AMERICAN POETRY
1922
A MISCELLANY
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
1922, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY, N. J.[Pg iii]
A FOREWORD
When the first Miscellany of American Poetryappeared in 1920, innumerable were the questionsasked by both readers and reviewers of publishersand contributors alike. The modest note on thejacket appeared to satisfy no one. The volume purportedto have no editor, yet a collection withoutan editor was pronounced preposterous. It wasobviously not the organ of a school, yet it did notseem to have been compiled to exploit any particularphase of American life; neither Nature, Love,Patriotism, Propaganda, nor Philosophy could be acclaimedas its reason for being, and it was certainlynot intended, as has been so frequent of late, to bringa cheerful absence of mind to the world-weary duringan unoccupied ten minutes. Again, it was exclusivenot inclusive, since its object was, evidently,not the meritorious if impossible one of attemptingto be a compendium of present-day American verse.
But the publisher's note had stated one thingquite clearly, that the Miscellany was to be a biennial.Two years have passed, and with the secondvolume it has seemed best to state at once the reasonswhich actuated its contributors to join in such[Pg iv]a venture.
In the first place, the plan of the Miscellany isfrankly imitative. For some years now there hasbeen published in England an anthology entitledGeorgian Poetry. The Miscellany is intended tobe an American companion to that publication. Thedissimilarities of temperament, range and choice ofsubjects are manifest, but the outstanding differenceis this: Georgian Poetry has an editor, and thepoems it contains may be taken as that editor's reactionto the poetry of the day. The Miscellany, onthe other hand, has no editor; it is no one person'schoice which forms it; it is not an attempt to throwinto relief any particular group or stress any particulartendency. It does disclose the most recentwork of certain representative figures in contemporaryAmerican literature. The poets who appear herehave come together by mutual accord and, althoughthey may invite others to join them in subsequentvolumes as circumstance dictates, each one stands(as all newcomers also must stand) as the exponentof fresh and strikingly diverse qualities in our nativepoetry. It is as if a dozen unacademic painters,separated by temperament and distance, were to arrangeto have an exhibition every two years of theirlatest work. They would not pretend that they werethe only painters worthy of a public showing; theywould maintain that their work was, generally speaking,most interesting to one another. Their gallerywould necessarily be limited; but it would be flexible[Pg v]enough to admit, with every fresh exhibit, three orfour new members who had achieved an importanceand an idiom of their own. This is just what theoriginal contributors to the Miscellany have done.
The newcomers—H. D., Alfred Kreymborg, andEdna St. Vincent Millay—have taken their placeswith the same absence of judge or jury that marksany "society of independents." The