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r> And you shall see the star."
The first two poems in The Harvest Moon (1916) are very fine; but sometimes I think her best work is found in a field where it is difficult to excel--I mean child poetry. Her Cradle Song is as good as anything of hers I know, though I could wish she had omitted the parenthetical refrain. I hope readers will forgive me--though I know they won't--for saying that Dormi, dormi tu sounds a triumphant exclamation at the sixteenth hole.
An American poet who won twenty-two years ago a reputation with a small volume, who ten years later seemed almost forgotten, and who now deservedly stands higher than ever before is Edwin Arlington Robinson. He was born in Maine, on the twenty-second of December, 1869, and studied at Harvard University. In 1896 he published two poems, _The Torrent_ and The Night Before; these were included the next year in a volume called The Children of the Night. His
successive books of verse are Captain Craig,_ 1902; The Town Down the River,_ 1910; The Man Against the Sky, 1916;
Merlin,_ 1917; and he has printed two plays, of which Van Zorn_ (1914) despite its chilling reception, is exceedingly good.
Mr. Robinson is not only one of our best known American contemporary poets, but is a leader and recognized as such. Many write verses today because the climate is so favourable to the Muse's somewhat delicate health. But if Mr. Robinson is not a germinal writer, he is at all events a precursor of the modern advance. The year 1896 was not opportune for a venture in verse, but the Gardiner poet has never cared to be in the rearward of a fashion. The two poems that he produced that year he has since surpassed, but they clearly demonstrated his right to live and to be heard.
The prologue to the 1897 volume contained his platform, which, so far as I know, he has never seen cause to change. Despite the title, he is not an infant crying in the night; he is a full-grown man,