Page:Our Poets of Today (1918).djvu/37



Many attempts have been made to define poetry for the layman. Some have sought to set it down as figures of speech or metric measures; others, a vague groping among soft sounding words for spiritual expressions reserved for a selected few.

In a contest of the Poetry Society (New York) a prize was awarded for the best definition of poetry to Annie L. Laney, who describes it:

Henry T. Schnittkind says:

"Our human minds are like so many imperfect and distorted mirrors in which the one is reflected in a million apparently irreconcilable variations. Now and