Myth and Romance Part 16

In that book, o'er which Chaldean Wisdom pored and many an eon Of philosophy long dead, This is all that man has read.

OTHER BOOKS OF VERSE BY MADISON CAWEIN

Days and Dreams Cloth, gilt top, $1.00 Moods and Memories " " 1.00 Red Leaves and Roses " " 1.00 Poems of Nature and Love " " 1.00 Intimations of the Beautiful " " 1.00

PUBLISHED BY

G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS,

27 & 29, West Twenty-third Street, New York, N. Y

_Sent by mail, postpaid, to any address on receipt of price._

SOME NOTICES OF MR. CAWEIN'S VERSES

"I should like to praise the poetry of Madison Cawein, of Kentucky, which is as remote as Greece from the actual everyday life of his region; as remote from it as the poetry of Keats was from the England of his day, and which is yet so richly, so pa.s.sionately true to the presence and essence of nature as she can be known only in the Southern West. I named Keats with no purpose of likening this young poet to him, but since he is named it is impossible not to recognize that they are of the same h.e.l.lenic race; full of like rapture in sky and field and stream, and of a like sensitive reluctance from whatever chills the joy of sense in youth, in love, in melancholy. I know Mr.

Cawein has faults, and very probably he knows it, too; his delight in color sometimes plunges him into mere paint; his wish to follow a subtle thought or emotion sometimes lures him into empty dusks; his devotion to nature sometimes contents him with solitudes bereft of the human interest by which alone the landscape lives. But he is, to my thinking, a most genuine poet, and one of these few Americans, who, even in their over-refinement, could never be mistaken for Europeans; who perhaps by reason of it are only the more American."--WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS in _Literature_.

"From the poetry of our day I select that of Madison Cawein as an example of conspicuous merit. Many American readers have enjoyed Mr.

Cawein's productions.... But the appreciation of his poetry has never been as great as its merits would indicate. His poems are rather _too good_ to be caught up on the babbling tongue and cast forth into mere popularity. They are caviare to the general; and yet they have in them the best elements of popular favor.

"Cawein is a cla.s.sicist. He will have it that poems, however humble the theme, however tender the sentiment, shall wear a tasteful Attic dress. I do not intimate that Mr. Cawein's mind has been too much saturated with the cla.s.sical spirit or that his native instincts have been supplanted with Greek exotics and flowers out of the renaissance, but rather that his own mental const.i.tution is of a cla.s.sical as well as a romantic mould.

"The themes of Cawein's poetry are generally taken from the world of romance. If there be any modern bard who can recreate a mediaeval castle and give to its inhabitants the sentiments which were theirs in the twelfth century, Cawein is the poet who can. He takes delight in the East. He is the Omar Khayyam of the Ohio Valley. He is as much of a Mohammedan as a Christian. He knows the son of Abdallah better than he knows Cromwell; and has more sympathy with a Khalif than with a Colonel. He dwells in the romantic regions of life; but the romance is real. The hope is a true hope. The dream is a true dream. The picture is a painting, and not a chromo. The love is a pa.s.sion, and not a dilettante episode. Cawein's art is a genuine art. His verse is exquisite. Out of the three hundred and thirteen poems in the five volumes under consideration there may be found hardly a false or broken harmony...."--JOHN CLARK RIDPATH, LL.D., in _The Arena_.

"The rattlesnake-weed and the bluet-bloom were unknown to Herrick and to Wordsworth, but such art as Mr. Cawein's makes them at home in English poetry. There is pa.s.sion, too, and thought in his equipment...."--WILLIAM ARCHER in the _Pall Mall Magazine_.

"I find in the best pieces an intoxicating sense of beauty, a richness, that is rarely achieved, although every young poet nowadays strives after it. I find, too, a daring use of language which sometimes, nay often, conducts to genuine and startling felicities."--EDMUND GOSSE.