ware of the task involved in creating such packed brevities. Emily
Dickinson knew this power. "H. D." is another woman who understands
the beauty of compactness. Superb sense of economy, of terseness the
art calls for, excessive pruning and clipping. Singular that these
three artists, so gifted in brevity were women. There is little, after
all, in existence that warrants lengthy dissertation. Life itself is
epigrammatic and brief enough. No volumes needed by way of
explanation. The fascinating enigma diverts and perplexes everyone
alike. The simple understand it best, or at least they seem to do so.
Segregation, aloofness, spiritual imprisonment, which is another name
for introspection, the looking out from bars of the caged house, all
this discovers something through penetration. Walking with life is
most natural, grazing its warm shoulder. There is little room for
inquiry if one have the real feeling of life itself. Poetry is that
which gleans most by keeping nearest to life. Books and firesides
avail but little. Secretaries for the baggage of erudition do not
enhance poetic values, they encumber them. Poetry is not declamation,
it is not propaganda, it is breathing natural breaths. There is
nothing mechanical about poetry excepting the affectation of forms.
Poetry is the world's, it is everybody's. You count poetry by its
essence, and no amount of studied effect, or bulging erudition will
create that which is necessary, that which makes poetry what it is.
The one essential is power to sing, and the intelligence to get it
down with degrees of mastery or naturalness, which is one and the same
thing.

Real singing is unusual as real singers are rare. Adelaide Crapsey
shows that she was a real singer, essentially poet, excellent among
those of our time. She impresses her uncommon qualities upon you, in
the cinquains of hers, with genuinely incisive force. She has so much
of definiteness, so much of technical beauty, economy, all very
valuable assets for a true poet. She had never been touched with the
mania for journalistic profusion. She cared too much for language to
ride it. She cared too much for words to want to whip them into
slavery. She was outside of them, looking on, as it might be, through
crystal, at their freshness. She did not take them for granted. They
were new to her and she wanted the proper familiarity. She worked upon
a spiritual geometric all her own. She did not run to the dictionary
for eccentrici