laim that he glories in
war as his natural element. [Footnote: For poetry dealing with the poet
as a warrior see Thomas Moore, _The Minstrel Boy, O Blame Not the Bard,
The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls, Shall the Harp then be Silent,
Dear Harp of My Country_; Praed, _The Eve of Battle_; Whitman, _Song of
the Banner at Daybreak_; E. C. Stedman, _Jean Prouvaire's Song at the
Barricade, Byron_; G. L. Raymond, _Dante, A Song of Life_; S. K. Wiley,
_Dante and Beatrice_; Oscar Wilde, _Ravenna_; Richard Realf, _Vates,
Written on the Night of His Suicide_; Cale Young Rice, _David,
Aeschylus_; Swinburne, _The Sisters_; G. E. Woodberry, _Requiem_; Rupert
Brooke, _1914_; Joyce Kilmer, _In Memory of Rupert Brooke, The Proud
Poet_; Alan Seeger, _I Have a Rendez-vous with Death, Sonnet to Sidney,
Liebestod_; John Bunker, _On Bidding Farewell to a Poet Gone to the
Wars_; Jessie Rittenhouse, _To Poets Who Shall Fall in Battle_; Rossiter
Johnson, _A Soldier Poet_; Herbert Kaufman, _Hell Gate of Soissons_;
Herbert Asquith, _The Volunteer_; Julian Grenfil, _Into Battle_; Grace
Hazard Conkling, _Francis Ledwidge_; Richard Mansfield, 2d, _Song of the
Artists_; Norreys Jephson O'Connor, _In Memoriam: Francis Ledwidge_;
Donald F. Goold Johnson, _Rupert Brooke_.] A recent writer has said,
"The poet must ever go where the greatest songs are singing," [Footnote:
See Christopher Morley, Essay on Joyce Kilmer.] and nowhere is the
poetry of life so manifest as where life is in constant hazard. The
verse of Rupert Brooke and Alan Seeger surely makes it plain that
warfare was the spark which touched off their genius, even as it might
have done Byron's,

When the true lightning of his soul was bared,
Long smouldering till the Mesolonghi torch.
[Footnote: Stephen Phillips, _Emily Bronte_.]

But no matter how heroic the poet may prove himself to be, in his
character of soldier, or how efficient as a man of affairs, this does
not settle his quarrel with the utilitarians, for they are not to be
pacified by a recital of the poet's avocations. They would remind him
that the world claims the whole of his time. If, after a day of
strenuous activity, he hurries home with the pleasant conviction that he
has earned a long evening in which to woo the Muse, the world is too
likely to peer through the shutters and exclaim, "What? Not in bed yet?
Then come out and do some extra chores." If the poet is to prove his
title as an efficient citizen, it is cle