There is a theory, especially prevalent on the Pacific coast, that when prose is printed in vertical snatches it becomes poetry. A current convert to this theory is Novelist Rupert Hughes, who has written an introduction for a book* by a Miss Virginia Church, California schoolteacher, in which he says she reminds him of Edgar Lee Masters and Sappho. He calls her pages "poems," a definition which may mislead other schoolteachers or puzzle them when they read what are really excerpts from an observant, slightly sentimental diary filled with familiar schoolhouse fauna. Samples:
"What pleased...