The writer is greatly indebted to Mrs. Austin for her generous interest in earlier work and especially for her helpful criticism of this study. N. B. Santa Fe, July 29, 1925 FOREWORD The student of poetry in America enjoys an opportunity, such as has never been practicable for the European student, to come in contact with the source and mould of poetic form. For in Europe, the overlaying of all native activity by the sedulously cultivated Greek and Roman preferences, the deliberate turning of scholarly inquiry _from_ what was self-sprung and indigenous _toward_ what had been perfected in another environment and upon other roots, left the whole subject of the origin of form dangling in the atmosphere of theory and surmise. To this day the most that we know of the high forms of poesy in Europe is owed less to authentic tradition than to the scholastic rehumation of native remains in dance and ritual, of what was once, in the interest of the classic ideal, discarded and buried, or at the least, permitted to survive only among the unlettered folk. Fortunately for our general understanding of poetic form, the Greeks had no such snobbish scruples as arose later throughout Europe against admitting the origin of their most majestic poetic medium in the communal dance around the tribal altar. Here in the United States we are, by a turn of fortune, undeserved and underappreciated, able to watch the evolution of poetic form from stages somewhat earlier than those recorded by Aristotle, going on as an indigenous type of human expression. We are face to face here with the evolution of lyric form out of the stanzaic act, ritualistically repeated; with the approach to the ode, along the path struck out by primitive man in the identification of himself with the sources of high states of being. We confront these things as unselfconscious acts, rather than as fragmentary and over-annotated poetic remains. We are able to refer them directly to accompanying gestures, to generative social occasions, and the environmental matrix. And we have to guess or to theorize, where these things are obligatory, only in reference to minds whose movements are influenced by factors lying open to intelligent apprehension.