ncomplete success as a poet, and in the end the hero becomes an
irreproachable churchman. At present Vachel Lindsay keeps up the
tradition of the poet-revivalist.

Even in England, the orthodox poet has not been nonexistent. Christina
Rossetti portrays such an one in her autobiographical poetry. Jean
Ingelow, in _Letters of Life and Morning_, offers most conventional
religious advice to the young poet. And in Coventry Patmore's _The
Angel in the House_, one finds as orthodox a poet as any that the
eighteenth century could afford.

The Catholic church too has some grounds for its title, "nursing mother
of poets." The rise of the group of Catholic poets, Francis Thompson,
Alice Meynell, and Lionel Johnson, in particular, has tended to give a
more religious cast to the recent poet. If Joyce Kilmer had lived,
perhaps verse on the Catholic poet would have been even more in
evidence. But it is likely that Joyce Kilmer would only have succeeded
in inadvertently bringing the religious singer once more into disrepute.
There is perhaps nothing nocuous in his creed, as he expressed it in a
formal interview: "I hope ... poetry ... is reflecting faith ... in God
and His Son and the Holy Ghost." [Footnote: Letter to Howard Cook, June
28, 1918, _Joyce Kilmer: Poems, Essays and Letters_, ed. Robert
Cortes Holliday.] But Kilmer went much farther and advocated the
suppression of all writings, by Catholics, which did not specifically
advertise their author's Catholicism. [Footnote: See his letter to Aline
Kilmer, April 21, 1918, _Joyce Kilmer, Poems, Essays and Letters_,
ed. Robert Cortes Holliday.] And such a doctrine immediately delivers
the poet's freedom of inspiration into the hands of censors.

Perhaps a history of art would not square with the repugnance one feels
toward such censorship. Conformance to the religious beliefs of his time
certainly does not seem to have handicapped Homer or Dante, to say
nothing of the preeminent men in other fields of art, Phidias, Michael
Angelo, Raphael, etc. Yet in the modern consciousness, the theory of art
for art's sake has become so far established that we feel that any
compromise of the purely aesthetic standard is a loss to the artist. The
deity of the artist and the churchman may be in some measure the same,
since absolute beauty and absolute goodness are regarded both by poets
and theologians as identical, but there is reason to believe that the
poet may not go so far astray if he cleave