tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">54

On Easter Day 55 A Christmas Carol 56 The Message of the Chimes 57 A Winter Lullaby 58 Rainy Day Fun 60 Apples in Winter 61 The Birth of Spring 62

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AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

A Pittsburgh musician whose fame as a composer is widely established confessed to me recently that he had been for years trying to catch the spirit of the Steel City with a view of representing it in music, but up to the present time had failed to grasp anything tangible enough for expression. This failure on his part, however, and on the part of all musicians, by no means proves the absence of a very real genius loci. Pittsburgh has a very vivid personality. Mr. John Alexander succeeded in holding the elusive spirit captive long enough to put her image on canvas in his remarkable friezes in the Carnegie Library, portraying the ranks of labor, and now in this volume of verse I offer to the people at large the songs I have found in the various moods of the smoke. “Songs for the Brothers Who Toil” have come in moments spent watching the giant stacks along the river fronts breathe forth their mighty energy; “Songs for the Evening Hour” were born when the breeze from the hills lifted and shifted the smoke, bringing lyric reveries of voices from the silent battlefield, and embers from the burning town; and following the changing tides of years, “Songs for the Seasons” have come.

The background and inspiration of most of these songs is industrial Pittsburgh; industrial Pittsburgh, however, is essentially American in the broadest sense. Some of the lyrics are addressed to the laborer, others to the dreamer and scholar; some to the mother and child, but all of them to that noble army made up of those who are everywhere striving to bring a measure of idealism into what is of necessity sordid and unlovely.

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INTRODUCTION
The Trend of Current Poetry

Among earnest social workers poetry is gaining a recognition that few anticipated. The reformer of the past was an orator who preferred the longer sentences of the pulpit to the concise expression of the poet. Oratory is in the mouth of the speaker; rimes in the heart of the singer. The one must be constantly repeated to be effective; the other, living in its own right, soon gets beyond the control of its maker, and creates a perpetual harvest wherever it is blown. This revival of poetry has been encouraged by The Survey, which recently printed a collection of social hymns. The same tendency is everywhere visible, and means a return to older modes of emotional expression combined with intense modern feelings.

If this movement in poetic expression did not have a double trend, it might be left to work out its own salvation; but the contrast between the two tendencies is too marked not to arrest attention. What is poetry, after all? Merely a survival, a relic of older modes of thought, something seeking expression only when deep-seated passions are occasionally revived; or is it a living, present force, an effective weapon of social reform? Few people can resist the impulse to write verse. Does this tendency and the interest it reflects indicate the presence of a concealed giant who could pull loads, or is it a mere survival of an old habit, like looking at a new moon over the shoulder to see what the luck is to be?

A question will help to make the issue clear. Is the function of poetry to create the emotion by which the day's work is done, as well as to serve as a relaxation for tired reformers when work is ended? Should we read poetry upon rising to get heart, or only at eventide to relax the tired mind? Is poetry to be put in the class with golf and solitaire, or with dynamos and rapid-firing guns? Ornamental art belongs in one class, functional art in the other. Poets who continue to describe Amazons and mermaids and bring us “news from nowhere” should write at night to relieve the monotony of the day, and what they write will have effect only by the relaxation it makes possible. But truly functional poetry shoots farther than any gun and cuts deeper than the sharpest knife. It goes ahead of the reformer and wakes the world to an appreciation of what he is doing. It works while he sleeps and enters a thousand minds into which his dry details and monotonous lament could find no entrance. And in this sense is not effectiveness of thought a beauty as well as its form? As we decide this question we take sides not only in poetry but in every field where thought and life are striving for expression.

The dominance of the older view is plain. Millions of dollars are given to preserve old relics and meaningless pictures, but scarcely a cent for the artist whose soul throbs with American life. When new buildings are erected the old conventions are used; no attempt is made to picture the new. The decorations of the public library of Boston, for example, are a mass of symbols to be deciphered only by the initiated. The one object that can be recognized without the aid of a guidebook is a telegraph pole. In the Congressional Library at Washington the principal figures of the mural decorations are short-skirted damsels, who flit along the wall, such as War, Peace, and other creatures of artistic fancy.

When will this epoch end, and art become related to the day's work, furnishing a motive for further output of energy? Not for a long time, possibly, in decoration; but there is no reason why its passing should be delayed in song-making. Here the motive for new expression is strong, and the avenues for reaching a public so many, that no force can prevent good poetry from reaching its audience. All virile thought, whether poetic or not, is at first functional with a meaning and an end. Only when this thought is expressed and other advances are being made, does its treatment become a mere avocation for those left behind in the march of events.

Conventional art is too often merely a medley of distorted, unusable concepts, whose only harmony is that they make a good color scheme. Poetry formed in the same manner becomes a collection of mere platitudes, whose main virtue is that they roll in the mouth.