"Anne Knish") of Spectra (1916). Spectra was a serious burlesque of some of the extreme manifestations of modern poetic tendencies -a remarkable hoax that deceived many of the radical propagandists as well as most of the conservative critics. A volume of his many translations from the Chinese is in preparation. GRASS-TOPS What bird are you in the grass-tops? And what is so nameless as beauty, VOICES O there were lights and laughter And the motions to and fro Of people as they enter And people as they go And there were many voices Vying at the feast, But mostly I remember Yours-who spoke the least. A FARMER REMEMBERS LINCOLN * 1 "Lincoln ? Well, I was in the old Second Maine, The first regiment in Washington from the Pine Tree State. Of course I didn't get the butt of the clip; "I ain't never ben to the theayter in my life— I didn't know how to behave. I ain't never ben since. I can see as plain as my hat the box where he sat in I can tell you, sir, there was a panic When we found our President was in the shape he was in! Never saw a soldier in the world but what liked him. "Yes, sir. His looks was kind o' hard to forget. He was a spare man, An old farmer. Everything was all right, you know, But he wasn't a smooth-appearin' man at all— Not in no ways; Thin-faced, long-necked, And a swellin' kind of a thick lip like. "And he was a jolly old fellow-always cheerful; He wasn't so high but the boys could talk to him their own ways. While I was servin' at the Hospital He'd come in and say, 'You look nice in here,' Praise us up, you know. *See pages 83, 147, 158, 279, 298, 400. 1 Reprinted by permission from Grenstone Poems by Witter Bynner. Copyright, 1917, by Frederick A. Stokes Company. And he'd bend over and talk to the boys- I don't mean that everything about him wasn't all right, you understand, It's just-well, I was a farmer And he was my neighbor, anybody's neighbor. Outside hove Shasta, snowy height on height, For you had often seen a mountain-peak Of brush and flowers that bring beside a track And you to you—a glad identity! After a time, when others went away, 1 Reprinted by permission from Grenstone Poems by Witter Bynner. Copyright, 1917, by Frederick A. Stokes Company. Until we found that we were college men Out to the field." Young Engineer, you meant As fair a tribute to the better part As ever I did. Beauty of the heart Because you half-surmise my quarter-mile And I know your quatrain, we could greet and smile. But leading in our visible estate— THE SINGING HUNTSMAN The huntswoman-moon was my mother, And when beauty darts by me or lingers, James Oppenheim was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, May 24, 1882. Two years later his family moved to New York City, where he has lived most of his life. After a public school education, he took special courses at Columbia University (1901-3) and engaged in settlement work, acting in the capacity of assistant head worker of the Hudson Guild Settlement, and superintendent of the Hebrew Technical School for Girls (1904-7). His studies and experiences on the lower East Side of New York furnished the material for his first and most popular book of short stories, Doctor Rast (1909). Oppenheim's initial venture as a poet, Monday Morning and Other Poems (1909), was a tentative collection, imitative and experimental. In spite of its obvious indebtedness to Whitman, most of the verses are in formal meters and regular (though ragged) rhyme. Beauty is sought, but seldom captured here; the message is coughed out between bursts of eloquence and fits of stammering. Songs for the New Age (1914) made Oppenheim his own liberator. The stammering has gone, the uncouth dissonances have resolved. One listens to a speech that, echoing the Whitmanic sonority, develops a music that is strangely Biblical and yet local. It is the expression of an ancient people reacting to modernity, of a race in solution. (See Preface.) This volume, like all of Oppenheim's subsequent work, is analysis in terms of poetry; a slow searching beneath the musical surface that attempts to diagnose the tortured soul of man and the twisted times he lives in. The old Isaiah note, with a new introspection, rises out of such poems as "The Slave," "We Dead," "Tasting the Earth"; the music and imagery of the Psalms are 'heard in "The Flocks," and "The Runner in the Skies." War and Laughter (1916) holds much of its predecessor's exaltation. The Semitic blend of delight and disillusion-that quality which hates the world for its shams and hypocrisies and loves it in spite of them-is revealed in "Greed," in the ironic "Report on the Planet Earth" and the brightly affirmative "Laughter." The Book of Self (1917) is less notable, an imperfect fusion. Oppenheim's preoccupation with analytical psychology mars the effect of the long passages which, in themselves, contain flashes of clairvoyance. The Solitary (1919) is a great stride forward; its major section, a long symbolic poem called "The Sea," breathes |