent but not too dominant; Torrence saves himself on the very verge of sentimentality and rhetoric by a chuckle, an adroit right-about-face. It was not until a quarter of a century later that Torrence published his second volume of verse. In the meantime, poems of his had attracted immediate attention upon their appearance in magazines and a few of his lyrics had been quoted so often that they had become contemporary classics. But Torrence remained in the peculiar position of one whose poetry was known only through the anthologies, his own verse being not only unprocurable, but unprinted. Hesperides (1925) remedied this strange circumstance. Like his first volume, this is not a large book-Torrence is not a voluminous writer-but in these one hundred pages is contained some of the most definite and distinguished poetry of the day. There is not a mediocre passage, not one strained epithet in this collection. In Hesperides one finds the magnificent "Eye-Witness," that most original treatment of the theme of Christ's second coming, the purely lyrical "The Singers in a Cloud" and that brief epic, "The Bird and the Tree" which is as famous as it is stirring. An entire column might be written concerning Torrence's firm clarity of thought and phrase. Practically every anthology of the period contains "The Son." And yet it is doubtful whether most of the readers of its sixteen lines are aware of the artistry which has crowded the tragedy of a lifetime into so brilliant a condensation. Every casual line makes the revelation greater; every word is as starkly dramatic as it is inevitable. In the other poems, Torrence's technique, though not ostentatious or dazzling, is sufficiently flexible; it loses none of the poet's nobilities of thought. Hesperides will silence those who have been talking of Torrence in terms of promise. This is an achievement-one which will undoubtedly loom high among the finer works of the period. Between Torrence's earliest and most recent volume, three of his plays were published: El Dorado (1903), Abelard and Héloise (1907), and Granny Maumee, The Rider of Dreams, Simon the Cyrenian (1917). The last group, being three plays for a Negro theatre, contains the best of Torrence's dramatic writing. He has caught here, particularly in Granny Maumee and The Rider of Dreams, something of that high color which the Negro himself is only beginning to reflect. THE BIRD AND THE TREE1 Blackbird, blackbird in the cage, The hours are long to-night. The sky is like a heavy lid Out here beyond the door to-night. 1 Compare the poem on the same subject on page 131. What's that? A mutter down the street. No use to reek with reddened sweat, They've got the rope; they've got the guns, They'll fire the answer through the door- There where the lonely cross-road lies, Perhaps you'll meet again some place. And you can halt and show them there Blackbird singer, blackbird mute, They choked the seed you might have found. Out of a thorny field you go For you it may be better so And leave the sowers of the ground Blackbird. THE SON (Southern Ohio Market Town) I heard an old farm-wife, Saying: "The crop's all in, "Twelve bushels at sixty cents, He sickened making fence; He was to be married "It feels like frost was near His hair was curly. The spring was late that year, Robert Frost Although known as the chief interpreter of New England, Robert (Lee) Frost was born in San Francisco, California, March 26, 1875. At the age of ten he came East to the towns and hills where, for eight generations, his forefathers had lived. After graduating from the high school at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1892, Frost entered Dartmouth College, where he remained only a few months. The routine of study was too much for him and, hoping to keep his mind free for creative work, he decided to earn his living and became a bobbin boy in one of the mills at Lawrence. He had already begun to write poetry; a few of his verses had appeared in The Independent. But the strange soil-flavored quality which even then distinguished his lines was not relished by the editors, and the very magazines to which he sent poems that today are famous rejected his verse with amazing unanimity. For twenty years Frost continued to write his highly characteristic work in spite of the discouraging apathy, and for twenty years the poet remained unknown. In 1897, two years after his marriage, Frost moved his family to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and entered Harvard in a final determination to achieve culture. This time he followed the cut-anddried curriculum for two years, but at the end of that period he stopped trying to learn and started to teach. For three years he taught school, made shoes, edited a weekly paper, and in 1900 became a farmer at Derry, New Hampshire. During the next eleven years Frost labored to wrest a living from the stubborn rocky hills with scant success. Loneliness claimed him for its own; the ground refused to give him a living; the literary world continued to remain oblivious of his existence. Frost sought a change of environment and, after a few years' teaching at Derry and Plymouth, New Hampshire, sold his farm and, with his wife and four children, sailed for England in September, 1912. For the first time in his life, Frost moved in a literary world. London was a hot-bed of poets; groups merged, dissolved and separated over night; controversy and creation were in the air. Frost took his collection of poems to a publisher with few hopes, went back to the suburban town of Beaconsfield and turned to other matters. A few months later A Boy's Will (1913), his first collection, was published and Frost was recognized at once as one of the few authentic voices of modern poetry. A Boy's Will, unlike the later volumes, is frankly subjective; original in outlook in spite of certain reminiscences of Browning. In A Boy's Will Frost is not yet completely in possession of his own idiom; but the timbre is recognizably his. No one but Frost could have written "Reluctance" or "The Tuft of Flowers." Chiefly lyrical, this volume, lacking the concentrated emotion of his subsequent works, is a significant introduction to the following book, which has become an international classic. Early in 1914, Frost leased a small place in Gloucestershire, his neighbors being the poets Lascelles Abercrombie and W. W. Gibson. In the spring of the same year, North of Boston (1914), one of the most in |