Tiffany Vergon, Cam Venezuela and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. THE ADVANCE OF ENGLISH POETRY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY BY WILLIAM LYON PHELPS Lampson Professor of English Literature at Yale Member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters _O! 't is an easy thing To write and sing; But to write true, unfeigned verse Is very hard!_ --HENRY VAUGHAN, _1655_ TO MY FRIEND FOR FORTY YEARS FRANK W. HUBBARD ACKNOWLEDGMENT The publishers of the works of the poets from whom illustrative passages are cited in this volume, have courteously and generously given permission, and I take this opportunity of expressing my thanks to The Macmillan Company, who publish the poems of Thomas Hardy, William Watson, John Masefield, W. W. Gibson, Ralph Hodgson, W. B. Yeats, "A. E.," James Stephens, E. A. Robinson, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, Sara Teasdale, J. C. Underwood, Fannie Stearns Davis; to Henry Holt and Company, who publish the poems of Walter De La Mare, Edward Thomas, Padraic Colum, Robert Frost, Louis Untermeyer, Sarah N. Cleghorn, Margaret Widdemer, Carl Sandburg, and the two poems by Henry A. Beers quoted in this book, which appeared in _The Ways of Yale_; to Charles Scribner's Sons, publishers of the poems of George Santayana, Henry Van Dyke, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, Alan Seeger; to Houghton, Mifflin and Company, publishers of the poems of Josephine Peabody, Anna Hempstead Branch, and W. A. Bradley's _Old Christmas_; to The John Lane Company, publishers of the poems of Stephen Phillips, Rupert Brooke, Benjamin R. C. Low; to the Frederick A. Stokes Company, publishers of the poems of Alfred Noyes, Robert Nichols, Thomas MacDonagh, Witter Bynner; to the Yale University Press, publishers of the poems of W. A. Percy, Brian Hooker, W. E. Benét, C. M. Lewis, E. B. Reed, F. E. Pierce, R. B. Glaenzer, L. W. Dodd; to the Oxford University Press, publishers of the poems of Robert Bridges; to Alfred A. Knopf, publisher of the poems of W. H. Davies; to John W. Luce and Company, publishers of the poems of John M. Synge; to Harper and Brothers, publishers of William Watson's _The Man Who Saw_; to Longmans, Green and Company, publishers of the poems of Willoughby Weaving; to Doubleday, Page and Company, publishers of the poems of James Elroy Flecker; to the Bobbs-Merrill Company, publishers of the poems of W. D. Foulke; to Thomas B. Mosher, publisher of the poems of W. A. Bradley, W. E. Henley; to James T. White and Company, publishers of William Griffiths; Francis Thompson's _In No Strange Land_ appeared in the _Athenaeum_ and _Lilium Regis_ in the _Dublin Review_; the poem by Scudder Middleton appeared in _Contemporary Verse_, that by Allan Updegraff in the _Forum_, and that by D. H. Lawrence in _Georgian Poetry_ 1913-15, published by The Poetry Bookshop, London. The titles of the several volumes of poems with dates of publication are given in my text.