The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Advance of English Poetry in the
Twentieth Century, by William Lyon Phelps
#2 in our series by
William Lyon Phelps
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.
Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how
the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since
1971**
*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of
Volunteers!*****
Title: The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century
Author: William Lyon Phelps
Release Date: April, 2005 [EBook #7930]
[Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on June 2,
2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English

Character set encoding: ACII, with some ISO-8859-1 characters
0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADVANCE OF
ENGLISH POETRY ***
Tiffany Vergon, Cam Venezuela and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.
THE ADVANCE OF ENGLISH POETRY IN THE TWENTIETH
CENTURY
BY
WILLIAM LYON PHELPS
Lampson Professor of English Literature at Yale
Member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters
_O! 't is an easy thing
To write and sing;
But to write true, unfeigned verse
Is very hard!_
--HENRY VAUGHAN, 1655
TO
MY FRIEND FOR FORTY YEARS
FRANK W. HUBBARD
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The publishers of the works of the poets from whom illustrative
passages are cited in this volume, have courteously and generously
given permission, and I take this opportunity of expressing my thanks
to The Macmillan Company, who publish the poems of Thomas Hardy,
William Watson, John Masefield, W. W. Gibson, Ralph Hodgson, W.
B. Yeats, "A. E.," James Stephens, E. A. Robinson, Vachel Lindsay,
Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, Sara Teasdale, J. C. Underwood,
Fannie Stearns Davis; to Henry Holt and Company, who publish the
poems of Walter De La Mare, Edward Thomas, Padraic Colum, Robert

Frost, Louis Untermeyer, Sarah N. Cleghorn, Margaret Widdemer, Carl
Sandburg, and the two poems by Henry A. Beers quoted in this book,
which appeared in The Ways of Yale; to Charles Scribner's Sons,
publishers of the poems of George Santayana, Henry Van Dyke,
Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, Alan Seeger; to Houghton, Mifflin and
Company, publishers of the poems of Josephine Peabody, Anna
Hempstead Branch, and W. A. Bradley's Old Christmas; to The John
Lane Company, publishers of the poems of Stephen Phillips, Rupert
Brooke, Benjamin R. C. Low; to the Frederick A. Stokes Company,
publishers of the poems of Alfred Noyes, Robert Nichols, Thomas
MacDonagh, Witter Bynner; to the Yale University Press, publishers of
the poems of W. A. Percy, Brian Hooker, W. E. Benét, C. M. Lewis, E.
B. Reed, F. E. Pierce, R. B. Glaenzer, L. W. Dodd; to the Oxford
University Press, publishers of the poems of Robert Bridges; to Alfred
A. Knopf, publisher of the poems of W. H. Davies; to John W. Luce
and Company, publishers of the poems of John M. Synge; to Harper
and Brothers, publishers of William Watson's The Man Who Saw; to
Longmans, Green and Company, publishers of the poems of
Willoughby Weaving; to Doubleday, Page and Company, publishers of
the poems of James Elroy Flecker; to the Bobbs-Merrill Company,
publishers of the poems of W. D. Foulke; to Thomas B. Mosher,
publisher of the poems of W. A. Bradley, W. E. Henley; to James T.
White and Company, publishers of William Griffiths; Francis
Thompson's In No Strange Land appeared in the Athenaeum_ and
_Lilium Regis_ in the Dublin
Review_; the poem by Scudder
Middleton appeared in _Contemporary Verse_, that by Allan Updegraff
in the Forum, and that by D. H. Lawrence in Georgian Poetry 1913-15,
published by The Poetry Bookshop, London.
The titles of the several volumes of poems with dates of publication are
given in my text.
I am grateful to the Yale University Librarians for help on
bibliographical matters, and to Professor Charles Bennett and Byrne
Hackett, Esquire, for giving some facts about the Irish poets.
W. L. P.

PREFACE
The material in this volume originally appeared in The Bookman,
1917-1918. It is now published with much addition and revision.
The Great War has had a stimulating effect on the production of poetry.
Professional poets have been spokesmen for the inarticulate, and a host
of hitherto unknown writers have acquired reputation. An immense
amount of verse has been written by