Robert Frothingham

Songs of Men, An Anthology Robert Frothingham

Publisher Marketing: If you are looking for old favorites or for something to please the pale esthetic brow you won't find them here. There's nothing about this collection suggestive of the drawing-room, nothing that by the widest stretch of the imagination could be identified with a "his mistress' eyebrow." Colloquially speaking, this is a bunch of verse intended to appeal to red-blooded men and women. Strong, virile stuff, it sings the Great Outdoors from the Arctic Circle to the Tropics, from the Occident to the Orient. It runs the gamut of man's emotions in-so-far as they can be stimulated by wanderlust, camp and trail, pioneering, seafaring, piracy, sport, battle afloat and ashore, gold-seeking, vagabonds, animals, the Great War, the joy of accomplishment and the bitterness of failure. Our own glorious West is here with its ever-present glamour of mountain peaks, mining camps, cowboys, desert and illimitable plains. With such an idea in mind as the title indicates, it was inevitable that the old favorites be overlooked and that "many a gem of purest ray serene" should be rescued from obscurity. Yes, and some of them were written by women---not the feminist type which the Great War has swept into the discard, but your real "man's woman" who has a fashion of looking life straight in the eye---and are all the more Songs of Men on that account. Within will be found the first authoritative publication in book form of that famous piratical ditty, "Derelict" or "Fifteen Men on the Dead Man's Chest," elaborated many years ago by my old friend Young Ewing Allison, of Louisville, Kentucky, from Stevenson's renowned quatrain in "Treasure Island," also "The Little Red God," an anonymous bit of verse written especially for this anthology by one of our best-known poets.