ng.

Thus, it was recently made possible for hundreds of thousands of
Americans to live, at least a considerable part of the year, where
they could hoard up an overplus of vitality. The result was that these
well-vitalized persons, whenever they returned to the city, were
better able to stand--and adjust themselves to--the severe urban pace,
than were the fagged city people. It was largely by the impact of this
new vitality that the city was roused to the importance of physical
efficiency, so that it went in for parks, gymnasia, baths, health and
welfare campaigns, athletic fields, playgrounds, Boy Scouts, Campfire
Girls, and the like.

There are signs everywhere that we Americans have, by wise living,
begun to win back the exuberance which we lost at the rise of the
modern city. One of the surest indications of this is the fact that
the nation has suddenly begun to read poetry again, very much as the
exhausted poetry-lover instinctively turns again to his Palgrave
during the third week of vacation. In returning to neglected nature we
are returning to the most neglected of the arts. The renaissance of
poetry is here. And men like Masefield, Noyes, and Tagore begin to
vie in popularity with the moderately popular novelists. Moreover this
is only the beginning. Aviation has come and is reminding us of the
ancient prophecy of H. G. Wells that the suburbs of a city like New
York will now soon extend from Washington to Albany. Urban centers are
being diffused fast; but social-mindedness is being diffused faster.
Men are wishing more and more to share with each brother man the
brimming cup of life. Aircraft and true democracy are on the way to
bear all to the land of perpetual exuberance. And on their wings the
poet will again mount to that height of authority and esteem from
which, in the healthful, athletic days of old, Homer and Sophocles
dominated the minds and spirits of their fellow-men. That is to
say--he will mount if we let him. In the following chapter I shall
endeavor to show why the American poet has as yet scarcely begun to
share in the poetry-renaissance.

VIII

THE JOYFUL HEART FOR POETS

_Nothing probably is more dangerous for the human race than
science without poetry, civilization without culture._

HOUSTON STEWART CHAMBERLAIN.

_A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is
a joke._

MAX EASTMAN.

In the last two chapters we have seen the contemporary m