RECENT POETRY AND EMOTIONALIZING OF EVOLUTION 1 5 



What does it take to make a rose, 



Mother mine ? 

 The God that died to make it knows 



It takes the world's eternal wars, 



It takes the moon and all the stars, 

 It takes the might of heaven and hell 

 And the everlasting love as well. 



Little child. 



Many other phases of evolution are calling to my pen; and even 

 on the topics already introduced I should like to summon the evidence 

 of other writers. However, this meager treatment of three rather 

 representative men may suffice to emphasize the feeling that evolution 

 will present an ever more fertile field for poetry, and that poetry is 

 bringing about the emotionalizing of the doctrine. Each day this 

 scientific truth will become a more integral part of our emotional 

 natures, and so will inevitably be transmuted into verse. I have 

 never been troubled by any serious doubts about the persistence and 

 power of poetry; nor have I today any patience with such a pessimistic 

 query about the Muse as is voiced by Mr. Phillips.^ 



How should she face the ghastly, jarring Truth 

 That questions all, and tramples without Ruth ? 



She will face it as she has ever faced it. The many mournful elegies 

 on the great god Pan and the Muses nine are piped but for the passing 

 hour. That rapturous Grecian world could have seen Httle hope for 

 poetry in the material grandeur that was Rome. The dwellers in 

 the imperial city on the Tiber must have been even more hopeless 

 about the new religion founded by one Christus, whose followers 

 were so obstinate and so inhuman. The cultured leaders of the 

 splendid, triumphant Roman Catholic church must have believed 

 that from the somber, creeping Protestant religion there could never 

 spring an epic at all comparable to Dante's. And so the tale is never 

 told. The honored speaker with whom my paper began was simply 

 repeating the old foreboding in its new environment. But Pan and 

 the Muses abide; and who shall doubt that under the spreading 

 branches of the tree of knowledge they will be more winsome than ever 

 before, the pipe and the song be sweeter on their lips ? 



» "The Dreaming Muse," in New Poems, pp. 94-96, 1907. 



