Word: poems
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Dates: during 1880-1889
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...average undergraduate poem seems to me to possess any of the characteristics of so-called true poetry. The undergraduate poet rhapsodizes over a ditch bordered by hummocks of meadow-grass and clumps of scrubby, unsightly bushes; he goes into ecstasies over a frog-pond in a cow pasture; he personifies familiar objects; invests them with a glamour of brilliant colors, and imagines various noble fancies about them, or draws high lessons from their imagined actions or feelings, - what more does the true poet? In short, in criticising poetry it is hard to say just where sentiment leaves off, and sentimentalism...
Does eternity usually crystallize in pyramidal forms? The first stanza of another poem ends with the lines...
...this poet forsaken that classic drudge, adamant? and why the abrupt transformation of a resisting person to one throwing darts? In the last line of all there is an abrupt descent from the sublime to the ridiculous, but then "gate" is an excellent rhyme for "mate." A little poem entitled "Crepusculum" attempts to describe the twilight season. In the second stanza the poet speaks...
...fresh start and sums up the long subject, - still no predicate; here he evidently gives up the idea of getting in that predicate at all, for, putting a semicolon at the end of the fourth stanza, he takes another new start in the fifth, and the rest of the poem is rather pretty and quite well expressed. A piece addressed "To Fancy," published about a year ago, presents some curiosities in the way of figures. The third stanza is as follows...
...give Mr. Wh-tm-n's poem entire...