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Rh useful tasks of assaying and classifying these poems, I have accepted the invitation of the Editor to make my own comment—not on the poems themselves (for I have been shown of this volume only the list of the poets whose work is here represented), but on certain potential aspects of American poetry which seem to me important to its renascence in the tomorrow already upon us.

I feel the more free to do so because this list of poets is a list largely of old friends, many of them intimate friends; and it is to them, gathered here round the Editor's hospitable board, more than to stranger readers in the visiting gallery, that I should like to submit a few queries and suggestions which may possibly appeal to them as craftsmen and fellow workers.

And first, as workers, I wonder if we are wholly aware what hermits we are, and what too little of fellowship enters into our lives as poets and into these contributions of ours to a time (despite its world war) the most cooperative the earth has ever known—an age that, as never before, cries out for fellowship of imagination to enlarge and reconstruct the basic architecture of society itself.

In so choral an age, shall the poets still be solitary pipers? In this majestic era of socialization, shall we alone continue to represent the anarchic order of an era of individualism?

Or if, like some insects, poets be hopelessly cellular by instinct, must we gather honey only as the hermit