Aloof from the social and political conflicts of his day, he gave
himself to the fastidious creation of beautiful lines, believing
that the beautiful line is the surest road to Arcady, and that
Herrick, whom he idolized, had shown the way.
To some readers of these pages it may seem like profanation to
pass over poets like Sill, George Woodberry, Edith Thomas,
Richard Hovey, William Vaughn Moody, Madison Cawein--to mention
but half a dozen distinguished names out of a larger company--and
to suggest that James Whitcomb Riley, more completely than any
American poet since Longfellow, succeeded in expressing the
actual poetic feelings of the men and women who composed his
immense audience. Riley, like Aldrich, went to school to Herrick,
Keats, Tennyson, and Longfellow, but when he began writing
newspaper verse in his native Indiana he was guided by two
impulses which gave individuality to his work. "I was always
trying to write of the kind of people I knew, and especially to
write verse that I could read just as if it were spoken for the
first time.
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