When taxed with the fact that the art is unrepresented the heads of the departments point deprecatingly to the fact that as a decorative feature of certain architectural archways poetical quotations are used. There is a quotation from Confucius, one from the Kalidasa, several from Edmund Spencer, and one (O Triumph of Modernity!) from Walt Whitman. As no commercial exhibit is accepted which was in existence at the time of the St. Louis Exposition this answer is doubly enlightening. All the other arts are here. Architecture, music, sculpture, mural and easel painting, drawing, prints and etching, landscape gardening, together with the so-called “Liberal Arts” are adequately represented. But not poetry. A perusal of the “P’s” of the official list in an attempt to discover it is significant. “Poultry” is there with a large exhibit, so is “Plumbago,” “Plumbers’ Implements,” “Pomology” and “Ponies.” Excellent exhibits all, but hardly lyrical. It may be urged, of course, that other arts, such as the arts of the theatre, acting and stagecraft, and the literary art of prose writing, are also omitted. But although exhibitions of these things would be eminently desirable they present great practical difficulties. And these arts have, after all, a commercial side which is more or less adequately suggested. But with poetry the case is different. The mere fact that commercially poetry is, like Perlmutter’s automobile, a liability and not an asset, ought in our practical age to prove that it is a “fine art!” And the practical difficulty of providing a set of bookshelves and a competent jury to pass on admissions need hardly stagger the directors of so colossal an undertaking. Add to this daily, or even bi-weekly, readings of contemporary poetry and the result would be a representation in proportion to the attention paid the other arts. It would be useless to urge that this Exposition is a private, or even a local enterprise. It cannot stand as such. It represents in the face of the warring world the development of our country, culturally as well as commercially. And the fact that one of the oldest and most reverenced of the arts is totally unrepresented must inevitably redound to the discredit of the executive officers, and through them of the people at large. For the root of this cavalier treatment of poetry is, after all, in the American people. As a nation, in spite of our complacency in the present world crisis, we are still in the stage of culture in which we believe that man can live by bread alone. And we can scarcely hope for more adequate recognition of the art until those of us to whom poetry is a living fact, and not an academic perception, have battled at greater length and with greater self-sacrifice in the eternal struggle through commercialism to beauty. The Mob-God