Page:Poetry, a magazine of verse, Volume 7 (October 1915-March 1916).djvu/253



OW did the Elizabethans feel when the young Shakespeare tried his first experiments on them, when he passed from the graceful romancing of the Two Gentlemen of Verona to the living symbolism of A Midsummer Night's Dream? Did Moliere's provincial audiences confess a thrill beyond the common when the obscure player, mad with genius, strutted through his early parts? And that London publisher who first read the manuscript of Wuthering Heights—did a wind from the moors put out his guttering candle and hale him through the dark? Did these people know what was happening? Was their little personal emotion, their pleasure of the moment, seized and swept on into timeless spaces of wonder and joy?

A little of this larger thrill shook me twice last month. The first time was at the Chicago Little Theatre, where I watched Mr. Maurice Browne and his company play the one-act tragedy, Grotesques by Mr. Cloyd Head. Was it possible that we were really doing something? Could it be that a young poet, here in boiling and bubbling Chicago, was seeing visions and setting them forth in a new strange form too beautiful to die? Was I listening to a bold interpreter of the mystery and poetry of life, one who felt and could suggest its magic and despair?

Mr. Head's thesis is by no means new—what thesis or theory is new in these latter days?—but he weaves it into a