Page:Poetry, a magazine of verse, Volume 7 (October 1915-March 1916).djvu/69

A Partisan Verdict herein deplored. But a more flagrant example of a tendency to substitute irritability for criticism can not be allowed to pass without a word of protest.

I have not read the whole of Mr. Joyce Kilmer's attack upon the so-called "Tagore craze," as it appeared in America, but as I read the excerpts from his article quoted in The Literary Digest, I cannot help feeling that it is not really as a poet that Mr. Kilmer has approached the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore.

Mr. Tagore is a Hindu, and not a Catholic—I should hesitate to call him less a Christian than many that I know; but if Mr. Tagare had been barn a Catholic (whether in Brooklyn or Calcutta) would Mr. Kilmer have felt that it was unfitting to link his name with that of St. Francis or Thomas à Kempis?

Of Gerard Hopkins, a Catholic poet, Mr. Kilmer has written, "His theme being God and his writing being an act of adoration, it is profitless to criticise him, as Mr. Bridges has done, for 'sacrificing simplicity' and 'violating the canons of taste'." Yet Mr. Kilmer objects to the "exotic" symbols—temple-bells, water-jars and the desert—the ordinary symbols of Mr. Tagore's daily life, which the poet uses to express "that desire for the mystical union with God" which is the theme of both Gerard Hopkins and Rabindranath Tagore. One might, of course, object to the Bible on the score of exoticism.

Certainly Mr. Kilmer has failed signally to appreciate the essential spirit of this man, who would, he says, "sub-