of juvenility, actual and recollected.
Riley's best "holt" as a poet was his memory of his own boyhood and his
perception that the child-mind lingers in every adult reader. Genius has
often been called the gift of prolonged adolescence, and in this sense,
surely, there was genius in the warm and gentle heart of this fortunate
provincial who held that "old Indianapolis" was "high Heaven's sole and
only understudy." No one has ever had the audacity to say that of New
York.

We have had American drama for one hundred and fifty years, * but much
of it, like our popular fiction and poetry, has been subliterary, more
interesting to the student of social life and national character than
to literary criticism in the narrow sense of that term. Few of our best
known literary men have written for the stage. The public has preferred
melodrama to poetic tragedy, although perhaps the greatest successes
have been scored by plays which are comedies of manners rather than
melodrama, and character studies of various American types, built up
around the known capabilities of a particular actor. The twentieth
century has witnessed a marked activity in play-writing, in the
technical study of the drama, and in experiment with dramatic
production, particularly with motion pictures and the out-of-doors
pageant. At no time since "The Prince of Parthia" was first acted in
Philadelphia in 1767 has such a large percentage of Americans been
artistically and commercially interested in the drama, but as to the
literary results of the new movement it is too soon to speak.

* "Representative American Plays," edited by Arthur Hobson
Quinn, N. Y., 1917.

Nor is it possible to forecast the effect of a still more striking
movement of contemporary taste, the revival of interest in poetry and
the experimentation with new poetical forms. Such revival and experiment
have often, in the past, been the preludes of great epochs of poetical
production. Living Americans have certainly never seen such a widespread
demand for contemporary verse, such technical curiosity as to the
possible forms of poetry, or such variety of bold innovation. Imagism
itself is hardly as novel as its contemporary advocates appear to
maintain; and free verse goes back far in our English speech and
song. But the new generation believes that it has made a discovery in
reverting to sensations rather than thought, to the naive reproduction
of retinal and muscular impressions, as