WILLARD WATTLES (1888– ) The Builder 355 Creeds 356
T. S. ELIOT (1888– ) Morning at the Window 357 From “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 357 Prelude 358
CONRAD AIKEN (1889– ) Chance Meetings 360 The Fulfilled Dream 360 Miracles 363 Morning Song from “Senlin” 364
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY (1890– ) Quickening 367
LESLIE NELSON JENNINGS (1891– ) Frustrate 368
MAXWELL BODENHEIM (1892– ) Poet to His Love 369 Old Age 370 Death 370
EDWIN CURRAN (1892– ) Autumn 372 The Painted Hills of Arizona 372
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (1892– ) God’s World 374 Renascence 375 Pity Me Not 382 I Shall Go Back 382 The Pear Tree 383 Wild Swans 383
MARY CAROLYN DAVIES The Day Before April 384 The Apple Tree Said 385
WINIFRED WELLES (1893– ) From a Chinese Vase 386 Humiliation 386 Love Song from New England 387
HERBERT S. GORMAN (1893– ) The Fanatic 388
BABETTE DEUTSCH (1895– ) The Death of a Child 389 In a Museum 390
ALTER BRODY (1895– ) A City Park 391 Searchlights 391 Ghetto Twilight 392
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT (1898– ) Portrait of a Boy 393
HILDA CONKLING (1910– ) Water 395 Hay-Cock 396 The Old Bridge 396 I Keep Wondering 397
The end of the Civil War marked the end of a literary epoch. The New England group, containing (if Poe could be added) all the great names of the ante-bellum period, began to disintegrate. The poets had outsung themselves; it was a time of surrender and swansongs. Unable to respond to the new forces of political nationalism and industrial reconstruction, the Brahmins (that famous group of intellectuals who dominated literary America) withdrew into their libraries. Poets like Longfellow, Bryant, Taylor, turned their eyes away from the native scene, rhapsodized endlessly about Europe, echoed the “parlor poetry” of England, or left creative writing altogether and occupied themselves with translations. “They had been borne into an era in which they had no part,” writes Fred Lewis Pattee (_A History of American Literature Since 1870_), “and they contented themselves with reëchoings of the old music.” ... Within a single period of six years, from 1867 to 1872, there appeared Longfellow’s _Divina Commedia_, C. E. Norton’s _Vita Nuova_, T. W. Parson’s _Inferno_, William Cullen Bryant’s _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, and Bayard Taylor’s _Faust_.