LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE _Facing page_ 28 BLISS CARMAN “ “ 48 LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY “ “ 76 JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY “ “ 112 CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS “ “ 134 MADISON CAWEIN “ “ 178 GEORGE E. WOODBERRY “ “ 198 FREDERIC LAWRENCE KNOWLES “ “ 214 ALICE BROWN “ “ 236 RICHARD BURTON “ “ 250 CLINTON SCOLLARD “ “ 270 MARY MCNEIL FENOLLOSA “ “ 292 RIDGELY TORRENCE “ “ 300 The Younger American Poets I RICHARD HOVEY RICHARD HOVEY was a poet of convictions rather than of fancies, in which regard he overtopped many of his contemporaries who were content to be “enamored architects of airy rhyme.” Hovey was himself a skilful architect of rhyme, an imaginative weaver of fancy; but these were not ends, he does not stand primarily for them. He stands for comradeship; for taking vows of one’s own soul; for alliance with the shaping spirit of things; for a sane, wholesome, lusty manhood; a hearty, confident surrender to life. He is the poet of positivism, virile, objective, and personal to a Whitmanesque degree, and answers to many of the qualifications laid down by Whitman for the testing of an American poet. His performance is eminently of the sort to “face the open fields and the seaside;” it does “absorb into one;” it “animates to life,” and it is of the people. It answers also to the query, “Have you vivified yourself from the maternity of these States?” for Hovey was an American of the Americans, and his patriotic poems are instinct with national pride, though one may dissent from certain of his opinions upon war. Hovey, to the degree of his development when his hand was stayed, was a finely balanced man and artist. The purely romantic motives which form the entire basis, for example, of Stephen Phillips’ work, and thus render him a poet of the cultured classes and not of the people, were foreign to the spirit of Hovey. He, too, was recasting in dramatic form some of beauty’s imperishable traditions; but this was only one phase of his art, it did not cause him to approach his own time with less of sympathy; and while he had not yet come deeply into the prophet gifts of song, their potency was upon him, and in the Odes, which contain some of his strongest writing, his passion for brotherhood, for development through comradeship, finds splendid expression. In the best known of his odes, “Spring,” occurs this stirring symbol: For surely in the blind deep-buried roots Of all men’s souls to-day A secret quiver shoots. * * * * * The darkness in us is aware Of something potent burning through the earth, Of something vital in the procreant air.