The three volumes of anthology of French Contemporary Poets from 1866 to 1916 have been supplemented by a fourth entitled Poets of Yesterday and To-day (1916). Edited by the painstaking M. G. Walch, it comprises the verse of poets born as late as 1886. Among the rest is the gifted Charles Dumas, who fell in battle, 1914. As epigraph to the new collection the editor has used a line from this poet's testament: "Ce désir d'être tout que j'appelle mon âme!" Another anthology of the new poets is prefaced by M. Gustave Lanson, but the Walch collection reveals more promising talents, or else the poems are more representative. Signor Marinetti, who is bilingual, is eccentrically amusing. But are his contortions on the tripod art? The auto and aeroplane are celebrated, also steam, speed, mist, and the destruction of all art prior to 1900. The new schools are wary of rhetoric, thus following Paul Verlaine's injunction: Take Eloquence by the neck and wring it! Imagists abound, but they are in an aristocratic minority. The watchword is: sobriety in thinking and expression. Strangely enough, two names emerge victoriously from the confusing lyric symphony and they are those of Belgian-born poets--Emile Verhaeren, whose tragic death last year was a loss to literature, and Maurice Maeterlinck. What living lyric poet has the incomparable power of that epical Verhaeren, unless it be that of the more sophisticated Gabriele d'Annunzio, or the sumptuous decorative verse of Henri de Régnier, whose polished art is the antithesis of the exuberant, lawless, resonant reverberations of Verhaeren? What thinker and dramatist is known like Maeterlinck, except it be the magical Gerhart Hauptmann? Rough to brutality--for Verhaeren at one time emulated Walt Whitman (variously spelled as "Walth" and "Withman"); with the names of foreigners Paris has ever been careless in its orthography, witness "Litz" and "Edgard Poë"; he can boast the divine afflatus. His personality is of the centrifugal order. He has a tumultuous rhythmic undertow that sweeps one irresistibly with him. But his genius is disintegrating, rather than constructive. Of what French poet among the younger group dare we say the same? Grace, lyric sweetness, subtlety in ideas, facile technique--all these, yes, but not the power of saying great things greatly. As for Maeterlinck, he owes something to Emerson; but his mellow wisdom and clairvoyance are his own. He is a seer, and his crepuscular pages are pools of glimmering incertitudes, whereas of Verhaeren we may say, as Carlyle said of Landor's prose: "The sound of it is like the ring of Roman swords on the helmets of barbarians."