The Conservative (Lovecraft)/January 1916/Introducing Mr. James Pyke

Of the many gifted poets entering The United Amateur Press Association during the present period of improved literary standards, few can bear comparison with the one who now makes his first appearance in these pages, Mr. James T. Pyke of Riverside, East Providence, R.I.

Mr. Pyke is a gentleman blessed equally with the advantages of highest culture and of highest intellectual endowments. He is a graduate both of Brown University and of Andower Theological Seminary, having been Class Poet at the latter institution. Upon his graduation from Andover, Mr. Pyke was ordained to the Congregational ministry, to which profession he lent all the remarkable genius with which favouring fortune has invested him; but the tremendous strain of pastoral activity on a delicate constitution at last proved excessive, and he has now retired to a quiet life of letters, cultivating the Muses in his cottage at Riverside, overlooking the sparkling reaches of Narragansett Bay.

The unusual modesty of Mr. Pyke has veiled a poetical genius which will now blaze out all the more resplendently because of its previous concealment. His first efforts were made in boyhood, and speciments written at the age of seventeen show all the inspiration and polish to be expected from a man of mature years. But these were no more than the faint promise of future excellence. His poems of manhood are infinitely moving and beautiful. Nature, viewed through the medium of his sonnets, takes on new and lovelier aspects, whilst his longer poems cover every phase of human life and aspiration. "The Conservative's" lines in the "United Official Quarterly" for November, 1914, were an endeavor to convey some idea of their grace and loftiness.

​Mr. Pyke's particular models in verse have ever been the New England poets, and to the classic coterie of the preceding century he may be justly deemed a legitimate successor.

It is not often that an organisation of amateurs can boast the membership of a genius of Mr. Pyke's type and "The Conservative" has scant need to say that he is vastly proud to have been the means of bringing Mr. Pyke into his beloved United Amateur Press Association.