wisdom, the idealistic beauty of the art, and thrill in rhyme with
poetry's profound, spiritual insights.

The promising thing is that America is beginning to do exactly this
to-day. The entire history of our enjoyment of poetry might be summed
up in that curious symbol which appears over the letter _n_ in the
word "canon." A rise, a fall, a rise. Here is the whole story of the
American poetry-lover. His enthusiasm first reached a high point
about the middle of the nineteenth century. A generation later it fell
into a swift decline. But three or four years ago it began to revive
so rapidly that a poetry-lover's renaissance is now a reality. This
renaissance has not yet been explained, although the majority of
readers and writers feel able to tell why poetry declined. Let us
glance at a few of the more popular explanations.

Many say that poetry declined in America because we turned ourselves
into a nation of entirely prosaic materialists. But if this is true,
how do they explain our present national solicitude for song-birds and
waterfalls, for groves of ancient trees, national parks, and
city-planning? How do they explain the fact that our annual
expenditure on the art of music is six times that of Germany, the
Fatherland of Tone? And how do they account for the flourishing
condition of some of our other arts? If we are hopelessly
materialistic, why should American painters and sculptors have such a
high world-standing? And why should their strongest, most original,
most significant work be precisely in the sphere of poetic, suggestive
landscape, and ideal sculpture? The answer is self-evident. It is no
utterly prosaic age, and people that founded our superb orchestras,
that produced and supported Winslow Homer, Tryon, and Woodbury,
French, Barnard, and Saint Gaudens. A more poetic hand than Wall
Street's built St. Thomas's and the cathedral, terminals and towers of
New York, Trinity Church in Boston, the Minnesota State Capitol, Bar
Harbor's Building of Arts, West Point, and Princeton University. It is
plain that our poetic decline was not wholly due to materialism.

Other philosophers are sure that whatever was the matter with poetry
was the fault of the poets themselves. Popular interest slackened,
they say, because the art first degenerated. Now an obvious answer to
this is that no matter how dead the living poets of any age become,
men may always turn, if they will, to those dead poets of old who live
forever o