Page:Poetry, a magazine of verse, Volume 7 (October 1915-March 1916).djvu/131

In Memoriam Seeger's article in the New Republic of May 22nd, from which the above sentence is quoted, seemed to me at the time the best brief presentation of a modern idealist's plea for war which I had ever read. Profoundly mistaken as I think it—"mediaeval gulf" a Chicago lawyer called it with precise exactness—yet this time-honored belief in "the sublimity of war" is sanctified by so many young lives, as many heroic deaths, that the world, struck to the heart, hesitates too long to give it up, and recognize war as a brutal and insane debauchery.

The death of this young poet in his neighbor's quarrel is one more heroic sacrifice to Moloch, one more note of beauty in the glamour.

Little serial leaflets are an adventure of poets in war-ridden England today. We advise our readers to subscribe for all of them; they cost but a few pennies apiece, or two or three shillings for a series, now, and some day a few at least may be precious "first editions." And the art in England needs fostering if it is not to be crushed under the heels of war.

We have, for example, the Poets' Translation Series, reprints from The Egoist of translations of the less familiar Greek and Latin poetry and prose—"literature which has too long been the property of pedagogues—its human qualities