Lilith Lorraine, "To the Practical Man"

Your little patterned universe
Of day, and hour, and minute,
Would be less like a cosmic hearse
If you were happy in it.



From the book Let the Patterns Break and quoted in Lorraine's book Character against Chaos (Avalon Press: Rogers, Arkansas, 1947). Lilith Lorraine was a pseudonym for Mary M. Wright, of Alpine, Texas, where she edited the poetry magazine Different. She was an active member of the League for Sanity in Poetry and a strong advocate of traditional verse. A leading antimodernist of the postwar period, Stanton Coblentz, praised Lorraine "one of the most convinced advocates of traditional poetry, a devoted and energetic worker" in the campaign against the chaos of modern poetry.