Three Hero-Poets
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, our honored Dean of American literature, has said that "war stopped literature, that war did not produce great poetry," but on the other hand, our Dean of American Poetesses, Edna D. Proctor, calls to mind the fact that, "war was the theme of the Iliad and war was the theme of the Odyssey"—two of the greatest Epics ever written. From the time of the Ancients to the present, war has so greatly stirred the hearts of men, that it must inevitably produce literature.
If this needed further or more abundant proof, we have evidence of it, in the fact that amidst the bloodiest and most terrible of all wars, known in the so-called age of civilization, three poets have arisen, simultaneously, as it were, from three different quarters of the globe, each of whom has had an opportunity to prove himself a great poet, or with the potentialities of greatness; which in the case of two, can never reach full fruition, on ac- count of their heroic deaths: Rupert Brooke, the young Englishman, who sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, February 28, 1915, in defense of his country, and died in the Aegean, April 23, 1915, at the age of twenty-eight; Alan Seeger, a young American, born in New York City, who, when the war was not yet three weeks old, enlisted in the Foreign Legion of France—
Came back the generous path of Lafayette,"
