I want to call attention to a poet who has not yet presented himself except through an occasional magazine piece, but who has written two of the finest sonnets in American poetry. Last year I reprinted, in my annual summary, Mr. Mahlon Leonard Fisher’s “As an Old Mercer,” and pronounced that an achievement which could hardly be surpassed. But in the sonnet “November,” which is reprinted in this book, Mr. Fisher has done, I believe, something that is even greater. It must rank with Lizette Woodworth Reese’s “Tears” and Longfellow’s “Nature” as the best sonnets that have been accomplished by American poets. I have known one competent judge and lover of poetry to declare that not since Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and Miss Reese’s “Tears” has there appeared so fine a sonnet in English poetry. The man who has written “November” has added something to American poetry that cannot be too highly estimated. Another poet who has enriched the magazines this year, after a period of silence, is Mr. Edwin Arlington Robinson, and in “The Field of Glory” we are under the spell once more of that characteristic magic with which he is endowed alone among American poets. As in former years, in my annual summary in the _Boston Transcript_, I have examined the contents of the leading American monthly magazines. I originally started, nine years ago, when the first summary appeared, with these six: The Atlantic, Harper’s, Scribner’s, Century, Lippincott’s, and McClure’s. Later I turned to The Forum. The poetry in McClure’s during the two years previous to the beginning of the present year had fallen off; the magazine would reprint occasionally verses from the books of accomplished but little known English and Irish poets, which, with the small amount of space that it devoted to verse, left but little chance of encouragement to native singers. This year I have included The Smart Set, which, under the new editorship of Mr. Willard Huntington Wright, himself a poet of considerable attainment, has been the means of offering the public a high and consistent standard of excellence in the verse it printed.