. What I am sure of is that in 'Weeds by the
Wall' he has more deeply charmed me with an art perfected from that I
felt in 'Blooms of the Berry' ten or fifteen years since. Many little
books of his have come (I hope not also gone) between the first and
last, and none of them has failed to make me glad of his work; and now,
again, I am finding the same impassioned moods in the same impassive
presences. To my knowledge, no such nature poems have been written
within the time since Mr. Cawein began to write as his are, or from such
an intimacy with the 'various language' which nature speaks. There are
other good poems in the book, poems which would have made reputes in the
eighteenth century, and which it would be a shame not to own good in the
twentieth; but those which speak for 'The Cricket,' 'A Twilight Moth,'
'The Grasshopper,' 'The Tree-Toad,' 'The Screech Owl,' 'The Chipmunk,'
'Drouth,' 'Before the Rain,' and the like, are in a voice which
interprets the very soul of what we call the inarticulate things, though
they seem to have enunciated themselves so distinctly to this poet. It
is cheap to note his increasing control of his affluent imagery and the
growing mastery that makes him so fine an artist. These things were to
be expected from his early poems, but what makes one think he will go
far and long, and outlive both praise and blame, is the blending of a
sense of the Kentucky civilization in such a poem as 'Feud.'...
Civilization may not be quite the word for the condition of things
suggested here, but there can be no doubt of the dramatic and the
graphic power that suggests it, and that imparts a personal sense of the
tragic squalor, the sultry drouth, the forlorn wickedness of it all. By
such a way as this lies Mr. Cawein's hope of rise from nature up to man,
if it is up; and also, as I perceive too late, lies confusion for the
critic who said that the poet does not transcend the limits he once
seemed to give himself."

* * * * *

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: Page 76 "wickednsse" changed to "wickedness" (the
forlorn wickedness of it all.)

End of Project Gutenberg's A Voice on the Wind, by Madison Julius Cawein

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