POETRY: A Magazine of Verse
must begin at home if it is not to be a wanderer on the face of the earth, seeking forlornly an alien audience.
So it was a satisfaction to discover, everywhere along "The Coast," a devotion to Mr. George Sterling which was not alone enthusiasm for his poetry, but also pride in him as a personality and a possession. As California loves Keith and certain later painters because they were—and are—faithful interpreters of her beauty, so she rewards this poet for his love of her.
One can forgive her if she seems to overrate him. I own to my surprise on hearing one enthusiast call him "the greatest poet since Dante," and on finding him the only living poet whose words were inscribed—along with Confucius and Firdausi, with Shakespeare and Goethe, on the triumphal arches of the Panama-Pacific Exposition. I rubbed my eyes —had I been blind and deaf? In 1909 and 1911 I had read A Wine of Wizardry and The House of Orchids without discovering a poet of the first order. Manifestly, I must re-read these books, and add the poet's first volume, The Testimony of the Suns, and his latest, Beyond the Breakers. All of which I have done.
Now, if I can not quite rise to the Californian estimate, at least I find in Mr. Sterling a gift, a poetic impulse, which might have carried him much further than it has as yet. His first long poem, The Testimony of the Suns, does indeed make one feel the sidereal march, make one shiver before the immensity and shining glory of the universe—this in spite of shameless rhetoric which often threatens to engulf the
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