I do not understand why so many Americans plaster the walls of their dining-rooms with pictures of overset fruit-baskets and of dead fish with their ugly mouths open; but in "still life" this paradoxical poet sees something full of demoniacal energy. O Death, where is thy sting? Never have I beheld such fierce contempt, Nor heard a voice so full of vehement life As this that shouted from a bowl of fruit, High-pitched, malignant, lusty and perverse-- Brutal with a triumphant restlessness. But the fruit in the basket is dead. The energy, the fierce vehemence and the lusty shout are not in the bowl, but in the soul. Subjectivity can no further go. It is rather curious, that when our poet can behold such passion in a willow-tree or in a mess of plucked fruit, he should be so blind to it in the heart of an old maid; though to be honest, the heroine of his poem is meant for an individual rather than a type. If there is one object on earth that a healthy young man cannot understand, it is an old maid. Who can forget that terrible outburst of the aunt in _Une Vie_? "Nobody ever cared to ask if my feet were wet!" Mr. Untermeyer will live and learn. He is not contemptuous; he is full of pity, but it is the pity of ignorance. Great joys or sorrows never came To set her placid soul astir; Youth's leaping torch, Love's sudden flame Were never even lit for her. _Don't you believe it, Mr. Untermeyer!_ Even in his "serious" volumes of verse, there is much satire and saline humour; so that his delightful book of parodies, called _---- and Other Poets_ is as spontaneous a product of his Muse as his utterances _ex cathedra_. The twenty-seven poems, called _The Banquet of the Bards_, with which the book begins, are excellent fooling and genuine criticism. He wrote these things for his own amusement, one reason why they amuse us. A roll-call of twenty-seven contemporary poets, where each one comes forward and "speaks his piece," is decidedly worth having. John Masefield "tells the true story of Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son"; William Butler Yeats "gives a Keltic version of Three Wise Men in Gotham"; Robert Frost "relates the Death of the Tired Man," and so on. I had rather possess this volume than any other by the author; it is almost worthy to rank with the immortal _Fly Leaves_. Furthermore, in his serious work Mr. Untermeyer has only begun to fight.