And all that Kilmer wrote, every line of it, he wrote in two ways; he wrote it in words, and he wrote it in his acts. When the idea of the Poets’ Meeting to express the sympathy of American poets with the three Irish martyred poets of Easter Week, Pearse, MacDonough and Plunkett, first occurred to Eleanor Rogers Cox, she asked Kilmer’s advice about it over the telephone. And he said, “Go ahead, I’ll back you up,” with the result that the meeting, a success, took place in Central Park, with Edwin Markham presiding, Kilmer, Margaret Widdemer, Miss Cox, Louis Untermeyer, and many other representative poets taking part. When you say of the making of ballads and songs that it is a woman’s work, You forget all the fighting poets that have been in every land. There was Byron, who left all his lady-loves, to fight against the Turk, And David, the singing king of the Jews, who was born with a sword in his hand. It was yesterday that Rupert Brooke went out to the Wars and died, And Sir Philip Sidney’s lyric voice was as sweet as his arm was strong; And Sir Walter Raleigh met the axe as a lover meets his bride, Because he carried in his soul the courage of his song. Indeed, in the logical scheme of things (or, at any rate, in Joyce Kilmer’s scheme of things) the poet is a soldier, an idealist with the courage of his song; and, in a manner of speaking, all soldiers are poets, whether or not they ever pen a line, for they give supreme expression to the conviction of their soul. And then, as Christopher Morley has finely written in his tribute to Kilmer, “the poet must go where the greatest songs are singing.” To anyone who knew Kilmer it would have been perfectly dumfounding if, when war was declared between his country and Germany, he had _not_ done exactly as he did. It is inconceivable--to picture him moving about here, from restaurant to office, in this hour. Flatly, the thing can’t be done. With him, when he joined the army, it was only one fight more, the best, and as it proved, the last. He hated many things, but I believe that of all things he hated most a pacifist--a pacifist in anything. He was a fighter. He fought for his home, stone by stone; he fought for his renown. His conception of the church was the Church Militant. His thoughts dwelt continually on warrior-saints. He believed in the nobility of war and the warrior’s calling, so long as the cause was holy, or believed to be holy. As he saw it, there was no question as to his duty. This I know, you might as well have asked Niagara Falls why it pours over its ledge, as have discussed with Kilmer the matter of his going to war. That was, in its way, just such another force of nature. As to what might happen to him, it is hardly necessary to remark that his faith told him that that would be all right, too. John Bunker was among the last to bid him farewell. There is the Kilmerian splendour in what he wrote: