Education: Schoolhouse Fauna

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...

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