(3 of 4)
What American poet so great, so heralded, so powerful that he can move huge audiences of very strong men to tears? What poet is it who is met at railroad trains by the town band? To whom politicians bow? Whose ditties sailors carry in their packets? Whom baseball players revere ? Before whom prizefighters are as little children? "We have no Homer, minstrelling through the land," you reply. Ah, but we have our Eddie Guest, and he cannot be denied.
This balladist of the Middle West, whose books sell millions of copies, is as representative of the great sentimentality of America, as the Ford car is of our thrift. He writes of tears and heartaches, of virtue rewarded, and of red, red blooded love. He represents beauty to the multitude, and to the multitude beauty is too often artificial flowers, but how important to them! Mr. Guest's poems will be forgotten tomorrow; but as ballads of the times they cannot be neglected. His collected poems, under the revealing title The Passing Throng, will be published this season. All along Main Street men who never even heard of Robert Frost will be reading Edgar A. Guest.
It is curious that so American a bard as Mr. Guest, singer of motherhood, should have been born in England. Such is the case; and he was born, moreover, in Birmingham. At the age of ten, however, he was transplanted to Detroit, a town somewhat similar in atmosphere to Birmingham. There he almost immediately went to work for the Detroit Free Press, with which paper he has been associated ever since. A romantic career, surely, for his rise has been from menial jobs to the height of fame—in journalism at least.
Eddie Guest in his office is a delight. Short, stocky, vital, with none of the manners of the British Isles, and plenty of the breeziness of the Middle West, he shows you his books with pride and talks of his work with high seriousness. I just managed to catch hold of his coattails and detain him for a few moments. This respite was doubtless between the writing of a syndicate poem and the sending out of a radio broadcast. He then took me for a ride in the Ford car which was presented to him by the great manufacturer himself. Riding with Eddie Guest in Detroit is almost like walking down Fifth Avenue with Douglas Fairbanks.
Good Books
The following estimates of books most in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:
ISLAND OF THE INNOCENT—Grant Overton—Doran ($2.00). There is a curious sort of magic in this book. It tells about the adventures of a poor girl stranded in New York alone, her struggles and her loves. Always more is told than a mere series of episodes. There is an inner reality that makes the narrative extraordinarily gripping. It is a hard book to set down and a hard one to get out of your mind.
THE INTERPRETERS—A. E.—Macmillan ($1.65). A. E. (George Russell), brilliant Irish poet-journalist-philosopher, unites mystic philosophy and practical politics. The Interpreters is a platonic dialogue between a poet, an anarchist, a labor leader, an historian, a despot. The theme of their discussion, broadly, is the relation of "the politics of time to the politics of eternity."