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Originally published in 1939
Some of this information may no longer be current and in that case is presented for historical interest only.
Edited by GET NJ, COPYRIGHT 2002
Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918) of New Brunswick, through his death on a
French battlefield and one short poem, Trees, achieved a posthumous
recognition seldom accorded a minor poet. His life, after he had graduated from Columbia University and had taught Latin for a year in a
Morristown high school, was chiefly that of a hard-working literary critic.
In 1913 he became a Catholic, a conversion that influenced his writing in
prose and poetry and led to one important literary work, Dreams and
Images: an Anthology of Catholic Poets.
Randolph Bourne, whose life-span covered the same years as Kilmer's,
was a native of Bloomfield. In the foreword to the posthumously published Untimely Papers (1919), James Oppenheim writes of Bourne, "He
was a flaming rebel against our crippled life, as if he had taken the cue
from the long struggle with his own body." Most of these papers are
articles first published in The Seven Arts, of which Bourne was contributing editor. A group including Van Wyck Brooks, also a native of New
Jersey, began publishing this journal advocating an American cultural
life transcending nationalism. Randolph Bourne, already a contributor to
other new liberal periodicals -- the Dial, New Republic, and Freeman -- became a leader. His earlier books, The Gary Schools and Education and
Life, had shown him a disciple of John Dewey, but the collapse of liberal
pragmatism in face of the national crisis convinced him that a new and
more creative program was necessary. With courage, sensitivity, and intelligence he opposed the growing war sentiment in America, criticizing
particularly those intellectuals "whom the crisis has crystallized into acceptance of war." The Seven Arts suspended publication in September 1917,
the subsidy withdrawn because of the editor's anti-war position. In 1918,
the last year of his life, he began The State, fragments of which are included in Untimely Papers. This, with The History of Literary Radical
(edited by Van Wyck Brooks, 1920), gives some indication of what
Bourne's later work might have been. Unfinished though it is, The State
seems now to many critics a prophetic indictment of the institution when
it becomes a symbol of force rather than an expression of a people's life.
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