as raw-meat realistic as anything in Zola or Tolstoy. Then as a poet
he reached his climax in "The Daughter of Mendoza"--a graceful but
moonshiny imitation of Tom Moore and Lord Byron. Perhaps it is better
for the weak to imitate than to try to be original.

It would not take one more than an hour to read aloud all the poetry
of the Southwest that could stand rereading. At the top of all I should
place Fay Yauger's "Planter's Charm," published in a volume of the same
title. With it belongs "The Hired Man on Horseback," by Eugene Manlove
Rhodes, a long poem of passionate fidelity to his own decent kind of
men, with power to ennoble the reader, and with the form necessary to
all beautiful composition. This is the sole and solitary piece of poetry
to be found in all the myriads of rhymes classed as "cowboy poetry."
I'd want Stanley Vestal's "Fandango," in a volume of the same title.
Margaret Bell Houston's "Song from the Traffic," which takes one to the
feathered mesquites and the bluebonnets, might come next. Begging pardon
of the perpetually palpitating New Mexico lyricists, I would skip most
of them, except for bits of Mary Austin, Witter Bynner, Haniel Long,
and maybe somebody I don't know, and go to George Sterling's "Father
Coyote"--in California. Probably I would come back to gallant Phil
LeNoir's "Finger of Billy the Kid," written while he was dying of
tuberculosis in New Mexico. I wouldn't leave without the swift,
brilliantly economical stanzas that open the ballad of "Sam Bass," and
a single line, "He came of a solitary race," in the ballad of "Jesse
James."

Several other poets have, of course, achieved something for mortals
to enjoy and be lifted by. Their work has been sifted into various
anthologies. The best one is_ Signature of the Sun: Southwest Verse,
1900-1950_, selected and edited by Mabel Major and T. M. Pearce,
University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1950. Two other anthologies
are _Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp_, by John A. Lomax, 1919,
reprinted in 1950 by Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York; _The Road to
Texas_, by Whitney Montgomery, Kaleidograph, Dallas, 1940. Montgomery's
Kaleidograph Press has published many volumes by southwestern poets.
Somebody who has read them all and has read all the poets represented,
without enough of distillation, in _Signature of the Sun_ could no doubt
be juster on the subject than I am.

Like historical fiction, drama of the Southwest has been less dra