Indeed, many of the lesser poets have capitulated to overtures of tolerance and not-too-curious inquiry into their private beliefs on the part of the church. In America, the land of religious tolerance, the poet's break with thechurch was never so serious as in England, and the shifting creeds of the evangelical churches have not much hampered poets. In fact, the frenzy of the poet and of the revivalist have sometimes been felt as akin. Noteworthy in this connection is George Lansing Raymond, who causes the heroes of two pretentious narrative poems, _A Life in Song,_ and _The Real and the Ideal,_ to begin by being poets, and end by becoming ministers of the gospel. The verse of J. G. Holland is hardly less to the point. The poet-hero of Holland's _Bitter Sweet_ is a thoroughgoing evangelist, who, in the stress of temptation by a woman who would seduce him, falls upon his knees and saves his own soul and hers likewise. In _Kathrina,_ though the hero, rebellious on account of the suicide of his demented parents, remains agnostic till almost the end of the poem, this is clearly regarded by Holland as the cause of his incomplete success as a poet, and in the end the hero becomes an irreproachable churchman. At present Vachel Lindsay keeps up the tradition of the poet-revivalist. Even in England, the orthodox poet has not been nonexistent. Christina Rossetti portrays such an one in her autobiographical poetry. Jean Ingelow, in _Letters of Life and Morning_, offers most conventional religious advice to the young poet. And in Coventry Patmore's _The Angel in the House_, one finds as orthodox a poet as any that the eighteenth century could afford. The Catholic church too has some grounds for its title, "nursing mother of poets." The rise of the group of Catholic poets, Francis Thompson, Alice Meynell, and Lionel Johnson, in particular, has tended to give a more religious cast to the recent poet. If Joyce Kilmer had lived, perhaps verse on the Catholic poet would have been even more in evidence. But it is likely that Joyce Kilmer would only have succeeded in inadvertently bringing the religious singer once more into disrepute. There is perhaps nothing nocuous in his creed, as he expressed it in a formal interview: "I hope ... poetry ... is reflecting faith ... in God and His Son and the Holy Ghost." [Footnote: Letter to Howard Cook, June 28, 1918, _Joyce Kilmer: Poems, Essays and Letters_, ed. Robert Cortes Holliday.] But Kilmer went much farther and advocated the suppression of all writings, by Catholics, which did not specifically advertise their author's Catholicism. [Footnote: See his letter to Aline Kilmer, April 21, 1918, _Joyce Kilmer, Poems, Essays and Letters_, ed. Robert Cortes Holliday.] And such a doctrine immediately delivers the poet's freedom of inspiration into the hands of censors.