Page:Poems, Alan Seeger, 1916.djvu/27

 lightly. There is no sign either of any struggle of the soul or of any very rending tempest of the heart. There is no posing, self-conscious Byronism, nor any of that morbid dallying with the idea of "sin" which gives such an unpleasant flavor to a good deal of romantic poetry, both French and English. There are traces of disappointment and disillusion, but they are accepted without a murmur as inevitable incidents of a great, absorbing experience. All this means, of course, that there is no tragic depth, and little analytic subtlety, in these poems. They are the work of a young man enamoured of his youth, enthusiastically grateful for the gift of life, and entirely at his ease within his own moral code. He had known none of what he himself calls "that kind of affliction which alone can unfold the profundities of the human spirit."

It was in Paris that he produced most of the "Juvenilia." He included only a few of the pieces which he had written at Harvard and in New York. Thus all, or nearly all, the poems ranged under that title, are, as he said—

Paris, however, did not absorb him entirely during these years. He would occasionally set forth on long tramps through the French provinces; for he loved every aspect of that gracious country. He once spent some weeks with a friend in Switzerland; but this experience seems to have left no trace in his work.

Then came the fateful year 1914. His "Juvenilia" having grown to a passable bulk, he brought them in the early summer to London, with a view to finding a publisher xxiii