Page:A Foremost American Lyrist, Lippincott's, March 1913.djvu/1

 AN APPRECIATION

By William Stanley Braithwaite



N a sonnet called "Poetry," Florence Earle Coates has a line in which she sings:

This "envisaging" the veiled heart of things is that transubstantiating power in the poet which enables him to evoke those images in which life symbolizes its manifold and myriad significations in the subtle woof that makes the warp of existence coherent and explicable. Life itself is a great mystery, and all the apparent realities in the visible world, however solid or imperative in form and color, are but the embodiment of what is eternally real in the secret and veiled spirit in man and nature. To manifest this eternal reality, to make an understandable language of exteriorities that will express and interpret the meaning and purpose of this vital, unsubstantial reality, is what makes poetry in its functional communication the most profound of the arts, and the poet the noblest benefactor of mankind.

Among contemporary American poets, Mrs. Coates holds a high position for serious and sustained work. In the four published volumes to her credit there is represented a varied and penetrative outlook on life in all its significant aspects which, expressed in the most compelling forms of lyric art, stamp her as the possessor of an extraordinary poetic gift. She has conceived the high function of poetry as an interpretation and criticism of life, adhering to the canons of her beloved master, Matthew Arnold, and has proven her worth, and the right to receive and exercise the spiritual influence inherited from that great and austere poet.

Her art becomes a criticism of life, but it loses nothing because of its seriousness, of those impalpable and exquisite qualities by which poetry itself is a special embodiment and expression of beauty. Because the message underlying the emotion and thought of her verse is the utterance of a soul that sympathizes with, and broods over, the "veiled heart"