Christian Abrahamsen, the young and independent portrait painter, has done some very remarkable work. His portraits are the result of penetrating study of his subject and adaptation on the part of the painter to the moods of the sitter. He varies his style with his subject. His portrait of Michael Murphy sparkles with life and vigor and holds your attention as few of the portraits of older painters can. Beside portraits Mr. Abrahamsen paints sunny landscapes in the open air and under clear skies. The large canvas filled with the freshness, strength, and beauty of a clearing in northern Wisconsin, reproduced in this issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW, represents some of the work done last summer. [Illustration: JEROME S. BLUM, _The Trickster_.] [Illustration: STANISLAW SZUKALSKI, _The Orator._] [Illustration: C. RAYMOND JOHNSON.] [Illustration: CHRISTIAN ABRAHAMSEN, _A Clearing in Northern Wisconsin._] To name is to destroy. To suggest is to create.—_Stéphane Mallarmé._ Art is a form of exaggeration, and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified ode of over-emphasis.—_Oscar Wilde._ Book Discussion Vachel Lindsay’s Books _The Congo and Other Poems_, by Vachel Lindsay. [The Macmillan Company, New York.] It is not too much to say that many of us are watching Vachel Lindsay with the undisguised hope in our hearts that he may yet prove to be the “Great American Poet.” He has come so fast and far on the road to art and sanity since the early days when he drew minute, and seemingly pathological, maps of the territories of heaven, and grinning grotesques of the Demon Rum! He has carved his own way with so huge and careless a hand! And his work, in spite of its strangeness, is so deeply rooted in the crude but stirring consciousness that is America to-day! Surely there is ground for hope. Like every artist who creates a new form, Mr. Lindsay has had to educate his public. And the task is not by any means accomplished yet. We have had to overcome an instinctive feeling that poetry should be dignified, and to look the fact in the face that it must first of all be telling, and that in cases where these two elements conflict, dignity is a secondary consideration. We have been rudely jostled out of our academic position that poetry must be condensed, poignant, and literary, and we have been shown that by going back to the primitive conception—which included as the principal element the half-chant of the bard—true poetry may be diffuse, full of endless iterations and strangely impassioned over crude and even external objects. So much we have learned, and after the first shock of surprise, learned gladly. It has opened to us whole new reaches of enjoyment. We hope sincerely that we are not yet done with Mr. Lindsay’s educative process.