Page:Our Poets of Today (1918).djvu/158

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OUR POETS OF TODAY
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He declared to Beauty
You shall not lead me, Beauty—
No, on no more passionate and never-ending quests.
I am tired of stumbling after you,
Through wild, familiar forests and strange bogs;
Tired of breaking my heart following a shifting light.

Mr. Untermeyer, who is thirty-two years of age, declares that his childhood was a "school-hating" one, and his Alma Mater, the "radical" De Witt Clinton High School.

He says that as a younger man—if one may speak in such terms of thirty-two—his taste in literature was execrable. "There was even a time when I considered Alfred Noyes a great poet. My taste in music was a far different matter. At sixteen I came perilously near being a concert pianist—I can still play most of Beethoven, Brahms, and Schumann without threats from the neighbors. Started to write extremely bad essays and even worse poetry at the age of seventeen. Up to then, my life was blameless! Upon the birth of a son, I became convinced that children must be fed. My wife also seemed to require food. Where-upon, after flirting with the idea of writing songs for the concert stage, I entered the jewelry manufacturing concern of my father—of which establishment I am now designer, superintendent, and vice-president."

John Gould Fletcher

Miss Amy Lowell, who classes herself with the imagists, declares that imagism is presentation, not representation, and for example cites Mr. Fletcher's