Recent American poetry is to recent British poetry somewhat as New York is to London. Its colours are higher and gayer and more diverse; its outlines are more jagged and more surprising; its surfaces glitter and flash as British poetical surfaces do not always do, though its substances are often not so solid or so downright as the British. Nowhere in America have we a poet of the deep integrity of Thomas Hardy, a poet so rooted in ancient soil, ancient manners, ancient dialect. Nor has England a poet shining from so many facets as Amy Lowell, or a poet resounding with such a clang of cymbals—now gold, now iron—as Vachel Lindsay. Experiment thrives better here than there; at least, our adventurers in verse, when they go out on novel quests for novel beauties, are less likely than the British to be held in by steadying tradition, and they bring back all sorts of gorgeous plunder considerably nearer in hue and texture to the flaming shop windows of Fifth Avenue than to those soberer ones of Bond and Regent streets. Even John Masefield, most brilliant living poet of his nation, runs true to British form, grounded in Chaucer and Crabbe, fragrant with England’s meadows, salt with England’s sea. Edgar Lee Masters, as accurately read in Illinois as Masefield in Gloucester, writes of Spoon River not in any manner or measure inherited with his speech, but more nearly in that of the Greek Anthology, by Masters sharpened with a bitter irony. In all directions such borrowings extend. Even the popular verse men of the newspapers play daily pranks with Horace, fetching him from the cool shades of wit to the riotous companionship of Franklin P. Adams and George M. Cohan. China and Japan have been discovered again by Miss Lowell and Mr. Lindsay and Witter Bynner and Eunice Tietjens and a dozen others; have been discovered to be rich treasuries of exquisite images, costumes, gestures, moods, emotions. The corners of Europe have been ransacked by American poets as by American collectors, and translators at last are finding South America. Imagism has been imported and has taken kindly to our climates: H. D. is its finest spirit, Miss Lowell its firmest spokesman. Ezra Pound is a translator-general of poetic bibelots, who seems to know all tongues and who ransacks them without stint or limit. With exploration goes excavation. Poets are cross-examining the immigrants, as T. A. Daly the Italian-Americans. The myths and passions of Africa, hidden on this continent under three centuries of neglect and oppression, have emerged with a new accent in Mr. Lindsay, who does indeed see his Negroes too close to their original jungles but who finds in them poetry where earlier writers found only farce or sentiment. Still more remarkably, the Indian, his voice long drowned by the march of civilization, is heard again in tender and significant notes. Speaking so solely to his own tribe, and taking for granted that each hearer knows the lore of