Among earnest social workers poetry is gaining a recognition that few anticipated. The reformer of the past was an orator who preferred the longer sentences of the pulpit to the concise expression of the poet. Oratory is in the mouth of the speaker; rimes in the heart of the singer. The one must be constantly repeated to be effective; the other, living in its own right, soon gets beyond the control of its maker, and creates a perpetual harvest wherever it is blown. This revival of poetry has been encouraged by The Survey, which recently printed a collection of social hymns. The same tendency is everywhere visible, and means a return to older modes of emotional expression combined with intense modern feelings.

If this movement in poetic expression did not have a double trend, it might be left to work out its own salvation; but the contrast between the two tendencies is too marked not to arrest attention. What is poetry, after all? Merely a survival, a relic of older modes of thought, something seeking expression only when deep-seated passions are occasionally revived; or is it a living, present force, an effective weapon of social reform? Few people can resist the impulse to write verse. Does this tendency and the interest it reflects indicate the presence of a concealed giant who could pull loads, or is it a mere survival of an old habit, like looking at a new moon over the shoulder to see what the luck is to be?

A question will help to make the issue clear. Is the function of poetry to create the emotion by which the day's work is done, as well as to serve as a relaxation for tired reformers when work is ended? Should we read poetry upon rising to get heart, or only at eventide to relax the tired mind? Is poetry to be put in the class with golf and solitaire, or with dynamos and rapid-firing guns? Ornamental art belongs in one class, functional art in the other. Poets who continue to describe Amazons and mermaids and bring us “news from nowhere” should write at night to relieve the monotony of the day, and what they write will have effect only by the relaxation it makes possible. But truly functional poetry shoots farther than any gun and cuts deeper than the sharpest knife. It goes ahead of the reformer and wakes the world to an appreciation of what he is doing. It works while he sleeps and enters a thousand minds into which his dry details and monotonous lament could find no entrance. And in this sense is not effectiveness of thought a beauty as well as its form? As we decide this question we take sides not only in poetry but in every field where thought and life are striving for expression.

The dominance of the older view is plain. Millions of dollars are given to preserve old relics and meaningless pictures, but scarcely a cent for the artist whose soul throbs with American life. When new buildings are erected the old conventions are used; no attempt is made to picture the new. The decorations of the public library of Boston, for example, are a mass of symbols to be deciphered only by the initiated. The one object that can be recognized without the aid of a guidebook is a telegraph pole. In the Congressional Library at Washington the principal figures of the mural decorations are short-skirted damsels, who flit along the wall, such as War, Peace, and other creatures of artistic fancy.

When will this epoch end, and art become related to the day's work, furnishing a motive for further output of energy? Not for a long time, possibly, in decoration; but there is no reason why its passing should be delayed in song-making. Here the motive for new expression is strong, and the avenues for reaching a public so many, that no force can prevent good poetry from reaching its audience. All virile thought, whether poetic or not, is at first functional with a meaning and an end. Only when this thought is expressed and other advances are being made, does its treatment become a mere avocation for those left behind in the march of events.

Conventional art is too often merely a medley of distorted, unusable concepts, whose only harmony is that they make a good color scheme. Poetry formed in the same manner becomes a collection of mere platitudes, whose main virtue is that they roll in the mouth. In the drama the same spirit shows all sorts of paths toward degeneration, but few by which men can rise. Are color schemes, word pictures, frontal architecture, and pathological plays all there is to art? If so, art is a paradise for the lame and the lazy. But to find a beauty in what one is doing makes it a virile function in social movements. True art comes when we are doing our best; when we are in earnest; when we throw aside hindrances and make every word, color, view, or line count. Today cathedrals are ugly because they have no use, and art galleries are dreary because artists think only of color, legs, and weak-faced Madonnas. The day of metaphor and word pictures is gone; but the day of song has not passed. The new poet must be more concise in expression and more social in thought than his long-winded predecessors. Song is the only means of appealing to the love of musical harmony that is deep in every breast.

There is no door to the soul so good as poetry. This approach may be used by the reformer if he will write poetry because he loves and needs it, and not because his leisure hours are hard to fill. His sentences must not merely roll along, but must hit some object or arouse some deep emotion. The end must dominate the form. It is with these feelings that I have been looking through the smoke, hoping that some one would come in view to express what I feel. I think of myself as a wordless poet—one who sees as a poet should, but whose linguistic power is too limited to express what I feel. I have said to myself many times, “The coming generation will do naturally, and do well, what we do with bungling hands.” There are signs that this prayer will be realized, and that the young are taking their places on the firing-line with quickening zeal and definite goals. Out of the rising generation must come not only workers, but also singers; for who can really work if he does not sing? This thought is the basis of the hope that the verses of this volume will help us feel, as well as help us work. The smoke has its charm, as well as the clear sky, and if its song is less articulate, it is more real. The first poem of Mrs. Miller that I saw made me feel that we had much in common. The present volume more than convinces me that she has opened up a new path for our emotions, through which will come new life for all. May she not only find readers, but may she be the forerunner of poets who see through the smoke into the future where all our treasures lie.