Cuando contemplo un arbol pienso: nunca vere un poema tan bello y tan intenso. Un arbol silencioso que con ansia se aferra a la dulce y jugosa entrans de la tierra. Un arbol que mirando los cielos se extansia y en oracion levanta los brazos noche y dia. Many of Kilmer’s poems have been translated into Spanish by Salomon de la Selva, Enriquez Urenia and others, and have appeared in a number of prominent South American papers. In a letter from France to Edward W. Cook, who in quest of material for a book on contemporary poets had written Kilmer asking several questions, Kilmer commented, among other things, on his “earlier efforts in poetry” (as the questionnaire apparently had put it), in a manner which is evidence again of how perfectly well he knew what he was about. “If what I nowadays write is considered poetry,” he announced, “then I became a poet in November, 1913.” Admirable for hard-headedness, directness and precision, it is a statement which leaves the critic no point upon which to take issue. His early poems “were only the exercises of an amateur, imitations, useful only as technical training.” The peculiar thing about these highly skilful experiments in various forms of craftsmanship is that they were so very much better as poems than the derivative efforts usually written at this period of apprenticeship, “so free,” as Mr. Le Gallienne notes, “from those artistic immaturities which have made many old great poets angrily denounce unlicensed reprinters of their ‘first editions.’” And in this fact they have a decided, and a perfectly legitimate, interest for the observer of the development of his talent--though Kilmer declared “they were worthless, that is, all of them which preceded a poem called ‘Pennies,’ which you will find in my book ‘Trees and Other Poems.’” He added, “I want all of my poems written before that to be forgotten.” He was writing, one remembers, to a gentleman with whom he was so slightly acquainted that he addressed him as “Dear Mr. Cook,” with the measure of whose sympathy and critical acumen, it is to be inferred, he was not conversant, and who presumably was about to estimate (with what perspective he could not perceive) his earliest productions. It were better to head off any uncertainty in the matter. Also, we all know, one’s hot impatience with one’s strivings of yesterday is mellowed by time into an amiable and appreciative tolerance of one’s earnest efforts of twenty years ago. It is difficult to think that Kilmer at fifty would have had an unjust scorn of those charming exercises on the poetic scales he wrote at twenty-one.