​For permission to use certain of the poems in this collection, thanks are due to the Editors of Ainslee's Magazine, Overland Monthly, American Poetry Magazine, Pacific Review, Stanford Cardinal, Unity, The Lingerer, Houston Post, and Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

By time-honored tradition, the candidate in letters has established his claim to be a master of arts through the defense of a thesis built of the body of tradition and fact associated with the arts or with the performance of some particular artist. To this selected group of scholars, those creative spirits who have actually produced art themselves have from time to time been admitted, but only as honorary members. Yet, as the creation of art is at least as severe a test of culture and of refined and disciplined thinking as the ability to reason sagely upon the art created by others, the English Department of this University has come to recognize the propriety of accepting belles lettres as partial evidence of a candidate's fitness to take the master's degree in course. We are satisfied that such a departure is in the interests of the humanistic tradition, and we are happy to rest our claim to the approval of scholars at large and of the public, upon the volume of verse to which this note of explanation serves as a preface.