s poet,
or mimic of that other's attitude and outlook. The great zest of living
which inspires him is far too real and intense to clothe itself
in the trappings of any alien individuality. He is too straightforward
to be even dramatic. It is not his instinct to put on a mask,
even for purposes of artistic personation, and much less of affectation.

If ever there was a being who said "Yea" to life, accepted it
as a glorious gift, and was determined to live it with all his might,
it was Alan Seeger. Such a frame of mind is too instinctive and temperamental
to be called optimism. It is not the result of a balancing of good and ill,
and a reasoned decision that good preponderates. Rather it is
a direct perception, an intuition, of the beauty and wonder of the
universe--an intuition too overpowering to be seriously disturbed
by the existence of pain and evil, some of which, at any rate,
has its value as a foil, a background, to joy. This was the message--not
a philosophy but an irresistible emotion--which he sought to deliver
through the medium of an art which he seriously studied and deeply loved.
It spoke from the very depths of his being, and the poems in which
it found utterance, whatever their purely literary qualities,
have at least the value of a first-hand human document,
the sincere self-portraiture of a vivid and virile soul.

There are three more or less clearly-marked elements in a poet's
equipment--observation, passion, reflection, or in simpler terms,
seeing, feeling and thinking. The first two are richly represented
in the following poems, the third, as was natural, much less so.
The poet was too fully occupied in garnering impressions and experiences
to think of co-ordinating and interpreting them. That would have come later;
and later, too, would have come a general deepening of the spiritual content
of his work. There had been nothing in either his outward or his inward life
that could fairly be called suffering or struggle. He had not sounded
the depths of human experience, which is as much as to say that
neither had he risen to the heights. This he no doubt recognised himself,
and was not thinking merely of the date of composition
when he called his pre-war poems "Juvenilia". Great emotions,
and perhaps great sorrows, would have come to him in due time,
and would have deepened and enriched his vein of song.
The first great emotion which found him, when he rallied
to the trumpet-call of Fran