The poems which appear in this volume are a contribution to the propaganda and the art of the new culture. "Above all things," writes Chaplin, "I don't want anyone to try to make me out a 'poet'--because I'm not. I don't think much of these esthetic creatures who condescend to stoop to our level that we may have the blessings of culture. We'll manage to make our own--do it in our own way, and stagger through somehow. . . . These are tremendous times, and sooner or later someone will come along big enough to sound the right note, and it will be a rebel note." It is that note which Chaplin has sought to strike, and that he has succeeded will be the verdict of anyone who has read over the poems. Chaplin's work speaks for itself. Some of the poems were written in Leavenworth Prison and published in the prison paper. Others were written during the tedious months of the Chicago trial, when the men were kept in the Cook County jail. Chaplin has had ample time to work them out. Christmas, 1921, was the fifth consecutive Christmas that he has spent in prison. The poems bear the impress of the bars, but they ring with the glad vigor of a free spirit that bars cannot contain. The reader of Chaplin's prison poems unavoidably makes three mental comments: 1. When poems so reserved, so vigorous; so penetrating, so melodious, so beautiful, come from behind jail bars, it is high time that thinking men and women awoke to the fate that awaits bold dreamers and singers under the present order in the United States. 2. Men are not silenced when steel doors clang behind them. Free spirits are as free behind the bars as they are under the open sky. The jail, as a gag, is impotent. While it may master the body, it cannot contain the soul. 3. The new order in America is already finding its voice. Although it is so young, and so immature, it is speaking with an accent of gifted authority. Chaplin is not a dangerous man--except as his ideas are dangerous to the existing order of society. His presence in the penitentiary, under a twenty year sentence, indicates how dangerous those ideas are considered by the masters of American public life. Rich those masters are--fabulously rich; and strong they may be, yet so insecure do they feel themselves that they are constrained to hold in prison this dreamer and singer of the new social order. Chaplin, in prison, like Debs in prison, is doing his work. He is resisting the encroachments of those jail demons--hate, bitterness, revenge; he is holding his mind on the goal--a newer, better social order; he is keeping his vision of nature, of humanity, of brotherhood, of courage, of love, of beauty,--clear and bright. Chaplin, the man, is in jail; but Chaplin the poet and singer is roaming wherever books go; wherever papers are read, and wherever comrades repeat verses to one another in the flickering light of the evening fire. SCOTT NEARING. MOURN NOT THE DEAD