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THE POEMS OF [Illustration] MADISON CAWEIN
"It shall go hard with him through thee, unconquerable blade" Page 270
WITH PHOTOGRAVURES AFTER PAINTINGS BY ERIC PAPE
INDIANAPOLIS THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1887, 1888, 1889, 1890, 1891, 1892, 1893, 1898 AND 1907, BY MADISON CAWEIN
PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH & CO. BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS BROOKLYN, N. Y.
TO WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS WHO WAS THE FIRST TO RECOGNIZE AND ENCOURAGE MY ENDEAVORS, THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED WITH AFFECTION, ADMIRATION AND ESTEEM
This first collected edition of my poems contains all the verses I care to retain except the translations from the German, published in 1895 under the title of _The White Snake_, and some of the poems in _Nature-Notes and Impressions_, published in 1906.
Several of the poems which I probably would have omitted I have retained at the solicitation of friends, who have based their argument for their retention upon the generally admitted fact that a poet seldom knows his best work.
The new arrangement under new titles I found was necessary for the sake of convenience; and the poems in a manner grouped themselves in certain classes. In eliminating the old titles--some eighteen in number--I have disregarded entirely, except in the case of the first volume, the date of the appearance of each poem, placing every one, according to its subject matter, in its proper group under its corresponding title.
Most of the poems, especially the earlier ones, have been revised; many of them almost entirely rewritten and, I think, improved.
Since the disappearance of the latest survivors of that graceful and somewhat academic school of poets who ruled American literature so long from the shores of Massachusetts, serious poetry in the United States seems to have been passing through a crisis of languor. Perhaps there is no country on the civilized globe where, in theory, verse is treated with more respect and, in practice, with greater lack of grave consideration than in America. No conjecture as to the reason of this must be attempted here, further than to suggest that the extreme value set upon sharpness, ingenuity and rapid mobility is obviously calculated to depreciate and to condemn the quiet practice of the most meditative of the arts. Hence we find that it is what is called "humorous" verse which is mainly in fashion on the western side of the Atlantic. Those rhymes are most warmly welcomed which play the most preposterous tricks with language, which dazzle by the most mountebank swiftness of turn, and which depend most for their effect upon paradox and the negation of sober thought. It is probable that the diseased craving for what is "smart," "snappy," and wide-awake, and the impulse to see everything foreshortened and topsy-turvy, must wear themselves out before cooler and more graceful tastes again prevail in imaginative literature.