If this movement in poetic expression did not have a double trend, it might be left to work out its own salvation; but the contrast between the two tendencies is too marked not to arrest attention. What is poetry, after all? Merely a survival, a relic of older modes of thought, something seeking expression only when deep-seated passions are occasionally revived; or is it a living, present force, an effective weapon of social reform? Few people can resist the impulse to write verse. Does this tendency and the interest it reflects indicate the presence of a concealed giant who could pull loads, or is it a mere survival of an old habit, like looking at a new moon over the shoulder to see what the luck is to be? A question will help to make the issue clear. Is the function of poetry to create the emotion by which the day's work is done, as well as to serve as a relaxation for tired reformers when work is ended? Should we read poetry upon rising to get heart, or only at eventide to relax the tired mind? Is poetry to be put in the class with golf and solitaire, or with dynamos and rapid-firing guns? Ornamental art belongs in one class, functional art in the other. Poets who continue to describe Amazons and mermaids and bring us “news from nowhere” should write at night to relieve the monotony of the day, and what they write will have effect only by the relaxation it makes possible. But truly functional poetry shoots farther than any gun and cuts deeper than the sharpest knife. It goes ahead of the reformer and wakes the world to an appreciation of what he is doing. It works while he sleeps and enters a thousand minds into which his dry details and monotonous lament could find no entrance. And in this sense is not effectiveness of thought a beauty as well as its form? As we decide this question we take sides not only in poetry but in every field where thought and life are striving for expression. The dominance of the older view is plain. Millions of dollars are given to preserve old relics and meaningless pictures, but scarcely a cent for the artist whose soul throbs with American life. When new buildings are erected the old conventions are used; no attempt is made to picture the new. The decorations of the public library of Boston, for example, are a mass of symbols to be deciphered only by the initiated. The one object that can be recognized without the aid of a guidebook is a telegraph pole. In the Congressional Library at Washington the principal figures of the mural decorations are short-skirted damsels, who flit along the wall, such as War, Peace, and other creatures of artistic fancy.