The poet who is obliged to live in the city has not yet been able to readjust his body to the pace of modern urban life, so that he may live among its never-ending conscious and unconscious stimulations and still keep on hand a triumphant reserve of vitality to pour into his poems. Under these new and strenuous conditions, very little real poetry has been written in our cities. American poets, despite their genuine love of town and their struggles to produce worthy lines amid its turmoil, have almost invariably done the best of their actually creative work during the random moments that could be snatched in wood and meadow, by weedy marsh or rocky headland. To his friends it was touching to see with what wistfulness Richard Watson Gilder used to seek his farm at Tyringham for a day or two of poetry after a fortnight of furious office life. Even Walt Whitman--poet of cities that he was--had to retire "precipitate" from his beloved Manahatta in order fitly to celebrate her perfections. In fact, Stedman was perhaps the only one of our more important singers at the close of the century who could do his best work in defiance of Emerson's injunction to the poet: "Thou shalt lie close hid with Nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange." But it is pleasant to recall how even that poetic banker brightened up and let his soul expand in the peace of the country. One reason for the rapidly growing preponderance of women--and especially of unmarried women--among our poetic leaders is, I think, to be found in the fact that women, more often than men, command the means of living for a generous portion of the year that vital, unstrenuous, contemplative existence demanded by poetry as an antecedent condition of its creation. It is a significant fact that, according to Arnold Bennett, nearly all of the foremost English writers live far from the town. Most of the more promising American poets of both sexes, however, have of late had little enough to do with the country. And the result is that the supreme songs of the twentieth century have remained unsung, to eat out the hearts of their potential singers. For fate has thrown most of our poets quite on their own resources, so that they have been obliged to live in the large cities, supporting life within the various kinds of hack-harness into which the uncommercially shaped withers of Pegasus can be forced. Such harness, I mean, as journalism, editing, compiling, reading for publishers, hack-article writing, and so on. Fate has also seen to it that the poet's make-up is seldom conspicuous by reason of a bull-neck, pugilistic limbs, and the nervous equipoise of a dray-horse. What he may lack in strength, however, he is apt to make up in hectic ambition. Thus it often happens that when the city does not consume quite all of his available energy, the poet, with his probably inadequate physique, chafes against the hack-work and yields