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50 Later Poets The youth of the Gettysburg campaign became the laureate of the Civil War heroes, and the volume of his poems entitled For the Country (i 897) is as typical as any. It includes Sheridan and Sherman and the excellent sonnet on The Life-Mask of Abraham Lincoln. Gilder took his place eagerly in the "wild, new, teeming world of men" that America meant to him, and desired a part, as he stated in a poem written abroad, in making it not only free and strong but also noble and pure — a land of justice lifting a light for all the world and leading into the Age of Peace. New York fostered if not produced one other important poet, Richard Hovey, who was bom in 1864, when Gilder was a young man. Follower of Whitman and the Elizabethans, and poet in his own right, Hovey won the enthusiasm of both the conventional school — especially Stedman — and the eager mod- ernists who began to attract attention near the close of the century. The odd mixture of loyalties in his verse is paralleled by the curious variety in his life. Bom in Illinois, he lived in Washington, D. C., graduated from Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, studied at the General Theological Seminary, New York, became lay assistant at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, accepted literature as his profession, and ended his brief career as professor of English literature in Barnard College and lecturer in Columbia University. Several years, also, he lived abroad — familiarizing himself, for one thing, with Ver- laine, Mallarme, and the later symbolists, and becoming one of the first American disciples and translators of Maeterlinck. Hovey's early death deprived us of a poet who had not yet reached the height of his powers. Finer work than he actually produced lay ahead unrealized, but it was probably not the unfinished dramatic work which he had come to regard as his magnum opus, — Launcelot and Guenevere: A Poem in Dramas, which he began to publish in 1 89 1 . This was not to be merely a rehandling of ancient poetic material by an idle singer of an empty day but a profound treatment of a modem problem in terms of the past — the conflict of the individual and society, and the establishment of a right relation between them. Hovey planned nine plays, though he completed only four. He ex- pected to arrange them in three trilogies : in the first, Launcelot and Guenevere were to disregard society; in the second they