When the Romantic movement became too saccharine, it was dispatched from the world with some promptness. It takes a genius to be convincingly romantic. The nineteenth century gave birth to Tennyson, Keats, Shelley and a few others, but as the years wore on these men dies, and the century, full of honorable years, could produce no more to take their places. As a result men grew tired first of the lesser poets who labored and brought forth exceedingly diminutive mice and then of the whole movement and what it stood for.

The war hurried this change. the nations looked out over the barren world with the sad face of disillusion. God, if there was a God, no longer was in His Heaven, and nothing was right with the world. Literature was not slow to sense this change. A new school grew up, a school of brittle intellectuals which bathed in the flotsam of a world beside itself. The decade of the twenties found a group of poets who distrusted the emotions, the subtler verse forms, the glories of nature, the grandeur of idealism. While the Romantics were making their last weak exit lines, these poets sat in a front box thumbing their noses with great determination. Today at 9 o'clock in Sever 7, Dr. Carpenter will lecture in America's contemporary poetry. The Vagabond is going; for don't doctors work on diseased corpses? And all the poetry is not discuses even to such a hopeless romantic as the Vagabond. There is much that is good, and more that is interesting in this period. But to those souls who find the triumph of American Literature in this post war age lot the Vagabond remark with one of the late Victorians, "Fare well Romance, and all unseen, Romance brought up the 9.15."