Baltimore Evening Sun (15 November 1911): 6.

Don’t bother about “Benny” Mahon and his merry men. They work in the open. They wear no disguises. But watch your Prominent Baltimoreans!

Only 1,280 days more!–but away with all such mathematical polemics and prognostications! Give the Hon. the super-Mahon one clear day of ecstatic self-veneration! Let no harsh cackle pollute the sweet harmony which leaps from the gullets of his sycophants and apologists, his wooers and asseocaputs! Today is Poets’ Day–and chiefly, it must be added, bad Poets’ Day, as this strophe from the lays of the Hon. John C. Wright, of Harbor Springs, Mich., will suggest to the discreet:

Sailing along to a sailing song, Oh, that is the life for me! On sea-legs prancing, With white caps dancing, Sailing along with a heart that’s free– Sailing, sailing over the sea, Sailing and singing’s the life for me.

Alas, that autograph albums are no longer seen on parlor centre tables. Mr. Wright, had he been composing 25 years ago, would have made copious contributions to them. He is a safe and sane poet–a poet comprebensible, as the old-time catechisms used to say, to tho meanest understanding. There is in him no wild yearning for what Walter Pater called the gypsy phrase: he is no more a mystic than your milkman. Even when he attempts a drama in blank verse, dealing with the romantic life of James Jesse Strang, the Mormon leader, he keeps to such conservative stuff as this:

I’m so afraid it would be a bad move. You have certainly pictured it fine, but Smooth words are the consorts of deception.

And this (an extract from the false Charlie Douglass’ wooing of beauteous Esther):

Promise me to go to Beaver Island, For I cannot live without you any more. Since meeting you, your face is ever on My mind * * * Oh, promise that You’ll be my wife * * * Then flowers will bloom and birds will sing And there’ll be no more winter, only spring.

Mr. Wright’s book is called “Lays of the Lakes” and is published by the esteemed Mr. Richard G. Badger, of 194 Boyston street, Boston, Mass., the friend to all scorned and scorpioned bards, who will send it postpaid for a dollar, and be grateful for the chance to oblige.

The “Life Throbs” of Mr. Paul Eldridge (also disoovered and embalmed in print by the good Badger) break open at this:

A longing so exquisite Does grasp me now and then, A wild and sweet desire To be a child again.

Let us leave Mr. Eldridge to his exquisite longing, his wild and sweet desire, and pass on to the pious stanzas of Miss May Louise Tibbits. Miss Tibbits’ philosophy seems to teach that life is a curse—but that, if we are patient, we can yet stand it. At all events, death is ahead, and to die is to be happy. Thus:

I count it gain, not loss; A crown, no cross; A leaving of the shuttle and the loom To pass into life’s upper room.

Meanwhile, the thing to do while suffering the foul outrage of life is to practice an ascetic (and almost suicidal) unselfishness:

When we can borrow From some sadder heart A larger part Of grief, ’Tis then we find relief.

It must be—but the cure seems worse than the disease. As for the rest of Miss Tibbits’ verse, it is flavored with platitudes of the Lesson Helps variety. I quote a few (suppressing the line division, for the poet’s lines are all irregular):

It is not happiness to travel on life’s road and feel the pressure of no load. Love knows not self or selfish ends. To see the way along life’s road would bode not good, but ill.

To such platitudes, in prose as well as in poetry, two sound objections may be made, the first being that their truth is universally admitted and therefore needs no further statement or demonstrstion, and the second being that they are not true. For Miss Tibbits let it be said that she offers them, as a rule, in somewhat attractive new dresses–that her phrase-making has a good deal more merit than her philosophy. Her book is called “The Pilgrim’s Staff” and emanates from the poetical foundries of Sherman, French & Co.

Elias D. Smith (Capt., Maj., Col., or Gen.?) is an old soldier, whe fit all through the War with the 14th New Jersey, and so his volume, “On Hurley Hills” (Sherman-French), is full of bugle music. As G. A. R. bards go, General Smith is not at all bad. His verses scan, he gets away from the more ancient banalities, and now and then, if he does not actually enter in, he at least looks over the backyard fence of poetry. The defect of the General is his partiality for puns. All of those he here offers are very bad ones, and so I refrain from reporting them. A modest, hearty bard, and obviously a likeable old gentleman. May he live to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the fight at Opequan!

Which brings us to the “Ophiel” of Mr. Talli J. Bouknight (Neale Publishing Company), a gentleman of uncertain nationality. “Ophiel” is an Indian legend of a thousand-odd duodecasyllabic lines, generally alexandrines, in which a considerable fluency of writing is unaccompanied by any noticeable poetic ideation. Finally comes James Henry MacLafferty, the best poet of the present boiling. The word “best,” of course, is here used comparatively. Mr. MacLafferty’s is no clarion voice. He will never scale the topmost peak of Parnassus, and there, with his head bulging the deck of Paradise, wake the world with an Homeric blast. No! But all the same, he slips in, between many pages of pious piffle, such things (a few! a few only!) As this little address to a daisy:

Darling of the poet’s breast; Jewel set in nature’s crest; Saucy in the summer shower, Half a gem and half a flower–

Here I find thee quite alone, Hast thou ______ to stone? Bowing meekly to the sun, What small evil has thou done?

Not great poety, to be sure–but still better poetry than any other of today’s bards has to offer. “The Army of Days” is the title of Mr. MacLafferty’s book, and Sherman, French & Co. print it.

New novels that you may read without loss of self-respect:

“Under Western Eyes,” by Joseph Conrad. “Hilda Lessways,” by Arnold Bennett. “Jennie Gerhardt,” by Theodore Dreiser. “Ethan Frome,” by Edith Wharton.

Boil your drinking water! Send your money to the boomers! Watch the First Branch at the Narrenhaus!

Two-thirds of the new Legislators, say the experts, are thoroughly “practical” men. A rich, a racy, a joyous, a juicy session looms ahead!