Amy Lowell headlines this issue--following some essays, she's contributing poems here. I like a lot of them, but one enriched by context is "The Foreigner," a goofy Noyes-ian swashbuckler poem about a swordfight between the speaker-foreigner and a bunch of callow treacherous locals. I think it's an allegory of Lowell's trip to England, and sheds some light on her confident encounter with the London avant-garde. Lowell figuring herself as a deft swordsman outfencing the locals seems a little ludicrous now...
More interesting formally is "The Forsaken," a prose dramatic monologue of a Swiss woman who is pregnant, and whose lover just died in an avalanche. Interesting formally as a prose poem in Poetry.
Joyce Kilmer writes so sweetly: his poem "Easter" is printed in this issue. John Reed also contributes a poem, though I tend to prefer his journalistic work in The Masses to his poetry.
Arthur Johnson contributes a poem "Lyra Vernalis," which is now the second pre-"Waste Land" wasteland poem in Poetry after Cawein's (see above).
Last quick note: there's a definite Orientalist strain in this issue as the vogue for Eastern art hits Poetry--in particular, several references to Japanese art and a sequence of poems by A. J. Russell titled "The House of Takumi: Poem-Sequence from the Japanese." Unfortunately these are as "from" as the "Sonnets from the Portuguese": a note in the authors section points out that "Mr. Russell's poem is not a translation."
Lastly, and related: this is the first ad in Poetry for something other than books and publishing-related stuff. Looks pretty cool, too:
Lastly, and related: this is the first ad in Poetry for something other than books and publishing-related stuff. Looks pretty cool, too:
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