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the board declares. And this, they say, is about as poetic as a large
city ever becomes.

Now let us glance for a moment at the poems in prose and verse of Mr.
James Oppenheim, a young man for whom a metropolis is almost
completely epitomized by the riveting-machine, the sweat-shop, and
the slum. There we discover that this poet's vision has pierced
straight through the city's veneer of ugly commonplace to the beauty
shimmering beneath. In his eyes the sinewy, heroic forms of the
builders, clinging high on their frail scaffoldings and nonchalantly
hurling red-hot rivets through space, are so many young gods at play
with elemental forces. The sweat-shop is transmuted into as grim and
glorious a battlefield as any Tours or Gettysburg of them all. And the
dingy, battered old "L" train, as it clatters through the East Side
early on "morose, gray Monday morning," becomes a divine chariot

"winging through Deeps of the Lord with its eighty Earth-anchored
Souls."

Oh, yes; there is "God's plenty" of poetry in these sights and sounds,
if only one looks deep enough to discover the beauty of homeliness.
But there is even more of beauty and poetic inspiration to be drawn
from the city by him who, instead of thus straitly confining his gaze
to any one aspect of urban life, is able to see it steadily and see it
whole, with its subtle _nuances_ and its over-powering dramatic
contrasts--as a twentieth-century Walt Whitman, for example, might see
it if he had a dash of Tennyson's technical equipment, of Arnold's
sculpturesque polish and restraint, of Lanier's instinct for sensuous
beauty. What "songs greater than before known" might such a poet not
sing as he wandered close to precious records of the Anglo-Saxon
culture of the race amid the stately colonial peace and simplicity of
St. Mark's church-yard, with the vividly colored life of all
southeastern Europe surging about that slender iron fence--children of
the blood of Chopin and Tschaikowsky; of Gutenberg, Kossuth, and
Napoleon; of Isaiah and Plato, Leonardo and Dante--with the wild
strains of the gypsy orchestra floating across Second Avenue, and to
the southward a glimpse aloft in a rarer, purer air of builders
clambering on the cupola of a neighboring Giotto's tower built of
steel? Who dares say that the city is unpoetic? _It is one of the most
poetic places on earth._

These, then, are the chief explanations w