Younger American poets 18301890 Author:Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: College, the other, by Mrs Laurence Turnbull, of Baltimore, giving the cult of the Lanierophant. From Lanier it is natural to pass to Helen Hunt, born Helen F... more »iske, and by a second marriage Helen Jackson. Nature was bountiful to her. She was what is called a natural poet, human in sympathies, and with a fine lyric touch. I have noticed, in reading the hundreds of books which I have had to examine for this work, that a larger percentage of women writers than men have the lyric quality. I attribute this to woman's not writing unless she has some natural turn for it, whereas a man's education shows him the mechanism of writing poetry, the mere moves on the chess-board, and he finds it an agreeable exercise to express his thoughts in this form, and more particularly in England, where every scholar has learned to write Latin and Greek verse, and is, consequently, well acquainted with prosody, though Americans must rival them in productiveness, if one can trust the witticism of the editor of Harper's Magazine, who once remarked to me: " Every night at nine o'clock I take out my watch and say to myself, there are at this minute a hundred thousand people on this continent writing poetry, and most of them will send their poems to me." To instance what I have said about women, I could quote a long list of Americans, such as Helen Hunt, Louise Chandler Moulton, Nora Perry, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Edna Dean Proctor, Edith Thomas, Helen Gray Cone, Margaret Deland, Danske Dandridge, and Louise Imogen Guiney. But to return to " H. H.," the broad human heart shows itself from one end of her writing to the other. She is essentially human, and she has eminently the faculty of creating an interest, forshe chooses bright, picturesque metres, and uses picturesque expressions. It was s...« less