Everyone who has had occasion to keep in touch with popular taste will tell you that the increased love for poetry shown in the publication of verse, the purchase of it, the study of it, the demand for it at public libraries, is nothing less than astounding. That this represents any sudden change in the public, I cannot believe. The public has always loved verse. The child chants it in his games; he drinks it in greedily at his mother’s knee. He begs for it, even when he cannot understand it, just for the joy of its rhythm, its lilt. But when the great poets go to the abodes of the gods, or to regions as far away in esthetics or metaphysics, for their subjects, they carry their product beyond public appeal. When our great verse is all remote and the familiar things are left to folk-lore and rag-time, then folk-lore and rag-time will monopolize public attention and fill the heart of the people. It is this feeling, on the part of many poets, that the familiar things of life are beneath their notice, that has made poetry so long unpopular. The feeling is quite unjustified. All the great elemental things are also among the most familiar--birth, death, love, grief, joy, in human experience: in the outer world, day and night, winter and summer, storm, wind and flood. And affiliated with these are all the little everyday things of which Riley sings--the bathing urchins, the ragged farm hand, the old tramp, the little orphan girl with her tales of fright, the rabbit under the railroad ties. When the modern reader first read in verse about such things there was a rush of red blood to the heart, with a recognition of the fact that verse had come down from Olympus to earth, and that after all, earth is where we live and that life and its emotions and events are both important and poetical.