College Poets

"The time has come," said Henry Goddard Leach one day last winter, "for somebody to stop guessing and really find out what undergraduates of 1934 think about."

Able, successful editor of Forum & Century, longtime promoter of student exchanges between the U. S. and Scandinavia, onetime English instructor at Harvard, Henry Goddard Leach decided that he himself was well equipped to do the job. Most students of a philosophic turn of mind, he figured, write poetry. Therefore he announced a college poetry contest. The response was overwhelming. For a chance at cash prizes of $50, $30 and $20, 2,394 college poets bared their souls in nearly 3.000 poems. Plucky Investigator Leach read every single one down to the last line. Last week in Manhattan he was ready to make his report.

"Entirely fallacious," said he, "is the popular conception of the average college student as a gin-drinking, jazz-crazy, sex-feverish iconoclast with communistic leanings who scoffs at the ideas of an older generation. . . . Repeal apparently has had a sobering effect on youth. The jazz age is definitely gone."

For proof he had the writings of students in 205 colleges, including every major one except Princeton, whose Class Poet in 1903 was Henry Goddard Leach. Every State except Arizona, Delaware, Nevada, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming was represented. There were marked regional differences. Most melodious were Southern poets, who picked dark themes, treated them tenderly. Most mystical were Californians; most practical, Ohioans. Natives of New England and Oregon, its Pacific offspring, were inclined to find their romance in scientific observation. New Yorkers distinguished themselves by lack of originality, as compared with Minnesotans.

Undergraduates are still interested in love, discovered Editor Leach--women approximately twice as much so as men. But: "It is a love of the mind rather than of the senses. . . . They still write about willow trees and the lovers' moon over the meadows, but their moon has no mushy tears in its eyes. . . . Freud has been dethroned. . . . Companionship and sympathetic understanding are the two goals which the new poets are seeking." Wrote a Pennsylvania boy: Do we love the less That our love is quiet? That we find heart-peace Though we miss heart-riot?

A young woman of Linfield College (McMinnville, Ore.) glanced bleakly at "Kisses": The first kiss that heated up my mouth to love Entrenched itself upon me with a long storm blast. But the last sophisticated taste of man's desire upon my lips Trembled only while I idly watched a butterfly that passed.

Oldsters were pleased to learn, however, that young passion is not wholly dead. The author of "Kisses," who submitted 27 other poems, cried out: As the powerful wind pushes the cliffs And polishes down the canyons, Tears from sage and greasewood Their sharp and bitter odor, Flings sand in fiendish figures-I-thrill! I am mad! I am here! Take me--wild-drunk with delight!

One-fifth of co-ed verses were about home, babies, motherhood. Many a poem was dedicated "To Mother" or "To Dad." Other subjects which interested the poets included the psychology of heterosexual athletic comradeship, a railroad terminal, night in the desert, the folly of war, an automobile show. Ninety percent of the verse submitted was rhymed. Every poem entitled "Sonnet" contained 14 lines.

Not one of 15 young women of the Catholic College of St. Teresa in Winona, Minn, wrote about religion. Nobody wrote about Communism or Socialism. Nobody wrote about Depression. Nobody wrote a line about Franklin D. Roosevelt or the New Deal.

First prize went to a girl from the College of St. Catherine (St. Paul, Minn.) for "Thistle in the Desert." A Harvardman took second with "Epicidium," a young woman from Cornell College (Mount Vernon, Iowa) third with "Pigeons."

"There is no evidence in these intimate thoughts of the nation's youth," concluded Investigator Leach, "that their morals have been undermined by motion pictures portraying divorce and other situations common in American life."

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