Here by the fire's ruddy streamers,
Tired with our hopes and our fears,
We inarticulate dreamers

Hark to the song of our years.
Up to the brooding divinity
Far in that sparkling infinity

Cry our despair and delight,
Voice of the Western night!

Harry Kemp

Harry (Hibbard) Kemp, known as "the tramp-poet," was born in Youngstown, Ohio, December 15, 1883. He came East at the age of twelve, left school to enter a factory, but returned to high school to study English.

A globe-trotter by nature, he went to sea before finishing his high school course. He shipped first to Australia, then to China, from China to California, from California to the University of Kansas. After a few months in London in 1909 (he crossed the Atlantic as a stowaway) he returned to New York City, where he has lived ever since, founding his own theatre in which he is actor, stage-manager, playwright and chorus.

Kemp's first book was a play, Judas (1910), a reversion of the Biblical figure along the lines of Paul Heyse's Mary of Magdala. His first collection of poems, The Cry of Youth (1914), like the subsequent volume, The Passing God (1919), is full of every kind of poetry except the kind one might imagine Kemp would write. Instead of crude and boisterous verse, here is a precise and almost overpolished poetry. Kemp has, strangely enough, taken the classic formalists for his models-one can even detect timid whispers of Pope and Dryden among his lines.

Chanteys and Ballads (1920) is riper and more representative. The notes are more varied, the sense of personality is more pronounced; the lyrics have a particular delicacy of execution.

Tramping on Life (1922) is an autobiographical narrative, especially ingratiating in its presentation of Kemp's childhood. The Love Rogue (1923) is an adaptation from the Spanish of Tirso de Molina, a drama that Kemp insists is "the original Don Juan play."

STREET LAMPS

Softly they take their being, one by one,

From the lamp-lighter's hand, after the sun

Has dropped to dusk . . . like little flowers they bloom Set in long rows amid the growing gloom.

Who he who lights them is, I do not know,
Except that, every eve, with footfall slow
And regular, he passes by my room
And sets his gusty flowers of light a-bloom.

A PHANTASY OF HEAVEN

Perhaps he plays with cherubs now,
Those little, golden boys of God,
Bending, with them, some silver bough,
The while a seraph, head a-nod,

Slumbers on guard; how they will run
And shout, if he should wake too soon,-

As fruit more golden than the sun

And riper than the full-grown moon,

Conglobed in clusters, weighs them down,
Like Atlas heaped with starry signs;
And, if they're tripped, heel over crown,
By hidden coils of mighty vines,-

Perhaps the seraph, swift to pounce,
Will hale them, vexed, to God-and He
Will only laugh, remembering, once
He was a boy in Galilee!

CAPE'S END

There is battle here, there is clean and vigorous war,
There are bivouacs visited by night's every star,

There are long, barren slopes of encampment burned clean by the sun,

And ramparts of strange new dreams to be stormed and won.
Here the five-petalled wild rose blossoms more sweet
Because the earth is barren and the heat
Intolerable for lush, domestic grass;

The ocean shines like many disks of brass,

Or between white hollows it lapses, great and green
Where solitude sifts slowly in between

...

The hills of sparkling waste and rise and fall—
Hills whose one music is the sea bird's call! . .
And here is all space that ever eye can see:
The ocean completing all immensity,

And the sky, mother of infinity

Yet greatness on smallness jostles till both are one
And a grain of sand stands doorkeeper to the sun.

Max Eastman

Max Eastman was born in Canandaigua, New York, January 4, 1883. Both his father and mother had been Congregationalist preachers, so it was natural that the son should turn from scholasticism to a definitely social expression. Eastman received his A.B. at Williams in 1905; from 1907 to 1911 he was Associate in Philosophy at Columbia University. But in the latter part of 1911, he devoted all his time to writing, studying the problems of economic inequality and voicing the protests of the dumb millions in a style that was all the firmer for being philosophic. In 1913, he became editor of The Masses which, in 1917, changed its name to The Liberator.

Child of the Amazons (1913) reveals the quiet lover of beauty as well as the fiery hater of injustice. The best of these poems, with many new ones, were incorporated in Colors of Life (1918).

Besides Eastman's poems and essays, he has written one of the most clarifying-and most readable-studies of the period. Enjoyment of Poetry (1913) is invaluable as a new kind of text-book, the chief purpose of which, in the words of its preface, is to increase enjoyment. Eliminating the usual academic and literary classifications, Eastman accomplishes his object, which is to show that the poetic in everyday perception and conversation should not be separated from the poetic in literature. The Sense of Humor, a companion volume of analysis, appeared in 1921.

COMING TO PORT

Our motion on the soft still misty river
Is like rest; and like the hours of doom
That rise and follow one another ever,
Ghosts of sleeping battle-cruisers loom
And languish quickly in the liquid gloom.

From watching them your eyes in tears are gleaming,
And your heart is still; and like a sound

In silence is your stillness in the streaming
Of light-whispered laughter all around,

Where happy passengers are homeward bound.

Their sunny journey is in safety ending,

But for you no journey has an end.

The tears that to your eyes their light are lending
Shine in softness to no waiting friend;

Beyond the search of any eye they tend.

There is no nest for the unresting fever
Of your passion, yearning, hungry-veined;
There is no rest nor blessedness forever
That can clasp you, quivering and pained,
Whose eyes burn ever to the Unattained.

Like time, and like the river's fateful flowing,
Flowing though the ship has come to rest,
Your love is passing through the mist and going,
Going infinitely from your breast,
Surpassing time on its immortal quest.

The ship draws softly to the place of waiting,

All flush forward with a joyful aim,

And while their hands with happy hands are mating,
And lips are laughing out a happy name-
You pause, and pass among them like a flame.

AT THE AQUARIUM

Serene the silver fishes glide,
Stern-lipped, and pale, and wonder-eyed!
As, through the aged deeps of ocean,
They glide with wan and wavy motion.
They have no pathway where they go,
They flow like water to and fro,
They watch with never-winking eyes,
They watch with staring, cold surprise,
The level people in the air,

The people peering, peering there:
Who wander also to and fro,

And know not why or where they go,
Yet have a wonder in their eyes,
Sometimes a pale and cold surprise.

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens, of Hartford, Connecticut, is a poet of peculiar reticences. His attitude to his work is, in itself, significant. Although most of it appeared in the two best known poetry magazines of the period, Others and Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, as