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Company."
I heartily envy him these experiences; to me every river is an adventure, even the quiet, serious old Connecticut.
Yet the poem that resulted from these visions is not remarkable. Nothing, I suppose, is more difficult than to write a good long poem. Poe disapproved of the undertaking in itself; and only men of undoubted genius have succeeded, whereas writers of hardly more than ordinary talent have occasionally turned off something combining brevity and excellence. I feel sure that Mr. Neihardt talks about this journey more impressively than he writes about it. His love lyrics, in A Bundle of Myrrh, are much better. The tendency to eroticism is redeemed by sincerity of feeling.
Charles Wharton Stork was born at Philadelphia, on the twelfth of February, 1881, and studied at Haverford, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania. He is a scholar, a member of the English Faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, and has made many translations of Scandinavian poems. Always interested in modern developments of poetry, both in America and Europe, he is at present the editor of Contemporary Verse, a monthly magazine exclusively made up of original poems. This periodical has been of considerable assistance to students of contemporary poetry, for it has given an opportunity to hitherto unknown writers, and often it contains some notable contribution from men of established reputation. Thus the number for April, 1918, may some day have bibliographical value, since it leads off with a remarkable poem by Vachel Lindsay, _The Eyes of Queen Esther_. I advise collectors to secure this, and to subscribe to the magazine. Mr. Stork has written much verse himself, of which Flying Fish: an Ode, may be taken as illustrative of his
originality and imagination.
Another excellent magazine of contemporary poetry is _The
Sonnet_, edited and published by Mahlon Leonard Fisher, at
Williamsport, Pennsylvania, of which the first number bears the date February, 1917.