POETS AND POETRY.
DOMESDAY BOOK.•
MR. EDGAR LEE MASTERS, the author of the Spoon River Anthology, has written a portentous poem. There are 396 pages to the book and an average of twenty-soven lines on each page. The idea of the poem is not uningenious. A young woman who has been a nurse in France is found dead by the side of a lake. The coroner is a man of nice philosophic curiosity, and, as far as he can, traces out all the ramifications of the girl's life. The author takes us,still further and shows us whore every ripple, or, as he prefers it, " riffle," touches the circle of some other life. The plot is a little like that of The Ring and the Book, and this was perhaps the model which gave Mr. Lee Masters the idea of writing in verse ; it proved a most unfortunate notion. Related in curt prose, the book could not have failed to be exceedingly interesting, but, alas ! he has rendered it in blank verse of sprawling mediocrity.
Mr. Lee Masters never lets us forget that he believes in eugenics, and is of the " nature " versus " nurture " schooL Dryden once made the infallibility of the Roman Church and the pros and cons of free will and predestination interesting in verse, but the principles of eugenics have proved a task beyond Mr. Lee Masters, and the book is all but impossible to read. We wish that he would give it us back again in prose, for it is full of interesting stuff.
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