The Eleventh Virgin Dorothy Day (digital ebook reader .TXT) 📖

the paper, shouting for liberty and free speech, and they also would get kicked out. An uproar in a university of five thousand students wouldn’t go unnoticed and just because Regina’s father was President of the Board of Trade and Jim’s father owns railroads, the big papers would make a stir. And in all the fuss, people would hear about birth control⁠—it would be advertised, so to speak, and mothers would cry for it. And demand is always followed by supply⁠—so there you are.”

“I love the way we sit around and talk about what we could do,” Regina sniffed. “Get a couple of people like Mrs. Stokes on the staff and something would be done.”

“Bah! placed in the same situation we are, she’d do just what we do⁠—nothing! Besides,” Jim suddenly remembered, “I thought we decided last week we were Nietzscheans.”

“That’s one way of getting away from responsibilities,” Regina protested, still under the influence of Mrs. Stokes.

“I’ll stick to Nietzsche,” June decided consistently. “Why give up several years of good fun and education and incur the wrath of the worthy Mr. Henreddy by fighting for a mob of stupid, dirty people. They haven’t gumption enough to lift up their voices and complain. I’ll fight for myself and for what I want and that will keep me busy, I guess. I’m not in danger of having babies yet a while, so why worry? And I want another sandwich!”

There were three poets who visited the university that year, and caused much discussion⁠—John Masefield, Edgar Lee Masters and Vachel Lindsay.

Before the first arrived June cut all her classes, spent the day in the library, gloating over The Everlasting Mercy, The Widow in the Bye Street, The Daffodil Fields and Dauber. Regina, Ray and Jim followed her example and there were energetic discussions of Masefield, Masters and Lindsay.

“It’s a good thing we read Masefield’s stuff before he got here,” Regina said over the inevitable cup of tea. “In that huge auditorium he was the hardest man to hear! But I think he’s a wonder.”

“I think he was bashful, he sounded so muffled; but I’d much rather have a poet act that way. Lindsay was too flamboyant. As a matter of fact,” June continued, “Masefield acted as though he were shy and unwilling. He probably needed the money. Books of poetry are never best sellers.”

“I was all prepared not to like him,” Ray confessed. “I have a prejudice against English writers coming over to America to be hailed as geniuses. We pay too little attention to our own product to know whether it’s any good or not. We take English writers for granted. But Masefield’s all right and I think his poetry’s great stuff.”

It was an opinion that was echoed by the several thousand students who went to hear him. And when it was rumored that Masefield had actually been a sailor, and had acted as assistant bartender in a New York saloon, there was a run on the library for his books. He was a man who had “lived,” it was decided.

Whether free verse was really poetry was a much debated question for a time. Vachel Lindsay had declaimed verse of the open road, immaculately dressed in an evening suit.

“The incongruity of his dress and the roughness of his poetry sets me against him,” Regina insisted. “Let him wander around the Middle West dressed in corduroys and recite in the wheat fields if he wants to. The farmers and field hands probably looked on him as a lunatic, that is, unless he composed and chanted as he worked, pitching hay, for instance. He’d be like sailors with their chanteys in that case and in establishing a precedent all sorts of songs of the fields would crop up.”

“I understand that’s what he did do,” June put in. “He worked in the fields, living the life of the people, and writing a poetry of the people. His songs are like the negro melodies in the south⁠—they have real beauty⁠—or like the cowboy songs which have never been well done.

“What I object to about the man is his misplaced enthusiasm in appearing before two or three thousand students who have little appreciation of art or beauty. If he’d blackened his face to recite ‘General Booth Enters Heaven’ they might have enjoyed his recitation as they would a minstrel show. As it was, his way of reciting was unprecedented and therefore ridiculous and they didn’t catch at all the lilting music of it. I didn’t myself until I read it the next day and got away from the spirit of the crowd in judging it.”

Then came Edgar Lee Masters, not in person, but in the shape of a small green volume from which Mr. Lord read short “vitriolic” epitaphs. The adjective was Mr. Lord’s.

Immediately rhetoric instructors were deluged with themes in free verse, and a free verse column appeared in the Mirror.

“It’s a marvelous piece of work,” Jim decreed. “Anybody who has lived in a small Middle Western town would know that. It’s real poetry because it has a languorous, sad rhythm in it, a desolate undercurrent note that you feel in an ugly little town on a summer afternoon.”

“You’re inspired,” June laughed. “I distrust it as poetry because everyone is so enthusiastic and is trying so hard to imitate it. They think it’s easy. I’m something of a snob, I suppose, but I think true poetry is like true music, not to be appreciated by the multitude. Look at Germany. It produces Wagner, and people only accept him under protest and are bored to death if they have to sit through a Wagnerian opera. Most German music is sickly sentimental stuff⁠—waltzes played by fat beery men on huge horns. That’s what makes the multitude thrill.

“And look at us. We produce an Edgar Allan Poe⁠—a great poet⁠—and he dies of starvation. The crowd has never raved about him. But look at the furor about Masters. It’s a vulgar enthusiasm in which I refuse to join.”

Then, just as the