world receives a new poet. Such an one will
of necessity break through the decadent customs of the period; and
falling back to the forms of true melody, sing a spontaneous song which
can not help being original, because it represents the unforced reaction
of a keen and delicate mind to the panorama of life. And when this
reaction is enabled to bring out in the simplest and most beautiful
style fancies and images which the world has not received or noted
before, we are justified in claiming that the bard is "different."

Such a bard is Winifred Virginia Jackson, whose poetry has for six years
been the pride of the United Amateur Press Association. Born in Maine,
and through childhood accustomed to the mystical spell of the ancient
New-England countryside, Miss Jackson for a long period quietly and
unconsciously absorbed a prodigious store of beauty and phantasy from
life. Having no design to become a poet, she accepted these ethereal
gifts as a matter of course; until about a decade ago they manifested
themselves in a burst of spontaneous melody which can best be described
as a sheer overflowing of delightful dreams and pictures from a mind
filled to the brim with poetic loveliness. Since that time Miss Jackson
has written vast quantities of verse; always rich and musical, and if
one may speak in paradox, always artless with supreme art. None of these
poems is in any sense premeditated or consciously composed; they are
more like visions of the fancy, instantaneously photographed for the
perception of others, and unerringly framed in the most appropriate
metrical medium.

When we peruse the poetry of Miss Jackson we are impressed first by its
amazing variety, and almost as quickly by a certain distinctive quality
which gives all the varied specimens a kind of homogeneity. As we
analyse our impressions, we find that both of these qualities have a
common source--the complete objectivity and almost magical imagination
of supreme genius. Objectivity and imagination, the gifts of the epic
bards of classical antiquity, are today the rarest of blessings. We live
in an age of morbid emotion and introspectiveness; wherein the poets,
such as they are, have sunk to the level of mere pathologists engaged in
the dissection of their own ultra-sophisticated spirits. The fresh touch
of Nature is lost to the majority, and rhymesters rant endlessly and
realistically about the relation of man to his fellows and to himself;
overlooking the