SOURCE: "Francis Jammes," in Contemporary European Writers, The John Day Company, 1928, pp. 243-51.

In the following essay, Drake praises Jammes's early works, but laments a decline in his later writing.

When one speaks of a poet as "well loved" or as a "favorite bard of simple things and homely virtues," one is not always seeking to condone a particular type of mediocrity which happens to appeal to him. Despite the thriving, if modest, school of Robert Frost, we have somewhat lost sight, in this day of neurotic exacerbations, of the proved truth that verse does not have to be tormented to be beautiful. The idyllic scenes of Whittier have in them more of pure loveliness than many of the most rapturous clamors of the sadistic school of English poetry; and there are also the classic examples of Hesiod's Works and Days and the Georgics of Vergil, which contain...