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Updated: June 19, 2025
Holliday's lively and tender essay is worthy to stand among the great memorials of brotherly affection that have enriched our speech. To say that Kilmer was not a Keats is not to say that the friendship that irradiates Mr. Holliday's memoir was less lovely than that of Keats and Severn, for instance. The beauty of any human intercourse is not measured by the plane on which it moves.
It is to Belloc, of course, and to Gilbert Chesterton, that one must go to learn the secret of Kilmer's literary manner. Yet, as Holliday affirms, the similarity is due as much to an affinity of mind with these Englishmen as to any eagerness to imitate. Kilmer was like them in being essentially a humorist. Mr.
Holliday well says: "People have made very creditable reputations as humorists who never wrote anything like as humorous essays as those of Joyce Kilmer. They fairly reek with the joy of life." "He that lives by the pen shall perish by the pen," the biographer tells us, quoting James Huneker.
Walt Whitman's position we have quoted, and after him came a number of American writers, assigning a football physique to their heroes. With the recent revival of interest in Whitman, the brawny bard has again come into favor in certain quarters. Joyce Kilmer, as has been noted, was his strongest advocate, inveighing against weakly verse-writers,
From this experience may he traced three of the most delightful of the "Walking-Stick Papers." It was while at Scribner's that he met Joyce Kilmer, who also served as a Scribner book-clerk for two weeks in 1909. This friendship meant more to Bob Holliday than any other. The two men were united by intimate adhesions of temperament and worldly situation.
Laughter and comradeship and hearty meals clustered about Kilmer: wherever he touched the grindstone of life there flew up a merry shower of sparks. There is convincing testimony to the courage and beauty that lay quiet at the heart of this singer who said that the poet is only a glorified reporter, and wished he had written "Casey at the Bat."
How droll! Whom would you suggest that I marry at once?" "Oh, when it comes to that " replied Mrs. Batjer, with a slight reproachful lift in her voice, and thinking of Kilmer Duelma. "But surely your need isn't so pressing. If you were to take up professional dancing I might have to cut you afterward particularly if any one else did." She smiled the sweetest, most sensible smile. Mrs.
Clad in a morning gown of gray and silver, her hair piled in a Psyche knot, she had in her lap on this occasion a Java basket filled with some attempt at Norwegian needlework. "Bevy," she said, "you remember Kilmer Duelma, don't you? Wasn't he at the Haggertys' last summer when you were there?"
Even in the peculiarly limited sensuous verse of the present the third element is implicit. Other poets, no less than Joyce Kilmer, have a dim sense that in their physical experiences they are really tasting the eucharist, as Kilmer indicates in his warning, Summer-saulting for God's sake. Only the poet seems to possess the secret of the fusion of sense and spirit in the world.
There was Byron, who left all his lady-loves, to fight against the Turk, And David, the singing king of the Jews, who was born with a sword in his hand. It was only yesterday, indeed, that Rupert Brooke, Francis Ledwidge, Alan Seeger and Joyce Kilmer made the memory of the soldier poet lasting.
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