IN MEMORIAM
Since our last number went to press, death has hushed the voice of Remy de Gourmont, the distinguished French poet and man of letters who contributed two brief poems, Je n'aime plus and La Vasque, and an article on French Poets and the War, to Poetry last January.
M. de Gourmont, dying at fifty-seven, is best known as a prose writer of curious, enigmatical and beautiful works; hut he has published a small volume of verse, Divertissements, and remarkable experiments in prose-poetry, like Las Litanies de la Rose, quoted with admiration in our pages.
As a critic—of literature, morals, institutions and life—he is perhaps most eminent; every intellectual person is bound to read sooner or later his L'Idéalisme, La Culture des Idées, Le Latin Mystique, La Livre des Masques, and other works of penetrating intelligence. Add to these his numerous novels, short stories, plays, translations from old French, Spanish and Latin, and his poetry, and you have evidence of one of the most catholic minds of his time, one whose motto is best expressed in his own words: Ne laissons pas mourir la tradition des libres esprits.
A more recent lamentable death is that of a young American poet, Alan Seeger, a member of the Foreign Legion who was killed in the trenches. A year or more ago he volunteered because "Paris was in peril; . . . the old haunts were desolate, the boon companions gone—it was unthinkable to leave the danger to them and accept only the pleasures oneself."
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