Edward Thomas: Prose Writings: A Selected Edition: Volume IV: Writings on Poetry (Edward Thomas Prose Writing Selected Edition) 0198784341, 9780198784340

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Edward Thomas: Prose Writings: A Selected Edition General Editors: Guy Cuthbertson and Lucy Newlyn Edward Thomas is an important figure in the English literary canon. A major twentieth-­century poet, he was also one of England’s most experienced and respected Edwardian and Georgian critics, and an observer of the countryside second to none. Although he died at the age of only 39, his prose output was massive and encompassed a range of genres: biography, autobiography, essays, reviews, fiction, nature books, travel writings, and anthologies. While Thomas’s stature as a poet is widely appreciated, his prose works have yet to be given their critical due—­in large part because scholarly editions have hitherto been lacking. Edward Thomas: Prose Writings: A Selected Edition shows that Thomas’s prose deserves to be much better known by literary scholars but also the general reading public. This six-­volume edition is the definitive edition of Thomas’s prose and a significant scholarly resource for the twenty-­first century. The edition is not the complete prose works, but it establishes Thomas as one of the most important prose writers in English, who contributed remarkable ideas about, and representations of, the self and community, the landscape and ecology, literature and history, the spiritual and artistic life. The prose works have been collected together into appropriate volumes, and each volume has a character of its own. Four of the substantial volumes contain works in their entirety; two take the form of selections to a theme. Works appear in ­chrono­logic­al order within each volume. Each volume begins with a long ­introduction, giving biographical details, an account of the circumstances of composition, a historical contextualization of the volume’s themes and concerns, and an interpretation based on original research. Thomas’s complex and brilliant prose, intricately woven, using many quotations and allusions, is discussed and elucidated by extensive annotation. Guy Cuthbertson is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English at Liverpool Hope University. He has held lectureships at Oxford (St Edmund Hall and Merton), Swansea, Brighton, and London (Queen Mary) as well as a teaching fellowship at St Andrews. He studied at St Andrews (MA) and at The Queen’s College, Oxford University (M.Phil and D.Phil).

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Lucy Newlyn has published widely on English Romantic literature, including four books with Oxford University Press and The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge (2002). Her book Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (OUP, 2000) won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay prize in 2001. She has published articles on Edward Thomas, and her edition of his Oxford was published by Signal in 2005. She also co-­edited England and Wales for the OUP edition of his selected prose. Her first collection of poems, Ginnel, was published by Oxford Poets, Carcanet in 2005; and her second, Earth’s Almanac, by Enitharmon in 2015. She is currently preparing a third collection. From 1963 until her retirement in 2002, Edna Longley was successively a lecturer, senior lecturer, reader, professor, and professor emerita in the School of English at Queen’s University Belfast. She is known as a critic of modern poetry in English, for her writings on poetry from Northern Ireland, and for her concern with cultural questions raised by Northern Ireland. She is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the British Academy.

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EDWARD THOMAS

Prose Writings

a selected edition General Editors guy cuthbertson and lucy newlyn

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EDWARD THOMAS

Prose Writings a selected edition Volume IV Selected Writings on Poetry

Edited by Edna Longley

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Editorial matter © Edna Longley 2023 The moral rights of the author have been asserted All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2011501440 ISBN 978–0–19–878434–0 Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgements My thanks are due, first, to Guy Cuthbertson and Lucy Newlyn, General Editors of this Selected Edition. I am grateful not only for their help with this volume, but also for their enterprise in ensuring that Edward Thomas’s prose is given its rightful prominence. I owe a special debt to the indispensable work of Alison Harvey on the Edward Thomas Archive in Special Collections and Archives, Arts and Social Studies Library, Cardiff University / Casgliadau Arbennig ac Archifau, Llyfrgell y Celfyddydau ac Astudiaethau Cymdeithasol, Prifysgol Caerdydd. I also owe much to her personal guidance: the task of negotiating the microfilm of Thomas’s poetry reviews was made far smoother than I had feared. She once again gave crucial assistance when Lockdown prevented me from returning to Cardiff. Anyone interested in Thomas’s reviews is forever indebted to the late R.  George Thomas, founder of the Edward Thomas Archive at Cardiff. I have also depended on the work of Richard Emeny and Jeff Cooper ‘towards a complete checklist’ of Thomas’s publications. I want to thank staff at Palace Green Library, University of Durham, for their help and for permission to quote from Thomas’s cor­res­ pond­ence with Charles Cazenove, his literary agent. Staff at the British Library and Cambridge University Library also guided me. An Emeritus Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust eased my research-­travels. I am greatly indebted to Jason O’Rourke: patient in-­putter of often-­difficult text. I must also thank Stephen Stuart-­Smith of Enitharmon Press, who published my monograph, Under the Same Moon: Edward Thomas and the English Lyric (2017): work on the book advanced my work on this volume. As ever, colleagues at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University Belfast, helped with their critical insights. Edna Longley Belfast 2022

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Contents Abbreviationsxi Textual Notexiii Introductionxv

Writings on Poetry 1899–19161 18991 19007 19019 190223 190357 190477 1905113 1906167 1907231 1908279 1909345 1910403 1911465 1912511 1913537 1914601 1915647 1916659 Appendix: Contemporary Poets Reviewed by Edward Thomas

693

Chronology717 Select Bibliography723 Index727

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Abbreviations Newspapers and journals A B DC DN ER L MP N NW  PD S SR W WS

The Academy The Bookman Daily Chronicle Daily News English Review Literature Morning Post The Nation New Weekly Poetry and Drama The Speaker Saturday Review The World Week’s Survey

Other abbreviations ABL

Archive of correspondence between ET and C. F. Cazenove, his literary agent, Abbott Literary Manuscripts, Palace Green Library, University of Durham (letters numbered) ACP Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems, ed. Edna Longley (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2008) ACS Edward Thomas, Algernon Charles Swinburne: A Critical Study (London: Martin Secker, 1912) EF Eleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958; Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997) ET Edward Thomas ETFN Edward Thomas Fellowship Newsletter ETGB William Cooke, Edward Thomas and Gordon Bottomley: Comrades in Letters (Petersfield: Edward Thomas Fellowship, 2021) ETPW I Edward Thomas Prose Writings: A Selected Edition, Volume I: Autobiographies, ed. Guy Cuthbertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) ETPW II  Edward Thomas Prose Writings: A Selected Edition, Volume II: England and Wales, ed. Guy Cuthbertson and Lucy Newlyn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)

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xii

Abbreviations

ETPW V  Edward Thomas Prose Writings: A Selected Edition, Volume V: Critical Studies: Swinburne and Pater, ed. Francis O’Gorman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) FIP Edward Thomas, Feminine Influence on the Poets (London: Martin Secker, 1910) GB Gordon Bottomley HE Edward Thomas, The Heart of England (London: J. M. Dent, 1906) IPS Edward Thomas, In Pursuit of Spring (London: Thomas Nelson and Son, 1914) JMW Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Edward Thomas: From Adlestrop to Arras: A Biog­ raphy (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) LGB Letters from Edward Thomas to Gordon Bottomley, ed. R. George Thomas (London: Oxford University Press, 1968) LJB The Letters of Edward Thomas to Jesse Berridge, ed. Anthony Berridge (London: Enitharmon Press, 1983) LPE Edward Thomas, A Literary Pilgrim in England (London: Methuen, 1917) LRF I The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume I: 1886–1920, ed. Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) LS Edward Thomas, The Last Sheaf (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928) MM Edward Thomas, Maurice Maeterlinck (London: Methuen, 1911) PBPS Edward Thomas (ed.), The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air (London: Grant Richards, 1907) PTP Judy Kendall (ed.), Poet to Poet: Edward Thomas’s Letters to Walter de la Mare (Bridgend: Seren, 2012) RF Robert Frost RFET Elected Friends: Robert Frost and Edward Thomas to One Another, ed. Matthew Spencer (New York: Handsel Books, 2003) RJ Richard Jefferies: His Life and Work (London: Hutchinson, 1909; London: Faber and Faber, 1978) SC Edward Thomas, The South Country (London: J. M. Dent, 1909) SL Edward Thomas, Selected Letters, ed. R. George Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) TE Edward Thomas (ed.), This England: An Anthology from her Writers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1915)

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Textual Note This volume is arranged chronologically, with two exceptions: Edward Thomas’s reviews of the same book are placed together; extracts from his own books are placed first in the year of their publication. As regards the reproduction of reviews: publishers (apart from university presses) and prices of books are not given; sub-­editors’ headings and sub-­headings have been removed; small printing-­errors, including those in quotations from books reviewed (although Thomas is very accurate in this respect), have been silently corrected; and the lay-­out of quoted poems has been standardized. Throughout the volume, italics have been substituted for inverted commas in book-­titles, and stops removed after abbreviations like Mr. In the heading of a review, ‘etc.’ indicates that other books have been reviewed as well as the item(s) in question. Cuts in reviews are indicated by [. . .]. An Appendix, ‘Contemporary Poets Reviewed by Edward Thomas’, gives details of the most notable poets whom he reviewed, and of his relations with some of them. Besides providing background information, the Appendix constitutes a snapshot of the literary milieu which, as a critic of poetry, Thomas inhabited in the early twentieth century. Here ‘contemporary’ covers Ernest Dowson (d. 1900) and Lionel Johnson (d. 1902); as it does George Meredith and Algernon Charles Swinburne, who published their last collections after 1900. In the footnotes to this volume, page-­references to the volume itself appear in square brackets. For the editor’s selection of items for inclusion, see Introduction [xviii].

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Introduction Edward Thomas was a poetry critic before he was a poet. That is, before the Great War, the influence of Robert Frost, and more intangible factors combined to make him a poet in December 1914: the month when this ‘prose man’ wrote his first poems.1 Like Thomas’s other prose writings, such as his ‘country books’,2 his poetry criticism fed into his poetry and now aids our understanding of it—­in part, as its reflexive dimension. A poem by Thomas may condense a critical encounter with, for instance, the Romantic poets or the traditions of English pastoral or the ‘war poetry’ of Rupert Brooke. But there are broader reasons for defying his own fiat: ‘The disinterment of criticism is a rare and an unsavoury task.’3 The relation of Thomas’s criticism to his poetry, unlike that of his other prose, centres on his aesthetic thinking. And, since his poetry criticism mainly takes the form of reviews, its contribution to his poetic matrix is inseparable from how he navigated a period of unprecedented flux in English-­language poetry. By the same token, had Thomas died before writing a line, his poetry criticism would not lose its significance. To disinter Edward Thomas’s writings on poetry is to fill a literary-­historical gap; to reset perceptions of early twentieth-­century poetry. The advent of ‘modern poetry’ tends to be read forward from one or two conspicuous dates: the outbreak of European war in 1914 or T. S. Eliot publishing The Waste Land in 1922. What happened between 1900 and 1914— Thomas’s years as poetry critic—­can be occluded. Here Thomas is at once mirror (although no critical mirror is clear glass) and agent: ‘among the interpreters, the evangelists’, where he said a critic should aspire to be.4 Yet his writings on poetry exceed their contexts in modern poetry, as in his own poetry. Commonly seen as a prose-­writer who became a poet, Thomas should equally be seen as a critic who became a poet. His extraordinary meta­mor­phosis bears on the whole relation, not only between poetry and 1  On 22 April 1910, ET signed off a letter to GB: ‘Ever your hurried & harried prose man’ (LGB, 203). 2  ET’s usual term, as in his essay ‘Some Country Books’, ET (ed.), British Country Life in Autumn and Winter: The Book of the Open Air (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1908); ETPW II, 241–5. 3  In review of (Francis) Jeffrey’s Literary Criticism [456]. 4  In review of John Burroughs, Literary Values and Other Papers [61].

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Introduction

prose, but also between poetry and criticism. An unwitting ‘poet-­critic’ may illuminate that term. Introducing Volume V of this edition, which comprises Thomas’s book-­ length ‘Critical Studies’, Algernon Charles Swinburne (1912) and Walter Pater (1913), Francis O’Gorman stresses that Thomas took himself (and was taken) seriously as a critic. To view his critical corpus as ‘hackwork’ is to misapply depressive self-critical remarks: ‘My opinion .  .  . is worth nothing (except money)’; ‘I am here writing the first & worst book on Swinburne’.5 Another self-­laceration takes a more complex form: ‘Perhaps my intense desire to say only things that come from the depths & to get on to paper somehow the (perhaps few) passionate moments of my reading life—­perhaps this has given a quality to the writing which a friend will not distinguish from perfect sincerity & independence of view.’6 Since Thomas’s longer critical projects were often desperately rushed, he tended to call the result ‘beastly’, ‘dirty’, ‘wretched’, ‘rotten’.7 Yet his ‘opinion’ (and ‘passion’) survived both the pressure of deadlines and engagement with uncongenial subjects. Here critical survival seems indexed to creative survival. For O’Gorman, Swinburne and Pater are ‘far better on Thomas than they are on two major authors of the nineteenth century’.8 Possibly so, but context matters too. While Thomas’s quest for a ‘form that suits me’9 shadows all his criticism, his frequently nega­ tive judgement of Swinburne or Pater (attacks on Pater sprinkle his reviews) does more than exorcise now-­unfruitful influences. It also instances his rare ability—­perhaps that of a poet-­critic—­to inhabit the historical moment, to sense changing literary times. Thomas’s poetry criticism opens up a complex scenario where nineteenth-­century modes are sometimes fossilized, sometimes evolving; fin-­de-­siècle Aestheticism has burnt out but charged the lyric poem with new symbolic intensity; W. B. Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival are in vogue; American poetry has begun to absorb Walt Whitman’s pioneering example; editions, studies, and reprints of dead poets are multiplying, as are translations from other languages and from the Classics (Thomas could read French and German as well as Latin and Greek); and criticism itself is in flux between belles-­lettres and the emergent literary academy. Thomas’s own criticism covers this whole burgeoning field. No poetry critic today would have either the chance or inclination to attempt a com­par­ able scope. Strikingly, too, the majority of his reviews appeared in two daily newspapers: the Daily Chronicle and the Morning Post. When Thomas started to review for the Chronicle, which had a daily literary page, he wrote about 5  Letters to GB: 30 June 1905 (LGB, 87); 26 May 1912 (ETFN 59, 38). 6  Letter, 22 April 1907 (LGB, 138). 7  See [465], [465], [404], [659]. 8  ETPW V, xxv. 9  Letter, 26 June 1904 (LGB, 57).

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Introduction

xvii

George Meredith; about younger poets like Yeats and John Davidson; about editions of Gower, Anne Finch, and Shelley. From one angle, he was given an intensive opportunity to think about contemporary poetry alongside poetry of the past: in effect, to configure tradition and new talent. Thus Thomas’s critical response to the ‘Symbolist Movement’ intersects with his response to its Romantic sources (as when he reviews the proliferating editions of Blake); while his critique of versifiers who, like William Watson, ‘can put a leading article into the form of a sonnet’, intersects with his reluctance to see most eighteenth-­century poetry as other than a social medium or ‘an additional ornament to eloquence’.10 More broadly, Thomas’s enthusiasm for certain earlier poets—­Michael Drayton or William Cowper as well as the Romantics—­both subtly re-­orders the past, and suggests the hidden evolution of his own aesthetic. Although his reviews of scholarly editions grad­ual­ly dwindled in number, the ground had been laid. Thomas did not only review new poetry, old poetry, and works linked with poetry. Since reviewing provided his main income, he also dealt with ‘country books’ in their many guises; with prose-­reprints, fiction, criticism, biographies, memoirs, travel-­books, essay-­collections; with books as dis­par­ ate as Criminal Types in Shakespeare, Peeps into Nature’s Ways, Nelson’s Lady Hamilton, and the Complete Works of Nietzsche. In 1910, a record year, he averaged between two and three reviews a week, besides publishing books and articles. Up to fifteen reviews by him could appear in a single month. Just as criticism gets into Thomas’s country books, the countryside into his criticism (nobody was better equipped to write A Literary Pilgrim in England), so his critical approach is holistic: included here are poetry-­ conscious reviews of a book on punctuation and of a reprint of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.11 Similarly, Thomas’s aesthetic thinking encompasses his ecological thinking on ‘the inseparableness of Nature and Man’.12 He calls W. H. Duignan’s Notes on Staffordshire Place Names ‘a series of earthly lyrics, sung by the earth itself ’, and says: ‘There is no end to the poetry and romance of dictionaries’.13 Until 1907, poetry or poetry-­related reviews made up a quarter to a third of Thomas’s annual total. Then the percentage began to rise; and by 1913–14, when he was writing fewer reviews (see below), they were almost all poetry reviews of one kind or another. Yet poetry was always central. In letters to Gordon Bottomley, his close friend and ‘Comforter’, Thomas often bemoaned his plight as a reviewer—‘Another 10  Review of Watson, Sable and Purple with Other Poems (MP: 22 June 1910); review of John Sergeaunt (ed.), The Poems of John Dryden (DC: 22 February 1911). 11  See [154], [177]. 12  ‘Some Country Books’, see n. 2 (ETPW II, 244). 13  A: 22 March 1902.

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Introduction

huge parcel of books has come for me to gulp & vomit & return to the vomit’14—but poetry drove his critical impulse and kept it alive: My mind . . . refuses to be illuded by anything but verse—­excepting a few short passages of prose. Poetry in verse is at one with the tides and the pulse; prose is chaos cut up into beds & borders & fountains & rusticwork like a garden. A merely great intellect can produce great prose, but not poetry, not one line.15

During his teens, Thomas has become addicted to poetry, although by 1900 he had given up the ‘vice’ of trying to write it.16 ‘Morgan Rhys’, a self-­portrait in Beautiful Wales (1905), experiences poetry as a revelation: ‘at the age of sixteen or seventeen, poetry gave him a second world in which he thenceforth moved with a rapture which I do not often observe in the religious’. In Beautiful Wales Thomas also says—­presumably of his reviewing: ‘Nothing is to be compared with the pleasure of seeing the stars thus in the east, when most eyes are watching the west, except perhaps to read a fresh modern poet, straight from the press, before any one has praised it, and to know that it is good.’17 Thomas would not always be so starry-­eyed about new poetry. But his negative criticism, too, is integral to his formation as critic and poet: the essential obverse of his praise for Yeats or Frost or D. H. Lawrence. Selecting from Thomas’s Writings on Poetry This volume mainly consists of reviews. Thomas and his wife Helen preserved most of Thomas’s reviews and critical articles in huge scrapbooks, now held in the Edward Thomas Archive, Special Collections and Archives, Cardiff University. Without that valuable resource, it would have been difficult to gather or guarantee many items assembled here. In the early twentieth century, much reviewing remained anonymous (a practice continued by the Times Literary Supplement until the mid-­1970s). Editorial policies differed or fluctuated on the matter. Thomas’s original articles are always signed, but by no means all his reviews. James Milne, his long-­term editor at the Chronicle, reports that ‘he hardly cared whether a review by him appeared with his name or without it’.18

14  Letter, 20 November 1907 (ETFN 59, 33). 15 Letter, 26 February 1908 (LGB, 158–9): by ‘illuded’ (deceived) ET seems to mean imaginatively transported. 16  ‘What an evil world it is that such vices as poetry should be on the increase. . . . It is the only vice of which I ever cured myself ’ (letter to William Elsey, 4 December 1900, ETFN 77, 5). 17  ETPW II, 135, 109. 18  James Milne, The Memoirs of a Bookman (London: John Murray, 1934), 149.

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Introduction

xix

Owing to the sheer mass of Thomas’s poetry reviews, this is the most pervasively ‘selected’ volume in the Selected Edition. Of necessity, editorial taste has had a larger shaping role. For instance, reviews of poetic no-­hopers are usually omitted; although two round-­ups, from 1901 and 1903, appear nearly in full.19 As for cuts in other reviews, these have been made for several ­reasons: where a review only partly concerns a noteworthy poet; where only Thomas’s generalizations about poetry seem of interest; where his reviews of the same book overlap; where some passages are unduly narrative or descriptive or quotation-­heavy. At the same time, poems quoted with special enthusiasm have been given their proper space. Longer essays or review-­ articles, written for journals such as the Bookman, English Review, and Poetry and Drama, are more often uncut. Selective criteria have also necessarily been applied to Thomas’s three books about poetry: Feminine Influence on the Poets (1910), Algernon Charles Swinburne (1912), and the briefer Keats (1916). Thomas’s prose generally requires ‘selection’ because his vast output prevented him (as he well knew) from always writing at the highest pitch. Feminine Influence on the Poets is a case in point: a mix of original critical insights and routine literary history. Swinburne appears in full in Volume V, but a few extracts are included here to maintain a sense of aesthetic chronology. Keats, minus its biographical aspects, ends the volume. Extracts from two other critical books, Maurice Maeterlinck (1911) and Walter Pater (1913), mark important stages in Thomas’s thinking about poetry. The five short passages from Pater suggest how, before he met Robert Frost, his own ideas about ‘speech and literature’ were coming together.20 The chapter from Maeterlinck, which engages with Symbolist poetry, concentrates Thomas’s critical principles and anticipates his creative practice. It amounts to an ars poetica. ‘A Writing Animal’ W. H. Hudson, who knew Thomas well, thought that he never seemed ‘to be quite or wholly himself ’ in his country books; and that: ‘As a critic of poetry he was . . . less influenced by other writers than in his creative work.’21 Perhaps 19  See [15], [71]. 20  ‘And you really should start doing a book on speech and literature, or you will find me mistaking your ideas for mine & doing it myself. . . . However, my “Pater” would show you I had got onto the scent already.’ Letter to RF, 19 May 1914 (RFET, 9–10). 21  Letters from W.  H.  Hudson to Edward Garnett (London: J.  M.  Dent, 1925), 177. Hudson’s sense of what hampered ET as a creator may have helped him as a critic (and poet-­in-­waiting): ‘His appreciation of other men’s work has been too keen—­too ineradicable.’ When Hudson wrote his letter (9 July 1917), he had not yet read ET’s Poems; by which, in fact, he was ‘a little disappointed’ (29 November; ibid., 180).

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it was always Thomas’s involvement with poetry, his finger on its pulse, which placed him in the literary vanguard. Nevertheless, all his writings before December 1914 are intertwined in that they belong to the characteristic profile of an early twentieth-­century ‘man of letters’. Thomas drew on his reviews and other articles when writing his books: one reason for the scrapbook files. Another reason may be that he did, indeed, value his critical work more than his moans acknowledged. Despite self-­deprecation, he was clearly flattered when Walter de la Mare, ‘the only man I do not know who has ever written to me about my reviews’, suggested that he might turn them into a book: I have never dreamed of collecting my reviews. I live by them & that seems to me to be wonderful enough without sending the poor things out in fine raiment to beg once more. For as I dislike writing about books and do it in haste & in such abundance, I assume it is valueless.22

Both fate and choice had led to Thomas ‘living by’ reviews. In 1900, aged 22, already married and the father of a son, he graduated from Oxford University with a second-­class degree in history. Illness (gonorrhoea, contracted during Oxford’s celebration of the Relief of Mafeking) largely accounted for a result that ruled out his once-­likely prospect of an academic career.23 Thomas’s civil-­servant father pressurized him to join the Civil Service; but he spurned this option because he now hoped to earn a living as a writer and literary journalist. Such an ambition was not just a romantic or Oedipal gesture. To quote John Gross: ‘By the 1860s, as outlets continued to multiply, literary journalism was at last becoming a secure enough profession for it to attract a steady flow of talent from the universities.’24 Yet Thomas was entering a market-­place which exacted hidden costs. His ‘creative work’ would suffer, as he sought publishers for books he wanted to write or took commissions for books he didn’t want to write. Deadlines and exhaustion could turn the first kind of book into the second. The market would also condition Thomas’s relations with the newspapers and journals for which he reviewed; the nature of the books he reviewed; his attitudes as a critic.

22  Letters to de la Mare, 14 November and 27 August 1906 (PTP, 30, 29). In fact, de la Mare, like Hudson, thought that ET’s original writings came ‘from a different hand from the Chronicle reviewer’s’, as an ‘annoyed’ ET reported to GB on 22 April 1907 (LGB, 138). 23 See JMW, 87–91. 24  John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of English Literary Life since 1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 25.

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xxi

1900 might be termed the moment of ‘peak print’. Philip Waller begins his magisterial study, Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918: The late Victorian period ushered in an unprecedented phenomenon, a mass reading public. We may now want to add that this was both the first and the only mass literary age.25

Thomas exemplifies the multi-­tasking professional author to whom the expanding print-­culture of the nineteenth century had given birth. (Yeats had followed a similar path in the 1890s, until Lady Gregory’s patronage relieved him from dependence on reviewing and editing.) He could count on ever-­increasing literacy; well-­used public libraries; the advent of new genres and publishers; cheap reprints that required editors or introducers; the ‘multi­ply­ing outlets’ for articles and reviews. If less highbrow media were also multiplying, a new hunger for literary education was fed by evening classes, biographies, anthologies, and critical studies, as well as by editions and reprints. Further, Thomas had an alternative paternal model and mentor in Helen’s father, James Ashcroft Noble (1844–96). Very much a late Victorian man of letters, Noble had worked as editor and literary editor in Liverpool and Manchester newspapers before coming to London: the print metropolis. In 1892 the Irish writer Jane Barlow ruefully reflected on ‘London’s centri­ pet­al force, which draws in first all literary produce, and next, by a natural sequence, the producers likewise’.26 Noble contributed to the Spectator and the Yellow Book; helped to found another periodical, the New Age; and published collections of literary criticism such as The Sonnet in England and Other Essays (1893). He also published Verses of a Prose-­Writer (1887): an odd portent. Encouraged by Noble, Thomas became virtually a teenager of letters in the mid-­1890s. He began by writing short pieces on the countryside, mainly for the Speaker: a generalist, pro-­Liberal weekly. These essays combine the influence of Richard Jefferies with a touch of fin-­de-­siècle mysticism (‘Hills of the Druids’). In 1897 Thomas published his first book, The Woodland Life. In September 1899, aged 21, he published his first critical work, ‘The Frontiers of English Prose’: a strangely prophetic article for the journal Literature, and now the first item in this volume.27 During the early 1900s Thomas published two commissioned books, Oxford (1903) and Beautiful Wales, and two self-­generated books: Horae Solitariae (1902)—a set of introspective essays—­and The Heart of England 25  Philip Waller, Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3. 26  B: June 1892. 27 For Literature, see [xliv].

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(1906). His work on the latter, however, he came to regard as ‘awful labour’, partly because he had now established himself as a literary journalist. He lamented to Bottomley: Even now I would give up if I dared & lose the £100 cheerfully. I pray it will be my last book if it ever become a book. Henceforth I cease to write ‘about the country’ & become a reviewer with a wife & family, tout court & no deception.28

In Autumn 1900 Thomas might have wished for the burdens he carried in 1906. Quoting from his letters, Jean Moorcroft Wilson nicely summarizes his initial odyssey among London editors: Literature . . . gave him ‘one wretched book to review’, the Daily News came to ‘no decision’, the Star ‘was (of course) rude’, the Academy ‘stupid’, the Literary World ‘made no promises’, the World was ‘undecided’ and the New Century ‘penniless’.  .  . . Only Henry Nevinson of the Daily Chronicle was positive, promising to put Thomas down to review poetry, essays and other elevated literature.29

Luckily, by 1905 Thomas had acquired an excellent agent, Charles Francis (‘Frank’) Cazenove—­who often found him a demanding client: ‘As what you want to say is not of the obvious kind which publishers can grasp at once, and as you prefer not to write first and sell the book afterwards, your agent’s work is necessarily—­please don’t think I am grumbling at all—­rather more difficult than is the case with most of the men for whom one acts.’30 Cazenove (1870–1915) was a partner in the Literary Agency of London: one of several such agencies established in the 1890s as a by-­product of peak print.31 He worked hard to secure good commissions and terms for Thomas, but the letter quoted above responds to a letter in which Thomas, whose income was then (September 1912) declining, has ended their financial—­although not personal—­relationship: ‘I must see what a change will do, if anything can be done at all.’32 Thomas was, indeed, well aware of ‘my unsaleable vices’, and had earlier admitted: ‘I want money but I can only write what I am able to write’.33 Back in 1904, he was also fortunate to become friendly with Edward Garnett: publisher’s reader and editor, critic, reputation-­maker, one-­man

28  Letter, 26 April 1906 (LGB, 107).   29  JMW, 92. 30  Letter from Cazenove, 16 September 1912 (ABL, 73); and see JMW, 140–1. 31 See Robert Gomme, ‘Edward Thomas and the Literary Agency of London’, The Book Collector 47, 1 (Spring 1998), 67–78. 32  Letter, 14 September 1912 (ABL, 518). 33  Letters, 3 December 1911, 17 December 1909 (ABL, 483, 401).

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­literary hub.34 Garnett and Hudson initiated the Thursday lunchtime literary gatherings at the Mont Blanc restaurant in London, which Thomas often attended, and which were one of his intellectual (also professional) lifelines. Garnett, who advised and published Joseph Conrad and D.  H.  Lawrence, published Thomas’s autobiographical novel The Happy-­Go-­Lucky Morgans (1913). Earlier, he ‘did all he could to open publishers’ doors for Thomas’.35 Thomas appreciated Garnett’s ‘direct and indirect criticism of me and my work’, and took his advice, despite initial mixed feelings: Certainly his talk is far better than his writing. . . . I don’t know anybody who seems to see literature & life as a whole so well as he, judging from his talk. But nevertheless I think that my respect for his opinion of my own work is possibly exaggerated by feeling that he was at one time reluctant to like it & even perhaps antipathetic to me & it; so that I had something to break down before reaching him & to succeed in that would always please my vanity. He is like the one sinner who repenteth.36

Garnett was also initially slow to appreciate Thomas’s poems, but would later call him ‘the finest poet of his generation’: ‘His method is so subtly beautiful that few people understand how great his achievement is.’37 Even with back-­up from Cazenove, Garnett, and the Mont Blanc network, Thomas still had to court publishers and editors in person when he made working visits to London from his rural homes (first in Kent, then in Hampshire). Ashley Gibson, also a literary journalist, remembers Thomas as a fellow-­professional: He always . . . went out of his way to describe himself, in writing and talking, as a journalist, laying a wistful emphasis on the fact that literature was his livelihood. That was of course the case. The sordid connotation of the fact was what he hated—­the perpetual foraging for commissions, the utter weariness of a task three parts of which was uncongenial. But if he detested his job, he took it seriously. As a critic, as a practical journalist since he would have it so, no one could have been prompter, more competent, more scrupulously and uprightly just. . . . Editors who sent him books counted with reliance on the receipt within a week of the neatest parcel of Hellenic script, scholarly, acute, 34  Edward Garnett (1868–1937) worked successively for several publishers, including T. Fisher Unwin, Heinemann, and Duckworth—­with whom he published The Happy-­Go-­Lucky Morgans. 35  Helen Smith, The Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett (London: Jonathan Cape, 2017), 162. 36  Letter to Garnett, 13 March 1909 (SL, 52); letter to GB, 15 March 1909 (LGB, 181). ET is replying to a letter (9 March) in which GB has wondered, perhaps a little jealously, ‘what it is in Edward Garnett that draws you and makes you trust his opinions so much’ (quoted, ETGB, 65). 37  See Smith, Uncommon Reader, 264.

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illuminating stuff, an ornament to any literary page.  .  . . And for all his avoidance of the cymbals and the big drum, he came in time to exert a singular authority. He made reputations.38

Other contemporary witness confirms that Thomas was held back by his incapacity for self-­promotion. The ‘tramp-­poet’ W. H. Davies describes him as ‘too gentle, and not blustering enough to compete with others who were less able to do the work’; and says: ‘We find it the same when a big, saucy, able-­bodied beggar can make more money than even a man that is blind.’39 If Henry Nevinson, literary editor of the Daily Chronicle, had been ‘positive’ at their first meeting, this was despite Thomas’s poor interview-­technique: Almost too shy to speak, he sat down proudly and asked if I could give him work. I enquired what work he could do, and he said ‘None.’40

But Nevinson did give him work; and in December 1902 Thomas ‘heard unofficially’ that he was ‘now to get the review-­books which used to go to Lionel Johnson who died last month’.41 Most significantly, that meant ­becoming the Chronicle’s regular poetry reviewer. After leaving Oxford in 1890, Johnson had prefigured Thomas by being ‘almost daily engaged in reviewing’.42 In retrospect, even if Thomas was only a decade younger than Johnson, this seems an epoch-­defining transition: that is, from a poet-­critic associated with Aestheticism, a member of the 1890s Rhymers’ Club, to a critic (and future poet) better adapted to the literary flux of the early twentieth century. For years, the Chronicle was Thomas’s most reliable source of income. But in 1908 he noted that ‘the brave days when I could make a bare living out of the Chronicle alone [were] gone’;43 his overall earnings fluctuated; and he always suffered bouts of financial anxiety. Even when he wished to concentrate on his own writing, he took every reviewing job he could: too few jobs causing as much anxiety as too many. He often reviewed the same book twice or even three times. While part-­protected by anonymity, Thomas somehow contrived to vary his approach—­as in his three reviews of Frost’s North of Boston. Here he certainly out-­shone Arthur Symons. On one typical occa38  Review of ET, Cloud Castle and Other Papers (B: January 1923). 39  W. H. Davies, ‘My Memory of Edward Thomas’ (1920), in Rory Waterman (ed.), W. H. Davies The True Traveller: A Reader (Manchester: Carcanet, 2015), 243–5. 40 Henry W. Nevinson, Changes and Chances (London: Nisbet, 1923), 195. 41  SL, 22; for Johnson, see [382] and Appendix [705]. 42  Letter, 18 December 1894, Lionel Johnson, Selected Letters, ed. Murray Pittock (Edinburgh: Tragara Press, 1988), 23. 43  Letter to GB, 7 February 1908 (LGB, 155).

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sion ‘it was shrewdly suspected that [Symons] was the critic who in the Quarterly, the Saturday Review, and the Athenaeum used precisely the same phrases and words’ about a collection by Stephen Phillips.44 In Autumn 1906 Thomas began to review regularly for the Morning Post, his friend Hilaire Belloc having become literary editor. He sometimes reviewed the same book on the same day in the Post and Chronicle. He was also reviewing more occasionally for the Saturday Review and, from January 1907, for the Bookman. (Thomas’s critical outlets are discussed in the next section.) Other literary tasks included editing The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air (1907), an oblique work of criticism, and providing introductions for J. M. Dent’s Everyman’s Library.45 Garnett may have recommended Thomas to the Library’s editor, the Welsh poet Ernest Rhys, who became a friend. In February 1911 Thomas told Bottomley: ‘Reviewing is failing me a little’; and in April he referred to an ‘unpleasant tendency’ in his work: ‘the necessity of producing many books instead of a few & much reviewing’, because ‘[t]he Chronicle & Morning Post are taking away my reviewing’.46 This was true of the Post, where Belloc had ceased to be literary editor, but not then of the Chronicle; although Thomas was ever-­unhappy with James Milne, Nevinson’s successor as literary editor (see below), his overall reviewing total was starting to drop, and he complained of being given less space and hence a smaller fee. Certainly, he wrote fewer two-­column Chronicle reviews (1,500 words). A year later, neither Thomas’s books nor reviews seemed to be wanted. He told Cazenove that he had ‘nothing to go on with after [Swinburne]’, and that his reviewing was ‘still decreasing’.47 Thomas’s preference evidently see-­sawed as between his two literary burdens. In 1909, unlike 1911, he had favoured books: Nobody wants me to do a book now, alas (for my purse)! So I have to do all the reviewing I can get. How I hate it.48

Yet he could find reviewing less spiritually wearing than book-­commissions: ‘Low as reviewing is it is only for the day & can be shaken off, but continuous hack-­writing of books seems to me worse, more damaging to freedom & reputation.’ He also noted that ‘having to write books’ was ‘costly’ and paid

44  Comment in WS: 3 May 1902. 45  e.g., introductions to George Herbert’s The Temple and A Priest to the Temple (1908), The Plays and Poems of Christopher Marlowe (1909), William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1912). 46  Letters, 23 February and 14 April 1911 (LGB, 209, 211). 47  Letter, 4 April 1912 (ABL, 499). 48  Letter, 12 October 1909 (LGB, 195).

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‘less than reviews’.49 Nevertheless, Thomas persisted in seeking (often unlikely) commissions. Two left-­field ideas were a travel-­book based on ‘a Mediterranean voyage or one as far as Constantinople in a Welsh trading ship’ and ‘an anthology of boxing & fighting’. (He made some practical plans for the voyage, but did not follow through.) Closer to home or the bone was a proposed ‘Anthology of the 100 Worst Poems, the work of living authors excluded’. In fact, the suggestions with which Thomas bombarded Cazenove, such as a book on Poets Laureate, mostly concerned poetry. In 1913, when their professional relationship had partly resumed, he genuinely wanted to write a book about Shelley.50 Thomas’s overall reviewing-­total dropped further in 1912–13, as did the number of his Chronicle reviews. Meanwhile he was working on books (Swinburne, The Happy-­Go-­Lucky Morgans, Keats); and, in June 1912, even envisaged a career-­change: ‘I am looking out for a job as secretary or librarian, & hoping I shall fail.’ Three weeks later, however, he reported that editors ‘are a little more favourable than they were’.51 His final review for the Chronicle appeared in April 1914. By then Thomas had come to rely on reviewing for the Bookman (in which his last few reviews appeared); on occasional articles for another monthly journal, the English Review; and on contributions to weeklies: the New Weekly, T. P.’s Weekly. He sometimes reviewed for the Daily News, where, in July 1914, he hailed Frost’s North of Boston as ‘revolutionary’. Frost, whom Thomas had met in October 1913, was also revolutionizing Thomas’s literary life. In January 1913 something had already ‘changed’ in that Thomas offered his services, unpaid, to Harold Monro’s new magazine Poetry and Drama: ‘My point of view has changed: I had better work for nothing than not at all.’ When Monro sent him a cheque for a review-­article on Hardy, Thomas scrupulously returned it, not only because ‘we had a distinct understanding that I was to review for nothing’, but also because: ‘I might thus appear to have lengthened [the article] on purpose’.52 Thus, even before the war, Thomas’s type of freelance literary career had become less sustainable. For instance, in February 1914 Cazenove told him that ‘the reprint business, apart from popular fiction and Everyman, is in the ordinary way dead’; and in May, when Thomas proposed a book on Christina Rossetti,

49  Letter to Harold Monro, 19 May 1911, Poetry Wales 13, 4 (Spring 1978), 46; letter to Walter de la Mare, 10 July 1911 (PTP, 107). 50  Letters to Cazenove, 16 September 1911; 18 June, 10 November, 15 August, and 14 October 1913 (ABL, 468, 523, 537, 530, 535). 51  Letters to Walter de la Mare, 27 June and 22 July 1912 (PTP, 133–4). 52  Letters to Monro, 3 January and 11 October 1913, Poetry Wales 13, 4 (Spring 1978), 54, 57.

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that publishers were disinclined ‘to do the book about books or writers’.53 The final issue of Poetry and Drama (December 1914) contained Thomas’s review-­article ‘War Poetry’. By then, the pre-­war literary market had wholly collapsed. Peak print was over. Thomas was writing poems, not reviews—­an ill wind: ‘There is little work that has to be done, so I do the other kind.’54 He was also agonizing over an existential decision: whether to enlist or to try his literary fortunes, with Frost’s help, in America (the war obliged Frost to end his English sojourn in February 1915). Thomas had to consider how either choice would affect his family financially. He was still apparently undecided when, on 24 June 1915, he complained to Garnett about ‘the insecurity of the last three years’ and asked for his help in obtaining a pension from the Civil List; yet also talked about the American plan.55 In mid-­July Thomas abruptly joined the Artists Rifles. In November he was sent to Hare Hall Camp, Romford, Essex, where he became a map-­reading instructor. In June 1916 he applied for a commission in the Royal Garrison Artillery. This further choice, possibly because he wanted to get closer to the war, was boosted by a £300 grant from the Royal Literary Fund in lieu of a pension. Everyman’s Library, established in 1906, epitomizes the positive, democratic spirit of peak print. But there was a dark side. In his essay ‘How I Began’ Thomas traces a kind of linguistic Fall: ‘Every one begins by talking, stumbles into writing, succumbs to print.’56 He often attacks the very culture on which he depends: a culture that may have induced or aggravated the psychological disturbance, to the point of suicide, recorded in some letters: ‘My great enemy is physical exhaustion which makes my brain so wild that I am almost capable of anything & fear I shall some day prove it.’57 Thomas’s neurotic symptoms (which include graphophobia and bibliophobia) seem bound up with creative frustration: distress-­signals from the repressed poet in him, the poet drawn to speech and orality. Yet there may also be objective point to his recurrent notion that books are taking over: multiplying and interbreeding without reference to life; and that, by ‘succumbing to print’— and to print about print—­he is complicit in this process. When he damns the seventeenth-­century poet Abraham Cowley as ‘a writing animal’, he damns himself. In The Icknield Way (1913) he wryly owns the term: ‘I am a writing animal.’58 In 1907 Thomas warned, with self-­irony: 53  Letters, 26 February and 22 May 1914 (ABL, 110, 112). 54  Letter, 19 December 1914 (LGB, 240). 55  SL, 115. 56  T. P.’s Weekly: 31 January 1913 (ETPW I, 175). 57  Letter, 2 February 1905 (LGB, 78). 58  Review of Cowley’s Poems [167]; Edward Thomas, The Icknield Way (London: Constable, 1913), v.

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It is a matter for alarm that nearly everyone who has read has also written a book, it is hardly less so that a large number of writers are also readers of books, inspired by books and owing to books a great part of their material. . . . [A] huge body of literature or printed matter is growing up, written by book-­ ridden men for the book-­ridden, not so much excluding the current life of Nature and humanity as taking it for dead.59

The Happy-­Go-­Lucky Morgans contains an even more savagely self-­ironical portrait of the ‘book-­ridden’ author. ‘Mr Torrance’ is trapped by a ‘sullen host of books’ in a nightmarish study-­library: No natural light could reach the ceiling or the corners. Instead of light, books covered the walls, books in a number of black-­stained bookcases of various widths, all equal in height with the room, except one that was cut short by a grate in which I never saw a fire. . . . [Mr Torrance] wrote what he was both reluctant and incompetent to write, at the request of a firm of publishers whose ambition was to have a bad, but nice-­looking, book on everything and everybody, written by some young university man with private means . . . or a doomed hack like Mr Torrance.60

In March 1914, nine months before he would cease to be either a prose man or a literary journalist, Thomas wrote a similarly self-­lacerating account of reviewing: ‘Reviewing: An Unskilled Labour.’ Here he represents reviewers as the bottom-­feeders of print-­culture: ‘a rabble of ridiculous and unlovely muddlers’, most of whom ‘have no aim clearly before them, except of covering space and putting the name of the book at the top’.61 Thomas’s negative feelings about reviewing had always included doubt of its validity (‘the futility of reviewing’), self-­doubt (‘my insolence in reviewing any book’), and the wounds of being reviewed himself.62 His ‘doomed hack’ or ‘unlovely muddler’ belongs somewhere between George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), which grimly anatomizes peak print, and George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). Thomas was himself a ‘university man’, but without ‘private means’. Jean Moorcroft Wilson declines to place Thomas in New Grub Street.63 It’s true that he once declared to Cazenove: ‘I am not a starving author’; and that he told Bottomley, if depressively, in 1905:

59  Review of Henry Charles Beeching, Provincial Letters and Other Papers (MP: 14 February 1907). 60  ETPW I, 77, 80. 61  See [604]. 62  Letter, 4 July 1905 (LGB, 90). 63 See JMW, 6.

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The year has passed; the Spring has done without me; I have not had one good hour of standing still & forgetting time. But I make over £200 a year, or can expect to.64

£200 a year in 1905 (in 1906 Thomas mentions ‘an income of £250’)65 would be around £26,000 today: not princely, but Thomas as ‘man of letters’ certainly never knew the dire penury suffered by Gissing’s tragic author-­hero, Edwin Reardon. Yet in February 1914 he had already approached the Royal Literary Fund for help (he received £100), on the grounds that his annual income had fallen from a healthy £400 in 1909 back to £250.66 Two psycho-­ social parallels with Reardon are chronic anxiety—­not only financial—­and the tension between commerce and artistic or critical values. Thomas could resent better networkers, including some writers whom he had helped up the literary ladder, such as Arthur Ransome (‘His flow & confidence!’) and Walter de la Mare: ‘He is a too busy man now, reading for Heinemann & reviewing multifariously & never quite unpuckering in our scanty meetings.’67 Earlier that year (January 1912) Thomas had rather abjectly asked de la Mare: ‘If you are giving up parts of your reviewing,—if you feel that you might have a voice in controlling what you give up,—if you also feel that you could recommend me,—& if you feel, furthermore, that you would be listened to while recommending me,—then would you?’68 In June 1915 he was annoyed when de la Mare, despite his higher literary earnings, obtained a Civil List pension; whereas: ‘I am told I have no chance myself.’69 In New Grub Street Reardon’s antithesis, the worldly Jasper Milvain, a successful player of the print-­market, offers this paradox: ‘You have to become famous before you can secure the attention which would give fame.’ According to Milvain, writers must accept that the ‘flood of literature that pours forth week after week’ has had Darwinian consequences: ‘The struggle for existence among books is nowadays as severe as among men.’70 The dark side of peak print surfaces in ‘The long small room’: a valedictory poem that Thomas (now a Second Lieutenant in the Artillery) wrote before embarking for the Western Front in January 1917. He would be killed on 9 April, the first day of the Battle of Arras. The poem takes its imagery from a house where Thomas had often secluded himself to work. Its last two 64  Letters, 13 May 1909 (ABL, 380); 30 June 1905 (LGB, 87). 65  Letter, 24 January 1906 (LGB, 103). 66  See R. George Thomas, Edward Thomas: A Portrait (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 216. 67  Letters, 3 May 1905, 31 October 1912 (LGB, 84, 224). Like ET, both writers reviewed for the Bookman. For his ambivalent attitude to Ransome, see also [451n.]. 68  PTP, 123. 69 See RFET, 74. 70  George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891; London: Penguin, 2012), 433, 513.

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stanzas represent life on earth as the macabre drudgery of ‘a writing animal’, while the act of writing symbolizes doom indeed: When I look back I am like moon, sparrow and mouse That witnessed what they could never understand Or alter or prevent in the dark house. One thing remains the same—­this my right hand Crawling crab-­like over the clean white page, Resting awhile each morning on the pillow, Then once more starting to crawl on towards age. The hundred last leaves stream upon the willow.71

‘Old Literary Pages’ Reviewing was integral to peak print: to the ‘journalising society’ that Victorian Britain became.72 Book reviews had begun to matter in the early nineteenth century, with the advent of the Edinburgh Review (1802) and Quarterly Review (1809). Effectively, the ‘review’ (still in journal-­titles today) became the ground of modern literary criticism. Victorian men of letters, like Matthew Arnold, published collections of their reviews and critical essays. Thomas reviewed for two long-­lived weeklies founded in the era and spirit of Arnold: the Academy, originally a monthly, and the Saturday Review. But they did not necessarily maintain the Arnoldian spirit (see next section), nor was/is reviewing always a high-­minded enterprise. Waller’s discussion of ‘Reviews and Reviewers’ charts the puffery and ‘log-­rolling’ generated by the book-­world’s Darwinian struggle, by editors’ need for publishers to advertise.73 Reviewing was sucked into the orbit where publishers, authors (often reviewers themselves) and various middlemen vied for the growing popular audience. Poetry was not immune. Harold Monro attacked the corruption whereby ‘great reputations . . . must not be impugned [and] insipid critics are preferred provided they have two or three hundred cliché phrases at their command, or tired critics, sometimes too hungry to object to writing what they are told’. Ultimately: ‘Their sentences are quoted as “Opinions of the Press”.’74 Yet superior publishers and middlemen, like Edward Garnett, were then promoting writers who became foundational to modern literature; and what we now term ‘literary fiction’ could be popular (Thomas Hardy), if less 71  ACP, 137. 72  Alvin Sullivan, British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913 (Westport, CT: The Greenwood Press, 1984), xiii. 73 Waller, Writers, Readers, and Reputations, 116–74. 74  PD II, 5: March 1914, 53.

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so than the romances of Marie Corelli. Even some poets—­Rudyard Kipling, Henry Newbolt and John Masefield, not to mention Thomas’s bête noire Ella Wheeler Wilcox—­had large sales. After Tennyson died in 1892, his works topped bookshop sales-­lists in the Bookman. Up to a point, peak print was less stratified than is the book-­world or literary-­critical world of today. Thus we find Thomas writing about Meredith, Yeats, Finch, and Shelley for the Daily Chronicle. Yet it was not quite inevitable that he should have done so. Thomas owed a career-­debt not only to the Zeitgeist, but also specifically to the Chronicle’s progressive ethos and its literary editor, Henry Woodd Nevinson (1856–1941). Nevinson, who helped Thomas in other ways too, became a friend—­and dedicatee of The Heart of England. Thomas describes him as ‘unspoilt by London journalism’.75 Nevinson did not confine his journalism to London. He had reported on the Graeco-­Turkish War and the Second Boer War, and exposed slave-­conditions in Portuguese Angola. After leaving the Chronicle (in 1903), he travelled in India and Russia. Back home, he helped to set up the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage. When the Great War began, Nevinson again became a war correspondent, being wounded at Gallipoli (the war-­ artist, Christopher Nevinson, was his son). Nevinson was himself indebted to a great newspaper-­editor: H.  W.  Massingham (1860–1924). Founded in 1872, the politically Liberal Chronicle was radicalized in the 1890s by Massingham, who lost the editorship in 1899 because he opposed the Second Boer War. From 1907 Massingham edited the Nation, formerly Speaker, to which both Nevinson and Thomas contributed. Massingham made the Nation a lively radical-­Liberal journal; but, angry with Lloyd George and the Liberals over their approach to the Great War, he joined the Labour Party, and resigned the editorship in 1923. In 1931 the Nation merged with the New Statesman to create a firmly left-­wing periodical. A year earlier the Chronicle’s merger with another Liberal paper, the Daily News, had established the left-­ of-­centre News Chronicle. In effect, Thomas benefited from—­and belonged to—­a progressive dynamic, at once political and cultural, which had begun when Massingham made the Chronicle ‘violently literary and artistic’.76 Nevinson, who calls it ‘the most conspicuous and most heroic paper in London’, celebrates Massingham as ‘[p]assionate, especially against injustice and cruelty’, a crusader against ‘the heavy battalions of wealth and Society, of authority and custom, of military force and traditions of conquest’.77 75  Letter, 16 September 1908 (LGB, 168). 76  Joseph Pennell, Adventures of an Illustrator (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1925), 247. 77 Nevinson, Changes and Chances, 182, 186–7.

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Massingham believed that literature was part of the crusade: hence the Chronicle’s key role in Thomas’s career. Nevinson writes: The mere formation of that ‘Literary Page’ was characteristic. An attempt had been made at it early in 1891, I think, when an extra sheet was pasted into the Chronicle once a week. Later in that year it developed into a daily column, and at that time, or in the spring of 1892, Massingham took over the editing of ‘The Page’, as we always called it.78

Besides ‘[t]hree whole columns’ being ‘nearly always given to reviews or other literary subjects every day’, there was a monthly Literary Supplement of ‘about eleven columns’: a model imitated by the TLS, launched in 1902, until it became autonomous in 1914. Nevinson claims that, ‘in those fortunate days for literature’, to be the Chronicle’s literary editor ‘was a rather important position’. He also claims, contra Thomas’s bleak depiction of reviewers as ‘writing in an indifferent vacuum’, that ‘hundreds or thousands of people took the Chronicle for those columns and nothing else’; and prides himself on having assembled ‘about the finest set of literary critics then to be imagined’.79 Whatever its strictly literary readership, the paper’s circulation was indeed high: 400,000 in 1914, then doubled by the war, during which the Chronicle sold more copies than did all the other London newspapers combined. Besides Thomas, Nevinson’s ‘set’ included William Archer, Arthur Waugh, and George Bernard Shaw. In 1905 Thomas worried about having ‘to do a signed review of dear Nevinson’s latest book’ (Books and Personalities) because it ‘is a not very good collection of newspaper reviews etc.—a very hard thing, especially as I am nearly 20 years younger than he & much in his debt and much liking & admiring him’.80 Thomas’s largely positive review may rebuke his own reservations: ‘He is entirely free from that one common virtue of critics, which is superiority to the author criticised.’81 In a later (again signed) review of Nevinson’s Essays in Freedom (1909), Thomas praises him for combining a ‘calm style’ with an ‘intrepid and defiant spirit’, and pays a significant tribute: The fact seems to be that it has been given to Mr Nevinson, not to compete with life by transferring it to paper, but to distil a life of adventure in the body and in the spirit into ideas, and to prove the truth of his assertion that ‘in the school of danger’ men learn ‘the politeness of equality’ by a natural fearlessness and grace to which it is hard to find a parallel, and in our time perhaps 78  H. J. Massingham (ed.), HWM: A Selection from the Writings of H. W. Massingham (London: Jonathan Cape, 1925), 153–4. 79 Nevinson, Changes and Chances, 190–1; and see ‘Reviewing: An Unskilled Labour’ [607]. 80  Letter, 17 February 1905 (LGB, 78). 81  DC: 4 March 1905.

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impossible. To use his own phrase for Sir Philip Sidney and his tribe, he is one of ‘The Knights of the Word’.82

Thomas did not get on nearly so well with James Milne (a Scot), who took over from Nevinson as Chronicle literary editor. He dubbed Milne ‘the Blind Man’, and thought him ‘neglectful & rude’, if ‘unintentionally’ so. Thomas may be a trifle paranoid when he alleges (in 1907–8) that Milne is marginalizing him, favouring other reviewers, and truncating his reviews to less than a column, because he ‘feels my innate hostility to him’.83 R. George Thomas notes that these complaints are not really borne out by that stage of Thomas’s history with the Chronicle. He also wonders whether Milne grasped how much Thomas depended on his income from reviewing.84 Certainly, Milne’s complacent memoirs indicate that, unlike Nevinson, he did not understand Thomas: ‘He carried the atmosphere of the country with him and its freshness and richness and poetry were in his eyes and his face.’ Other London observers noticed Thomas’s air of stress, and ‘poetry’ suggests hindsight rather than insight. Without self-­knowledge, it seems, Milne also recalls Thomas as ‘shrinking from all contact that was not sincere’.85 Yet the Chronicle remained Thomas’s most constant reviewing outlet up to 1914, and its ethos may have helped to keep alive his sense of literary possibility. Massingham’s imprint on the paper endured: an editor who ‘never tolerated the fashionable separation of literature, or of any other form of art, from actual daily life’.86 For Milne, the Chronicle had changed the situation whereby: ‘Literature and its affairs hardly came into the daily record of the nation’s life as reflected by the newspapers.’87 This is the context in which Thomas describes ‘our poets’ as ‘seriously absorbed in the life, social, political, philosophic, and artistic, of our day’.88 His early Chronicle reviews can manifest a Messianic spirit with regard to new poetry and the new century: an ‘evangelical’ pitch he never really lost. Admittedly, Thomas also came to review for the Tory Morning Post. But, even while moaning about Milne, he told Bottomley: ‘It is only in the Chronicle that I feel quite at ease & do my best when any best is possible.’89 In fact, the Post, too, was strong on literature and the arts in the early 1900s.90 Few literary journalists could afford to be ideologically choosy—‘I can 82  DC: 9 June 1909. 83  Letters, 24 January 1906, 7 February 1908, 11 October 1907 (LGB, 103, 155, 149). 84 See LGB, 149n., 155n. 85 Milne, Memoirs, 149–50. 88  See review [281]. 86  Massingham (ed.), HWM, 154. 87 Milne, Memoirs, 93. 89  Letter, 11 October 1907 (LGB, 149). 90 See Wilfrid Hindle, The Morning Post, 1772–1937: Portrait of a Newspaper (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1937; repr. 1974), 213.

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f­orswear nobody who will give me money’91—and Thomas never trimmed his critical opinions to fit the politics of different newspapers or journals. Witness his reviews of the same book for the Chronicle and the Post. There is no evidence that Milne (if ‘neglectful’) or Belloc pressurised him in any political way, or that he asked to review specific books which they declined to send him for any dubious reason. Thomas also placed his country-­sketches and meditative essays wherever he could. Indeed, his most ‘political’ reviews of any poet are his attacks on Kipling in the right-­wing Saturday Review.92 Thomas’s reviews sit alongside various takes on current affairs in other weekly journals too: from the Week’s Survey (of ‘Politics, Literature and Commerce’) early in the century, to the short-­lived New Weekly: born, March 1914, with an optimistic prospectus for critical ‘weeding and sifting . . . the discovery of what is alive, energetic, and sincere’; died, August 1914.93 The political articles in early twentieth-­century weeklies concern such issues as Women’s Suffrage, the House of Lords veto, Irish Home Rule, and the Ulster question—­until Ireland is abruptly superseded by more global ‘war and argument’, to quote Thomas’s poem ‘This is no case of petty right or wrong’. The poem also includes the statement: ‘I hate not Germans, nor grow hot / With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.’94 It’s instructive to note the print-­context of Thomas’s own moves into politics or cultural politics in 1914–15. His essay ‘This England’, which foreshadowed his decision to enlist, appeared in the Nation; the more documentary ‘Soldiers Everywhere’ in the New Statesman.95 And it was to the monthly English Review that he contributed ‘Tipperary’ and ‘It’s a Long, Long Way’, two ‘country articles [related] solely to the war’s influence’, and ‘England’: a broader reflection on nationality and war.96 The initial articles were commissioned by Austin Harrison, the Review’s editor; but Thomas had conceived, and (with Cazenove’s help) negotiated, an assignment, which entailed ‘travell[ing] through England, from Swindon to Newcastle-­on-­Tyne’ in late August and early September 1914, ‘listening to people, in railway carriages, trams, taverns, and public places, talking about the war and the effects of it’. Harrison (pro-­war and fiercely anti-­German) had made two stipulations: that Thomas should get away from ‘the Southern and agricultural districts’; that ‘nothing must be said which will stop recruiting’.97 Although the experience may have raised Thomas’s socio-­political consciousness, this was no switch to investigative 91  Letter to Walter de la Mare, 10 August 1907 (PTP, 39). 92  See [389], [454]. 93  NW: 21 March 1914. 94  ACP, 104. 95  ETPW II, 571–6; 590–2. 96  Letter from ET to Cazenove, 19 August 1914 (ABL, 552); ER: October 1914, December 1914, April 1915: see ETPW II, 526–58. 97  ETPW II, 539; letters from Cazenove to ET, 19 and 26 August 1914 (ABL, 123, 125).

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journalism. The special brand of patriotism, which he develops in his ‘English’ essays, is ultimately poetic—­an extension of his criticism, as is his wartime anthology This England.98 The politics of the English Review, broadly Liberal or ‘New Liberal’ (a more collectivist wing of the party), are usually, but perhaps wrongly, deemed peripheral to its significance as the most ambitious and influential British literary journal founded during the first decade of the twentieth century.99 Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells were involved in the journal’s gestation; and its founding editor, from November 1908 to January 1910, was Ford Madox [Hueffer] Ford (1873–1939). Far from signalling parochial concerns, the journal’s title masked Conradian irony. According to Ford, Conrad ‘felt a certain sardonic pleasure in the choosing so national a name for a periodical that promised to be singularly international in tone, that was started mainly in his not very English interest and conducted by myself who was growing every day more and more alien to the normal English trend of thought’.100 For instance, Constance Garnett, Edward’s wife, contributed translations of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Yet, under Ford, the Review engaged with domestic as well as foreign politics, and most contributors were Anglophone. They included ‘late-­Victorian luminaries’ like Henry James and Thomas Hardy; ‘Edwardian doyens’ like Wells, John Galsworthy, and W.  H.  Hudson; and young pretenders like Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Walter de la Mare—­and Edward Thomas.101 Ford was deposed as editor because his financial incompetence outweighed his editorial flair.102 The journal’s new owner, Sir Alfred Mond, appointed Harrison who (rather unfairly) has been seen as blunting its edge, while multiplying its circulation and advertising revenue. Lawrence called the Review ‘so piffling now’, but Harrison took his work more often than did other editors.103 It was Harrison who, in 1911, controversially published John Masefield’s long poem ‘The Everlasting Mercy’, with its frank depiction of a journey from sin to salvation. And, like Ford, 98  See Note to TE [647]. 99  See John Attridge, ‘Liberalism and Modernism in the Edwardian Era: New Liberals at Ford’s English Review’, in (ed.) Jason Harding, Ford Madox Ford, Modernist Magazines and Editing (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010), 169–83. 100  Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931), 379. 101  Attridge, ‘Liberalism and Modernism’, 180. 102  See Nora Tomlinson, ‘ “An Old Man Mad about Writing” but Hopeless with Money: Ford Madox Ford and the Finances of the English Review’, in Harding, Ford, Modernist Magazines and Editing, 143–51. 103  Letter to Edward Garnett (10 June 1913), George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (eds), The Letters of D.  H.  Lawrence, Vol. II: June 1913–October 1916 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 21. See Martha S. Vogeler, Austin Harrison and the English Review (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2008).

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Harrison featured writers from across the literary generations. Indeed, when Ford recruited Pound and Lewis, they were not yet writing in a particularly avant-­garde style. Because Ford (in 1924) became editor of the decidedly avant-­garde Transatlantic Review, and is also known for his war-­inflected tetralogy of novels, Parade’s End (1924–8), the ‘proto-­modernist’ elements of Ford’s English Review have been overstressed, as against more diverse ways in which this journal represented its literary and cultural moment. Thomas’s ‘condition of England’ wartime articles complicate Conrad’s irony. Earlier, he had written about William Morris for Ford, whose politics Eric Homberger places somewhere between Morris and the Fabianism of Wells. Thomas may belong on this spectrum too. He calls Morris’s Arthurian poems ‘not medieval, nor modern, but the work of a thoroughly modern man deeply and intelligently concerned with medieval things and things of no age, and he gives them a vivid dream-­life’.104 Thomas also reviewed Pound, de la Mare, and Frost for the Review; his obituary-­tribute to Rupert Brooke appeared there; and his wartime articles had been preceded by other original pieces, such as ‘Swansea Village’: a first excursion—­encouraged by Harrison and Cazenove—­into a more sociological mode.105 Despite its association with formidable novelists (Wells allowed Ford to print extracts from Tono-­ Bungay), the English Review paid serious attention to poetry. Lawrence figured in both his generic guises; and poems had their own section, headed ‘Modern Poetry’. Before the war, indeed, Ford was himself chiefly known as a poet. Thomas’s reviews of his work salute Ford’s gifts, while shrewdly judging that he has mistaken his métier: ‘a man of feeling and curiosity, with . . . a subtle sense of words’, but with ‘no remarkable melody, no original form’; ‘the verse of a prose writer’. Reviewing London Rhymes, Thomas hails Ford’s ‘very brilliant and ingenious mind’; but discerns ‘an impersonality and a mercurial adaptiveness that would be more happy and perhaps more valu­ able in dialogue or play’ than in ‘poems of a lyrical character’.106 Ford’s first editorial had announced ‘a periodical consecrated to the arts, to letters and to ideas’. He also wanted to create a ‘meeting-­place’ for what he saw as England’s atomised literati—‘each one isolated, as it were, upon a little hill’. The Review would indeed attract a fan-­club among young writers. Ford thought poorly of a country where ‘in the minds of engineers, empire-­ builders and moral or social reformers . . . imaginative literature occupies no 104  Eric Homberger, ‘Ford’s English Review: Englishness and its Discontents’, Agenda 27: 1, 4-­28 (Winter 1989–Spring 1990), 61–6; and see [345]. 105  See [358], [462], [633], [648]; ER: June 1914, 316–24. 106  Review of From Ireland, and Other Poems (DC: 5 August 1907); MP: 12 May 1910.

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place at all’.107 In defining the English Review against utilitarian mindsets and the mass book-­market, Ford accepts that it would be ‘commercially described as “of the ‘heavy’ order” ’.108 Here he may also define or defend the Review against the more middlebrow ethos of another monthly: the Bookman ­(circulation: 10,000). Founded in 1891, the Bookman was a phenomenon—­ perhaps the phenomenon—­of peak print. Its begetter and editor, [Sir] William Robertson Nicoll (1851–1923), even wanted to call it The New Grub Street Journal; but was warned that this would deter advertisers (of which he secured many). Nicoll conceived the Bookman as a sixpenny Magazine for Bookreaders, Bookbuyers, and Booksellers: in effect, a comprehensive guide through the print jungle. The Bookman’s contents included profiles of living writers, essays on dead writers, literary chat (‘Mr and Mrs Rudyard Kipling have been spending their honeymoon quietly in London’), lists of new publications, articles about publishers, book-­trade and bookshop information, advice for ‘Young Authors’, and reviews intended to be more readable than those in ‘heavier’ journals. Over the years, photographs and other visual effects multiplied, and there were bumper Christmas Supplements (in 1912 Thomas contributed a round-­up of ‘Poetry and Belles Lettres’). The Supplements could encompass special editions, such as a richly illustrated (in colour) Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1910). The Bookman may also have begun the practice of asking literary folk to nominate their books of the year: a practice that should have simultaneously ended, when Max Beerbohm responded that a ‘very amiable man values friendship above truth’; and that he would have named a book if only one ‘personal friend’ had published a book in 1906: ‘But quite fifty personal friends of mine have had books published in 1906. And I would rather not make quite forty-­nine personal enemies.’109 Nicoll grew up in Aberdeenshire, son of a bibliophile father who was a minister in the Free Church of Scotland. He followed his father into the ministry, while also writing and editing. In 1886 he moved to London, having been recruited by the publishing firm, Hodder and Stoughton. Besides the Bookman, Nicoll edited the nonconformist British Weekly: A Journal of Social and Christian Progress (circulation: 100,000). Contemporaries noted Nicoll’s contradictions: ‘a curious mixture of the practical, the ruthless, the devout, and even the mystical’; ‘the most successful Christian of his time’.110 Nicoll’s influence was felt throughout the book-­world—­his advocacy of J. M. Barrie 107  ER: December 1908, 157–8; ER: March 1909, 797; ER: September 1909, 318. 108  ER: December 1908, 157. 109  B: January 1907. 110  Quoted in Waller, Writers, Readers, and Reputations, 112.

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virtually created the Scottish ‘kailyard’ school—­while The British Weekly provided a platform or pulpit for his copious opinions, delivered under the pen-­name ‘Claudius Clear’. Andrew Lang wrote a satirical rhyme: ‘Will nobody boom me? / Oh Robertson Nicoll! / My prospects are gloomy, / Will nobody boom me?’111 Thomas was unhappy with an edition of Emily Brontë’s poems, to which Nicoll contributed; and he sums up The Round of the Clock, Nicoll’s quasi-­anthology of the human life-­span, as ‘a mass of imperfectly arranged notes, very numerous, but quite incomplete’.112 Nicoll may or may not have associated Thomas with these reviews, but the Bookman continued to employ him. In any case, the assistant editor (subsequently, editor), Arthur St John Adcock (1864–1930) headed a team who did the hands-­on work. John Gross remarks of the Bookman: ‘no English paper can ever have been more cosily, more lavishly, more exclusively devoted to the spirit of belles-­ lettres.’113 That seems unfair. Nicoll (averse to negative reviewers) was no reputation-­maker of Garnett’s or Ford’s calibre. But, himself an obsessive reader and writer, and driven by a desire to educate or convert, he undoubtedly wanted more people to read better books as well as more books. Unlike Thomas, he also wanted more people to write books: his daughter’s evocation of Nicoll’s overflowing library contrasts with Thomas’s oppressive ‘black-­ stained bookcases’: ‘In that room, even now that he is gone, happiness and keenness haunt the air.’114 Thomas may have Nicoll’s brand of literary democracy in mind when, reviewing a collection of critical essays, he acerbically asks: ‘what is the aim of such a book in these days of cheap reprints, numerous lectures, literary newspapers, and the enthronement in amicable dis­ agree­ment of Shakespeare and Miss Corelli?’115 In fact, most Bookman reviews and articles are closer to Shakespeare than to Corelli. Contributors during its first decade included Hardy, Yeats (a regular reviewer), Swinburne, Pater (reviewing The Picture of Dorian Gray), and Symons. James Ashcroft Noble wrote about Leslie Stephen for a series called ‘Living Critics’.116 One Bookman supplement was a substantial Keats-­Shelley Memorial Souvenir (1912), and the October 1914 issue led with a lengthy discussion (by Adcock) of poetry and war. Thomas mainly reviewed new poetry for the Bookman; but he also covered, for instance, a Life of Tolstoy, editions of Drummond of Hawthornden’s A Cypress Grove and Sidney’s Arcadia, and the Collected 111  Quoted in John Attenborough, A Living Memory: Hodder and Stoughton Publishers 1868– 1975 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975), 48. 112  See [480]; DC: 26 December 1910. 113 Gross, Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, 202. 114  B: July 1923. 115  Review of Stephen Gwynn, The Masters of English Literature (DC: 19 September 1904). 116  B: December 1895.

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Works of William Morris as they appeared. There was no shift in his critical language. The Bookman, like ‘heavier’ periodicals, could also give him more space, as for his first review of Morris’s works.117 The Bookman of March 1907 showcases Edward Thomas in a way that says something about the Bookman as well as about Thomas. Arthur Ransome profiles him in ‘The Bookman’ Gallery; and the issue also contains a laud­ atory review of The Heart of England, again by Ransome, and two lengthy signed reviews by Thomas.118 It says something about the Bookman that it should ‘boom’ such a relatively unknown author. What this says about Thomas concerns his position in print-­ culture at that date. Ransome’s profile begins hyperbolically: ‘The highest expression of the intellectual life of our day is probably to be found in the small group of essayists and miscellaneous writers of whom Mr Thomas is one.’ ‘Essayists and miscellaneous writers’ is a category to which Ransome also assigns Belloc, Beerbohm, and G. K. Chesterton. But he then claims that Thomas ‘expresses something in the modern attitude that not one of them attempts to express’. Ransome links Thomas’s ‘individuality’ with how he combines two influences in both his criticism and his original work: Walter Pater’s ‘precision of speech’ and Richard Jefferies’s ‘accuracy of observation’. Similarly, Ransome’s review of The Heart of England promotes Thomas as exemplifying a new kind of ‘country writing whose relation to nature is that of the best criticism to literature’; and he concludes his profile with a perceptive analysis, which further unifies Thomas’s ‘miscellaneous’ works: We have heard people lament that Mr Thomas has had to waste so much of his time on reviewing. It is true that much of his best work has whistled down the wind in old literary pages; but it is also true that the doing of it made him write more than he would otherwise have written, and read much that he would otherwise not have read. Mr Thomas has so consistent a mind that he owes his development to his perpetual business, that kept him writing, and at the same time compelled him to realise a world outside his own.119

As a niche journal, Poetry and Drama differs from Thomas’s other reviewing outlets. More concerned with poetry than with drama (although would-­be ‘poetic drama’ then abounded), this was effectively the first British poetry 117  See [486]. 118  Reviews of Dampier’s Voyages and Charles M. Doughty, The Dawn in Britain, Vols V and VI [242]. 119  B: March 1907, 244–5, 262. For ET’s ambivalent attitude towards Ransome, see [xxix] and [451n.]. He had rather ungratefully pre-­empted Ransome’s profile in a letter to GB (21 January 1907): ‘You will mourn to hear that AMR is doing my life & letters for a Bookman article (with portrait) . . . I had just to giggle’ (LGB, 131).

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magazine. Harold Monro launched it in March 1913, three months after opening his Poetry Bookshop. In fact, the Poetry Review, also edited by Monro, had preceded Poetry and Drama by a year. But Monro fell out with the Review’s sponsor, the Poetry Society, because he ‘insisted on bad verse being called bad verse as often as occasion required’; and because the Society ‘apparently desire[d] to preserve some kind of monopoly in poetry’.120 The Poetry Review was subsequently edited by Stephen Phillips121 (who died in 1915), and then sank further into obscurity under the editorship of its ori­ gin­al founder, Galloway Kyle. Both Society and Review survive to this day, having continued to oscillate between poles of vitality and obscurity, conservatism and radicalism. Like the English Review, Poetry and Drama was consciously international. Every issue lists publications from America and continental Europe, and provides ‘chronicles’ of poetic and dramatic activity abroad. One issue is devoted to Italian Futurism, despite Monro’s doubts about its agenda. The December 1914 issue, where Thomas’s ‘War Poetry’ article appears, contains an ‘Italian Chronicle’—which challenges the Futurist dictum that war is ‘the only hygiene of the world’—and ‘French Literature and the War’ (by Remy de Gourmont), which begins: ‘The war cut short all literary activity in France, suppressed in a day all the means by which men of letters ordinarily derived an income from their art.’122 For similar reasons, Monro announces the ‘suspension’ of Poetry and Drama (optimistically, until 1916), while ruefully noting its success in attracting readers and contributors. In fact, this proved to be the last issue; although, despite his own war-­service, Monro contrived to keep the Poetry Bookshop and its other publications going.123 His eclectic choice of poems for the magazine mirrored the fact that the Bookshop published the Pound-­inspired Des Imagistes (1914) as well as the Georgian Poetry anthologies, edited by Edward Marsh. Joy Grant and Dominic Hibberd argue that Harold Monro has not been given his due as a ‘literary entrepreneur’: that his reward, for doing ‘more to bring poetry to the public than any other man of his generation’, has been ‘near-­oblivion’.124 It might equally be argued that Poetry and Drama has been under-­noticed as an epoch-­defining poetry magazine: perhaps because it was engulfed by the war; or because Monro’s editorship of its postwar successor, The Chapbook, lacked the same energy; or because Monro never quite made his own literary mark in poetry or prose—­contrast the retrospective 120  PD 1, 1: March 1913, 10. 121  For Phillips, see [16n.]. 122  PD 2, 8: December 1914, 403, 335. 123  See Appendix [709]. 124  Joy Grant, Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), 4; Dominic Hibberd, Harold Monro: Poet of the New Age (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 3.

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cachet bestowed by Ford on the English Review. Nor did Monro really make his mark as a critic. Yet part of the magazine’s historical significance consists in its stress on criticism: backbone of the most influential poetry magazines thereafter. Monro’s judgement could be erratic. He rejected ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (although he and Eliot later became friends), and hurt Thomas by twice refusing to publish his poems.125 Monro also wrote rather too much critical commentary himself. Even so, as an interventionist editor, like Geoffrey Grigson or Ian Hamilton later in the century, he promoted debate about poetry. In the first issue we find Rupert Brooke writing on John Webster and reviewing Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s Fires collections; Henry Newbolt reviewing Georgian Poetry 1911–1912; and Thomas both lampooning Ella Wheeler Wilcox and subtly questioning Yeats’s revisions of his work.126 Monro had clearly wanted Thomas’s critical involvement. Comparing Poetry and Drama with Poetry Review, Hibberd comments: The most valuable new recruit was Thomas, well-­known and highly regarded as a critic; he had kept out of the Review, probably because he detested the Poetry Society, but now he became Monro’s principal adviser, contributing articles and/ or reviews to every number.127

Thomas’s writings for Poetry and Drama and influence on Poetry and Drama constituted his brief apotheosis as a poetry critic. Even if this magazine portended poetry’s own ever-­shrinking niche, it gave him a platform for his accumulated insights along with access to his most receptive audience. Indeed, in two contributions, ‘Ella Wheeler Wilcox’ and ‘Reviewing: An Unskilled Labour’, he satirically doubts the ability of a mass-­readership to appreciate either poetry or criticism. And without Monro, without Poetry and Drama, Thomas might never have written ‘War Poetry’: an essay which brought his criticism into the ante-­room of his poetry.128 ‘The Lack of Good Criticism’ It was Walter Jerrold’s anthology, The Book of Living Poets (1907), which led Thomas to affirm that ‘our poets are seriously absorbed in the life, social, political, philosophic, and artistic, of our day’; and hence to claim that their work ‘has in it elements deserving as wide a popularity as poetry can ever 125  See Appendix [709]; Poetry Wales 13, 4 (Spring 1978), 43–70. 126  See [550], [555]. 127  Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 191. On Christmas Day 1911, ET prophesied that the Poetry Review would die, and called it a ‘home for incurables’ (LGB, 219). 128  See [638] and notes.

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have among contemporaries’. But he also lists the ‘immense and, so far, insuperable difficulties in the way of any such popularity’. These difficulties include the abundant reprints of older poetry, the advance of prose ‘rich in poetic qualities’ (otherwise good news) and deeper—­structural—­problems: Then the multiplication of authors, and of writers of verse in particular, makes choice very difficult. An imbecile with ten pounds in his pocket can easily add one to the number of the volumes from which the lover of poetry has to choose. Finally, in a centrifugal age, in which principles and aims are numerous, vague, uncertain, confused, and in conflict, the lack of good criticism, or even of moderately good criticism that has any authority, defrauds many noble and beautiful voices of the ears which expect them.129

Peak print at once boosted and overwhelmed poetry, rather like ‘Creative Writing’ today. The spate of bad poetry that greeted the war did not come out of the blue. Monro, swamped by ‘several hundred books’ for review in 1914, signed off Poetry and Drama with a complaint about poetry’s contribution to the literary flood: ‘Firstly, I accuse human vanity of parading itself to the bounds of all decency; secondly, I accuse the publishers of abetting human vanity in a manner almost unscrupulous.’130 It was also then more common for authors, whether serious artists like Hardy or multi-­tasking men and women of letters, to write both prose and poems. In ‘The Frontiers of English Prose’, when noting ‘the apparent destruction of the boundaries between poetry and prose’, Thomas asks: ‘how many writers of the day have not produced at least one volume in each?’131 Everyone, it seems, was writing poetry; most publishers were publishing it. New collections, usually costing between half a crown and five shillings, came from big general publishers like Macmillan; from publishers with a strong literary mission like Gerald Duckworth, Elkin Mathews, and Grant Richards, some of whom took a special interest in poetry; from small ephemeral presses; from Vanity Press ‘imbeciles’. Selection for this volume has screened out most of the dross, not only self-­published, that Thomas received for review. His newspaper reviews sometimes feature the heading or subheading ‘Minor Poetry’: a category about which he liked to speculate. But there were murky depths far below the ‘minor’—partly because peak print had also eroded the boundaries between poetry and verse. For Thomas, even good verse is not poetry: ‘Perfect verse is the brazen image of poetry which clever men are permitted to make.’ His review of Lyra Britannica, an anthology designed to promote patriotism in children, indicts ‘rhetorical verse’ as actively pernicious: ‘a bastard artifice, 129  See [281].

130  PD II, 8: December 1914, 383.

131  See [1].

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likely to give a fatally false notion of poetry itself.’132 Yet, although Thomas attacks Kipling, he sometimes finds positive qualities—­often ballad-­like qualities—­ in best-­ selling verse by poets, like Newbolt, who appeal to Kipling’s constituency. Thus he calls the (still-­popular) Australian poet ‘Banjo’ Paterson ‘akin to the old ballad singers’; while showing no mercy towards Wilcox and her fans: Even if we can resist her and her tens of thousands, ought we to resist her? Should we not rather sink ourselves in the multitudes joyously devouring this palpitating human stuff?133

How could readers not sink, given ‘the lack of good criticism, or even of moderately good criticism’? Thomas’s powers as a critic of criticism, in­sep­ar­ able from his powers as a poetry critic, are displayed in this volume. His acute sense of the historical moment encompasses criticism as well as poetry; not only where criticism affects poetry, although poetry may always be his underlying concern. When Thomas calls for better criticism, he e­ choes a call built into the foundations of various literary periodicals since the mid-­ nineteenth century: a call easily ignored or muffled, however. Alvin Sullivan notes that the ‘very title’ of the Academy, launched in 1869 as A Monthly Record of Literature, Learning, Science, and Art, can be seen as ‘invoking and offering to fulfil [Matthew] Arnold’s wish that England should have some cultural equivalent of the French Academy’, including a regard for literary value.134 But in 1896 the Academy was sold to an American businessman, and became more middle-­brow. In 1905, having raised its brow again, the journal ‘suddenly show[ed]’ Thomas ‘unmitigated kindness’; then another change of hands just as suddenly reduced the space for literature and reviews.135 John Gross comments: ‘The amateur spirit in England was still too strong for purely academic journals of the Continental type to find much support’, although this ‘had its compensations for the educated general public’.136 The Saturday Review, founded in 1855 by Oxbridge intellectuals as a journal of ‘Politics, Literature, Science, and Art’, also aimed high insofar as it ‘encouraged a style of acidic superiority in its reviewers’ (nicknamed ‘revilers’).137 Yet acidity did not necessarily mean rigorous critical ­standards; 132  Review of R. C. Lehmann, Crumbs of Pity and Other Verses (DC: 19 June 1903); and see [205]. 133  See [79], [551]. 134 Sullivan, British Literary Magazines, xx. 135  Letters, 13 June 1905, 11 January 1906 (LGB, 84–5, 101). 136 Gross, Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, 66. 137 Sullivan, British Literary Magazines, xix.

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nor, as Gross remarks, did this elitist and snobbish periodical favour ‘the rise of an independent literary intelligentsia’.138 When Thomas wrote for the Saturday, it had become blander in tone, more traditionally conservative in politics and theology. In 1902, reviewing Recreations and Reflections, an anthology of Saturday Review ‘middles’, he noted the absence both of ‘anything very disturbing in its excellence’ and of ‘a new name with something new to its credit’.139 Did his own reviews of Kipling disturb the peace? Literature (1897–1902), the journal that took Thomas’s first critical article, represented another attempt at creating ‘an important and authoritative organ of literary criticism’. It preceded the TLS as a literary offshoot of The Times, and was edited by H. D. Traill: a well-­regarded man of letters who feared that ‘contemporary criticism [was] running a real danger of neglecting its discriminative functions, and of forgetting that the special recognition which it owes to writers of genuine literary merit is necessarily depreciated in value by association with a too liberal complaisance of attention to all writers whatsoever’.140 Sadly for ‘discriminative functions’, Traill died in 1900, and in 1902 Literature was absorbed into the Academy. Thomas’s letters reveal his anxiety about the uncertain demand for his critical skills; as periodicals disappear or merge, or change their owners or editors or reviewing-­policies. He reported in 1905, for instance, that the World ‘never review[s] verse or practically never & I only annoy them when I ask them for it’.141 Thomas’s writings about criticism bear on his own indeterminate status as a critic, at a time when critics were among the ‘multiplying’ authors. He was neither a belle-­ lettrist inclined to ‘liberal complaisance’ (like Edmund Gosse), nor an academic (like A. C. Bradley). He was neither a paradigm-­ challenging theorist (like Irving Babbitt), nor—­to his knowledge—­a poet-­ critic (like Arthur Symons). But he sifted what came from all those quarters, as well as from his reading of genuinely ‘fresh’ poetry. In the early 1900s Matthew Arnold (1822–88) still loomed as a critical colossus. Resistant to any critic who moralizes, Thomas often disagreed with Arnold, especially with his notorious attack on Shelley (a poet whom Thomas considered ‘part of myself ’).142 Yet he saw him as standing for important principles and for joined-­up critical thinking. As a young critic, Thomas honoured Arnold’s legacy in a review of Victorian Prose Masters by W. C. Brownell, an American man of letters and Arnold-­disciple: 138 Gross, Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, 65.   139  DC: 17 May 1902. 140 Sullivan, British Literary Magazines, 199. 141  Letter, 14 November 1905 (LGB, 98). 142  Letter, 6 August 1904 (LGB, 61); see [109–10], [144].

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Arnold had that possession which makes criticism art and literature. He treated literature, and life as he found it there, just as the true artist treats actual life. The result is—­and it would have been more emphatically so if Arnold had not only been more careful of what he wrote, but had written more, in the sphere of criticism—­that he built a kind of philosophy out of books, reinforced, of course, by his experience in life. That, Mr Brownell does not achieve. For, in spite of his cunning analysis, it is evident that he is often led by books into a train of thought which he would otherwise never have pursued, and once pursued he leaves it alone. Thus, each book means an independent and unrelated flash of thought in his mind. Every book that Arnold seriously considered left an essential addition to his house of thought. Mr Brownell merely adds to his museum.143

Thomas at once praises and damns Brownell by doubting ‘that he is anything more than a very intelligent reader’: author of ‘a body of educated opinion such as would tell heavily in a debating society’. He similarly regrets the frequent ‘tone of a debating society’ in Basil de Selincourt’s William Blake: ‘It is a mistake to be a partisan even of truth, since one does but raise the devil by partisanship on every hand and truth has to hide during the conflict.’144 Thomas often points to a missing element, some evasion of complication or ‘truth’, in critical studies. Reviewing French Profiles by Gosse, he salutes him as ‘an erudite and polished critic’, with ‘much grace, and some starch’, but remarks: ‘One goes along with Mr Gosse, agreeing, disagreeing, always admiring, but nothing more.’ He adds a killer-­blow: ‘Sometimes . . . one feels that it is not necessary for Mr Gosse, though he reads everything, to write about everything.’145 For Thomas, criticism (which Gosse believed to have ‘thoroughly proved its right to exist as an independent form of literature’)146 was augmenting the print-­nightmare. His review of Brownell ends with an accurate prophecy: ‘such intelligence, though it adorn the lecture room, the breakfast table and the railway train, would become rather an evil than a good, if it should spread and cause, as in Mr Brownell’s case, an increase in the tonnage of the British Museum.’ During the next century, the academy would cause the main increase. In 1900 the critical spectrum ranged from freelance literary journalists to full-­ time academic scholars/critics, with many intermediate points and careers. George Saintsbury (1845–1933), a prolific reviewer, became Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh University (1895– 1915), and later returned to reviewing. Further, since neither scholarship nor criticism was yet a professional monopoly, some editors and critics had non-­ 143  DC: 9 May 1902. 145  W: 7 February 1905.

144  See [354–5]. 146  B: June 1892.

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literary, non-­academic day-­jobs—­as clergymen or civil servants, for instance. Thomas valued, more than he did most criticism, the editions of older poetry which serious scholars were making available. But he could be annoyed by poor presentation (an edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti makes his poems look ‘like jewellery in a coal-­scuttle’),147 as by footnotes and endnotes: ‘the present arrangement, though the usual one, reminds us of a dining-­room which is a kitchen and scullery as well.’ He also queried the value of some scholarly recoveries. When Matthew Prior’s heroic editors ‘have reached their peak in Darien they must see clearly that beneath them is a dirty duck-­ pond.’148 Thomas’s attitude to The Cambridge History of English Literature, which began to appear in 1907, is revealing.149 He generally finds the chapters by literary journalists, like Charles Whibley, more readable than those by academics: Whibley’s ‘ability to write seems out of place, like a dancer at a temperance meeting’.150 But style is not Thomas’s sole measure. He thinks that the whole enterprise lacks critical coherence, ‘unity of purpose’: ‘We are still doubtful whether it is to succeed as work of reference, as a readable book, or as something between the two’—note that he could then envisage a readership beyond the academy. While praising the ‘solid information’ on offer, Thomas detects few ‘steps in the evolution of a critical method’ or of critical terminology. Thus he writes: ‘To praise the “skill” of a great poet is absurd; “skill” is shown in imitation or experimental exercise, not in absolute achievement which creates a standard.’ In the first volume, prosody ‘remains the abyss it always has been, where gnomes gibber in their own tongue’.151 For Thomas, most academic critics are as deficient in method as in literary enjoyment, literary judgement, and receptivity to contemporary authors. He calls Edward Dowden’s Essays Modern and Elizabethan (1910) ‘invertebrate sweet slush’.152 More rigorous scholars can also desecrate what he holds dear: witness his recoil from Walter W. Greg’s Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama and his suggestion that W.  P.  Ker’s ‘inhuman’ Essays on Medieval Literature ‘might wisely be exhibited after meetings of literary men as, after the banquets of the Egyptians, a wooden image of a dead body was exhibited, for a reminder of death’. Should Ker ‘be succeeded by many scholars like himself ’, Thomas ‘thinks it likely that, by the time when poetry can no longer

147  DC: 22 February 1912: for other parts of this review, see [518]. 148  See [123], [253]. 149  See ET’s review of Vol. I and notes [268]. 150  Review of Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. VIII (DC: 22 July 1912). 151  Review of Cambridge History, Vol. VII (DC: 21 August 1911); review of Vols V & VI (DC: 5 June 1910). For ET on prosody, see [37]. 152  PTP, 79; ET reviewed this book (DC: 26 July 1910).

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be made, critics will have discovered how it is or ought to be made’.153 Again, Milton Memorial Lectures is ‘a cause for regretting that something like taste is not more widely distributed in academic circles’. Here, in calling Saintsbury ‘as flighty and journalistic as ever’, Thomas hints at complicity between two sources of bad criticism.154 Elsewhere he remarks that Saintsbury’s ‘grumbling at Tolstoy could leave us with little doubt that [he] prefers to look backward rather than forward’. W. J. Courthope, a former Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1885–91) who deplores the Romantic poets and their influence, attracts Thomas’s most severe reproof to a backward-­looking academic.155 But three academic critics of poetry caught Thomas’s interest: Mark H. Liddell, J. W. Mackail, and A. C. Bradley.156 Liddell’s Introduction to the Scientific Study of English Poetry opened up questions of metre and rhythm that would continue to occupy Thomas. In The Springs of Helicon, a collection of lectures given by Mackail when Oxford Professor of Poetry (1906–11), it is ‘an uncertain note’ that Thomas approves: Mackail’s partly unwitting exposure of ‘how backward our criticism still is’. This review reads like a prospectus for the New Criticism: ‘He has discovered for himself the tremendous truth that there comes a time when actually you cannot go on talking about the poets, with a spice of history, a spice of generalisation, a few quotations from them and from earlier critics, a graceful simile, a per­or­ation, and then a condemning silence.’ But the academic critic who most significantly added to Thomas’s ‘house of thought’, or reinforced its foundations, was A. C. Bradley: Professor of Poetry between Courthope and Mackail. In 1902, reviewing Bradley’s inaugural lecture published as Poetry for Poetry’s Sake, Thomas applauds him for ‘distinguish[ing] between the subject and the substance of a poem’; for noting that ‘ “a perfect poem” may be written on a sparrow, and a worthless one “on the omnipresence of the Deity” ’. Thomas’s absorption of Bradley runs through to his brilliant critical aphorism in Maurice Maeterlinck: ‘Anything, however small, may make a poem; nothing, however great, is certain to.’157 Thomas praises Bradley’s collected Oxford lectures because (like Mackail) he is ‘not afraid to show perplexity’ and (unlike Brownell or de Selincourt) ‘would make the worst of debaters’, being ‘only troubled about what is true’; and because the reader experiences his criticism as a ‘process’. Himself unafraid of perplexity, and liable to take winding syntactical paths, Thomas may have felt an affinity with Bradley’s mind. 153  See [203]; DC: 29 January 1906. 154  Review of Percy W. Ames (ed.), Milton Memorial Lectures (MP: 19 August 1909). 155  See [264], [430]. 156  See reviews of Liddell [37]; review of Mackail [352]; reviews of Bradley [35], [367]. 157  See [474].

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In contrast, he has problems with two American critics of a more the­or­et­ ic­al bent, Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt.158 These critics shared a conservative, moralistic, anti-­Romantic approach to literary and social criticism: a body of ideas later termed the ‘New Humanism’. It’s relevant to the aesthetic dialectics and academic criticism of modern poetry that Thomas should have questioned their thinking. More and Babbitt influenced the professed ‘classicism’ of their friend T. S. Eliot, although Eliot would later scold Babbitt for discounting humanism’s religious hinterland.159 Babbitt’s influence has also more recently surfaced in the academy. His critique of Romanticism in The New Laokoon (1910), a critique countered by Thomas, laid the ground for Jerome J. McGann’s The Romantic Ideology (1983). When Thomas faults More and Babbitt for deciding poetic likes or dislikes by too rigid a template, he may partly be reacting against a style of American intellectual moralism to which Eliot himself is prone. Reviewing More, he speaks up for ‘irresponsible impressionism’ as against More’s advocacy of ‘rea­son­ able judgments’ and his ‘retarding respect for authority’.160 Despite ceasing to revere Walter Pater, despite regretting the survival of Aestheticism in Arthur Symons’s critical make-­up (see below), Thomas remained true to the lib­er­ ations of the fin-­de-­siècle in his regard for Oscar Wilde’s criticism: ‘I have just finished the “Critic as Artist” again & am astonished to think how much I owe to him, & in fact I am not sure if there is ever anything but him in my criticism—­anything worth having.’161 Yet Thomas seems most deeply drawn to poet-­critics (as if recognizing himself). He thought that poetry criticism had not got beyond Coleridge or, indeed, Sir Philip Sidney. Contrasting Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie with the once-­influential neo-­classicism of Thomas Rymer (1641–1713), he says: The influence of Sidney upon the development of criticism is little, and yet it is he who is as fresh today as he was three hundred years ago, while Rymer is as dull as a State newspaper. Sidney’s attitude is a permanent one, which must vitalise the criticism of generation after generation by the force of its personality. . . .162

Thomas speculated that Byron, in whom poet and critic ‘are so wildly interwoven’, might be a critic who had mistaken his vocation.163 In 1909 he 158  See [121] and notes; [447] and notes. 159  In ‘The Humanism of Irving Babbitt’ (Forum 80 [July, 1928]). 160  See review [140]. 161  Letter, 16 February 1907 (LGB, 132). In his second review of More, ET praises Pater’s essay, ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ [141]. See nn. 166 and 167 below. 162 For Coleridge, see [310]; review of Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn, and Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie, ed. J. Churton Collins (DC: 27 August 1908). 163  Review of The Confessions of Lord Byron, ed. W. A. Lewis Bettany (DC: 18 July 1905).

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praised Yeats’s literary articles as ‘a body of critical ideas which it would be im­pos­sible to equal in England today’; and in 1910, while calling Ezra Pound ‘too much bent on being interesting’, he welcomed The Spirit of Romance as an antidote to ‘learned dullness’.164 Above all, he considered that Arthur Symons ‘hardly had a superior living as a critic combining instinct & scholarship’, although he doubted his ‘originality’ as both poet and critic.165 It’s against Symons that Thomas most crucially defined his own critical stance. To review poetry at that period was inevitably to engage with the fallout from the 1890s, from the Symbolist Movement, from the last phase of what Pater had termed ‘aesthetic poetry’. Thus Thomas says à propos Symons’s The Romantic Movement in English Poetry: ‘in this critic’s composition the literary aesthete is too predominant still, as at one time it was supreme.’166 Reaction against Aestheticism informs Thomas’s preoccupation with speech and poetry, with ‘word’ and ‘thing’, with life and art. In Walter Pater he rejects any lingering idea that writers should ‘treat life in the spirit of art’; and in Maurice Maeterlinck he resists Symbolist poetry at its most hermetic.167 Yet the ars poetica he conceives in opposition to Maeterlinck may itself be a version of Symbolism. Thomas’s critical (and creative) trajectory has a positive as well as negative relation to the dissolution/transmutation of fin-­de-­siècle paradigms. His sensitive tracking of Yeats’s development epitomizes this, as it does Thomas’s importance to poetry criticism after 1900. Although his writings on poetry have been largely hidden from view, their essence has been obliquely transmitted by the inner critic shaping his poems. ‘The Poet of the Next Age’ The year 1900 inspired new visions of modernity. When Thomas began to scan the horizon for ‘a fresh modern poet’, he liked to peer into poetry’s future, and into other futures that poetry might encrypt. There are parallels with the quest-­structures in his prose and poems, as in this review from 1902: We make no pretence of being able to create imaginatively the poet of the next age from the material in the books before us. We seem, nevertheless, to see in the best of them the beginnings of a path farther into the unknown.168

164  See [339], [445]. 165  Letter, 15 March 1909 (LGB, 181); see [222n.]. 166  ‘Aesthetic Poetry’, an essay on the Pre-­Raphaelite poets, appeared in 1868. See [388]. 167  ETPW V, 249; and see [468]. 168  See [53–4].

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Thomas’s reviews enable us to follow the evolution of his principles and terms as a poetry critic for ‘the next age’ in search of its poet. Yet they also betray some ambivalence about modernity and the modern. In 1903 he gave an ironical welcome to a journal consciously ‘representative of the younger modern literature’: this thing modernity is the strangest medley that was ever put into a cauldron to produce the spirit of an age. Nothing comes amiss to it. All the ends of the world are come upon it; and it is equally at home in Athens, Alexandria, Samoa, and the East-­end. . . . The literature to come is in the cauldron; these are its first products.169

Whatever the excitements of path or cauldron, the basic point of a review is, to quote H. D. Traill, its ‘discriminative function’. No reviewer, especially one as prolific as Thomas, can be wholly consistent in principle or judgement. Without devaluing his critical currency, he varies in the degree of his severity/generosity towards the same poet or towards weak collections. We sense where he is being kind; where he has been maddened into unkindness; where his wit will out: ‘obviously we are not worthy to deal with the work of a man who has heard the nightingale in Autumn’.170 But Thomas is arguably consistent in an aspect of poetry-­reviewing likely to draw attention today: that is, with respect to the ‘identity’ of the author reviewed. He applies the same criteria across well-­known poets, unknown poets, poets he knew personally, female and male poets, class, nationality, the final work of old poets, the shock of the new. In keeping with his critical origins as an ‘opinionated savage youngster’,171 he never accepts special pleading on behalf of a peasant-­poet, a working-­class poet, an aristocrat-­poet, a versifier distinguished in other fields, or someone hoping to put Kentucky on the poetic map.172 Thus he says bluntly of the ‘Miner Poet’ Joseph Skipsey (a Morning Post sub-­editor did not resist the pun): ‘Had his work been left to speak for itself, had we never heard anything about his admirable character, his struggles, his hard work, his delight in books, his hideous surroundings, it would never have 169  Review of The Venture: An Annual of Art and Literature, ed. Laurence Housman and W. Somerset Maugham (DC: 28 November 1903). Literary contributors included G. K. Chesterton, Havelock Ellis, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, Alice Meynell, and John Masefield; the artists included Charles Ricketts. A second volume appeared in 1905. 170  The man was Douglas Carswell, reviewed with other ‘minor poets’: see [94]. 171  T. Sturge Moore’s phrase: see Appendix [710]. 172  Madison Cawein, in Kentucky Poems. Having quoted Edmund Gosse’s introductory claim that the Kentucky landscape ‘forms a mise en scène which, I make bold to say, would have scandalised neither Keats nor Spenser’, ET remarks: ‘There is no doubt that Keats and Spenser would not have been scandalised by Kentucky; but we need not therefore bow down to Mr Cawein’s Kentucky Poems’ (DC: 5 September 1902).

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been noticed.’173 Thomas reviewed many collections by women; many were published at that date (unlike later in the century). But women poets, such as Frances Cornford and Alice Meynell, constitute only a tenth of the contemporary poets who figure in the reviews selected here. This seems due to wider circumstances weighted against the emergent female ‘poet of the next age’, circumstances understood by Thomas, rather than to bias on his part. Witness some of his insights in Feminine Influence on the Poets; his salutes to Anne Finch; the possible links between his own poetry and his empathy with Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, and Mary Coleridge. Thomas’s attack on Ella Wheeler Wilcox has nothing to do with gender. Perhaps an unwitting poet-­critic is the most disinterested, because most questing, of poetry critics. The quester in Thomas’s poem ‘The Other’ says: ‘While what I sought, nevertheless, / That I was seeking, I did not guess.’174 With hindsight, we can see where Thomas unconsciously favours poets (like Christina Rossetti) who feed his embryonic Muse. His advocacy of Charles  M.  Doughty’s multi-­volume epic The Dawn in Britain appeared quirky then as now. Yet we grasp the poem’s appeal to Thomas’s mythic and folkloric sense of Britain—­and hence might take another look at Doughty ourselves. Negative models matter too. For instance, Thomas may be in a different kind of dialogue with his poetic unconscious when he judges that ideas, including critical ideas, can get in the way of poetry: when he calls Pound too ‘pestered with possible ways of saying a thing’; when he censures John Davidson: ‘We ought to guess the philosophy from the poetry no more than we guess the athlete’s meals from the length of his leap’; when he says of Thomas Sturge Moore: ‘Mr Moore rightly thinks a great deal: perhaps he does not unthink sufficiently.’175 Thomas’s ‘Lob’ is partly a poet-­philosopher who unthinks: ‘He can talk quite as well as anyone / After his thinking is forgot and done.’176 That might allude to a transformative day when the critic became a poet. Pending that day, Thomas as reviewer often positions himself where a poet is writing. He identifies with work-­in-­progress, identifies work-­ in-­regress (Davidson). He even virtually urges and predicts Yeats’s future direction, as when he writes of the early verse-­plays: ‘not one of them . . . seems to me to have drawn upon all those qualities of Mr Yeats’s mind, and especially the intellectual qualities, which I have from time to time ­recognised in his printed and spoken utterances.’177 For a number of poets, Thomas must have become what Robert Graves calls ‘The Reader Over My Shoulder’.178 173  MP: 6 January 1909. 174  ACP, 42. 175  See [393], [245], [108]. 176  ACP, 78. 177  See [91]. 178  Title of poem in Graves, The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 2003), 314.

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He seriously mentored (or tried to mentor) W. H. Davies, over the years; and other poet-­friends, such as Bottomley and de la Mare, sought his opinion of new poems or proposed collections. Here he could be bluntly honest, as in his response to Bottomley’s The Gate of Smaragdus: ‘the book is not for me. . . . I am sorry . . . because I can’t like everything you do tho I like everything you are.’179 The reciprocity between Thomas and Frost takes all this to another level. Beyond poets like Moore or Davies (who always slightly disappoint him); beyond his deeper response to de la Mare—­an affinity of sensibility—­are the poets whose work Thomas receives as a revelation. His fascination with Yeats, his discovery of Lawrence and Frost (not to mention Doughty), his delight in J.  M.  Synge’s language, resemble the epiphanies in his poems. Literary-­historical narratives of this period tend to impose retrospective categories on its poetry: mainly the binary categories ‘Modernist’ and ‘Georgian’. ‘Modernism’, as now understood by the literary academy, did not enter poetry’s critical vocabulary until the mid-­twentieth century; while ‘Georgianism’ remains more an accusation than a definition. Thomas’s reviews of the first Georgian Poetry anthology already question both the historicity and a­ esthetic point of its title: ‘Not a few of these [poets] had developed their qual­ities under Victoria and Edward.’180 Critics sometimes loosely ‘Georgianize’ Thomas’s own poetry or co-­opt him for another latter-­day label, ‘Dymock poets’. It’s not just that Thomas is himself a reluctant categorizer: his reviews bear countervailing historical witness. They remind us that Hardy was only then coming into view as a poet; that Yeats’s huge influence in the early twentieth century (obscured by Eliot-­ ­ centric narratives) was poised to endure; that Meredith and Swinburne lived until 1909, the year of Pound’s Personae and Exultations; that Pound’s impact in Britain was paralleled by Frost’s; that Des Imagistes (1914) contributed to a dialectic rather than constituted a coup. Thomas’s reviews also signpost the links between poetic ‘modernity’ and a new wave of scholarly and critical interest in the Romantics. They suggest the extent to which, for good and ill, a neo-­Romantic or Symbolist spirit persisted after the 1890s. It’s amazing how often he found himself writing about William Blake. Thomas’s criticism supports the proposition that there was no Year Zero for ‘modern poetry’. His change of heart over Personae, which he had reviewed with great enthusiasm, marks a complex moment: Oh I do humble myself over Ezra Pound. He is not & cannot ever be very good. Certainly he is not what I mesmerised myself—­out of pure love of 179  Letter, 12 May 1904 (LGB, 56).   180  See [540–1].

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praising the new poetry!—into saying he was & I am very much ashamed & only hope I shall never meet the man. My greatest humiliation is due to regret for cheapening praise & using the same words about such a man as about, say, Sturge Moore, though of course I did indicate the chaos of the work.181

This might seem a rare critical misjudgement or critical surrender: Pound proved to have more poetic mileage in him than had Moore. Thomas again indicated chaos—‘turbulent opacity’—when he reviewed Pound’s second collection, Exultations, a few months later. But, as his subsequent reviews of Des Imagistes and The Spirit of Romance show, he did not dismiss all Pound’s work; and it might be argued that ‘turbulent opacity’ is writ large in the Cantos. Thomas’s warning comment on Exultations, ‘If he is not careful he will take to meaning what he says instead of saying what he means’, coincides with Yeats’s view of the Cantos in 1936: ‘he is often content, if certain verses and lines have style, to leave unbridged transitions, unexplained ejaculations, that make his meaning unintelligible’.182 Overall, Thomas’s response to Pound’s poetry prefigures the continuing history of its mixed reception. And, although Thomas did not meet Frost until four years after he first reviewed Pound, we can already glimpse the outline of their shared differences with Pound over what makes poetry ‘new’. When Thomas proclaims the ‘revolutionary’ importance of Frost’s North of Boston, he has Pound in his sights as well as the shade of Tennyson: This is one of the most revolutionary books of modern times, but one of the quietest and least aggressive. It speaks, and it is poetry. . . . These poems are revolutionary because they lack the exaggeration of rhetoric, and even at first sight appear to lack the poetic intensity of which rhetoric is an imitation. Their language is free from the poetical words and forms that are the chief material of secondary poets. The metre avoids not only the old-­fashioned pomp and sweetness, but the later fashion also of discord and fuss.183

Here we catch Thomas in the act of discovering a ‘poet of the next age’, who will help him to become one too. Edward Thomas thought that Keats ‘lived more passionately in the company of the dead than any other man ever did’; that in Keats’s poetry ‘we see the poets all as one company’.184 Much the same is true of Thomas himself. Even when exhausted by reviewing, he continued to live passionately in the

181  See [358]; letter, 12 June 1909 (LGB, 187). 182 See [392], [621], [443]; W.  B.  Yeats (ed.), The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), xxv. 183  See [629–31]. 184  See review of The Poems of John Keats, ed. E. de Sélincourt [124].

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company of poets, dead and alive. We can feel this company behind or within his own poems. Thomas absorbed poetry, ancient and modern, in other languages too. But, at the time of peak print, poetry was especially opening up across the multifarious English-­speaking, London-­published world. As a reviewer, Thomas became the most respected mediator of this ferment. As a poet, if any national consciousness (English or Welsh) enters his work, it is deeply informed by other points of the literary compass. His criticism shows his intimacy with how Irish poets (primarily Yeats) and American poets (primarily Frost) were defamilarizing, and hence renewing, the idioms, rhythms, forms, landscapes, and cultural cosmos of poetry in the English language. Like Yeats, Thomas also saw that poetry’s folk-­roots, its sources in song and ballad, might be another agent of renewal. This is a critic who fully faced into the expanding Anglo-­Celtic, Anglo-­American horizons of modern poetry: into aesthetic possibilities and aesthetic arguments, still alive in the twenty-­first century. Thomas ultimately brought his critique of ‘the new poetry’ to bear on its readiness (or unreadiness) for war. To quote his poem ‘Roads’, there is a sense in which all his writings on poetry ‘lead to France’— lead to ‘War Poetry’—just as ‘War Poetry’ may have been the ultimate critical road to his becoming a poet. Only a few weeks into the Great War, Thomas laid foundations for how we might think about the poetry of that war. He could do so, perhaps, because his criticism had remained true to ‘the poetic intensity of which rhetoric is an imitation’.

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1899 The Frontiers of English Prose There are many differences between the literatures of last century and of today. For example, an affectionate portraiture of les dehors has been added. But a most noticeable fact is the apparent destruction of the boundaries between poetry and prose, if not between verse and prose. The same writers work in both styles indifferently; for how many writers of the day have not produced at least one volume in each? That in itself is nothing new. Sidney, the Herberts,1 Spenser, and hundreds more did so. The point is that not only do most writers use verse and prose, but they treat also in both styles the same subjects, or subjects of the same class. In the last century no writer would have dreamt of describing in prose the riverside scene of Richard Feverel and Lucy Desborough.2 Whence, then, this audacity of prose? As was said above, it is traceable far back, but in particular to the work of great poets at the beginning of the century. Of course, verse develops earlier than prose. It is the natural form of literature for men, when their joy is expressed by laughter, their sorrow by tears and sighs. Sappho’s poetry is perfect; but certainly no contemporary wrote perfect prose. In England also, there is nothing in prose to compare with the ballads, except the but-­and-­and romances.3 From the first some fastidiousness was imposed by verse—­by metre, by rhyme, perhaps. In Italy poetry had a sumptuous patrician vocabulary of its own, and so it had, to some degree, in England. Nor for a very long time would this vocabulary mix with the vulgar prose. Chaucer tried; but surely his intricate prose, though pure English, is a failure; and the nearest to triumph at any early date, is the romantic prose of ‘Kitsun’s’ Testament of Love.4 Spenser’s prose is not very 1  The poet George Herbert (1593–1633) wrote one prose-work: A Priest to the Temple; or, The Country Parson his Character and Rule of Holy Life (1652). His brother Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), wrote prose in Latin and English, as well as poems. For ET on George Herbert, see [83]. 2 In The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) by George Meredith. 3  Perhaps oral narratives of picaresque adventure. 4  The Testament of Love was first attributed to Chaucer, then (because of an authorial anagram) to an unknown ‘Kitsun’, finally to Thomas Usk.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916

significant. Shakespeare’s is not; or that of the other poets of his day, except Sidney’s, though the poets Du Bellay and Ronsard were then carving ex­quis­ ite prose in France. As to Milton, for the form of prose he did little, indeed; but he swelled its vocabulary conspicuously, and in his liveliest work we see the possibility of what is to come. Sir T. Browne5 came, with the same splendour, but a wonderful delicacy and sweetness too, and with a full quiver of rhetoric, melody, and metaphor; and Dryden, with no striking matter, but a careful attempt at scholarship which produced a style so fastidious, that men like Chesterfield declared they would use no word that was not to be found in his work. Drummond of Hawthornden, Ben Jonson’s friend, a true poet, ought not to be omitted; for part of the Cypress Grove is a philosophical rhapsody full of a modern opulence and melancholy. Then, in the eighteenth century, this line of development, that promised such magnificence ahead, was cut short. The spirit of prose—­argumentative and partisan—­entered into verse. The spirit of poetry breathed only in pensive Gray, pastoral Dyer,6 and homely religious Cowper. But the air was highly charged at the junction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: 1800 precisely is the date of Wordsworth’s publication of the second volume of Lyrical Ballads. This volume contained ‘Hart-­Leap Well’ and ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’; but it is the manifesto by way of preface that is of importance at present. That stirring piece contains an earn­ est and a prophecy of the character of much that is weightiest in the literature of our century. It would be [he says] a most easy task to prove . . . that not only the language of a large portion of every good poem, even of the most elevated character, must necessarily, except with reference to the metre, in no respect differ from that of good prose, but likewise that some of the most interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be strictly the language of prose when prose is well written.7

The opinion was startling if not new, and, as we have seen, the enunciation of it had been prepared for. Poetry had been too long and too harshly divided from prose. Life, like a lyre, had been touched in all her strings by poetry: while prose hung back. Take an example. The plays of Shakespeare contain innumerable pictures of natural beauty, which harmonise entirely, in their 5 In November 1902 ET told GB that he was ‘so much in sympathy’ with passages in Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1643) and Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) ‘that they seem to belong to my own experience; in some cases, I even feel, I hope not impudently, “I ought to have written that myself!” ’ (LGB, 40). 6  ET edited The Poems of John Dyer (1903): see [212n.]. 7  The italics here are ET’s.

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1899

3

subtlety, mysticism, and feeling, with the attitude toward Nature as it finds expression today; but the prose of his time was leagues behind. As Wordsworth was writing this preface, prose had, in fact, after centuries of lagging, drawn level with poetry, whose birthright it claimed to divide. A notable fact! For in the literature of Rome and Greece, prose never went abreast with poetry. Let us hear Wordsworth again. It may be safely affirmed, that there neither is, nor can be, any essential [the italics are his] difference between the language of prose and metrical composition. We are fond of tracing the resemblance between Poetry and Painting, and, accordingly, we call them Sisters: but where shall we find bonds of connection sufficiently strict to typify the affinity betwixt metrical and prose composition? . . . the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both.

Wordsworth himself put life into his theory by actual prose of the kind suggested. Nor was he alone. Other poets, of whose verse the poetic quality is popularly more incontestable than his, from metre turned aside to prose, permanently or at intervals. Coleridge, the impassioned dreamer, received from Mill the title of ‘the seminal mind of the century’.8 When the seed is of that kind, the fruit will be likewise, and hence the vague horizons, the generosity to doubt and idiosyncrasy, of this age; hence a rapture in all modes of prose composition, even philosophy. And yet more; confidently and successfully he treats matter as poetical as ‘Kubla Khan’ in prose. See, for instance, ‘Allegoric Vision’ in the Poems of 1834; and ‘Over the Brocken’ in Gillman’s Life of Coleridge. Coleridge, too, has a passage very pertinent to the subject in hand. It is to be found in that volume of fragments which Mr E. H. Coleridge christened Anima Poetae (1895),9 and reads as follows: When there are few literary men, and the vast 999,999/ 1,000,000 of the population are ignorant, as was the case of Italy from Dante to Metastasio,10 from causes I need not here put down, there will be a poetical language; but that a poet ever uses a word as poetical . . . which he, in the same mood and thought, would not use in prose or conversation, Milton’s Prose Works will assist us in disproving. But as soon as literature becomes common, and critics numerous, in any country, and a large body of men seek to express themselves habitually in the most precise, impassioned, sensuous words, the difference as to mere words ceases, as, for example, the German prose writers. . . . The sole 8  In his essay ‘Bentham’ (1838), John Stuart Mill (1806–73) calls Coleridge and the (Utilitarian) philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) ‘the two great seminal minds of England in their age’. 9  Anima Poetae contained extracts from Coleridge’s then-unpublished notebooks. 10  Italian poet and librettist (1698–1782).

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 difference in style is that poetry demands a severe keeping—­it admits nothing that prose may not often admit, but it oftener rejects.

Soon after Coleridge, other poets began writing notable prose. There is no unnatural gap between the versifying and prosifying periods of Scott’s life, but a natural transition, involving not even a change of subject-­matter. The loveliest passages in his fiction differ quite inessentially from his verse; the ballad scene between Bertram and the girl, in Guy Mannering, would fit (so to speak) the same bezil as many a scene in The Lady of the Lake or Marmion.11 Here was the beginning of the new romantic fiction, which expresses in prose many things for which another age would certainly have employed verse. Lyrical, idyllic, elegiac prose, all was henceforward possible; they have been realised by De Quincey, by Ruskin, by Pater, by the author of Aylwin,12 and by others. Byron, again, despite his weakness for the eighteenth century, was not unmoved by the new spirit. His imitation of Ossian is well known. But most of all Shelley, in whose work the heat and purple of passion are more constant than with any one else, wrote prose such as Wordsworth had anticipated. It is fragmentary, indeed; and chiefly to be found in his letters, where, of course, a man can reasonably be autobiographical and so have a store of unusual flame and colour at hand; but such pieces as the ‘Defence of Poetry’ and ‘The Coliseum’ and ‘On Love’ permanently extended the boundaries of our prose.13 [. . .] The change was wrought before Shelley died. Here, however, names become so numerous that most are of necessity left unmentioned. De Quincey,14 perhaps, is the most typical of all; and was conscious, as he himself boastfully records, of his revolution in prose, which, under his touch, possesses most of the beauties of verse—­melody, passion, imagery. In Germany and elsewhere the same progress had been made, but more rapidly; and it acted considerably upon De Quincey, by way of Richter,15 whom he translated; still, on the whole, he was accurate in saying that he knew of no precedent in literature. As to France, the mere names of J.  J.  Rousseau, Ducis, Chateaubriand, 11  Guy Mannering (1815): novel by Walter Scott; The Lady of the Lake (1810) and Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field (1808): narrative poems by Scott. Bezil: the space shaped in a ring to fit a stone. 12  In 1898 Theodore Watts-Dunton (1832–1914), chiefly known as friend, assistant, and carer of Algernon Charles Swinburne, had published Aylwin: a best-selling romance. 13  ET proceeds to quote from ‘On Love’, ‘The Coliseum’, and Shelley’s Preface to ‘Adonais’. 14  See note 5. 15  Jean Paul [Johann Paul Friedrich] Richter (1763–1825): German Romantic author.

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Hugo,16 and their compeers will be more eloquent than brief criticism. Before De Quincey’s death, his work had been followed by Ruskin’s, with the addition of a minute and tender knowledge of natural things to the armoury of prose. Both these writers were also careful philologists, improving, defining our vocabulary, and thus continuing the work of Coleridge, who first made the study of words a beautiful and living thing. Their successors are innumerable, though their advance has been not un­opposed; for we know how Matthew Arnold doubted whether Ruskin was not going beyond the limits of prose.17 The field has been won; prose shares it with verse, having in her grasp the lyre of life and claiming to touch every string by right, and to sing ‘of man, of nature, and of human life’.18 L: 23 September 16 All French proto-Romantic or Romantic authors: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), Jean-François Ducis (1733–1816), François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), Victor Hugo (1802–85). 17  In Arnold’s essay, ‘The Literary Influence of the Academies’. 18  ‘On Man, On Nature, and On Human Life’ was the projected theme of Wordsworth’s nevercompleted long poem, The Recluse.

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1900 Harold Begbie, The Handy Man And Other Verses; Danske Dandridge, Joy and Other Poems; etc.1 We have heard memory defined as the feeling that creeps over one when a friend begins to tell a story. We are inclined to define it as the feeling that crept over us as we read The Handy Man. Of course, it is about the war,2 and is full of blood and thunder. It contains dozens of skilful verses about soldiers and sailors that any very healthy person could read with exhilaration. But we do not like such things as:— With a nod to the Gent of the Absent Mind, up doubles the Handy Man.

In ‘Both Arms’, etc., the writer seems to have used a sword (or a shovel) instead of a pen; and the result is not powerful, in spite of every sign of ­vigour. He is not vulgar often enough to be true. Such lines as these, for example, are ludicrous:— But the gun has ketched the land idea—­and me?3

And why does the writer call Lord Roberts ‘Bobs’? It is quite unnecessary. And why ‘a little bloke called Plumer’?4 ‘The Deserter’ is a good piece of work, heavily coloured. Still, even if we had not found ‘whacking big cheroots’ and the like, it goes without saying that had Mr Kipling never been born, Mr Harold Begbie would never have written The Handy Man. 1  This is an excerpt from what, according to ET’s scrapbooks, seems to be his first poetry review for DC. [Edward] Harold Begbie (1871–1929): primarily a journalist and fiction-writer, occupied with religious and (mainly liberal) social concerns, despite the imperialist fervour of The Handy Man. In August 1914 Begbie published a popular recruiting poem, ‘Fall In’ (see [641n.]), but later defended conscientious objectors. Danske Dandridge / Caroline ‘Danske’ Beringer (1854–1914): American author, born in Denmark, mainly known for historical and horticultural works. Joy was first published in 1888. ET is reviewing an expanded edition. 2  The Second Boer War, 1899–1902. 3  Dialect for catched/caught. 4  ‘Bobs’: Nickname of Frederick Roberts (1832–1914), 1st Earl Roberts, Commander of the British troops in South Africa 1899–1900; Plumer: Herbert Plumer (1857–1932), then lieutenantcolonel, prominent in Roberts-led Relief of Mafeking (May 1900). Both soldiers would continue to have notable military careers.

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8

Joy is a delightful collection of poems. In fact, it is several years since we read anything new that was better. The note struck in her stanzas of ‘Invocation’ is in a real sense the keynote of the authoress’s work:— Sometimes, I pray thee, Spirit, linger long Over a drowsy song   Such as new-­mated thrushes lisp in sleep; Make it so soothing and so low That they who lie awake and know How tardily the moments come and go—   All they that lie awake to weep— May feel it like a touch of tenderness, And only they may hear, and only they may bless. Into thy music put the budding Spring, With all the birds and every pleasant thing: With words like flowers thy singing pastures set, To teach me to forget   The flexed chords that the world had keyed too low; The strident wail; the shrilling discontent;   And all the dissonance that marred me so Before I had become thy instrument.

In these poems the expression is exquisitely simple, lucid, and harmonious, showing a genuine gift of style that shadows forth a distinct personality. Moreover, the style is very even, so as to make a thing of beauty out of a very slender thought. For instance, the stanzas called ‘Dreams’ are faultless. ‘I feel’, she says,   I feel the need of dreams; Earth palls, and naught is fair but that which seems.

Then, for the staging of her dreams, she cries:— Fetch me a mating bird to twitter low; Spin sounds of night, fine-­drawn, remote, and shrill.

Everywhere the same ease and clarity. ‘The Prelude’, ‘Apple Bloom’, and many others, especially ‘The Grateful Heart’, are all well-­rounded things that have dropped like ripened fruit from her brain. She knows all the outdoor emotions; and what is rare, she has not mistaken her vocation in recording them. In the presence of Nature, her cheerfulness has nothing loud, her melancholy nothing bitter. [. . .] DC: 23 November

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1901 George Meredith, A Reading of Life with Other Poems The title of Mr Meredith’s new collection is received from the first poem in the book, a poem in four chapters, called respectively ‘The Vital Choice’, ‘With the Huntress’, ‘With the Persuader’, and ‘The Test of Manhood’. But in fact every poem in the volume is part of his reading of life, and must be read conjunctively as part of his testament. This distinguished author, known among novelists as a novelist, among poets as a poet, has shown in all his books that earthly never need be earthy.1 He has now in A Reading of Life used more than a hundred pages in a minute exposition of his creed. Here and there we think he loses power by almost ceasing to describe, to il­lu­min­ ate, to criticise, and beginning almost to teach. There is, if we may say so, too much consistency in the book. By the logical compactness of the whole, fine as it is, the author is in danger of weakening his grasp by weakening the sympathy of his audience. But let those who are willing to sit at the feet of a remarkable man read this book straight through. Let those who sift all new wheat, and look over the old, before adding to their store, read a poem here and a poem there. The vital choice in youth, as Mr Meredith conceives and expresses it on his first page, is between Artemis and Aphrodite. The opening is in his clearest manner, but we are disappointed by the rest. The last three lines are as imperfect as they could be made, and fourteen lines seems to us too much for pointing out that we must all be footballers or lyrists in the Lydian mood. We quote it at length. Or shall we run with Artemis, Or yield the breast to Aphrodite? Both are mighty; Both give bliss; Each can torture if divided; Each claims worship undivided, In her wake would have us wallow. 1  ET always stresses Meredith’s ‘earthliness’: ‘From first to last he wrote as an inhabitant of this earth’ (IPS, 60). See his discussion of Meredith’s early poems [437]. In his poem ‘The Other’, ET represents himself as ‘An old inhabitant of earth’ (ACP, 42).

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 Youth must offer on bent knees Homage unto one or other; Earth, the mother, This decrees; And unto the pallid Scyther Either points us shun we either Shun or too devoutly follow.

But once he has got rid of his mission in its crudity, he carries us through page after page of verse in a high imaginative vein, full of a great music that is independent of sound, full of phrases that make us start or sigh for pleasure, and yet full, too, of those regrettable malversations of our tongue which make us understand why Mr Meredith would prefer to have written in French, where his obscurities at least would have been impossible. In the poems that follow, Artemis is ‘The Huntress’, Aphrodite ‘The Persuader’. For sheer, nervous wisdom, combined with beauty, his Huntress reminds us of the picture of Venus disguised as Minerva,2 the charming face grown austere and still sweet in its dark scholastic hood. On the whole, however, his Artemis is the huntress of the woods that are above the earth, the huntress that night after night makes Orion pale with ‘the arrows of that silver sphere’.3 She is expressive of the negativeness of exclusive animal health, mere virginity, mere faultlessness:— Colder she than sunless dew, She, that breath of upper air . . .

And yet, such a painter of the woodland life and such a poet is he, Mr Meredith makes us love her; we could be content with her, if she would have it so:— She, that breath of nimble air, Lifts the breast to giant power. Maid and man, and man and maid, Who each other would devour Elsewhere, by the chase betrayed, There are comrades, led by her, Maid-­preserver, man-­maker.

We love Artemis until we come to the Persuader, whom he makes expressive, as Aphrodite, of all that is inexpressible, magical, infinite, ‘on the peaks of life’, or in quotidian experiences:— 2  Possibly an error: in Virgil, Aeneid, I, Venus, disguised not as Minerva but as Diana/Artemis, appears to Aeneas (her son) and Achates, as they seek the road to Carthage. This scene has been the subject of several paintings. 3  Artemis is a moon-goddess. Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’ contains the lines: ‘Keen as are the arrows / Of that silver sphere’.

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1901

11

Who murmurs, hither, hither: who Where nought is audible so fills the ear . . .

We cannot overpraise the wealth of thoughtful fancy which almost always makes inoffensive the occasional lack of the glory of words. [. . .] In the ‘Test of Manhood’, which continues and consummates the thought, Mr Meredith seems about to choose between the two, the Huntress and the Persuader; then with great dignity he insinuates a combination of the two, for— Ascend no sacred Mounts Our hungers or our fears.

He shows us the test of manhood. He who passes it owns a mightier mother, a Venus, Urania, a Virgin and yet a Mother too; her worshipper becomes a communicant at a wonderful rite, He less the shaken thing of lusts and nerves.

He regards mere strength as morbid, just as mere reverie is morbid. He deifies, and in fact embodies in his worthy verse, an athletic tenderness, a meek strength, ex forte dulcedo, like Shelley’s— And I was meek and bold.4 [. . .]

DC: 8 June

The Complete Works of John Gower,1 Vols II and III: The English Works, edited by G. C. Macaulay (Oxford: Clarendon Press) It is the difficult task of the student, whether he is dealing with the literature of his own or of past time, to distinguish all work that is merely à la mode 4  Ex forte dulcedo: from strength comes sweetness; the quoted phrase is from Shelley’s ‘Dedication’ to The Revolt of Islam (1818). In a youthful poem ET refers to Helen, his future wife, as ‘the meek and bold’ (ACP, 278). 1  John Gower (?1330–1408): poet of courtly love and moral allegory, who wrote in French (Mirour de l’Omme), Latin (Vox Clamantis), and English (Confessio Amantis). All ET’s quotations here are from Confessio Amantis. Gower may have been a lawyer or a court official like his friend Chaucer. His reputation declined until the mid-twentieth century, when scholarly interest in his work increased. ET subsequently wrote of Gower’s more ponderous Latin poems (Vol. IV of the Complete Works): ‘They can in no way contribute to Gower’s reputation as a poet’; that is, because ‘the charm of the English poems, so delicate in spite of its solemnity, is not to be found here’ (DC: 29 October 1902).

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from what seems to have perdurable qualities. Thus in Shakespeare we find, among several such elements, euphuism and a love of the extravagant in other things than words. In the verse-­writers of the eighteenth century it is hard to label the residue of this eliminating process; we may even think it leaves nothing behind. In earlier times the literature that really survives has less of this fleeting element. For before printing came into use a book was fortunately able to die. Since, there is no book so base as to escape a ­life-­in-­death which is equal to some immortalities. Thus, for their size, the old literatures seem more perfect than ours. In Malory, for example, it were rash to say what is merely the fashion of the day, though doubtless there was a fashion. With Chaucer it is almost the same; but his contemporary, Gower, ad­mir­able as he is in many ways, throws a useful and often a destructive light. He is now admitted to be inferior to Chaucer, or, rather, he is not so great a man. The comparison is justifiable. Both have used the same metre; their schemes are often alike, as in the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis; in certain parts of their work they have used the same material. In handling metre Gower is at least the equal of the other. He seems to have been a learned man; for he wrote in Latin and French as well as in his native tongue, the latter being, perhaps, the best instance of his learning. Chaucer is a scholar; Gower smacks of the school, and is to his contemporary as Cowley2 is to Milton. To compare them passage by passage would be unjust; yet we cannot help setting beside any of Gower’s references to fairies, a subject characteristic of the time, those picturesque lines, so humorous and so pathetic, which open the tale of the Wife of Bath. Conventionality, so far as, at this distance of time, we can judge, is powerful in Gower’s poetry. He has many lines about ‘fresh flowers’, etc., which occur almost in the same words in Chaucer; they are the conventional padding of that day. How tame, in spite of its fascinating olden garb, is this:— And that was in the Monthe of Maii, Whan every brid hath chose his make, And thenkth his merthes forto make Of love that he hath achieved . . .

Nevertheless, within his limits he has a great beauty. As one of the few representatives of that age his charm must always last, and the mere ‘antique pa­geant­ry’3 will gain him love where he deserves no praise.

2  For ET on Abraham Cowley, see [167].    3  Quotation from Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’.

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1901

13

I thenke forto touche also The world which neweth every dai, So as I can, so as I mai.

Thus he sings in the Prologue to the Confessio Amantis, a poem which almost fills the two large volumes before us. Gower has innumerable lines of the same wonderful ease and simplicity. He sings ‘as the linnet sings’. Often, too, his expression has that directness in which things are said when they are said once for all. Wordsworth might have envied him. It is characteristic of Gower that he regrets the old time, ‘when the face proclaimed the man’,4 and his stories are nearly all old. The worlde stod thanne in al his welthe.

Most of these are the classical stories, from the Metamorphoses and elsewhere, announcing the favourite literary food of the day. Even those who love Ovid’s versions can enjoy them, and find much that is new. They open with a fine music, soft or pompous— As Nabugodonosor slepte.

There are lines that touch us by their grace, as— And slayn was Baltazar the king. Over the Montz of Lombardie.

It is remarkable, too, how sympathetically he tells a tale about the Olympians by whom he and his contemporaries are said to have been benightmared. Here and there the severe classical bounds of a story are expanded by a sweet romantic note, usually pathetic. [. . .] The story of Philomela, Procne and Tereus is one of the wildest in Greek mythology, and by telling it Gower shows us his best qualities, in a realisation of the sorrow of the bird that ages ago hid the shame of Philomela, a realisation as poignant as Matthew Arnold’s.5 The bird appears and sings, he says, when the woods are so green that it may be concealed—       Ha, nou I am a brid, Ha, nou mi face mai ben hid.

4  ET’s translation of line in a Latin passage from the Prologue to Confessio Amantis: ‘Dum facies hominis nuncia mentis erat’. 5  An allusion to Arnold’s poem ‘Philomela’.

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Procne, the swallow, is pathetically described, and to us these two lines seem classical, perfect:— Forevere it duelleth in here mynde Of that thei founde a man unkinde. [. . .]

DC: 18 June

[Verse and Prose] When a certain famous actress recently cried, in the wrong place, ‘I am not happy; I am not happy!’ the audience laughed. It was a tragic moment, and there was cause for unhappiness. But the audience knew she had mistaken her words, and there was good cause for the laugh. For a similar reason we are inclined to smile when we open books of the latest verse.1 We know that, with a small reading public, with publishers who are generally on the tight side, the poet’s place is no sinecure. The vanity of publishing is in most cases outweighed by the self-­ denial that is felt in the purse at least. The self-­denial is deeper than that. In spite of its possible exuberance, the poet’s life is full of self-­denials. Even the moralist might well put the severity of some of Byron’s versification into the balance against his license. However vain one may be, there is something which must appal, when one sees even one’s best thoughts in the cold light which dwells upon a line of verse. Lengthy correspondents, we feel sure, would use less ink if they wrote in verse; and everybody must have noticed the terseness which creeps into advertisements when the medium is verse. There is something slinking about prose. Sentence steals into sentence, and it is hard to concentrate the blame. A foolish hexameter is a plucked goose. The result is that the standard, from a purely artistic point of view, is higher in verse than in prose. The brevity, the elliptical intensity of verse, survives in its most evil days. In its better days even it is interesting to compare it with the prose of men who write both. Some of us may think, for example, that in Modern Love2 Mr Meredith has proved that a psychological motive may be completed as well in three or four thousand words as in a hundred times as many. [. . .] DC: 2 July

1  ET went on to review six collections by C. J. W. Farwell and others. 2  For George Meredith’s narrative ‘sonnet’-sequence, see Appendix [708].

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1901

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[The Lyric Poem] F. Hugh O’Donnell, The Message of the Masters: A Legend of Aileach; Selections from the Poems of S. Weir Mitchell; A. Buckton, Through Human Eyes; Mrs James Glenny Wilson, A Book of Verses; E. M. Holden, The Songs of Christine; Aleister Crowley, The Mother’s Tragedy and Other Poems1 Early last century it was boldly prophesied that dramatic poetry would supersede all other branches of the art. Lyric and epic were classed as outworn, barbarous forms, incapable of expounding the complexity of modern life. If the speculation arose from any known facts, it was from the cul­min­ation of the drama among the nations of Europe when they had attained a high degree of Imperial unity. Calderon, Shakespeare, Molière, Goethe, and their circles might have been given in evidence. Negative proof lay in the absence of a significant Italian drama, for Italy had no unity. As in a sense a national force it might be admitted that literature did achieve its supreme felicity then; by no other artifice, we think, can such claims on behalf of the poetic drama be supported. The speculation was paradoxical in a bad sense, for it remains a paradox. At that very time the lyric was asserting a supremacy which it has never lost. The very dramas of the day were often lyrical, and had only lyrical good qualities. Prometheus Unbound is actually called by Shelley ‘a lyrical drama’. The noblest literary achievements were in the lyric. So puissant was it that its caress entrapped philosophy. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and their great contemporaries revealed its adaptability to every mode of thought and emotion. The names of those who followed them are on every lip, and in many hearts. Today at least the place of the lyric seems assured. There are Swinburne and Meredith, of a passing 1  F[rank] Hugh O’Donnell (1846–1916): journalist, maverick politician, and renowned orator, who had represented the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster (1877–85). S[ilas] Weir Mitchell (1829–1914): polymathic American doctor and author, whose contribution to neurology and psychiatry influenced Freud; but whose ‘rest cure’ treatment was attacked by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and by Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway. His Collected Poems had been published in 1896. A[lice] Buckton (1867–1944), as a child, was acquainted with Tennyson. She published further collections (1904–18), and promoted Glastonbury as a spiritual centre. Mrs James Glenny Wilson [Anne Adams] (1848–1930): Australian poet and fiction-writer, later an Arts and Crafts embroiderer. E.  M.  Holden, of whom little is known, published several more collections. Aleister Crowley (1875–1947): poet, painter, novelist, occultist, sexual libertine, ‘the wickedest man in the world’. After being expelled from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (partly owing to W. B. Yeats, who called him ‘a quite unspeakable person’), Crowley founded his own occult cult: ‘Thelema’. Known for his axiom, ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’, Crowley became an icon of 1960s counter-culture, figuring on the sleeve of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’.

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age; in the lyric drama, the drama which is essentially lyric, though not in form, there is Mr Phillips,2 and above all there is Mr Yeats. And its place in poetry is almost equalled by its place in homeopathy. Thousands of the sad people in the streets write lyrics, following Goethe,3 no doubt, to get rid of their dreams, their debts, and the effect of reading other men’s verse. To the careless reader, however, what is the amusement of these gentlemen may seem painful enough. But we venture to think that for this, and for still nobler reasons, the lyric will prosper, at least so long as individualism makes way in literature. Increasing complexity of thought and emotion will find no such outlet as the myriad-­minded lyric, with its intricacies of form as numerous and as ex­quis­ite as those of a birch-­tree in the wind.4 For instance, Mr E. M. Holden and Miss Buckton, among the writers before us, have used several dainty forms with more or less success, though we do not think that these forms appeal to aught but the outward eye or ear. The lyric may claim other points of superiority. Contrasted with the drama in couplets or blank verse, how much more truthful it is. As an ejaculation, a volume of laughter or lament, the best lyrics seem to be the poet’s natural speech. In one of his prefaces Wordsworth writes as if he thought that passion chastened the speech. Does it? Solemnity and force it gives; but the only excuse for Hamlet’s dying words, as Shakespeare gives them, is that their solemnity probably equals in effect, though it does not resemble, the solemnity of a dying man. The lyric, on the contrary, lays no such claim as the drama to reality. Nobody supposes, for example, that Mr S. Weir Mitchell would think of saying in mixed company, as he does in his charming ‘Ode on a Lycian Tomb’, What gracious mimicry of grief is here!

He was impressed by the tomb, determined to write, and in order to impress possible readers, chose conventional means, rhythm, rhyme, and an un­nat­ ural language—­with delightful effect. There is no deception. He says frankly: I am writing an Ode. The lyric then is self-­expression, whether by necessity

2  Stephen Phillips (1864–1915): writer whose early vogue as poet and dramatist did not last. Reviewing his New Poems, ET wrote presciently: ‘Since Mr Phillips was compared with Aeschylus it has been hard to be just to him. His lyrical gifts are few and simple and distinct. . . . His is not a new voice; it does but repeat remembered strains and run into variations of them. Excessive praise of such gifts must not only do him harm by insuring him a longer fall when his time comes, but it must lure many further into the comfortable and conventional path where genuine new voices will be still more distressing and unintelligible than they usually are when first heard’ (DC: 1 November 1907). 3  Perhaps a reference to Goethe’s influential Bildungsroman, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). 4  ET applies the same simile to Christina Rossetti’s poetry [613], and identifies his own lyric with another tree in his poem ‘Aspens’ (ACP, 97).

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or by mere malice aforethought. Those that practise the art include men who have spent a laborious life in sounding their own stops, like Shelley or Sidney, and also the men (and women) who mistake the lowest form of vanity for the highest form of art. Everyone must have noticed, standing on the shore, when the sun or the moon is over the sea, how the high way of light on the water comes right to his feet, and how those on the right and on the left seem not to be sharing his pleasure, but to be in darkness.5 In some such way the former class views life. Their sense even of common things is so poignant that it must be unique; so Coleridge writes:— Wait only till the hand of eve Hath wholly closed yon western bars.6

So Miss Buckton, on seeing one little cloud:— Sail long, blessèd cloud!   With thy burden tender, On, till thou art all dissolved   In the endless blue, And my spirit falls again, Through the heavens, silently,   Born anew!

So, too, Mrs Wilson writes:— Still half the fields return the sun,   Still laughs the running wheat.

‘Running wheat’ is right. It shows something at least of the power that can give us truth ‘with more than truth exprest’,7 i.e., poetically. Others have seen wheat running under the wind; some have written it down; but we do not remember seeing it rightly put before. The second is a larger class, including Aleister Crowley. They are in search of thoughts, which, never finding, they describe. Aleister Crowley, it seems to us, does not justify by any wit, or legitimate pathos, or music, his choice of subjects, difficult or unclean, which make him a sinister rival to the mutoscope.8 These few lines cannot suggest the unpleasant whole of his ode on ‘Sin’, but they are quite characteristic of his manner:— 5  This image for poetic inspiration re-appears in one of ET’s first poems, ‘An Old Song II’ (ACP, 47). 6  From Coleridge’s ‘The Ballad of the Dark Ladie’. 7  From Shelley’s poem ‘To Jane: The Recollection’. 8  An early form of cinema: the viewer looked through a lens at cards spinning on a wheel.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 Ye rivers, and ye elemental caves,   Above the fountains of the broken ice, Know ye what dragon lurks within your waves?   Know ye the secret of the cockatrice?   The basilisk whose shapeless brood   Take blood and muck for food?

The author, too, has a strong stomach. In another place he twits the sea, with being ‘cave-­rolling’. Most modern lyrists apparently think that in ‘Nature’ they have a subject ready-­made. Nature is as productive of bad poetry as were Chloë and Delia long ago. [. . .] Mrs Wilson is not nearly always so good as in the lines above. Too often she is full of emotions which can only give a cold thrill to the spine of her reader; the same is sometimes true of Miss Buckton. The former’s best is in such lines as these:— The wood-­wren sings his five sad syllables, Over and over, like a soul that grieves . . .9

The latter’s, in this realistic stanza from ‘January Rain’:— The starling whistles on the bough   The gusty twilight through: No songster he: but his feathers wet, Storm-­ruffled, are with jewels set;   And he turns his jetty eye   Careless and proud,   Upon the cloud,   And cons the travelling sky.

Yet we have not heard the unique note which we were led to expect by the choice hand-­made paper, the old-­fashioned letters u and s, and the introductory stanzas by Mr Bridges.10 Nature has never had a more enthusiastic lover than Mr  E.  M.  Holden, and his rhyming is usually faultless. He writes of flowers and the emotions they arouse. Strangest of all those who have chosen verse, though scarcely as a panacea, is Mr Frank Hugh O’Donnell. The subjects to which we have alluded seem ludicrous when we turn to The Message of the Masters. He is fighting over again the battle for the Irish and the Irish tongue with the same mighty voice that used to be heard at Westminster. 9  ET’s poem ‘Digging’ contains the lines: ‘While the robin sings over again / Sad songs of Autumn mirth’ (ACP, 80). 10  The poet Robert Bridges: see Appendix [695].

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Undoubtedly this is Mr O’Donnell’s natural speech, and if he is not ‘inspired’, inspiration is a trifle. The skulking priest, the Irishman who uses the English tongue (the ‘Beurle’11 which Mr O’Donnell writes so well), the long line of English Herods and Irish Judases—­for these, curses. To the Irish heroes he bows down, and especially to that Hugh O’Donnell, Prince of Tir Connell, who, in the words of the dedication:— by repeated victories defended conscience and country against the English oppressors of both, and who on that account, while on a military mission to Spain, was poisoned at Valladolid, Anno Domini MDCII, by an assassin avowedly sent from the government of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, Elizabeth Boleyn being Queen in England.12

His message is well known. In these verses it is reduced to its lowest terms, simply to a cry that is sometimes a battle-­cry, in a martial metre which he loads, aims, and fires with exquisite skill, as here, in ‘The Muster of the Chiefs’: For Ireland, All for Ireland, the Centuries are there; The passion of their craving is storming through the air:— ‘O speak, O speak, our Masters, how doth our Erin fare? And is it now for battle? And is it now to dare?’ The Chiefs are hot with hating the noisome Night of Words, The Chiefs are wild with waiting the leaping Light of Swords.

Like Lillibulero, or the Marseillaise, it cannot be criticised. Its power is all the more notable because it does not contain a single ‘poetical’ word. The trumpet has been blown, and it happens to be Frank Hugh O’Donnell who has blown it. DC: 27 August

Bertram C. A. Windle, The Wessex of Thomas Hardy ‘We may talk what we please’, wrote Cowley, ‘of lilies, and lions rampant, and spread-­eagles, in fields d’or or d’argent; but, if heraldry were guided by ­reason,

11  More usually Béarla: the English language. 12  Dedication unpunctuated, except by its layout, in the original text.

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a plough in a field arable would be the most noble and ancient arms.’1 And in Mr Thomas Hardy’s books we see continually the sombre gleam of these noble and ancient arms. We see them in the low doorway of the cottage and on the panelling of many a farmhouse wall. They are, too, in a wider sense, the arms of Mr Hardy’s—­or, shall we say, Gabriel Oak’s or Dewy’s2—­ kingdom of Wessex. He has shown that if by a misfortune as old as time these arms are not ‘noble’, they are divine. The old D’Urbervilles were busy founding a family; the modern D’Urbervilles overlook such trifling objects, and are claimants to eternity by ploughing the land and cherishing the growth of forests. The trees, too, and those microcosms which are commonly regarded as mere details in the landscape, are all Mr Hardy’s loyal subjects. If he has sometimes drawn men and women who are as trees that eat and drink, so he has also drawn trees that are as men. More perhaps than any other English writer he has shown Nature as a not inanimate setting for human life. Many times in his books the fields and their population share the comic and tragic adventures which they behold, just as the plains of Enna are inseparable from Persephone’s grief, or the hyacinths from the remorse of Apollo.3 All landscape is capable of this; indeed all landscape has done the same; and there is not a tree, nor does any sunset pass, that is not charged with human aspiration and passion. We dream vaguely of the willows at Marlow or the wayside oaks at Coate,4 while every willow and oak which we see from our window is a chapel, a signpost or a grave. The writer of this book takes us round Wessex and shows us the principal tombs. He evidently knows well the novels and the country they are supposed to describe. Feeling that it is as difficult for us to describe Mr Windle’s methods as for him to explain Mr Hardy’s, we give this specimen from a chapter on Casterbridge (i.e., Dorchester):— At the top of the street are the Barracks, where Troy was stationed, and on either hand are two of the avenues. That on the left, just below a fragment of the old Roman wall, is called the West Walks, and is perhaps the most beautiful of all the boulevards surrounding the town. Here it was that Farfrae, with the

1  From the essay ‘Of Agriculture’ (early 1660s) by Abraham Cowley (see [167]). 2  Gabriel Oak: character in Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874); [Reuben] Dewy: character in Under the Greenwood Tree (1872). 3  In Greek mythology Pluto snatched Persephone from the vale of Enna in Sicily, and Apollo accidentally killed Hyacinthus (whom he loved) with a discus, and then turned him into a flower rather than have him enter Hades. 4  ‘The willows at Marlow’: later immortalized in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908); Coate: Wiltshire village where ET’s literary model, Richard Jefferies (1848–87), grew up.

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aid of Henchard’s tarpaulins, constructed that out-­of-­doors ball-­room, which proved so successful a rival to his master’s feast in Poundbury. In one of the houses here also Mrs Newson lived prior to her second marriage with the mayor. [. . .]

We are quite unable to see the use of this.5 At most it is no better than offering pig’s bones as relics of saints. Nor should we be convinced if Mr Hardy, to whom the book is dedicated, gave it his support. Such matter as we have quoted is really in conflict with Mr Hardy’s work. In places Mr Windle even ventures to complicate the absurdity by giving his own impressions, and thus suggesting a comparison between himself and Mr Hardy. We think that is a mistake that it would have been hard to avoid; but we contend that in presenting us with what we suppose he would call the novelist’s material he gives the reader no help whatever. He tells us in another place that at the far corner of Durngate Street, is all that remains of Lucetta’s house, ‘High Place Hall’:— One wall of it remains, that in Durngate Street, but the ‘grey façade and parapet’ have given way to a modern shop front. As to the face of stone over the back door, that item was taken from another building which has yet to be encountered.

This is, we think, actually caricature. It gives us two halves as if they were the whole. And in a score of places this record of the artist’s material is deceptive. It is merely one view of a thing, Mr Hardy’s work being another. For if we were to take from an artist [? in words or colours],6 a piece of landscape, and to find out where he painted, with an account of the temperature, the amount of moisture in the air, etc., etc., at the time of execution, we should have an artist’s point of view and a meteorologist’s. But, looked at in another way, this book fails, we think, because it seizes just those merely solid facts which the novelist could have invented or found anywhere else, and misses those peculiarly Wessex facts which have made Mr Hardy and his work what they are. [. . .] DC: 6 December 5  In 1902 ET would attack a similar book in similar terms. He says of Wilkinson Sherren’s The Wessex of Romance: ‘We think that the book ought . . . to be called The Wessex of Wilkinson Sherren. . . . In our opinion, Mr Hardy has written all that can be said of Tess Durbeyfield. Mr Sherren can only contribute towards an account of another person of that name’ (DC: 23 April 1902). 6  Parts of this review, which had been pasted the wrong way round in its scrapbook, are difficult to decipher.

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1902 The Collected Poems, Lyrical and Narrative of A. Mary F. Robinson (Madame Duclaux) The poetess of Retrospect has presented us with a choice collection of her poems. She has omitted some that we may regret; she has added some that none of us can regret. But no addition is more spiritual than her preface, or more astonishing. It contains, in fact, a just though incomplete criticism of her own work. I live (she writes) in a Catholic country1 where almost every city boasts of its historic cathedral. They are nearly always empty. But turn down the side street, enter yon barn-­like chapel topped by a wooden cross: the whitewashed walls of the sanctuary of St Anthony of Padua are thronged with worshippers intimate and devout. St Peter and St Paul have their incomparable domes; save on highdays and holidays, they have them all to themselves! In the work-­a-­day hours of life, when you snatch at a prayer in passing as you pluck a rose over a fence, half furtively—­ the swift petition, the familiar avowal, are, apparently, for the Lesser Saint.

And so it is with the genuine minor poet. We cannot always endure the ‘Cothurnus’.2 The cardinal emotions, as we are apt to regard the themes of Shakespeare or of Goethe, are often too much for our tiny sails. But the minor poet, ‘the man of a smaller race, the younger brother’,3 comes across the road to us, and we are glad. In humble but by no means self-­abasing mood, Mary Robinson avows herself a minor poet. At the same time she is swayed to expect the appreciation, years hence, of a student ‘beside a bookstall of Cape Town or Honolulu’. There, we think, the secret of her weakness and her strength lies not very deeply hid. That she has to ‘count on’ friendship is her weakness; that, once gained, her friends will listen to a unique appeal is her strength. Her best work is purely emotional. She has poems which are melodious transcripts of her sighs, her tears, her longings, and her laughter tempered by all these. She finds all her thoughts through her emotions. But her peculiar gift is her lucid, simple, and, as it were, unimpassioned 1  Mary Robinson lived in France: see Appendix [711]. 2  ‘Cothurnus’: the high boot worn by actors, in ancient Greece or Rome, when performing in tragedies: hence, a lofty style. 3  Robinson’s phrase.

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expression of passion. This gift is the intellectual element in the poetess. She revels in the intangible, the half-­seen, the evanescent, because she knows so well how to catch and hold them, as if she could trap the ­shadows lying on her page. How calm, how anatomical almost, and yet how gracious, with a throb as of a dying bird, is her ‘Aubade Triste’:— The last pale rank of poplar trees   Begins to glimmer into light,   With stems and branches faintly white Against a heaven one dimly sees   Beyond the failing night. A point of grey that grows to green,   Fleck’d o’er with rainy yellow bars,—   A sudden whitening of the stars, A pallor where the moon has been,   A peace the morning mars; When, lo! A shiver of the breeze   And all the ruffled birds awake,   The rustling aspens stir and shake; For, pale, beyond the pallid trees,   The dawn begins to break. And now the air turns cool and wan,   A drizzling rain begins to fall,   The sky clouds over with a pall— The night, that was for me, is gone;   The day has come for all.

That is typical of the way in which she addresses her friends. A great deal is expressed. But of the spirit of the poem hardly anything is at the surface; it haunts the landscape, and it is for ‘all whom it may concern’ to complete it. Coupled with her intellectual, disciplinary power, her emotional life really becomes a sort of hedonism. Her memories, her hopes, and her present enjoyments are of emotions alone. In ‘Souvenir’, for example, she can think of no happiness so great after life as ‘the radiant souvenir’— Of one unchanging moment known on earth.

So great is her enjoyment of these things she fears that they may cease to come to her. I filled my hands with delicate buds and dear,

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she says, but she has gazed on them long, she has used them for her own purposes, and so ‘turned them all to stone’. Therefore, when winter comes, I shall not eat Of mellow apples such as others prize.

To us, however, it seems that her very miserliness in dealing with her ­emotions would save her from this result. For she not only saves them carefully, but she succeeds in giving them an extraordinary sanctity. Nothing is more remarkable in these poems than their ardent holiness. The poetess is the nun of hedonism. If she were writing on what are vulgarly called sacred subjects she could not be more hieratic, more serious, more refined. This she attains more often by the less difficult path of melancholy; but we must quote from ‘Celia’s Home Coming’, where it is by the paths of delight:— Cyder bring and cowslip wine,   Fruits and flavours from the East, Pears and pippins too, and fine   Saffron loaves to make a feast: China dishes, silver cups, For the board where Celia sups! Then when all the feasting’s done,   She shall draw us round the blaze, Laugh and tell us every one   Of her far triumphant days— Celia, out of doors a star, By the hearth a holier Lar!

She herself says in the preface that one should write poetry only as one dies, and ‘at the last extremity and when it is impossible to do otherwise’. Hence nearly all her good work has that seriousness of which we speak. Hence, too, her usual brevity and that elliptical plan which leaves much to the reader. We have indeed found that in many cases her poetry has served (a rare and fine service) to set our thoughts as it were backward upon the path to which she only puts the last milestone. It is therefore impossible or unnecessary to read it a second time, and perhaps her friendly Muse would like nothing better than this. It is certainly part of her suggestive treatment of the intangible. It gives a fatal weakness to all her poems of the actual, her ballads for instance. She says of these poems what, we think, may be said [with omissions] of her best work, which serves as a kind of spiritual experience to her readers for them to build upon. They should be learnt by heart, half forgotten, and then

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rewritten, she says—­rewritten in the fancy of course; for in words they could scarcely be more delicately recorded than by Mary Robinson.4 DC: 20 January

William Watson, Ode on the Day of the Coronation of King Edward the Seventh Mr Watson has the best possible excuse for calling his latest poetry a Coronation ode.1 For the Coronation has been his inspiration, the impulse that has sent him far into a field of delicate poetry. His ode is merely one cry among all those now arising from these kingdoms and commonwealths. Mr Watson has no scheme. His poem is a sonorous wave of brooding, reminiscential passion, enveloping and volatilising all his thought. He begins:— Sire, we have looked on many and mighty things In these eight hundred summers of renown Since the Gold Dragon of the Wessex Kings On Hastings field went down; And slowly in the ambience of this crown Have many crowns been gathered, till, today, How many peoples crown thee, who shall say?

Then he calls up the men and women who have made the crown something more than can be made with hands . . .2 [ . . . . ] Then he marshals the ghosts of mountain and shore and sea, and all those natural barriers which have been changed into bonds between race and race. Like Milton’s poetic references to politics, Mr Watson’s are in matter slight and not very new, but in manner how superlative:— Nor must she, like the others, yield up yet The generous dreams! but rather live to be Saluted in the hearts of men as she 4  ET would be less positive in his review of Robinson’s The Return to Nature, calling her ‘sometimes felicitous’ but ‘rarely quite at ease, and . . . often outwitted by her rhymes’ (DC: 26 July 1904). 1  Underneath the book’s title in DC, the note [PUBLISHED TODAY] signals its timeliness (or opportunism). But, because Edward VII became ill, his coronation was postponed from 26 June 1902 to 9 August. 2  ET proceeds to quote from Watson’s celebrations of Edward I, Henry V, Elizabeth I, William III, and Queen Victoria.

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Of high and singular election, set Benignant on the mitigated sea; That greatly loving freedom loved to free, And was herself the bridal and embrace Of strength and conquering grace.

This passage, as we think, proves his possession of a style that stands, with that of Mr Yeats and Mr Francis Thompson, among the most individual that we now enjoy. But unlike the styles of those two poets, Mr Watson’s is rhet­ oric­al, and his best work tends to exhibit a quality which is rather that of prose than of verse. It resembles in many places a translation from Latin or Greek. We confess that we are reminded of Pope by some of his rhetoric, as when he says, of the British people— Who stretch one hand to Huron’s bearded pines, And one on Kashmir’s snowy shoulder lay.

The temperament is modern; the mould is not. [. . .] DC: 13 June

The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea1 from the Original Edition of 1713 and from Unpublished Manuscripts, edited with an introduction and notes by Myra Reynolds (University of Chicago Press) One of the most abundant charms of English poetry lies in its interpretation of Nature, which distinguishes it from other great European literatures. So inevitable has been the drift of English genius towards Nature that all our greatest poets have been either specially concerned in its interpretation, or have achieved some of their most exquisite effects with its assistance. Of no other literature can the same be said. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Browning—­how rich in natural magic would our literature be, 1  Anne [Kingsmill] Finch (1661–1720) was unusually well educated for a woman of her day. She knew Swift and Pope, and wrote in secret when attending the court of James II. She and her husband, Colonel Heneage Finch, remained Jacobites after the accession of William and Mary (1688). Heneage avoided imprisonment, and in 1712 succeeded to the earldom of Winchilsea. Finch’s poetry was once again rediscovered in the late twentieth century: see Denys Thompson (ed.), Selected Poems (1987, 2003); Roger Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (1989). ET, with his general dislike of eighteenth-century poetry, does not do justice to her range.

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if it boasted of these names alone. Shakespeare’s and Milton’s achievement as poets of Nature would alone give them very high rank. And in the two great ages—­the Elizabethan and the Revolutionary—­it was impossible to be a great poet without having this charm. If we examine the drama alone, where opportunities for allusion to Nature are limited, what fine touches there are in Chapman, Dekker, Ford, Marston, Peele! And not only has our literature been continuously devoted to Nature, but its moods have been the same. Chapman’s phrase, ‘As when the moon hath comforted the night’, Middleton’s ‘dew-­skirted dairy wenches’, and Marston’s ‘snarling gusts nibble the juiceless leaves’, might have been written yesterday, and not have been accused of archaism.2 But in the great chain there are some weak links, and especially in the eighteenth century. Much of our modern scepticism as to the permanent merit of the poetry of that age is due to its lack of this one element. Yet, weak as the chain may be, it is unbroken. Dyer, Gray, Cowper, to mention but half, each supplies a link; Pope himself seemed to feel his lack, and attempted to supply it, with what success readers of Windsor Forest may judge; and not the least of these links is the poetess whose work is now published, for the first time, in what is probably a perfectly complete form. Miss Reynolds claims for her that she was a pioneer of ‘women’s rights’ because she called women ‘Education’s and not Nature’s fools’; that her social circle is attractive; that her fables are unique. But the one strong excuse for this large volume is to be found in two or three poems, and two or three stray passages, dealing with Nature. Wordsworth noticed these; so in our own day has Mr Gosse, whose character sketch of the Countess in Gossip in a Library has hitherto constituted her most charming claim to fame.3 The great poet and the versatile critic have inspired the University of Chicago and their able editress to prod­ uce this book. Mr Gosse’s manuscript poems of ‘dear Anne Finch’, together with those in possession of the Earl of Winchilsea, and the volume of 1713, have been combined in this edition. To print the whole was perhaps a duty to the neglected name of an excellent and inspired woman. But it was an extreme 2  ET quotes from three seventeenth-century plays: George Chapman’s The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608: I.iii), Thomas Middleton’s The Witch (1616: I.ii), and John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1600: Prologue). 3  In his ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815) Wordsworth asserts that, apart from Finch’s ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’ and ‘a passage or two’ in Pope’s Windsor Forest, the poetry between Paradise Lost and James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726–30) ‘does not contain a single new image of external nature’. ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’ virtually initiated a sub-genre of the Romantic lyric: continued by ET in poems such as ‘Liberty’ and ‘Rain’ (ACP, 103, 105). Edmund Gosse (1849– 1928): man of letters, critic and reviewer, author of the autobiography Father and Son (1907). His Gossip in a Library (London: William Heinemann, 1891) includes the sympathetic essay ‘Lady Winchilsea’s Poems’: ‘her talent was hampered and suppressed by her conditions’ (123). For ET on Gosse, see Introduction [xlv].

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duty. For a very large part can only interest the most minute students of her age. Her fables and religious poetry are of no great value as literature, though we have found in the dullest of them some models of pure and simple style, and some sweet allusions to Nature embedded in commonplace; e.g., in ‘All is Vanity’ the rising and falling notes of a trumpet call forth this comparison:— As the harmonious Lark that sings and flies, When near the Earth, contracts her narrow Throat,   And warbles on the Ground.

And again, in ‘An Invitation to Dafnis’,4 a painter, it was much to have noticed the cornflower among the corn, and to have written it down, in that age! But everywhere she is handicapped by her too early birth, in 1661. Denham, Cowley, and Dryden5 are among her great poets. She uses the heroic couplet, and not all her flavouring can change it. Some of her verses might have been inspired by mere convention, if we had not known with what devotion she went To the best seat of fam’d and fertile Kent.

To enjoy her ‘Tree’ one has need of the historic imagination by which one may forget all the achievements of later ages and contemplate it in its contemporary environment. Her ‘Nocturnal Reverie’—her most notable poem—­ opens with ‘gentle Zephyr’ and ‘lonely Philomel’, and we have to be grateful for such homely lines as:— And swelling Haycocks thicken up the Vale.

But the concluding lines will startle anyone with an historic imagination:— When a sedate Content the Spirit feels, And no fierce Light disturbs, whilst it reveals; But silent Musings urge the Mind to seek Something too high for Syllables to speak; Till the free Soul to a compos’dness charm’d, Finding the Elements of Rage disarm’d, O’er all below a solemn Quiet grown, Joys in th’ inferiour World, and thinks it like her Own: 4  Finch’s love poems to her husband call him ‘Dafnis’; herself, ‘Ardelia’. He supported her work, but in ‘The Unequal Fetters’ she rebukes patriarchy: ‘Mariage does but slightly tye Men / Whil’st close Pris’ners we remain’. 5  Sir John Denham (1615–69), author of Cooper’s Hill (1642): a long poem in heroic couplets, which initiated the poetic genre of a meditation on landscape. For ET on Abraham Cowley, see [167]. Reviewing The Poems of John Dryden, ed. John Sergeaunt, he says: ‘The fact is that either Dryden spoke his own thoughts in plain, weighty verse, or else he dressed up and over-dressed what he imagined ought to have been the thoughts of a poet’ (DC: 22 November 1911).

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 In such a Night let Me abroad remain, Till Morning breaks, and All’s confus’d again; Our Cares, our Toils, our Clamours are renew’d, Or Pleasures, seldom reach’d, again pursu’d.6

Her verse has an interest quite out of proportion to what it expresses, because she has not failed to make us feel how much magical experience she has had. That is of far more importance than her mere description, which has little felicity, though some fidelity. The hint in the above lines makes us search with more care among the dreary pages of her dramas and fables, and not without reward. For not only is all her work thinly sown with wild flowers, but she has a happy gift of expressing her own character unmistakeably, like Margaret Newcastle.7 The editress has studied her with most diligent affection; her introduction is masterly, and full of necessary if somewhat extravagant enthusiasm; and though in one or two places she has either overlooked a misprint or an omission, or too carefully followed her manuscript original, she has done fine work in editing a volume in which even the quaint and varied spelling helps to give a most interesting picture of the Countess and her quiet life, struggling against the artificiality of the age, like her bird that was entangled in arras work:— Flutt’ring in endlesse cercles of dismay Till some kind hand directs the certain way Which through the casement an escape affoards And leads to ample space the only Heav’n of Birds.

DC: 24 June

W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: New edition The Celtic Twilight has been doubled in size and charm by the addition of a score of slender chapters. The new portion is the issue of almost the same mood as the old, and like that slips through the fingers of criticism. We had 6  ET repeats his praise of ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’ in FIP: see [414]. Besides absorbing the poem’s contribution to lyrical genre (see note 3), he seems to echo it at a nocturnal moment in his own poem ‘The Other’: ‘The last light filled a narrow firth / Among the clouds. I stood serene, / And with a solemn quiet mirth, / An old inhabitant of earth’ (ACP, 42). 7  Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1623–73), a poet, philosopher, and playwright, resembles Finch in her history of being disregarded and rediscovered.

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rather criticise Plynlimmon or the Valley of the Dove than this book. For to us it seems just such a part of nature’s physiognomy as they. Nearly all the chapters are concerned with Irish legends of every date, recorded in Mr Yeats’s well-­known economical style with so little obvious egoism that the anthropologist might attribute them to some lucky pupil of Mr Tylor.1 The writer merely seems at first sight to have taken notes from Biddy Early or ‘a woman that I know’, and printed them; he says himself that he tells these things as accurately as he can, and with no theories to blur the history. But it is impossible to travel far in this ‘region of stories’ without coming under the spell of a cadence or mixing one’s own thoughts in the crucible of Mr Yeats’s dreams. After that, even if one is a mere Saxon, one has the honour of being kidnapped by the ‘gentle people’, the faery. In this half of the region which Mr Yeats now opens up for the first time, we come at once into the presence of the beautiful Mary Hynes, who died sixty years ago, and of Raftery, her poet.2 Some of Raftery’s verses on Mary, which Mr Yeats gives in translation,3 we print, for although they are not his own they seem, like all his quotations, to belong properly to him; indeed when we meet a passage from Porphyry or Martin Roland4 we cannot avoid a feeling of surprise that it is a quotation:— Going to Mass by the will of God, The day came wet and the wind rose; I met Mary Hynes at the Cross of Kiltartan, And I fell in love with her then and there . . . There is sweet air on the side of the hill When you are looking down upon Ballylee; When you are walking in the valley picking nuts and blackberries, There is music of the birds in it and music of the Sidhe . . . Her hair was shining, and her brows were shining too; Her face was like herself, her mouth pleasant and sweet. She is the pride, and I give her the branch, She is the shining flower of Ballylee. It is Mary Hynes, the calm and easy woman, Has beauty in her mind and in her face. 1  Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917): a founder of the discipline of anthropology, author of Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilisation (1881). 2  Antoine Ó Raifteirí/Anthony Raftery (1779–1835): blinded by smallpox, Raftery was the last of the wandering Irish-language bards. Never transcribed during his lifetime, Raftery’s poems and songs were collected by Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde. In his poem ‘The Tower’ (1925) Yeats tells the story of Raftery and Mary Hynes to symbolize the power of poetry. 3  The translation is by Gregory and, according to Yeats, ‘by the country people themselves’. 4  Porphyry (c.234–c.305): neo-Platonic philosopher; Martin Roland: old Irish countryman.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 If a hundred clerks were gathered together, They could not write down a half of her ways.

Raftery is said to have been physically blind. She, of course, died young, and in talking of her not blameless life the old men and women ‘grow gentle as the old men of Troy grew gentle when Helen passed by on the walls’ of Troy, and it is said in Ireland that ‘no one that has a song made about them will ever live long’, except as Mary and Raftery will live, in Mr Yeats’s words, as ‘perfect symbols of the sorrow of beauty and of the magnificence and penury of dreams’. Later, he puts down the visions of some ‘Happy and Unhappy Theologians’ among the peasants: the visions of a friend who ‘came face to face with heroic beauty, that highest beauty which Blake says changes least from youth to age, a beauty which has been fading out of the arts, since that decadence we call progress set voluptuous beauty in its place’. He writes of ‘Enchanted Woods’ and ‘Miraculous Creatures’; ‘Concerning the Nearness Together of Heaven, Earth, and Purgatory’, ‘The Friends of the People of Faery’, and ‘Dreams that have no Moral’. It is often the fate of a dreamer not to be able to give away his dreams. On reading this book, many a dreamer will envy Mr Yeats his good fortune in moving about a world where perfect dreams are as cheap as evening papers. He is indeed to be envied, like a man with a fine house. He has a fine house, but we are mainly concerned with the way he has furnished it. And everywhere there is evidence, not always on the surface, of his inspired skill. Often enough, when telling an old peasant’s story, he finishes it with a touch that may not be his own, but which only an artist would seize. Paddy Flynn saw the banshee ‘batting the river with its hands’. In the same way Dante saw Chiron parting his beard with an arrow. So again, one of the old women whom Mr Yeats can use so well describes the heroic faery women: ‘those with their hair up have short dresses, so that you can see their legs right up to the calf ’, like Burns’s ‘vision’.5 All these things Mr Yeats will write down with the precision of a telegram, and the sweetness of one who writes for the pleasure of writing, like a heaven-­sent Stevenson6 without a patent reading-­lamp:— I love better (he writes) than any theory the sound of the Gate of Ivory, turning upon its hinges, and hold that he alone who has passed the rose-­strewn threshold can catch the far glimmer of the Gate of Horn. 5  In Robert Burns’s poem ‘The Vision’, a ‘Scottish Muse’, who resembles the dream-women of the Irish aisling genre, is described thus: ‘Down flow’d her robe, a tartan sheen, / Till half a leg was scrimply seen’. 6  Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), whose prose-style ET disliked. Reviewing Stevenson’s letters, he calls his language ‘perilously near the ghostliness of mere words’ (SR: 1 July 1911).

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Some of the stories, doubtless, he found in a [?relatively] spare condition; his style reveals nothing of this; he has made each one of them a beautiful thing, as full of perfume as one of his poems, although, in his own words, he has invented nothing but his comments and ‘one or two deceitful sentences that may keep some poor story-­teller’s commerce with the devil and his angels, or the like, from being known among his neighbours’. The divine people . . . live out their passionate lives not far off, as I think, and we shall be among them when we die if we but keep our natures simple and passionate. May it not even be that death shall unite us to all romance, and that some day we shall fight dragons among blue hills, or come to that whereof all romance is but Foreshadowings mingled with the images Of man’s misdeeds in greater days than these, as the old men thought in The Earthly Paradise when they were in good spirits?7

Mr Yeats continually shows us his closeness, and helps us to believe in our own, to the ante-­chamber of another world, and his sentences, culmina visendique vices,8 are so many coloured windows from which we may see the ‘divine people’ moving, and through which we feel them, their sad or happy faces always calm, sometimes looking in upon us. DC: 12 July *** The Celtic Twilight has been almost doubled in size, and Mr Yeats calls it a ‘handful of dreams’. Of the new chapters, not more than one or two are def­ in­ite­ly records of dreams. Most of them are notes from the talk of Irish peasants about fairies and ghosts, and about actual persons like the beautiful Mary Hynes and the poet Raftery, whom Fable is already transfiguring ‘in her cauldron’. Nevertheless, after thrice reading them, we find no real distinction between the class which confessedly narrates the experiences of ­others and the smaller class of autobiographical studies, dramatisations, to 7  Lines from conclusion of ‘The Doom of King Acrisius’, a mythological tale in The Earthly Paradise: epic poem (written 1868–70) by William Morris. 8  ‘Vantage-points and shifts of perspective’: phrase from the Latin poet Statius (Silvae, I.ii.73).

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pervert his phrase, of the poet’s own moods. The whole is, in fact, a series of prose stanzas towards an exposition of one side of Irish character. Mr Yeats and his confidants all give a very similar expression to this character. It is, in a word, strangely mystical and strangely material. The most ordinary affair is the occasion for a knocking at the door of the unknown, and the unknown chooses often quite a gross and hard manner of manifestation. This extreme definiteness of imagination is a link between the peasants and the greatest poets, who constantly prove that they have seen what they have imagined. Thus even Mr Yeats is approached by the unknown to the sound of ‘something much bigger than a pea’ striking the wainscoting of his room. An old Mayo woman, one of his ‘happy theologians’, illustrates this material mysticism very well. She heard ‘a bang right down on the table’. ‘King’s County all over’, she said, and knew that it was a warning that the fairies wanted the place to themselves. She knew the exact figure of Christ; He alone was ‘exactly six feet high’. Her insouciance at an appearance of fairies is equally characteristic; and yet, as Mr Yeats describes her, we are reminded of the charm which he, as a literary man, can add to this mysticism:— Her thoughts and her sights of the people of Faery are pleasant and beautiful too, and I have never heard her call them the Fallen Angels. They are people like ourselves, only better-­looking, and many and many a time she has gone to the window to watch them drive their waggons through the sky, waggon behind waggon in long line, or to the door to hear them singing and dancing in the Forth.

Another notable characteristic of the stories is the vividness, or ‘cleanness’, to use a favourite word, which is somewhat out of keeping with the languor of some of Mr Yeats’s work.9 An old woman—­e.g., who had seen the faery queen Maeve, insists on her vigour, ‘fine and dashing looking’, so different from the ‘sleepy-­looking ladies one sees in the papers’. This is not the only reason for comparing the Irish with the Greek mythology, a comparison that has occurred to Mr Yeats. He has, he tells us, often entangled himself in arguments as to the true nature of apparitions; he even promises a big book that shall be ‘systematical and learned’ on the fairies. Whatever that may be, we find it impossible to consider The Celtic Twilight as a contribution to folk lore. For Mr Yeats’s entire sympathy with the peasants and their visions gives his work an originality—­though he has ‘invented nothing’—which we are aware of at almost every page. The cast of a sentence—­ an epithet—­ a parenthesis—­here and there is sufficient to place the book in harmony with 9  For ET on Yeats’s ‘languor’, see [260n.].

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his poetry. Without any abuse of his business of story-­teller, he makes it a contribution towards that expression of himself which is so delightful and so much expected from an author like Mr Yeats. ‘I will at times’, he says ‘explore every little nook of some poor coppice with almost anxious footsteps’, feeling that at any moment he may find somebody or something that he had ‘long looked for without knowing what [he] looked for’,10 and with a hope to make his spirit ‘of one substance with strange moods of ecstasy and power’. In another place he seems half to find what he seeks, when in lucky mood he feels ‘only for a second, an emotion which I said to myself was the root of Christian mysticism’. A voice singing ‘Eibhlín a Rúin’ carries him so far ‘that it was as though I came to one of the four rivers, and followed it under the wall of Paradise to the roots of the trees of knowledge and of life’.11 In Ireland, he says, ‘this world and the world we go to after death are not far apart’. That it is so in The Celtic Twilight is due in no small degree to his happy skill in words as well as to his good luck in finding so much material for his plastic gift ready to hand. When we are in his company ‘all nature is full of people whom we cannot see’—or rather, whom we cannot always see. WS: 13 September

A. C. Bradley,1 Poetry for Poetry’s Sake (Oxford: Clarendon Press) In this little book Mr A. C. Bradley has reprinted the striking lecture which he delivered in June last year at Oxford. It was his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry, and we have seen few that justify so well the existence of that famous and now distinguished chair. Poetry for Poetry’s Sake is full of

10  ET’s poem ‘The Other’ seems to echo this passage: ‘While what I sought, nevertheless, / That I was seeking, I did not guess’ (ACP, 42). 11 ‘Eibhlín a Rúin’, Anglicized as ‘Eileen Aroon’: Irish traditional song; ‘Aroon’: ‘my love’. Another poem by ET, ‘The Ash Grove’, may recall The Celtic Twilight. It presents an epiphany which involves trees; passing through a wall ‘without noticing’; and a girl singing ‘The song of the Ash Grove’ (ACP, 108). 1  A[ndrew] C[ecil] Bradley (1851–1935) held literary chairs at Liverpool University and Glasgow University before becoming Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1901–6). Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) laid the foundations for modern Shakespeare criticism. ET also enthusiastically reviewed his completed Oxford Lectures, published in 1909 [367]; see Introduction [xlvii].

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sane discrimination, of literary delicacy and charm; and if, like a Platonic dialogue, it leads us to no distinct conclusion, like that, too, it takes us to many pleasant places by interesting paths; we are even disposed to think that no conclusion worth having could have been attained. The discourse, as he says, is upon words, and premises that poetry is to be considered in its essence, though without regarding metrical form merely as an accident or vehicle. ‘An actual poem’, Mr Bradley says, ‘is the succession of experiences—­ sounds, images, thoughts, emotions—­through which we pass when we are reading as poetically as we can.’ The poetic value of the work is the intrinsic worth of this ‘imaginative experience’. Everything else is ulterior, and does not affect this poetic value. That this is not a statement of the doctrine of form for form’s sake it is the main business of the book to prove. The subject, of course, cannot determine the value of the work, when ‘a perfect poem’ may be written on a sparrow,2 and a worthless one ‘on the omnipresence of the Deity’. ‘What the thing is in the poem’ is what the writer must be judged by; and the Professor justly distinguishes between the subject and the substance of a poem. He says:— When you are reading a poem, I would ask—­not analysing it, and much less criticising it, but allowing it, as it proceeds, to make its full impression on you through the exertion of your re-­creating imagination—­do you then apprehend and enjoy as one thing a certain meaning or substance, and as another thing certain articulate sounds, and do you somehow compound these two? Surely you do not, any more than you apprehend apart, when you see some one smile, those lines in the face which express a feeling, and the feeling that the lines express. Just as there the lines and their meaning are to you one thing, not two, so in poetry the meaning and the sounds are one; there is, if I may put it so, a resonant meaning, or a meaning resonance.

This is not new, but it was worth while repeating it so well. Mr Bradley has not, however, taken into consideration the formal and especially the metrical imperfections of great poems, such as Wordsworth’s ‘Ode on the Intimations of Immortality’. In any imperfect poem, we can separate substance and outline, as, for example, in certain poems we can see where the execution has not fully rendered the original design. Nevertheless, he seems to us quite fair when he says that Arnold was deceiving himself when he said, of the lines— Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal Silence,

2  An allusion to Catullus’s poem on the death of Lesbia’s sparrow (Carmina, II).

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that ‘quite independently of the meaning . . . there is one note added to the articulate music of the world’.3 About the best poetry (says Mr Bradley), and not only the best, there floats an atmosphere of infinite suggestion. The poet speaks to us of one thing, but in this one thing there seems to lurk the secret of all. He said what he meant, but his meaning seems to beckon away beyond itself, or rather to expand into something boundless which is only focused in it; something also which, we feel, would satisfy not only the imagination but the whole of us.

Thus, with a fitting and delicate admission that there lies something in­cal­cul­ able and infinite beyond the horizon of criticism, Mr Bradley brings to a close his admirable essay. DC: 12 July

Mark H. Liddell,1 An Introduction to the Scientific Study of English Poetry: Being Prolegomena to a Science of English Prosody Mr Liddell, a clever English scholar, an editor of Chaucer, and recently Professor of English at the University of Texas, is dissatisfied with our prosody and our criticism of poetry. The former dates from the sixteenth century, when, in Mr Liddell’s words, ‘Chaucer was read as Elizabethan English . . . English models and English rules were therefore out of the question as the basis of a formal theory of poetry.’ He regards that prosody as being still ‘merely the application, with some modification, of classic prosody to English rhythms’. Our criticism is still more antiquated, he thinks, and still more absurd. It is full of phrases which describe poetry as ‘a thing of God’, ‘the inner thought of things’, or ‘something divine’; Wordsworth has called it ‘the finer spirit of all knowledge’. ‘Even at this present day’, says the Professor of English 3  Bradley actually quotes from George Saintsbury’s Essays in English Literature 1780–1860 (London: Percival and Co. [1890], 27), but his attribution is unclear. The lines are from Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’. 1  Mark H[arvey] Liddell (1866–1936): Chaucerian and Shakespearean scholar, whose ideas about approaching poetry ‘scientifically’ anticipated those of I.  A.  Richards. ET subsequently reviewed A Study of Metre by T. S. Omond: ‘while he proves that the old system—­which is content to call a line of blank verse “iambic”—is wooden and ridiculous, he does not really offer an alternative for that old system, stripped of its deluding terminology and want of pliancy’ (DC: 24 March 1903).

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at Texas, the poet is comparatively rare; we need not, therefore, wonder that the Greeks and Romans, ‘who brought the supernatural into almost every relation of human life’, should make poetry divine; and we are the posthumous victims of this ridiculous notion. Mr Liddell would change all this and enter upon poetry as a field for study ‘much like that of Economics or Ethics’. He does this with a sympathetic and analytic skill quite astonishing in an English critic, and compares the method of study with that of biology rather than of metaphysics; for, in his own words, ‘the development of poetry is intimately associated with the subtlest activities of the most complex arrangement of life-­material known to man’,—a phrase not superior by much to those which he disdainfully quotes above. He shows occasionally an English critic’s fondness for metaphor and imaginative generalisation, and a German critic’s fondness for an extravagantly technical vocabulary; but in the development of his scheme these weaknesses stand alone if we ignore a few slight faults of detail. The most important of the earlier chapters deals with the fundamental elements of verse form. He examines Hebrew and Old English poetry with a view to establishing the fact:— that the aesthetic arrangement of the thought-­moments is as vital an element of it (English poetry) as are the aesthetic arrangements of stressed and unstressed syllables which mark these moments off for us.

He speaks of ‘thought-­moments’ instead of ‘phrases’, because ‘it is important here altogether to dissociate them from words and to think of them as groups of notions’. By way of illustration, he quotes a passage from Beowulf, which exhibits ‘certain well-­defined moments of more or less equal length’ even in a rough translation. In a chapter on the punctuating elements of verse form, he points out that English quantity is of ‘too shifting and uncertain a character for poetry to build on’; an experiment with the metronome proves that ‘proportionate time equivalence between long and short vowels in English is a mere fiction of the imagination’. The importance of ‘the thought-­moment structure’ is nowhere more ingeniously shown than in an analysis of three lines of Walt Whitman— Blow | Blow | Blow, Blow up | sea winds | along Paumanok’s shore; I wait | and I wait | till you blow my mate to me.

Here thought-­moments are marked by a printer’s device. Again, he quotes— Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting . . . And fade into the light of common day,2 2  Quotations from Whitman’s ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’ and Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (Liddell quotes the full nineteen-line stanza).

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and, we believe, he proves that those nineteen lines ‘stripped of their r­ hythmic cadence as well as of their rhyme, and reduced to a form like that of Whitman’s verse, would still be a thing of beauty’; certainly, at least, if un­assist­ed by a division into lines, they would equally impress the sensitive student of poetry. Mr Liddell goes further:— the English mind will not recognise a series of rhythmic impulses as a verse form unless they are applied to an already aesthetic thought-­moment structure, though it will vaguely receive rhythmic successions of thought-­moments, punctuated only by emotion-­pulses as an essentially aesthetic, though unusual, form of poetic expression.

Discussing the punctuating system of English verse, he examines the lines— So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men, And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.3

The only naturally and absolutely accented syllable is ‘dy’. If we judge by quantity, the first line is a ‘trochaic-­spondaic-­iambic-­pyrrhic’ line of ten syl­ lables. If we judge by natural emphasis, the line is made up of a trochee, two spondees, an iambus, and a spondee. Only a very young child could make it thoroughly satisfy our prosody and read it thus:— So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men, And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

Mr Liddell concludes that ‘the characteristic which punctuates English thought-­moments into æsthetic form is neither quantity nor accent, nor yet accentually determined quantity’. The principle which takes the place of these, in everyone’s practice, and in Mr Liddell’s theory, is that of stress. Quite naturally, without education, we distribute stress ‘with unerring ac­cur­ acy of position, and deftly shaded precision of intensity’. He considers its importance in these words from Othello:— My lord is not my lord.

If we can only make use of accent and lack of accent, the thing is meaningless. Stress applied to it in two different strengths (e.g., 1 the stronger, and 2 the weaker) makes it intelligible:—    1  1 2 My lord is not my lord.

3  Last two lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146.

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The writer is then at pains to divide primary stress under ten different heads, which we mention here without criticism in order to illustrate the fineness of his method; he makes seven divisions of secondary stress; two of low stress. ‘Identity stress’ is his name for the stress in ‘error’; ‘sense-­stress’, and ‘emotion-­ stress’ are continually taking advantage of this original stress; and— no impulse that has not already sense-­stress could have emotion-­stress attached to it. For no notion that was not logically significant to the sense of the thought could, under normal conditions, be emotionally significant for the experience of the thinker. Moreover, from its very nature, emotion-­stress must necessarily be thus augmentative to sense-­stress, for it is a fundamental principle of sense-­ stress that the new and particular notion receives more stress than the familiar and general; and emotion-­stress always particularises. There is thus no conflict in the incidence of the various sorts of stress, but they all harmoniously blend together in an ever-­varying rhythm which gives colour and interest to the simplest forms of predication.

‘Attention-­stress’, then, is his answer to the question: ‘Upon what does English poetry depend?’ Here his work is almost done. He refines upon the conclusions which we have stated; he does it amply and with subtlety. But in these last chapters the reader becomes nervous in expectation of the completion of the system. He reads to the end, and is not less nervous when he finds Mr Liddell scoffing at ‘pleasing “views” and “criticisms” in “literary” formulation’, and pointing out ‘the necessity of considering literature as material of science, and not as a subject for pleasant talk’. His last words are:— And the fine flower of this scientific effort will be a full and complete understanding and appreciation of English Poetry, the richest and most beautiful poetry the world has known.

The reader who has been impressed by Mr Liddell’s talent will turn back, and seeking an end more substantial than the above, he will find this:— As unit groups in our prosodic system we have ‘waves of impulse’ instead of feet. We can use the English numerals instead of the Greek prefixes, and describe English verse as being in ‘five-­wave rhythm’ . . . ‘three’ for tri-, ‘two’ for di-, ‘six’ for hex-, etc.,—simple English terms quite as descriptive and graphic as the Greek prefixes, and quite as dignified.

We confess that we think that the line So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,

does not consist of five waves, and that to say so is as unnecessary as to accent it thus:—

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So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men.

Mr Liddell tells us himself that he has proved that his system is practicable. We have no hesitation in saying that his book is more likely to interest and serve the student of English poetry than any we have seen before. If it were necessary to have a standard of poetry, we should say that there is an excellent one between these covers. It is not a new system of prosody, though it makes the old one ridiculous. It affords no basis for a classification of metres; it leaves blank verse, as before, an infinitely varied line usually of ten syl­ lables. Its strongest quality is that it states the grounds for the appreciation of verse which have been used by the best critics of every age; it states them subtly and amply for the first time, and in such a way as not to offend those who are far from wishing to study poetry as they study economics. DC: 18 September *** One of the most obvious results of every new body of poetry which has come into the modern world has been a new body of criticism. The business of the critic has largely been to praise, to justify, and to explain; incidentally, he has usually condemned the poetry that has been superseded. Thus the romantic poetry of the nineteenth century produced a romantic school of criticism. Survivors of the old school meantime did not hesitate to condemn Wordsworth and Keats very much as Dr Johnson would have done. We have therefore naturally become cautious in our loyalty to the school of our own time, and this caution is perhaps responsible for our preference of ‘appreciation’ to ‘Criticism’:— Critics (said Matthew Arnold) give themselves great labour to draw out what in the abstract constitutes the characters of a high quality of poetry. It is much better simply to have recourse to concrete examples;—to take specimens of poetry of the high, the very highest quality, and to say: The characters of a high quality of poetry are what is expressed there. They are far better recognised by being felt as the verse of the master, than by being perused in the prose of the critic. Nevertheless if we are urgently pressed to give some critical account of them, we may safely, perhaps, venture on laying down, not indeed how and why the characters arise, but where and in what they arise. They are in the matter and substance of the poetry, and they are in its manner and style. Both of these, the substance and matter on the one hand, the style and manner on the other, have a mark, an accent, of high beauty, worth, and power. But if we are asked to define this mark and accent

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 in the abstract, our answer must be: No, for we should thereby be darkening the question, not clearing it.

Here, certainly, is a reason for caution, if a critic whose importance is proved as fully by his opponents as by his supporters, writing for a popular audience of vague taste, can found himself on nothing firmer than this in an essay on the ‘study of poetry’. The passage has a certain fitness for our moods of more sensuous meditation, but we question whether a brown study of poetry is what the critic desired. Other modern critics have furnished some excellent writing, and helped many towards a subtler enjoyment of poetry; but they tend to regard it mainly from the point of view of the poet himself, and have established little save that poetry must be ‘indefinably poetical’. When Arnold himself is forced to a definite statement he is apt to put us off with such as this:— it is advisable to construct all verses so that by reading them naturally—­that is, according to the sense and legitimate accent—­the reader gets the right rhythm.4

Advisable! Mr Liddell’s book is, in a sense, an enforcement of this idea to its utmost limit of expansion. That verse form is primarily ‘a rhythmic arrangement of the successive parts of an idea’ is the one of his conclusions upon which he most insists. It is natural, therefore, that Mr Liddell should start not very gently with a condemnation of the school of dilettante criticism and pleasing ‘views’. He questions, too, the adequacy of our current notions of poetry. We are told (he says, characteristically) that ‘poetry is a thing of God’; that it is ‘the finer spirit of all knowledge’; that it is ‘something divine’ . . . that it is ‘the inner thought of things’; that it is ‘the completest expression of humanity’; that it is ‘the language of ideality’; that it is ‘the expression of the inner motions of the soul’. These are but a few of the vague and meaningless forms of literary expression that so-­called definitions of poetry take.

He destroys these phrases one by one somewhat in the manner of a logic lecturer; and yet we are allowed to feel at last that Wordsworth’s noble phrase, ‘the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge’, is not meaningless and has even gained in intention from Mr Liddell’s fine elucidation of the difficult ways and strange by which poetry acts. In the same mood, anxious to justify his 4  ET’s first quotation is from Matthew Arnold’s influential essay ‘The Study of Poetry’, first published as introduction to Thomas Humphry Ward’s four-volume anthology The English Poets (1880); his second, from Arnold’s On Translating Homer (1861).

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work in the direction of a scientific study of poetry, he disposes of poeta nascitur non fit5 in its extravagant sense:— What it arrogates to the poet, however, is not peculiar to the maker of poetry. Any craftsman may show similar adaptations not to be acquired in a single generation by formal training, without startling us with an admission that his peculiar power is divine and passes the understanding of the reason.

He uses, we think, some needless violence towards the old school and the old beliefs, and when he says that ‘the effect of poetry cannot be secured by the observance of any mechanical body of rules now known to men’, he means as much as the ordinary careless man who repeats that poetry is ‘something divine’. [. . .] Le mécanisme de la pensée, to use Joubert’s6 phrase, is his theme, especially as it is exhibited in English poetry. By an examination of some passages from the Psalms and Beowulf, he shows that the primary and essential element of all poetry is an aesthetic arrangement of ‘the moments of thought’, which is his technical term for a phrase—­e.g., this line is divided into three thought moments:— O night! | do I not see my love | fluttering out among the breakers? |7

Again, he quotes these words:— He brought me up also out of the pit of destruction,   out of the miry swamp, And set my feet on a rock,   made firm my stepping,8

pointing out that the alternating systole and diastole in the words arranged in four lines is ‘really a rhythm of the mental faculties as sharp and distinct as those muscular rhythms which one may illustrate in moving the hands or the feet’.9 Speaking more especially of English verse, he says:—

5  ‘A poet is born not made’: from ancient commentary, of uncertain authorship, on Horace’s Ars Poetica. 6 Joseph Joubert (1754–1824): French philosopher and essayist, whose Pensées appeared posthumously. 7  From Whitman’s ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’: see note 2. 8  Translation of Psalm XL.2. 9  ET either shared or retained this idea. Introducing the Everyman’s Library edition (1912) of William Cobbett’s Rural Rides, he says: ‘The movement of his prose is a bodily thing. His sentences do not precisely suggest the swing of an arm or a leg, but they have something in common with it. His style is perhaps the nearest to speech that has really survived’ (xi).

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 it is worth while to notice here that the presence of this thought-­moment verse form in all the earliest forms of Indo-­Germanic poetry we can reach . . . points to this arrangement of the thought in forms of rhythm as the original condition of Indo-­Germanic poetry; and that these turnings back, versus, of the mind in regular efforts of collocation of connotations or limitations were the original distinctions of poetically formulated thought from the straightforward, straight-­ away, prorsus, formulations of mere prose.

Alliteration, rhyme, etc., is but ‘added adornment’, let the young poet as well as the student remember, ‘to an aesthetically-­proportioned structure’; though we would substitute ‘emphasis’ for ‘adornment’. More briefly, ‘a rhythmic structure of ideation, and not a rhythmic structure of some speech con­comi­ tant of ideation, is the original state out of which poetic form was developed’. This ‘thought-­moment structure’ still is the most important element in our verse, and the thought-­moments must fit into the rhythm, which is made for them, or, more accurately, which they make for themselves. [. . .] English poetry is, in Mr Liddell’s words, ‘a rhythm not of sound but of ideas’, where we think that the opposition between sound and ideas is false. Poetry is thus, as it were, absolutely onomatopoeic, or has under command onomatopoeia, and all correlated mysteries of language; and nowhere is this more brilliantly shown than in Mr Liddell’s chapters on the general prin­ ciples of stress and on rhythm waves. There lies the main value of his book. On the other hand, he fails to reveal a quality in verse which has not been, or in future may not be, achieved in prose. Perfect prose has always a music of ideas, and its stresses are, or should be, as subtle and constant as in verse. The millennial prose may unfold a rhythm, and possibly even a rhyme, of grander music than Dante’s or Homer’s, availing itself, nevertheless, of all their mighty inventions. Meantime, le mécanisme de la pensée is here finely set forth. The student will no longer be content with saying that the subject of a great poem is ‘worthy of poetry’, and that the verses are in the ‘grand style’. He will gain just such an understanding of poetry as is implied in the utterance of a Coquelin or a Kean.10 He will have, so to speak, a dramatic know­ ledge of verse. Something of the kind he has had before, we admit. When Matthew Arnold quoted a line of Milton or Shakespeare we believe that he appreciated it as learnedly as Mr Liddell does, but unconsciously. To the later critic belongs the honour of having stated with perfect lucidity and full illustration and in a scientific way the real bases of the

10  Jean Coquelin (1865–1944): French actor; Edmund Kean (1787–1833): English Shakespearean actor.

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most rapturous and complete appreciation of poetry. His conclusions are by no means entirely in conflict with the criticism of our day, though his method differs. We venture to think that Arnold’s ‘touchstone’ lines will now have a higher value than before; they will no longer be lines merely ‘in the grand style’, but lines infinitely varied by stresses, by rising and falling rhythms, by crescendo and diminuendo; and the student will be able to apply, what we should hitherto have thought impossible, a scientific system of criticism to verse with no loss of emotional appreciation, or any colder homage to the deum certissima proles.11 WS: 20 September

Sir Alfred Lyall,1 Tennyson Sir Alfred Lyall has overcome many of the difficulties of his task. He has inwoven, with perhaps too little narrative, a biography of Tennyson’s poetic life. Above all, he has given us, as he is well able to do, a vivid impression of what the poet was to his own time. And though he has wisely not taken the opportunity, somewhat illegitimate in a book of this kind, of refining his own general and scattered judgments and giving us what he may regard as Tennyson’s special quality and particular achievement, yet here and elsewhere there is shrewd material for one of those estimates which are the nat­ ural outcome of lively interest in a poet’s work. Such an interest may suggest that among English poets one division can be made without violence. On the one hand are those whom we may call the men of action in fields of thought and imagination, men puzzled to some purpose by the riddles of their own day, men whose loftiest moods are warmed or troubled by the strife of their contemporaries. Thus, not to go farther back, Shelley confessed to a passion for reforming the world, and Crabbe did nothing else. On the other hand, there is a long line of poets who, even if, like Sidney, they are in the sphere of action a great part of their own age, yet write like recluses, and might belong to any age. Sidney, Carew, Gray, and Keats are of this family. They are the 11  ‘True offspring of the gods’: Virgil represents Aeneas as addressed thus by the Cumaean Sybil (Aeneid, VI.322). 1  Alfred Comyn Lyall (1835–1911), knighted in 1887, rose to the top of the Indian Civil Service. Besides poetry and literary criticism, he wrote studies of folklore, religion, and Indian history.

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poets’ poets. Of these Tennyson is not the least. Nearly all his immediate predecessors had been at some time conspicuously moved by the great ­tremors of their day. Tennyson’s age, as Sir Alfred Lyall says, was one of ‘practical Liberalism, of strong intellectual fermentation stimulated by the growing power of the Press; of energetic agitation for political, economical, and legislative reforms’—in short, an age that would not easily and directly impress a poet’s mind. In accordance with this temper he was ‘one of the few great English poets who have fallen in readily with the ways and manners of a cultured class and their social surroundings, who did not in their youth either hold themselves apart from the ordinary life of school or college, or live recklessly, or rebel against social conventions’. The length and calm undulation of his own life was in remarkable harmony with the years in which he lived. He was never much in love with any wandering that meant a long remove from his high-­backed chair. It was, therefore, not to be expected that he should be in a very obvious way influenced by ‘the spirit of the age’. Here, then, was an opportunity for the artistic temperament to develop within its own world, ‘in a green shade’.2 And to us Tennyson’s poems seem to be the history of a sensibility and an intellectual balance in unrivalled combination. He contracted tricks; his sweetness was apt to resemble wedding-­cake; and his weakest performances almost justify the opinion that he was the greatest minor poet that ever lived. Nevertheless, he shows at his best a felicitous choice of subject and an execution that remind us of Raphael. We may almost say of him—­such is his voluptuous avoidance of excess— His strength is as the strength of ten, Because his heart is pure.3

From his eighteenth year, when the Poems by Two Brothers were published, to 1842, his thirty-­fourth year, when the ‘Morte d’Arthur’ appeared, his life met the utmost needs of his exquisite poetic frame. He was devoted to the beautiful in art, Nature, books and human life. The nature of his devotion is to be read in ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘A Dream of Fair Women’, and ‘The Palace of Art’.4 These poems and their companions, as we think, place him high among the lotus-­givers of life, among those who make ‘A flowery band to bind us to the earth’.5 As we read the verses, 2  From Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘The Garden’. 3  From Tennyson’s poem ‘Sir Galahad’. 4  All the poems mentioned are included in Tennyson’s Poems, in two volumes (1842). 5 Keats, Endymion, I.7.

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There she weaves by night and day A magic web with colours gay. She has heard a whisper say, A curse is on her if she stay   To look down on Camelot. She knows not what the curse may be, And so she weaveth steadily, And little other care hath she,   The Lady of Shalott. And moving through a mirror clear That hangs before her all the year, Shadows of the world appear. There she sees the highway near   Winding down to Camelot: There the river eddy whirls, And there the surly village-­churls, And the red cloaks of market-­girls,   Pass onward from Shalott.

as we read them, we are sometimes disposed to think of the poet writing with ‘little other care’. The curse that threatened him was of the same kind. Whenever he turned to contemporary life, except in his own person, the mirror received a crack, his power decreased. For he never saw life dra­mat­ ic­al­ly. When he thinks, he is a much-­read child. Luckily, in his golden age, he never thinks. Sir Alfred Lyall has much to say about the moral of, e.g., ‘The Palace of Art’. But could anything be sadder than that a man should spin those perfect verses in order to point the same moral as a hundred pulpits? As it seems to us, a far subtler moral may be drawn from the capacity of a most delicate soul for a diversity of sensuous enjoyments that yet does not fail in strength or in sympathy with everyday life. Tennyson has done more to assert the true nobleness—­we had almost said saintliness—­of the perfect artist than all the apologists. Sir Alfred Lyall insists, more and more as we reach and pass The Princess and In Memoriam,6 upon the importance of Tennyson’s attitude towards life. That he was always occupied as a man with the questions of his day is true, but at his finest period he seems to have felt that his powers were out of place in the world which attracted Browning. From no poet do we so often quote for the sake of beauty. From no poet is the thought—­except his later thought, and that from the pulpit—­so rarely

6  The Princess was published in 1847; In Memoriam in 1850.

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quoted. His command of pathos, for the same reason, is usually slight; and his finest passage (in the ‘Morte d’Arthur’) comes straight from Malory. If Coleridge discovered, in Shelley’s phrase, a kind of ‘thought in sense’,7 Tennyson amplified it and revealed its fullest possibilities. He was a sybarite in sensuous meditation and meditative emotion. He never wrote a successful poem on a subject (vulgarly speaking) of any importance. What we value is the quality of his voice, just as in a great singer. Almost all he says is interesting, because he has his own consummate way of saying it. Thus Virgil composing in the blue Italian mornings hardly fascinates us more than Tennyson in his high-­backed chair, sending half his verses up the chimney with his tobacco smoke. Wine is good for shrivelled lips,   When a blanket wraps the day, When the rotten woodland drips,   And the leaf is stamped in clay.8

And what wine he has poured for us! We are content to think that poetry has few more gracious gifts than those ‘heart-­easing things’9 of which Tennyson bestows so many. We have alluded to his ‘thought in sense’. Nowhere is that more opulent than in his treatment of nature. Sir Alfred Lyall lays stress on his ‘painting’ nature, as distinct from Wordsworth’s method of describing nature by her effects. At his best he certainly proves nature a sentient and passionate thing. A cadence, an epithet, a grouping, in nearly all his descriptions, seems to give the landscape a brain and heart that fluctuate with his own. But here again he is the recluse. His nature has not ‘that universal spirit of the world’ which Bacon felt in April. His is an entirely personal impression, far different from Wordsworth’s, which made of nature a neighbour commonwealth to our own. We are interested in the one man Who paced for ever in a glimmering land,   Lit with a low large moon.10

7 In Peter Bell the Third (written in 1819), a critique of Wordsworth, Shelley refers to Wordsworth’s poetry as ‘Wakening a sort of thought in sense’ (IV.311): perhaps not a wholly satirical phrase. 8  From Tennyson’s poem ‘The Vision of Sin’. 9  From Keats’s poem ‘Sleep and Poetry’: ‘And they shall be accounted poet kings / Who simply tell the most heart-easing things’ (267–8). ET liked to quote these lines. 10  From ‘The Palace of Art’.

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When he begins to think, nature is ‘red in tooth and claw’; and we become interested only in seeing Darwin done into verse. Parts of In Memoriam are melancholy attempts, followed by innumerable others, to show the world that he kept up with the thought of his time. Sir Alfred Lyall very rightly tells us what impression Tennyson, the philosopher in verse, made upon his contemporaries. As a citizen Tennyson became vastly more interesting in his later years. As a poet, we think that he did little more than a series of elab­or­ ate and brilliant experiments after the volumes of 1842. Those could not be replaced. They fixed Tennyson’s place and quality in the line of English poets—­not so high a place as he himself claimed, not indeed among the highest, but, by their amazing ‘superiority of diction and movement’, certainly a place second only to the highest. He is with Keats. DC: 7 October 

Henry Newbolt, The Sailing of the Long-­Ships, and Other Poems It is surprising how few Englishmen have struck the heroic lyre in a worthy and memorable way. Mr Newbolt’s verses1 have given him a strong claim to be reckoned among those few, and in such a matter the common opinion is likely to be pretty sound criticism. He is popular. He appeals to a few cardinal emotions. All his verse might be described as an elaborate corollary to ‘Rule Britannia’. At the same time he has usually written in a simple and careful style, that has an unaffected pathos and even a sweetness quite exceptional in verses of the kind. He has thus been able to attract a class of readers whom a mere drum or trumpet would repel; one might almost say, at the risk of vagueness, that there is something classical about his work, which is seldom uneven or excessive. He will certainly never be too popular in the bad sense. In fact, there seems to be a danger that he may become academic. The present volume shows his nearest approach to perfection of a technical kind. The unity of all the compositions and the delicacy of every part might well disarm a critic. We find here that sweetness of which we speak in a high and delightful degree. The pathos which, in Mr. Newbolt’s work, we feel rather than read, is here finely mingled with the spirit that breathes ‘Heroic ardour

1  Especially ‘Vitaï Lampada’: see Appendix [710]. This review is headed ‘A Singer of Mars’.

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to adventurous deeds’.2 But there is in many of the poems an unruffled ease that is very nearly academic. There is just perceptible a smack of the study, a ripeness that we enjoy, though it lacks the sting and gusto of his theme. For example, in ‘The School at War’ (a good thing) the second verse is an excrescence, charming in itself, but unnecessary. For this reason, the purely martial poems are not so forcible as the reflective, and of this class we need not say that ‘The Best School of All’ and the like are fine. ‘On Spion Kop’ might have been written by an eighteenth-­century nonentity, and it marks the worst of Mr Newbolt’s academic tendency.3 ‘The Nile’ is all pedestal and no statue. But the rest of the book is of a very high order, and proves that Mr Newbolt has no need to depend on patriotism for his reputation. [. . .] DC: 19 November

Gordon Bottomley, The Crier by Night. A Play in One Act; Alfred Noyes, The Loom of Years; Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, The Queen’s Vigil and Other Song; etc.1 Mr Bottomley’s first verses, Poems at White-­Nights, were published in 1899. They were marked by a tortured rhythm and oddness of phrase so persistent

2  Quotation from Paradise Lost (VI.65–6). 3  The Battle of Spion Kop (January 1900) was a traumatic defeat for the British in the Second Boer War. Newbolt’s poem elegizes a major called ‘Vertue’: ‘Foremost of all on battle’s fiery steep / Here VERTUE fell, and here he sleeps his sleep . . .’. ET may have thought that ‘VERTUE’ was merely an abstraction rather than the soldier’s unusual and suggestive name. 1  ET reviewed seven more collections. He did not yet know Gibson, and had only just begun to correspond with GB. In a letter of 10 November, more eulogistic than his review, he says that The Crier by Night has given him an ‘unbroken wave of pleasure’, calls the play ‘a delicate experience’, praises its ‘perfect unity’, and compares GB with Yeats; although he finds fault with the language of the play’s ‘lyrics’ (LGB, 40–1). On 16 December he wrote: ‘I fear my review in the Chronicle betrayed my haste and fatigue. For I assure you it is not a pastime to consider 26 volumes of verse, to discard the very bad, and then to review the few that have survived. I have to conceal my own preferences & to keep my mind open to all different & apparently inconsistent kinds of excellences. I sometimes wonder if I have illtreated anyone who is to be a poet’ (LGB, 42). In the same letter he says of GB’s second collection Poems at White-Nights (1899)—not his ‘first verses’ as above—­which GB has sent him, that he finds ‘something to like, and, in the diction, a good deal to regret’. In a later letter (6 August 1904) he refers to GB’s ‘command of a jewelled and blossomy vocabulary’ (LGB, 59).

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as almost to destroy the mind that turned these ill-­chosen weapons upon itself. Yet a careful reader could not but notice the unity of feeling and con­ tinu­ity of mood which at least meant sincerity. Combined with a care in versification which was none the less laborious for being in the main misapplied, this sincerity and consistency in a young poet were promising. His latest book is not without those faults. But the tortured rhythm has now developed into a rhythm of great individuality; the oddness of phrase is now as a rule nothing more than the elaborate detail of a very self-­conscious artist. He writes now of Blanid, an Irish bondsmaid, and her love for her master, Hialti; of Thorgerd, his wife; and of ‘an old strange man’, the fairy ‘crier by night’. The action of this one-­act play is supposed to take place on a wild night of late autumn, in a cottage near a misty mere and among unseen mountains. It takes place indeed in a region where there are no mountains and no meres, in the gray chambers of a fantastic brain. It is a handful of dreams. No ombres Chinoises or ‘plays for marionettes’ behind gauze were ever more unreal. And yet not unreal. For the poet and those readers whom he has a right to expect, these voices out of the mist are as real as Hamlet’s or Paula Tanqueray’s.2 ‘Ohohey! Ohohey!’ cries the old strange man, and the spine becomes icy, the ears throb. They are the more real because the poet’s language and rhythm are true to the life of those beings that never lived, save in his fantasy. The dialogue is remarkably monosyllabic, and modulated with such infinite legitimate variations as to make the blank verse perhaps the most delicate of our time. The lyrics have a fatal complexity. As a rule, they come no nearer to perfect than to show that the writer is trying to express the inexpressible. He still lets pass occasionally what means nothing; yet this patiently written little book is full of ‘natural magic’ which will make a strong and enduring appeal to some. [. . .] That Mr Noyes has very little to say is, of course, no condemnation today. He has read Baudelaire, Mr Swinburne, Gautier,3 and Mr Yeats, and these have stimulated a mind that has evidently a rich natural taste in words and the sounds of words. But in the present volume this taste has not carried him very far. He hardly seems to have found one subject which he could not merely play with, and the lack of seriousness even in a trivial labour is fatal. His ‘Love-­Song of Morna’ is pretty and Celtic, and all that; but the words ‘faint’ and ‘dim’ and ‘drear’ and ‘desolate’ have become jaded during their gay 2  The Second Mrs Tanqueray, by Arthur Wing Pinero, had been a theatrical hit in 1893, with Mrs Patrick Campbell in the title-role. 3  Théophile Gautier (1811–72): French writer who propagated the doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake’, and influenced the literature of the fin-de-siècle.

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life in the last ten years, and are no longer able to make a poem by their presence.4 His ‘Michael Oaktree’ exhibits one quality in which he may very well attain more distinction in future; now he writes too diffusely, is too easily dazed by lines like The sacred consolation of the sea;

and thinks too highly of strangeness as compared with accuracy. Such lines as these, however, are promising, and the last is exceptionally beautiful:— . . . And fragrant grasses, murmuring a prayer, Bowed all together to the holy West, Bowed all together through the golden hush, The breathing hush, the solemn scented hush, The holy, holy hush of eventide. And, in among the ferns that crowned the hill With waving green and whispers of the wind, A boy and girl, before me, linking hands, Into the golden West wandered away.

In ‘Art’ he shows a high degree of mechanical perfection; in ‘An Aesthete’ and ‘The Symbolist’ the same mechanical perfection, and a power of conciseness and restraint. ‘The Mysterious Chamber’ (after Baudelaire), though it has brought out all his extravagance, is his best. He has there given some words a force quite apart from their dictionary sense; he has made some of them magical—­and to do that consistently is to be a poet. Could this magic have been combined with the conciseness of ‘The Symbolist’, the ‘Mysterious Chamber’ would have been a very fine piece. Hark, how the battered clock ticks to and fro—   Life, Death—­Life, Death—­Life, Death—

Such effects as that, and Mr Noyes’s care for words give his book a prophetic interest that outweighs its intrinsic value. [. . .] Mr Gibson is a very poetical versifier. He uses all the very poetical adjectives and very poetical metaphors, which poets have ever used. Thus he begins ‘The Queen’s Vigil’:— Among her singing maids, within The garden of the trellised vine,

4  ‘Dim’ appears in ET’s poems ‘The Signpost’ and ‘House and Man’; ‘drear’ in ‘Out in the dark’ (ACP, 37, 60, 138).

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At Angelus Queen Amelin Drank the rose-­fragrant air like wine [. . .]

This level—­by no means a low one—­is maintained throughout the volume. He seems to us to be nearly a perfect minor poet—­without the intellectual equipment for originality, but with much grace of manner, melody of numbers, and clearness as well as opulence of fancy. ‘The Singers’ is a very pretty conceit, without one unnecessary epithet. DC: 5 December 

[Minor Poetry] Minor poetry might profitably be used for other purposes than the making of spills, for which the choice paper on which it is printed is an apt material.1 Some persons keep a shelf for these books as lapsus Naturae,2 or collect them from a kindly belief that the proper study of mankind is men. But we would recommend a generous and serious study. For the minor poet himself the study of his peers would have the wholesome effect of exercising his mind upon those weaknesses which he never perceives in himself; he might even learn that his most valued peculiarities are shared by scores. For the ordinary uninspired person, on the other hand, such books hold out not only a hope of discovery, like digging for coal in Kent, together with a solemn amusement, but also a fertile land of reflection. To take only one point among many, minor poetry is, we believe, significant, because it is abundantly prophetic of the future of poetry. We do not deny that it is imitative, especially in manner; but we do assert that it is in a large degree original. The youthfulness, the exuberance which distinguishes nearly all minor poetry succeeds in masking the new thoughts which are almost equally characteristic. In the minor poet himself these thoughts are seldom matured. They lie in a sort of life-­in-­death until the touch of a mighty hand grants them their full development. For the great poet comes at the end of a period, the résumé of a score of mediocrities, as Wordsworth was. We make no pretence of being able to 1  ET used pages from hopeless slim volumes as ‘spills’ for lighting his pipe from the fire. The collections he went on to review, which include C. M. Masterman, Folia Dispersa, and Wayside Musings by a supposed ‘Tramp’, have indeed vanished without trace. 2  Errors of Nature.

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create imaginatively the poet of the next age from the material in the books before us. We seem, nevertheless, to see in the best of them the beginnings of a path farther into the unknown. [. . .] DC: 27 December 

In Memoriam, The Princess, and Maud, by Alfred Lord Tennyson, edited by John Churton Collins Those who do not know already will learn from this volume that Mr Churton Collins1 is a very widely-­read man. But if authors have often considered a display of their wide reading sufficient grace for a book, from Mr Collins, who is known for a determined and conscientious critic, we expect something more. Non-­commentating minds may perhaps be pardoned for their inability to find something more in this book. At the same time, it has one peculiar interest for all. It is in a sense a very contentious manifesto from one of the two large and partly hostile classes into which lovers of poetry may be divided. One class consists of men for whom reading is almost a creative act. They read in order to think or to dream. Poetry is a drug that leads on to a mood favourable to their most desired thoughts. Subtle plagiarists, they know that a poet is a poet if they rise from the rapture of reading him richer and more deeply versed in life. The reading of Shakespeare is a tract of experience. They connect certain years or hours with books rather than deeds. But Mr Collins is probably not one of these. He belongs to a class of readers more humble, more inquisitive, and more sane; more humble, because they are 1 John Churton Collins (1848–1908): well-known scholar, critic, and lecturer; appointed Professor of English Literature at Birmingham University in 1904. As in The Study of English Literature (1891), he was an ardent advocate for introducing English literary studies into the university curriculum. Tennyson himself disliked Collins’s listing of parallel passages, which he saw as a charge of plagiarism. But it seems he did not (as reported by Edmund Gosse) call Collins ‘a louse on the locks of literature’; although the phrase gave Anthony Kearney the title for his book on Collins (1986). Gosse was retaliating against a notorious attack by Collins (an aggressive reviewer) on his own lack of scholarly rigour. Reviewing Collins’s Posthumous Essays, ET again rebukes his moralistic approach. Citing Collins’s view that Tennyson ‘had illustrated in the tragedy of Guinevere and Lancelot “the havoc which may be wrought through the sins of the senses” ’, he comments: ‘We should be inclined to say that that tragedy is more likely to glorify the sins of the senses in the eyes of those who might be influenced by poetry’ (SR: 29 June 1912).

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before all things anxious to know the exact intention of their poet; more inquisitive, because in searching for it they are unrelenting; more sane, because a poet is to them not so much a magician as an instructor, not so much a benevolent despot as a constitutional monarch of their minds. From this class come those fanatical lovers of poetry whose devotion is like that of the Indians, who hold an arm aloft for years and believe they are blessed. Their devotion is immortalised in such patient, fruitless work as Mr Macaulay’s Life of John Gower, or Mr Bond’s Life of John Lyly.2 Mr Collins’s notes to In Memoriam, The Princess, and ‘Maud’, naïvely reveal a characteristic mental attitude of this latter school. He has collated all the editions of Tennyson which could be supplied by the British Museum and other public libraries, by booksellers and friends. He remarks, in his preface, upon the ‘incessantly shifting variants’ which Tennyson introduced in the matter of whole stanzas, epithets, spelling, etc.; and nearly every page of this text is enriched by a footnote, showing what changes Tennyson made between the first edition and the last. The editor has not pointed out that these changes are often significant of something more than the poet’s faddishness. It seems to us that he would have done well to comment upon the poet’s changing views of rhythm as shown by these variants. The change from ‘through’ to ‘thro’’ merely exposes the minor poet in Tennyson. The change from ‘dasht’ to ‘dash’d’ is perhaps a sane one, though it should be observed that the former represents the only possible pronunciation. But, granting the need for comment, it is surely worthy of remark that hundreds of blank verse lines which were hendecasyllabic in 1847–8 became decasyllabic in later editions. Tennyson’s preference of the conventional line to the hendecasyllabic line, with its often agreeable quavering motion, marks an interesting change of taste. Mr Collins shows amazing care in the parallel passages which swell his notes. ‘In the case of some poets’, he says, ‘notably of Virgil, of Milton, of Gray, and of Tennyson, they are not merely of interest, but indispensable in commentary’. He thinks many of the parallels accidental; some ‘undoubtedly represent Tennyson’s originals’. The practice of deliberately seeking and printing parallel passages seems to us pernicious. Our own unlearned and uninquisitive mind found more than one or two ‘parallels’ which Mr Collins had omitted; and who could not? It is perhaps an amusing occupation of the same 2  George Campbell Macaulay (1852–1915) also edited Gower’s Complete Works, see [11]; as R. Warwick Bond (1857–1943) also edited Lyly’s Complete Works, then being reviewed by ET (DC: 2 January 1903). He told GB (16 December 1902) that Bond was ‘a very able English scholar’, and that Lyly ‘made some beautiful sentences’, but ‘such editors bore me completely’ (LGB, 42).

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order as a missing word competition. But where is the value of the note which reminds us that Tennyson was not the only poet to use ‘vast’ and ‘wandering’ in the same line? The game is endless and should find favour in schools. Even if the habit is wholesome in the critic, what effect will it have on his readers? Learned men will find no satisfaction in notes that prove Mr Collins to be one of themselves. Smaller readers will receive some verbal information, without the trouble of using their wits and a library. The studious mind will often see a path of happy digression in a learned line, and perhaps the poet himself prepared it consciously. But, with a note at the bottom of the page, that pleasure is impossible. It is too mechanical, too bald, too unproductive of anything save applause to Mr Collins. Notes such as that explaining a reference to the Oppian law3 are more defensible. Yet even they are more helpful to the idle than the unlearned. The editor leaves some obscure passages still obscure, and by his own gross style sometimes tires the student. He is, we think, never inaccurate in matters of fact. But surely these lines:— He finds on misty mountain-­ground His own vast shadow glory-­crown’d—

are explained by that well-­known phenomenon of the dawn, when dew or snow is on the grass, which has been noted by Jefferies, Cellini, and by Coleridge in these lines:— The woodman . . . Sees full before him, gliding without tread, An image with a glory round its head.

Mr Collins says, ‘an allusion, perhaps, to the spectre of the Brocken’.4 Accuracy and thoroughness he shows in a high degree; and we believe that he has been betrayed into the obvious and the unnecessary by a too reverent opinion of those editorial virtues. In fact we welcome the little splenetic spots here and there, as reminding us that the possessor of this immense curiosity is human. But we still wonder for whom the careful, thoughtful, learned commentator intends his work. DC: 31 December 3  Mentioned in The Princess, this Roman law, which restricted women’s purchase of clothes and jewellery, was enacted in 215 bce during the Second Punic War. 4  ‘The Brocken spectre’ is an effect (so-called because particularly notable on the highest peak of the Harz Mountains in Germany), whereby watery mist at dawn or dusk causes a rainbow to halo or encircle a walker’s shadow. This phenomenon is evoked by Tennyson in In Memoriam, XCVII, and by Coleridge in ‘Constancy to an Ideal Object’. Benvenuto Cellini (1500–71) describes such an effect in his autobiography: ET may have seen Cellini’s description quoted by Henry David Thoreau in Walden. Curiously, in ‘Iris by Night’, an elegy for ET, RF would use an encircling rainbow to symbolize the poets’ status as ‘elected friends’.

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1903 The Poetry of George Wither,1 edited by Frank Sidgwick One formerly had need of luck or riches to find a pleasant edition of Wither’s good things; and Mr Sidgwick and his publisher are to be heartily thanked for these two volumes, which change all that. We are a little surprised that such an edition has not come until today. But since his contemporary popularity died long before his own death in 1667, Wither’s fame has, for some reason, failed to ripen as one may think it deserved. Eighteenth century critics misspelt his name, ignored his books, and abused him. Bishop Percy reprinted the fine lyric, ‘Shall I wasting in despair’, and upon that, and a quota­tion from The Mistress of Philarete, by Wordsworth, and Lamb’s essay on Wither,2 his reputation at present rests. That essay, indeed, is so good, as far as concerns the poems known to Lamb, that it is hard to do anything but add a little water to it and hand it on. He did to Wither the great and ne­ces­sary justice of proving that so far from being ‘a rustic poet’, he expounded, in brilliantly varied verse, a character more sweet and simple and consistent than any other writer of English verse. We have met with no style at once so nat­ural, monosyllabic, idiomatic, and melodious as Wither’s. His very facility is made pardonable and even lovely by virtue of the almost physical health and heartiness which it expresses. Had he written little, his facility would have condemned him; combined with profusion, it is to be counted in his favour, though not as an artist; and it is one’s business to be interested in his continuous self-­expression or to leave him alone. He is to be esteemed for the grace both of his heroics and his heptasyllabic couplets that flow on as nat­ ural­ly as good prose; for the uncommon sweetness and e­xuberance of his

1  George Wither (1588–1667) had a turbulent career from the Jacobean to the Caroline period, with much litigation and some spells in prison. His works include Spenser-inspired pastoral poems, satirical pamphlets, hymns, and religious poems. He fought for the Commonwealth in the Civil War, and became increasingly puritanical. 2 Thomas Percy (1729–1811), Bishop of Dromore, Co. Down, compiled the influential anthology Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). Wordsworth prefaces his poem ‘To the Daisy’, not with an extract from Wither’s Faire-Virtue, the Mistresse of Phil’arete (1622), but from a speech by ‘Philarete’ (‘lover of virtue’) in the Fourth Eclogue of The Shepherds Hunting (1615). The extract, which celebrates the Muse, includes the lines: ‘Her divine skill taught me this, / That from everything I saw / I could some invention draw’ (366–8). Interestingly, Wordsworth has ‘instruction’ rather than ‘invention’. Charles Lamb’s essay ‘On the Poetical Works of George Wither’ was published in 1818.

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rhymes; and for his faculty of painting abstractions without materialising them. He professes himself unable, as his readers must be unable, to say whether ‘Fair Virtue’ was a woman or an idea. In either case, the portraiture is rich and refined. Nor should it be forgotten that he is an interesting link in the chain of English poets who have been inspired by Nature.3 His poetry seems to have been such an inevitable expression of himself, that the merits of his verse may almost be counted as personal merits and charms. He tells us himself how the Muse dwelt with him— But though that all the world’s delight forsake me, I have a Muse, and she shall music make me; Whose airy notes, in spite of closest cages, Shall give content to me, and after ages. Nor do I pass for all this outward ill, My heart’s the same, and undejected still; And, which is more than some in freedom win, I have true rest, and peace, and joy within.4

This proud and sober cheerfulness was intimately allied to the purity of his poetic fancy, the somewhat monotonous ripple of his verse, and the kissing of his rhymes. No one gave virtue, as Wither gave it, a kind of sensual beauty and warmth. [. . .] DC: 22 January 

The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne1 from the original manuscripts, edited [and published] by Bertram Dobell Mr Dobell has made an interesting discovery. For two centuries this book had existed in manuscript, in the hands of a Herefordshire family, and h ­ aving 3  ET later called Wither ‘one of the poets whom we can connect with a district of England’, saying: ‘if you know the pond at Alresford before the poem, you add a secondary but very real charm’ to Wither’s poem on the subject; while in the poem itself ‘you taste something of the human experience and affection which must precede the mention’ (IPS, 100). 4  Quotation from ‘Sonnet’ in Third Eglogue of The Shepherds Hunting. 1  Thomas Traherne (1636/7–74), an Anglican clergyman, was indeed little known until the early twentieth century, aside from his Roman Forgeries (1673): an attack on the Catholic Church’s claim to be the only true church. Reprints of Traherne include Dick Davis (ed.), Selected Writings (Manchester: Carcanet, 1988); Julia Smith (ed.), Select Meditations (Carcanet, 2009): a selection from Traherne’s most celebrated work, the prose Centuries of Meditations.

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in 1888 left that obscurity and passed to the more dangerous publicity of a bookstall, it was purchased for a few pence by a friend of Mr Dobell. Dr Grosart2 bought it again, and was about to print it as the work of Henry Vaughan. On his death it came to Mr Dobell, together with another manuscript in the same handwriting, which the present editor and publisher slowly but almost positively found to be that of the author of Roman Forgeries, Thomas Traherne, who was until then remembered though not known by name as the author of a poem in the Oxford Book of English Verse and two in Carmina Mariana.3 He was probably born at or near Hereford in or about 1636, of Welsh or possibly Cornish, and certainly poor, parents. Of his childhood we know nothing; for we do not think that his persistent mention of the wonders and joys of infancy is an absolute proof that his own early experience was joyous and wonderful. [. . .] In 1657 he was admitted to the rectory of Credenhill, in Hereford, but became soon afterwards chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman, and minister of the parish of Teddington, in Middlesex. Towards the close of his life he published Roman Forgeries, and in 1674 died, just before the publication of his Christian Ethics and twenty-­five years before his Serious and Pathetical Contemplation of the Mercies of God appeared anonymously. The very few who know these first two books have probably been mildly impressed by their earnestness, staunch Protestantism, and moving style. Readers of the verse in the last of these three have judged without any of the deceptive magic of a great name, and apparently have judged unfavourably. Mr Dobell reprints it here, with the verse from Christian Ethics. He pleads, and with justice, that the poet of the volume now published is on a level with Vaughan. But Traherne will be treated as a new poet, and it must be long before he has the respectable reputation of Vaughan, which has grown, in a way which we will not try to explain, very largely by mere lapse of time. Moreover, the first stanza of Vaughan’s ‘Retreat’4 is a condensed form of nearly half of Traherne’s poetry, for he is continually writing thus of his childhood:— That prospect was the gate of Heaven, that day The ancient Light of Eden did convey Into my soul: I was an Adam there,   A little Adam in a sphere 2 Alexander Balloch Grosart (1827–99): Presbyterian minister, Elizabethan and Jacobean scholar, interested in religious poetry and prose. 3  The poem in question is ‘News’; Carmina Mariana (1893): anthology ‘in honour of or in relation to The Blessed Virgin Mary’, ed. Orby Shipley. 4  ‘The Retreat’ by Henry Vaughan (1621–95) begins: ‘Happy those early days! when I / Shined in my angel infancy’.

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Of Joys! O there my ravisht sense Was entertained in Paradise, And had a sight of Innocence, Which was beyond all bound and price. An antepast of Heaven sure! I on the Earth did reign, Within, without me, all was pure: I must become a child again.5

This and the poem ‘Upon those pure and virgin apprehensions which I had in my infancy’ very naturally remind Mr Dobell of Wordsworth’s Ode. But when he claims that Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan cannot be compared with Traherne ‘in the most essential qualities of the poet’, and that neither Milton nor Shelley ‘has more of the impetuous rush of a mind lifted into ecstasy beyond itself ’, we are unable to see the grounds of his claim. Ecstasy is indeed perceptible on every page, but it is Traherne’s weakness that his slow, monotonous verse cannot rush. His prose is different. When he is speaking of ‘the free and kingly life’ and of the joy of first contemplating the beauty of the world he is incomparable:— The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The Men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal Cherubims! And young men glittering and sparkling angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty!6 [. . .]

DC: 7 April 

5  The poem is ‘Innocence’; antepast: foretaste. 6  ET quotes this passage, from Centuries of Meditations [III] in all his reviews of Traherne’s works. His poem ‘Words’ calls words ‘Precious as gold, / As poppies and corn’; in ‘The Other’ he celebrates ‘one star, one lamp, one peace / Held on an everlasting lease’ (ACP, 92, 41). Dobell quotes extracts from Centuries in his introduction to Poetical Works, but did not publish the text until 1908. For ET, ‘The Meditations . . . fully answer the promise of this and other passages . . . In all they make one of the finest English autobiographies, worthy to stand with a book which they often suggest, Richard Jefferies’ Story of my Heart’ (MP: 31 August 1908). ET cooled on Traherne’s poetry, writing of Poems of Felicity: ‘Nobody who had read his prose could doubt that Traherne was a poet; few that had read both verse and prose could fail to regret that he had troubled with verse’ (DC: 9 December 1910). In SC, ET heads Chapter VIII: ‘June—­Hampshire—­The Golden Age—­Traherne’ (ETPW II, 293–310).

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John Burroughs,1 Literary Values and Other Papers Under such titles as ‘Style and the Man’, ‘Criticism and the Man’, ‘Poetry and Eloquence’, ‘Suggestiveness’, and ‘On the Re-­reading of Books’, Mr Burroughs confesses that he has written chapters of his autobiography, in so far as he is one who dwells among books. Sometimes he criticises Whitman or Thoreau; sometimes he criticises criticism, and sometimes the criticism of criticism; but always, apparently, he conceives that he will have succeeded if he has shown the reader just what is his impression of the matters in hand. [. . .] One of the most original, if one of the most negligent, of modern critics, has stated very brilliantly the grounds of autobiographical criticism in an essay called ‘The Critic as Artist’.2 Mr Burroughs does not mention Wilde, but it is evident that theoretically his point of view is a similar one. It is not (he says, in ‘Criticism and the Man’) truth alone that makes literature; it is truth plus a man. Readers fancy they are interested in the birds and flowers they find in the pages of the poets; but no, it is the poets themselves that they are interested in. There are the same birds and flowers in the fields and woods,—do they care for them? In many of the authors of whom Sainte-­Beuve writes I have no interest, but I am always interested in Sainte-­Beuve’s view of them, in the play of his intelligence and imagination over and around them. After reading his discussion of Cowper, or Fénelon, or Massillon, or Pascal, it is not the flavour of these writers that remains in my mind, but the flavour of the critic himself. I am under his spell, and not that of his subject. Is not this equally true of the criticism of Goethe, or Carlyle, or Macaulay, or Lamb, or Hazlitt, or Coleridge, or any other? The pages of these writers are no more a transparent medium, through which we see the subject as in itself it is, than are those of any other creative artist.

We accept that opinion, and because we accept it we think that as a critical artist Mr Burroughs fails. For we close his book with the feeling that we have heard his opinions upon more critics than have ever been assembled in one book before. They are nearly all here; but not Mr Burroughs. He seems to have fallen a victim to the diversity of his own sympathies. Instead of being

1  John Burroughs (1837–1921): American essayist, naturalist, and proto-environmentalist, who attacked romantic and anthropomorphic approaches to the natural world; a close friend of Walt Whitman. Most of Burroughs’s publications were country books. Reviewing Far and Near, ET asks: ‘who is there that does not know and admire him as perhaps the cleverest and most charming of the picturesque naturalists now writing?’ (DC: 10 October 1905); and he praises Ways of Nature for ‘observations’ that ‘are profuse, new, and recorded in [a] plain and lively way’ (DC: 29 January 1906). 2  Wilde’s criticism was important to ET: see [302n.] and Introduction [xlviii].

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able to show us what Arnold or Sainte-­Beuve3 appear to him, he only shows that he agrees with them, or understands why they wrote as they did. ‘Many and diverse’ he quotes from Arnold, ‘must be the judgments passed upon every great poet.’ And he sees that it is so. ‘The critic reveals himself in and through his subject’, he says; and again, ‘The critic must escape from the local and accidental. We would have Macaulay cease to be a Whig’, etc., which is contradictory. ‘It is good’, he says, in another place, ‘to be a realist, and it is good to be a romanticist . . . it is good to be a Carlyle, and it is good to be a Mazzini4– always provided that one is so from the inside and not from without’; yet in another essay he says that Emerson ‘exploits Plato, Goethe, Montaigne, etc., in relation to his thought’, but that ‘it is not criticism, and does not set out to be’. A very prominent opinion of our critic’s is that ‘the common, the average, the universal’, etc., is what is valuable in literature. He is all for straightforwardness, for preference of subject to style (whatever that may be), and is unwilling to see that a man may be quite straightforwardly and inevitably ‘affected’, just as he himself is as ‘personal’ as possible when he appears to us so ‘impersonal’. Again, ‘One can go back’, he says, ‘to The Vicar of Wakefield; but can he read a second time The Woman in White?’ And al­together he is surprisingly impersonal in ‘the re-­reading of books’. Only ‘the normal, the sane, the simple’, he repeats, ‘have the gift of long life’; as if Pantagruel or Religio Medici or Hamlet were normal and sane and simple. And we begin to suspect that Mr Burroughs’s admiration of these things is bred of phlegm, when he says, ‘each of us has about all the happiness he has the capacity for’. Mr Burroughs would perhaps agree that in every age there will be at least three types of critics: those who are occupied in relating books to life; those who are occupied in relating books to books, and striving for a standard; and finally, the secluded lovers of books, who move among them just as ‘men of the world’ move among men. They are the gifted readers. The supreme fe­li­ city of their criticism will probably be a quotation.5 All will justify themselves 3 Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–69): French literary critic and historian, who pioneered contextual and biographical approaches to literature, and who influenced Matthew Arnold. 4  The Scottish writer and philosopher, Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), and the Italian patriot, Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72), represent opposing ideas of history. Carlyle, as in The French Revolution: A History (1837), believed in individual ‘great man’ agency; Mazzini, in collective and communitarian (not Communist) action. 5 RF would have agreed. Here he may refer to ET: ‘People make their great strides in understanding literature at most unexpected times. I never caught another man’s emotion in it more than when someone drew his finger over some seven lines of blank verse—­beginning carefully and ending carefully—­and said simply “From there to—­there.” He knew and I knew. We said no more.’ (LRF I, 240).

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in so far as they ‘make literature’, and especially in so far as they open a track for the appreciation of the little known, and send the new into the current of thought in their own day. They will, in a measure, help genius to its own in good time. Mr Burroughs is particularly aware of the difficulty of doing this. He is irritably anxious to discover a nostrum by which we shall learn who will last. Will Emerson? Will Mr Meredith? But to us it seems that the Critic should find rather what the times are in need of. If a writer shall serve or nobly please the men of his day he does his duty. If he shall not, but shall have to wait a century, he is unfortunate, and may be immortal; but the critic is not to be blamed for not being among the prophets. It is far more difficult to be among the interpreters, the evangelists. And as for seeing things as in themselves they really are, it is a dull occupation, even when successful. To suggest the case by analogy, what is a fine summer’s day as in itself it really is? Is the Meteorological Office to decide? or the poet? or the farmer? [. . .] DC: 14 July 

Magnus Maclean,1 The Literature of the Celts, its history and romance This book is, as it claims to be, the first general survey of Celtic literature. Mr Maclean is an enthusiastic Celt, and if his preferences are those of a Scot, they are so frank as to be very easily corrected. He has a wide acquaintance with his subject, and a still wider acquaintance with the critical and other literature which that has called forth. A marvellously corrupt style is his only considerable fault. Mr Maclean writes of St Patrick and St Columba as the morning stars of Celtic literature, by virtue of achievement and influence. Though Christians, they were druided by the past of their race. St Patrick, it has been written, was suspicious of his own fearful joy at hearing the stories of the Feinn;2 but his guardian angels reassured him and even suggested that he should write the stories down, since they would be a joyous influence ‘to the end of time’. Mr Maclean pays a fine tribute to Columba, that tender, warlike priest,

1 Magnus Maclean (1857–1937): a native of Skye, Maclean was Professor of Electrical Engineering at Glasgow University, as well as a scholar of Celtic languages and literature. Maclean dropped the book’s subtitle in a new edition (1926). 2  More usually, Fianna.

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author and scribe, and quotes this exquisite passage, which must have been recalled to many by ‘Innisfree’:— Were the tribute of all Alba mine, from its centre to its border, I would prefer the sight of one house in the middle of Derry. The reason I love Derry is for its quietness, for its purity, and for the crowds of white angels from the one end to the other . . . My Derry, my little oak-­grove, my dwelling, and my little cell, O eternal God in heaven, woe be to him who violates it.3

Even so early was the characteristic note of Celtic literature struck; to some it may seem that all its finest pieces might have come from one brain alone. Gaelic and Welsh poets were rhyming in subtle metres ‘while the Germanic races could only alliterate’. From that time forth Celtic literature falls under half a dozen heads. First, in point of antiquity of theme, though not always in antiquity of execution, there are the mythological poems. To this class belong such portions of the Mabinogion4 as the Tale of Pwyll, and the greater part of the ‘Three Sorrows of Story Telling’. The writers apparently took the old myth­ ology (which was more a mystery to them perhaps than to us) as actual fact. We need hardly mention the ‘Tragedy of the Children of Lir’ as one of the loveliest of this class. They were changed by a sorceress into four white swans, and—­how significantly!—when she wished to lighten their sorrow she gave the swans ‘the use of their Gaelic speech, of their human reason, and the power of singing sweet, plaintive, fairy music, surpassing all known in the world in its harmony and soothing influence’. One more example of this class, from the story of ‘Deirdre and the Sons of Uisneach’. It is from Deirdre’s lament on leaving Loch Etive, and is found complete in Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain:5—

3 Translation of poem by St Columba/Colm Cille (521–97), who founded monasteries in Durrow and Derry; and, after being expelled from Ireland, an abbey on the island of Iona. Alba: Scotland; Derry (Doire) means ‘oak grove’ or ‘oak wood’. 4  A collection of eleven mythic prose stories about early Britain, written down in MiddleWelsh in the fourteenth-century Red Book of Hergest (named for Hergest in Radnor). Lady Charlotte Guest (1812–95) published an influential translation in a bilingual format (1838–45). ET drew on Guest’s Mabinogion, which he translates as ‘twice-told tales’, and on various Irish sources for his Celtic Stories (1911). A quatrain in his poem ‘Roads’ affirms: ‘Helen of the roads, / The mountain ways of Wales / And the Mabinogion tales, / Is one of the true gods’ (ACP, 107). 5  Lady Augusta Gregory had published Cuchulain of Muirthemne, a version of the Ulster Red Branch legendary cycle, in 1902. The translation that follows is not by Gregory, but by the Celtic scholar, William Forbes Skene (1809–92).

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Glen Etive! O Glen Etive! There I raised my earliest house; Beautiful its woods on rising When the sun fell on Glen Etive. Glen Orchy! O Glen Orchy! The straight glen of smooth ridges; No man of his age was so joyful As Naois in Glen Orchy.

Naois, of course, was her lover. And two versions of this story were taken down from the words of a foxhunter on Tayside and an old Macneill in Barra, last century. Secondly, there is the heroic cycle, to which belong the stories of Cuchullin and such tales in the Mabinogion as ‘The Lady of the Fountain’. Mr Maclean calls them Homeric. It is true that we can find Hector in Cuchullin and a Ulysses in Kai, but there is a grand, purely human interest in the Greek epics which is lacking in the Celtic stories. Cuchullin is perhaps as fine as any Greek or Trojan, but he seems to us to have suffered the supreme misfortune of missing his Maeonides.6 In literature, at least, he remains an impressive torso, but still a torso. And, it must be remembered, not only were the heroes seen through a thick mist of ages, but the poets were writing at a time so long after the downfall of their race that their activity and success have scarcely a parallel in the history of literature. They write of Death, of Battle, of Women, of the voices of Birds, as if these portents had never become stale to them, as if they had been apprehended in an ecstasy of surprise and never forgotten. The third class is made memorable by heroes who are all but historical, such as Fionn, Goll MacMorna, Ossian, Diarmad and Caoilte MacRonan. ‘As the name of David is traditionally associated with the Hebrew Psalter’, says Mr Maclean, ‘so is that of Ossian the warrior bard with the classic poems of the Gael. His name will always be identified with the bardic literature that celebrates the deeds of the Feinn, even though scholars cannot affirm with historic certainty that he actually lived or was the real author of one of the ballads attributed to him.’ The tales would occupy 3,000 pages. The poetry alone—‘it is believed’—is more than 80,000 lines in length. The elegiac tendency is very strong in this class; so, too, the feeling for Nature. ‘I hear’, says Ossian— I hear no music, I find no feast, I slay no beast from a bounding steed, 6  Kai: the Arthurian Sir Kay; Maeonides: either a patronymic for Homer or because he was thought to come from Maeonia (Lydia) in Asia Minor.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 I bestow no gold, I am poor and old, I am sick and cold, without wine or mead.

‘Sweet’, he sings, and again the quotation is from the ‘Book of the Dean of Lismore’— Sweet is man’s voice in the land of gold, Sweet the sounds the birds produce; Sweet is the murmur of the crane, Sweet sound the waves at Bundatreor, Sweet the soft murmuring of the wind; Sweet sounds the cuckoo at Cas-­a’choin . . .

How far from the simplicity of this have we moved, and how little from its power! The fourth class includes the lives, e.g., of St Columba and the histories, e.g., of Gildas, Nennius, and Keating. They are in Latin and Gaelic, and with the exception of the work of Adamnan and Keating they are still more or less raw material, and must wait yet a little longer before they compete with Greek and Latin story as treasuries of poetic theme.7 The fifth class of personal lyrics, powerfully represented in medieval Welsh, is the most perfect of all in form. From seas, and from mountains, And from the deep rivers, God brings wealth to the happy man.

So ‘Taliesin’ sang. But the names of the ‘happy men’—Gwalchmai, and Dafydd ap Gwilym and the rest—­are unfortunately only names. Readers of Thomas Stephens or the Iolo MSS remember their names, but unless they are Welsh they remember nothing else. Here and there, like these by Llywarch Hên— At Aber Cuawg the cuckoos sing, The recollection is in my mind; There are that hear them that will not hear them again. Have I not listened to the cuckoo on the ivied tree? Did not my shield hang down? What I loved is but vexation; what I loved is no more— 7  Gildas the Wise: sixth-century Scottish monk and historian; Nennius: ninth-century Welsh monk to whom is attributed Historia Brittonum, the first work to mention King Arthur; Geoffrey Keating / Seathrún Céitinn (c.1569–1644): Irish priest, poet and historian; (St) Adamnan or Eunan (c.624–704): Abbot of Iona Abbey, authority on canon law, cousin of St Columba, of whom he wrote a biography.

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a few lines faintly suggest an excellence. But we may say of Welsh lyrics that they are worse than untranslated, because they are abominably translated.8 Mr Maclean’s chapters in connection with all these classes are full and accurate, but, as it seems to us, the philological and critical element is too strong. We cannot over-­praise his account of the MSS, their writers, their discoverers, and their editors. But how much better than the present peremptory divisions of Celtic literature into The Book of Deer, of Lismore, of Hergest, etc., would be some such division as is suggested by the names, Book of Arthur, of Cuchullin, of Ossian! It would be better because more vital, more literary. The philologists can take care of themselves. Their work is its own reward. But literature is meant not merely to satisfy the curiosity of German savants. Its place is on the knees of men and women. The most important work to be done is to present Celtic literature to the world, both Celts and those who are not Celts. Then we shall be able to answer the question, How has it affected, and how will it affect, our literature and life? Today, the position of that literature is as pathetic as when it was imprisoned in the libraries of Europe, and we may say with almost perfect truth that Celtic literature comprises little more than the Mabinogion (of Guest or Loth), ‘Ossian’, Dr Whitley Stokes’s Goidelica, and the poetry of Mr Yeats.9 Not until the Celtic literature is translated shall we be able not only to condemn such a rash statement as this—­controverted by half the Elizabethans—­that ‘the passionate, close, and poetical observation and description of natural scenery’ is not found in English poetry till Wordsworth’s time, long after it appeared in Celtic; but also to show that the Celtic sentiment for Nature is and always has been a fundamentally different one from the English, and in nothing so different as in its capacity for lonely emotion.

8  Taliesin: legendary sixth-century chief of Welsh bards, supposed author of poems in MiddleWelsh Book of Taliesin: see Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams (trans.), The Book of Taliesin: Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain (London: Penguin Classics, 2019); Gwalchmai ap Meilyr (c.1130–80): court-poet of Anglesey; Dafydd ap Gwylim: fourteenthcentury Welsh poet, who elaborated and popularized cywydd (couplet of seven-syllable lines) form; Thomas Stephens (1821–75): scholar and critic of Welsh literature; Iolo MSS: collection of Welsh ‘medieval’ manuscripts, mostly forged by bard and antiquarian Iolo Morganwg/Edward Williams (1747–1826); LLywarch Hên (c.534–608): poet and prince. ET repeated his complaint about translators when reviewing Evelyn Lewes’s Life and Poems of Dafydd ab Gwilym [619]. 9  Joseph Loth (1847–1934): French historian and expert on Celtic languages, who translated the Mabinogion into French. ‘Ossian’: The Works of Ossian, a supposed ‘translation’ of poetry by ‘Ossian’, was published by James Macpherson in 1765: see ET’s review of J. S. Smart’s book on Macpherson [151]. Whitley Stokes (1830–1909): prolific Irish exponent of Celtic studies and pioneering editor of ancient texts.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 Time drops in decay, Like a candle burnt out, And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day; What one in the rout Of the fire-­born moods Has fallen away?10

Even so has Celtic literature survived, and it should be the work of critics like Mr Maclean to expose it with all the fullness possible; and, dividing it into what is Celtic,11 what is not especially so but is still notable (a large class), and what is merely dull (a very large class), to preserve the first class as a possession as soon as possible and for ever. DC: 21 October 

John Davidson, A Rosary Mr Davidson has often shown himself to be a writer of verse and prose,1 with an unselfish and successful devotion to his arts. His artistic honesty has been equalled by his moral fearlessness, and we need hardly say that his admirers will not be disappointed now. For here undoubtedly is much sound writing and high thinking. But it would appear that Mr Davidson, for the time being, is dissatisfied either with the effect of his careful workmanship or with the barrier of time which that of necessity throws between himself and the ­readers he desires. He has, perhaps, been afflicted with that most painful ‘horreur de plume’, during which the writer is fain to contemn that facile proverb, ‘The pen is mightier than the sword.’ Several other distinguished writers have been so afflicted. Fors Clavigera, for example, seems to be an 10  W. B. Yeats, ‘The Moods’, first published in 1893. 11  A year later, ET was commissioned to write Beautiful Wales (1905), in which he attacks Celticism as a fin-de-siècle affectation founded on ignorance. He says of ‘lovers of the Celt’: ‘Their aim and ideal is to go about the world in a state of self-satisfied dejection, interrupted, and perhaps sustained, by days when they consume strange mixed liquors to the tune of all the fine old Celtic songs which are fashionable. . . . I cannot avoid the opinion that to boast of the Celtic spirit is to confess you have it not’ (ETPW II, 98). See, too, ET’s reviews of Fiona Macleod’s work [279], [372]. 1  A Rosary intermingles poems, aphorisms, prose-sketches, and brief critical essays.

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attempt to hold readers more forcibly than could be done with a Crown of Wild Olive.2 And now Mr Davidson seems to say, though he puts the words into the mouth of a character in one of his ‘Eclogues’: ‘Let us express ourselves; let us utter our quintessences’—a speech that is qualified, a little farther on, in answer to a captious question, by the remark, ‘Perhaps it is not to be done; but let us try.’ The same thing is expressed several times in this book, and nowhere more vigorously than in this passage, which we quote the more readily because it also reveals a very characteristic attitude of Mr Davidson:— The prismatic cloud that Shakespeare hung out between poets and the world! It was the newspapers that brought about what may be called an order of Pre-­ Shakespearianism. It was in the newspapers that Thomas Hood found the ‘Song of the Shirt’—in its place the most important English poem of the nineteenth century; the ‘woman in unwomanly rags plying her needle and thread’ is the type of the world’s misery. The ‘Song of the Shirt’ is the most terrible poem in the English language. Only a high heart and strong brain broken on the wheel of life, but master of its own pain and anguish, able to jest in the jaws of death, could have sung this song, of which every single stanza wrings the heart. Poetry passed by on the other side. It could not endure the woman in unwomanly rags. It hid its head like the fabled ostrich in some sand-­bed of Arthurian legends, or took shelter in the paradoxical optimism of The Ring and the Book3 . . . The offal of the world is being said in statistics, in prose fiction; it is besides going to be sung. There it is in the streets, the hospitals, the poor-­houses, the prisons; it is a flood that surges about our feet, it rises breast-­high. And it will be sung in all keys and voices. Poetry has other functions, other aims; but this also has become its province. Will it be of any avail? No; nothing that can be done avails. Poor-­laws, charity organisations, dexterously hold the wound open, or tenderly and hopelessly skin over the cancer. Poetry has no spell to cure it. The world cannot be changed until it falls back into the sun.

Probably Mr Davidson would like to express these things, but, above all, he wishes to express himself, and this book is in part his protest against the 2  In 1866 John Ruskin (1819–1900) initiated a series of lectures on work, war, history, and politics, published as The Crown of Wild Olive. His Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, written during the 1870s, was a more assertive socio-political intervention. Ruskin’s punning title connects the great powers represented by Force, Fortitude, and Fortune with the Latin for bearing a club (clava), key (clavis), and nail (clavus): strengths personified by Hercules (Deed), Ulysses (Patience), and Lycurgus (Law). 3  Here Davidson attacks two celebrated Victorian narrative poems as equally escapist, despite their differences: Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859–85); Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–9), which concerns a murder-trial in seventeenth-century Rome. ‘The Song of the Shirt’ by Thomas Hood (1799–1845) angrily evokes the slave-labour of a seamstress. The poem has the refrains ‘Work-work-work’ and ‘Stitch stitch! Stitch! / In poverty, hunger, and dirt’.

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insufficiency of customary modes of expression. He seeks a pen that shall be half a sword. The mood of his book is one of alert, determined despair, not that comatose despair which is contented with itself, but a despair that is nervous, interested, and so strenuous that it serves some men as well as hope. In fact, Mr Davidson puts it very well himself in a description of one of those busy winter days on the downs which he loves so well. ‘Despair’, he says, ‘is the highest power of hope’, and he finds it out of doors, when he and the hawthorn buds are stirred to life by the raw wind, with its ‘muffled thunder of gongs, drums, cymbals, behind a thick curtain’.4 Here and everywhere he is essentially autobiographical. If the volume were less hearty, tumultuous, and full of the north-­east wind, it might have been called Table Talk. A Rosary hardly describes it; for though it has unity, it is not an obvious or an artistic unity. An old title of his own, A Random Itinerary,5 would better describe it. For in it he is always roving, and often out of doors, and his thoughts have that suddenness and energy which often come from a walk through chan­ ging scenes under changing skies. At one time he is impressed with Nietzsche, at another with Wordsworth, and again with Whitman. They are three out of a hundred influences that have coloured, if not shaped, his mind. Inevitably, too, he attains the height of self-­ expression which is implied by self-­ contradiction. He does not attempt to satisfy himself with a system or to subdue himself to consistency. On one page he praises Hood as we have seen, and on another he writes a ‘Villanelle’ which is as unlike Hood as verse could possibly be. No one lets us see more clearly the extent to which his achievement falls short of his aim. On another page he insists that literature should be ‘a statement of life’, and not a criticism;6 and on many other pages he writes parables and fables, and utters his quintessence in allegories. Then, explaining himself, and also uttering a magnificent half-­truth, he says:— To me it is strange that men should still suppose, because they can speak and write, that therefore they can say what they think and feel. It is not true: 4  ET’s last poem ‘The sorrow of true love’ (13 January 1917) may recall Davidson’s aphorism and imagery: ‘The sorrow of true love is a great sorrow / And true love parting blackens a bright morrow. / Yet almost they equal joys, since their despair / Is but hope blinded by its tears, and clear / Above the storm the heavens wait to be seen . . .’; ET’s ‘Like the touch of rain’ compares the speaker’s feeling for a woman to ‘the joy of walking’ in a storm (ACP, 139, 118). 5  A prose-work (1894), based on walks around London and other parts of southern England: not unlike ET’s own books in that genre, perhaps an influence on them. 6 Davidson calls literature ‘a Statement of the World’, when disputing Matthew Arnold’s repeated and influential definition of literature, specifically poetry, as ‘a criticism of life’; as in his essay on Wordsworth (Essays in Criticism: Second Series [London: Macmillan, 1888], 143).

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thought and feeling are themselves, and cannot be expressed: words are another thing—­themselves also; even action is a poor proxy. Speech, written or oral, represents cerebration and emotion as little as the House of Commons represents Great Britain. Virgil wanted to burn the Aeneid; it was not what he meant. It is probable that the whole literature of the world is a lie.

Whether Mr Davidson expresses himself well or ill, we have not the honour of knowing. If it does not express his quintessence, it is because this is far too small a book for that. Certain it is that he has here produced a book which is extraordinarily rich in genuine human accents, gestures, and sentiments; a book that is a handsome image of an active, sentient, reflecting man. Now his landscapes, now his obiter dicta, now his verse, and now his dialogues, call for praise; and if, as we have said, he freely admits the influences to which he had submitted, not less clearly does he announce his own personality. Literature, he says in one place, is freedom, and the law of freedom is this:— Thou shalt not require thy neighbour to vote as thou dost, to believe as thou dost, to think as thou dost, nor expect thy neighbour to be other than he is; for no two people are alike.

Yet he wishes, and it is finely said in his ‘Critic and Author’, to ‘extend his self-­consciousness into the self-­consciousness of the world’. And his book gives us not only proof that he is so unlike other men as to stimulate them to wholesome conflict, but also so like them as often to surprise us into saying, ‘Here at last we find ourselves expressed’; that is a very small part of the extension of his self-­consciousness which this lusty writer deserves. DC: 28 October

William Watson, For England: Poems Written During Estrangement; Ernest Crosby, Swords and Ploughshares; Laurence Binyon, The Death of Adam and Other Poems; Rosamund Marriott Watson, After Sunset; W. W. Gibson, The Golden Helm and Other Verse; R. C. Trevelyan, Cecilia Gonzaga; T. Sturge Moore, The Centaur’s Booty; John Masefield, Ballads; etc. We have lately had the privilege of reading forty volumes of verse, all sent into the world during the unspeakable summer and autumn of the present

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year. With thirty of these we feel, for various reasons, unqualified to deal;1 for they come rather within the province of preventive medicine than our own. Setting aside those submerged three-­quarters, good or bad, but to us indifferent, we have been astonished by the diverse excellences of the remainder. We find amongst them dignity, style, imagination, and humour, and serious pondering of life, such as would be sufficient to equip a poet of the first rank. They fill us with respect for the poetry of the twentieth century. In short, we know of no other age that has abounded in lesser writers of verse with so much individuality. We have to look back as far as Tottel’s Miscellany or England’s Helicon2 for an assembly of contemporaneous versifiers anything like this. Yet there is hardly one whose pedigree is not plain. There is, of course, hardly a great poet who might not be addressed in the words of Apollo to Ascanius, dis genite et geniture deos.3 But here the descent is a more obvious one. Thus Mr Ernest Crosby4 is, in manner and spirit, descended on one side from Whitman, and Whitman, it should be remembered, has alone among poets met our changed world frankly with a changed style, as if he saw in it nothing in common with Dante’s or Spenser’s world. Mr Binyon, less directly, is descended from Keats. Mr Watson, again, is inclined to be too conscious of his descent from Milton and Wordsworth in their political moods. But Mr Watson is a party man, as neither Milton nor Wordsworth was in poetry; and he is somewhat vainglorious of ‘espousing unpopular truth’.5 Political truth or falsehood, however, does poor service to his verse. Being a party man, he attempts to reason and persuade, and the whole volume contains not more thought than would furnish one leading article. He was born to write elegy, narrative poetry, and political leaders in verse. We prefer the former two, and find an indication of his true line in this consummate historical verse— When lofty Spain came towering up the seas   This little stubborn land to daunt and quell, 1  In fact, ET reviewed twelve volumes in all, including a translation of Virgil. 2  Tottel’s Miscellany: Songes and Sonettes (1557), compiled by Richard Tottel: the first anthology of English poems; England’s Helicon (1600): a selection of pastoral poems. 3  ‘Begotten of gods and destined to beget gods’ (Virgil, Aeneid, IX.642). Ascanius is Aeneas’s son. 4  Ernest Howard Crosby (1856–1907): Presbyterian minister and religious writer, critic of Anglo-American imperialism, friend of Leo Tolstoy on whose Christian-pacifist ideas he wrote two books. He also published Edward Carpenter: Poet and Prophet (1901). For Carpenter, a prominent English advocate of Whitman, see [190n.]. 5  Watson had lost fans by opposing the Boer War: see Appendix [715].

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The winds of heaven were our auxiliaries,   And smote her, that she fell.

The companion verse to this shows us how Mr Watson succeeds in metrical paraphrase of the newspaper:— Ah, not today is Nature on our side!   The mountains and the rivers are our foe. And Nature with the heart of man allied   Is hard to overthrow.

In another poem we have been shocked to find this imperfect phrase— The great achievement of the human mind Is the idea of Justice—

coming after four perfect historical lines. Nevertheless ‘A Laodicean’ and ‘Alpha and Omega’, among others, keep warm our hope that Mr Watson is destined not only to utter the finest English of our time, but to find a subject that may adequately employ it. Mr Ernest Crosby, an American, shares some of Mr Watson’s opinions, and he has undoubtedly found a suitable vehicle in the jerky arrangement of paragraphs which Walt Whitman liked. He believes that ‘The world lives and grows by heresy and treason. It dies by conformity to error and loyalty to wrong’, and he addresses his book to ‘the noble army of traitors and heretics’. He says:— I am no patriot. I do not wish my countrymen to overrun the world. I love the date-­palm equally with the pine-­tree, and each in its place . . . I thank the genial breath of climate for making men different . . . Humanity is no air to be strummed on one note or upon one instrument . . . I am no patriot. I love my country too well to be a patriot.

And those who can ignore his opinions, as well as those who share them, cannot but admire the powerful ejaculation beginning, ‘Hail to the Anglo-­ American alliance for the vulgarisation of the world!’, and that addressed to New York:— O, sprawling, jagged, formless city! City without a face! . . .

Love of love and hate of hate were never better expressed than in some of Mr Crosby’s poems. Vigour and tenderness, high thinking and imagination,

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magical dreaming and practical exhortation are wonderfully blent. ‘Love the oppressors’, begins one poem; and it continues, ‘for love is hell-­fire to the unloving’; and such good things are common here. His few ventures in rhyme are not successful; but those in Whitman’s style are as wholesome and moving, and what is more, as individual, as Whitman’s own. [. . .] Mr Binyon is one of the most careful and successful artists of the day. He has style not merely in single lines, which is common, but in whole poems, which is rare. Many writers laboriously perfect each sentence and each epithet, and let the whole take care of itself. Much of Mr Binyon’s art is devoted to the less flashy and more important task of giving shape and outline to whole poems; and some day he must have his reward. His ‘Death of Adam’, for example, is not a superficially attractive poem. Its subject is rather remote from human interest, and has little intrinsic beauty. Yet the poem has the pure and relevant loveliness of true art. So now she sits reposing in the dusk Of their wide tent, like a great vision throned Of the Earth Mother, tranquil and august, Accorded to some youthful votary Deep in an Asian grove, under the moon.

The passage that ends thus reminds us of ‘Hyperion’, and elsewhere in the poem the same august predecessor is suggested, to our intense delight. ‘The Deserted Palace’, a later poem, owes nothing that we can call a debt to ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, so that we give it no qualified praise in saying that it belongs to the same family. It comes straight   from faery land, Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed.

But there Mr Binyon has the advantage of dealing with a picturesque episode, partly his own and partly suggested by the picture of ‘Love Among the Ruins’.6 ‘The Belfry’ is quite as fine a poem, and is moreover entirely his own. It describes the ascent of two children to a belfry-­room, and their emotions on meeting its mingled light and shade, and finally on hearing the giant birth of sound. The poet invests the whole with magic, quite legitimate, and without exaggeration or verbiage, and the spiritual note which is naturally reached at the end seems to us to be one of the best things in poetry. Mr Binyon is less successful in lyrics, and the third verse of ‘Look Not Too Deep’ surely does 6 Two paintings (1873 watercolour / 1894 oil) by Edward Burne-Jones, based on Robert Browning’s poem of the same name.

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not express what the author meant. Those who care for fine phrasing as well as composition will find it in the odes and ‘A Vision of Resurrection’. Mrs Marriott Watson7 and Mr W. W. Gibson are as modern as Mr Binyon, but not as new. Thus Mr Gibson has in an exaggerated form the romanticism which is so common. His verse has usually the quality which we may condemn as very poetical. It has a strong flavour of saccharine, and is usually a matter of words only. He has taken great pains with the sestet system of his ‘Golden Helm’, with this result:— All night, beside her slumbering lord, the Queen Tossed sleepless—­every aching sense astrain With tingling wakefulness that racked like pain Her weary limbs; all night, in wide-­eyed dread, She watched the slow hours moving dark between The glimmering window and the curtained bed.

But great pains are not enough. Briefly, Mr Gibson’s romanticism is as flat and tedious as the later classicism of the eighteenth century; and if a man is to be flat, he had better employ couplets than anything else. Mrs Watson, on the other hand, succeeds in suggesting, if not always in expressing, the mystery of Nature. ‘Strange how this song of the scythe sets the old days singing’, she writes in ‘Les Foins’, and she does make us feel that the sound means something more than steel and grass. ‘Wanderlied’, too, has a vague magic. She hears the blackbird and exclaims:— Close hid within the misty green-­veiled thicket,   That strange voice drew my heart beyond believing, And as I leaned across the orchard wicket   I knew not was it glad or was it grieving. But this I knew . . . ’twas to no earthly meadows   He called me hence from out his dim wood’s hollow,   He bade me to the Place of Dreams and Shadows, And one day he will call and I shall follow.

‘Meminisse Juvabit’ is the title of another poem,8 and might almost have been the title of her book. For it well suggests the nature of her pervading 7  Rosamund [Ball] Marriott Watson (1860–1911) also wrote essays, a novel, books on gardening and interior decoration. Twice divorced, she eventually took her surname from her common-law husband, the writer H. B. Marriott Watson. 8  forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit: ‘perhaps one day it will be a joy to have remembered even these things’ (Virgil, Aeneid, I.203). The quotation might equally apply to ET’s future poems: ‘October’ includes the line, ‘Some day I shall think this a happy day’ (ACP, 101), and ‘melancholy’ appears in the next line.

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melancholy. Mrs Watson, in common with many others, has made an advance upon former ages in her intimacy with Nature. It gives her verse a great charm; but as yet the intimacy is insufficiently articulate. Mr R. C. Trevelyan9 disappoints us. His ‘Polyphemus’ and ‘The Lady’s Bat’ of last year were not only in themselves delightful poems, but they were promising. But Cecilia Gonzaga is a tragic drama, and is not in the least promising. It reveals no character, and the interest of the story is spoilt by a useless heap of corpses at the end of the play. We have even looked in vain for the quaint lyrical charm of his first book Polyphemus. [. . .] The Centaur’s Booty is another classical dialogue, by Mr Sturge Moore. After Maurice de Guérin10 and Mr Trevelyan’s Polyphemus it is rather dull, though full of tenderness, fine small dramatic touches, and much pure English. It can, however, hardly raise Mr Moore’s high, select reputation. Its paper, print, and brown-­paper cover make an unusually agreeable book. Nor is Mr Masefield’s book anything more than a continuation of Salt-­ Water Ballads.11 His ‘Dawn’ is a good sad song of the open road, and Laugh and be merry: remember, in olden time, God made Heaven and Earth for joy He took in a rhyme, Made them, and filled them full with the strong red wine of His mirth, The splendid joy of the stars: the joy of the earth—

is his one conspicuous success. DC: 26 November 9 R[obert] C[alverley] Trevelyan: (1872–1951): poet and translator, associated with the Bloomsbury Group. ET had given Polyphemus, and Other Poems (1901) a favourable review: ‘His shorter poems . . . are fresh and spontaneous, having a naïve originality in common with one another, and entirely unlike any other verse we know’ (DC: 23 March 1902). With Lascelles Abercrombie, Trevelyan edited An Annual of New Poetry (1917), which contains eighteen poems by ET (under his pseudonym Edward Eastaway), alongside poems by RF, W.  H.  Davies, and others. The Annual was the only volume where ET saw a substantial group of his poems published in book-form. 10  Maurice de Guérin (1810–39): French Romantic poet, one of whose ‘poèmes en prose’ is ‘Le Centaure’, which Moore translated along with ‘La Bacchante’ (1899). 11 Masefield’s Salt-Water Ballads had appeared in 1902. The poem quoted is ‘Laugh and be Merry’.

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1904 The Prophetic Books of William Blake: Jerusalem, edited by E. R. D. Maclagan and A. G. B. Russell It is improbable, think Mr Maclagan and Mr Russell, that Blake will ever be a popular poet. It may be true; it is certainly a truism. But why should he be? Shakespeare is not popular: that is to say, the multitude does not sincerely admire his true excellences: nor is Milton. Tennyson’s poetry is not exactly popular; it is the ‘May Queen’ that is popular. We are inclined to think, moreover, that the only poet who was ever popular is Longfellow, and even that exception depends upon the admission that he was a poet.1 But of all poets Blake is the least likely to gain popularity. For it is part of his distinction that he speaks a language that few can understand. He had the supreme imagination which is the most revered quality of great poetry, but which most effectually sets poets against the world; they see the world, as it were, from among the stars, while those who see it from the elevation of five or six feet, see it distorted and not as it really is. And Blake had this quality almost alone. In his youth, he had a gift of simple and fair speech; but he lost it. Although he could always catch the heavenly harmony of thoughts, he could seldom mount them on a fitting chariot of rhythm and rhyme. His fine passages were the direct gift of the Muse, and are followed by lines of other origin. He wrote before his time, not because he was an innovator, but because he had glimpses of what the dead are supposed to see. Nothing he touched but he raised to its highest power. The microscope is a toy compared with his vision. He made human the stars and the seasons, and he made starry the flower and the grass. When he says, in this book, ‘I write in South Molton Street, what I both see and hear’, the street seems to be something more than its builder knew. He saw the world as a commonwealth of angels and men and beasts and herbs; and in it horrible discords that we scarcely hear seemed to strike the stars. ‘Each outcry’, he sang—

1  ‘The May Queen’, a sentimental poem about a girl who dies, has the refrain: ‘I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, / I’m to be Queen o’ the May’. For ET’s opinion of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, see [104].

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 Each outcry of the hunted Hare A fibre from the Brain doth tear A Skylark wounded in the wing A Cherubim does cease to sing.2

What Mr Chesterton is splendidly endeavouring to do,3 he did as easily as a child laughs— To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.

He saw Autumn as Keats never saw it. His spiritual qualities of poetry are on a level with Dante. But to lovers of poetry, who are sane or but modestly dowered with madness, his qualities of mind are more questionable. Messrs Maclagan and Russell may be supposed to be exceptions. For they have not only edited the first complete edition of Jerusalem, but they understand it, and they promise a complete exposition with justificatory references. We shall applaud them when that comes. Meantime, we are inclined to think, in spite of their laborious and penetrating preface, that Blake wrote as a seraph and for seraphim. Yet it must be remembered that Blake contemned Reason, and forgot that ‘Bacon and Newton, sheath’d in dismal steel’ could only be fought with their own weapons, and not with tears and sighs and groans, although, as he says— . . . a Tear is an Intellectual thing: And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King: And the bitter groan of a Martyr’s woe Is an Arrow from the Almighty’s Bow.4

He wrote as a seraph and for seraphim. Men are not fit for his world. Beautiful as it is and full of a glory which even the ignorant knows to be divine, it is full also of things which are, in his words—

2  This quotation and the next are from Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’. 3  For G. K. Chesterton, see [129], [504] and Appendix [696]. This is a slightly odd comparison. ET had written of Chesterton’s The Wild Knight and Other Poems (1900): ‘In him . . . the note of indignation is very shrill. He protests—­against nearly everything, but always cleverly and often powerfully. But though he feels that reverence is a good thing, he has not yet arrived at the scorn of scorn; he is inclined to be the professional “strong man” in verse’ (DC: 1900/1?). 4  Quotation from poem in Jerusalem, sometimes printed separately as ‘The Grey Monk’.

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Shadowy to those who dwell not in them, mere possibilities: But to those who enter into them they seem the only substances.

It may be that ‘this Vegetable Universe’ is but the faint shadow of his ‘real and eternal World’, but we that are shadows cling to the superstition that we are not, and have but prejudiced and fearful ears for his prophecies. We recommend the book to those who can delight to lose themselves in a ‘selva oscura’5 and be content to guess at what hides therein. None save the impudently sane can affect not to be deeply moved by it. Nor are the trees thereof without fruits and flowers of beautiful colour and taste. Only, we admit that until Mr  Russell and Mr Maclagan publish their explanation, and perhaps an ex­plan­ation of that, there will be much ‘Believing where we cannot prove’.6 About matters of the spirit, men are all engaged in colloquies with themselves. Some of them are overheard, and they are great poets. It is Blake’s misfortune that he is not often overheard in ‘Jerusalem’. DC: 11 January 

A. B. Paterson,1 Rio Grande’s Last Race and Other Verses We should have had small reason for expecting such a fine volume of verse as this from Australia, had we never seen The Man from Snowy River. Many things seemed to make it impossible. The country is new. The most typical people are leading an active life such as might produce a ballad, at the most. And in the United States, which has been settled for a greater time, there has been no indigenous poetry, except Whitman’s.

5  ‘Dark wood’: phrase from second line of Dante’s Inferno. 6  Last line of first quatrain of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. 1 A[ndrew] B[arton] Paterson (1864–1941): Australian poet, journalist, war-reporter, and editor, known as ‘Banjo’ Paterson because he initially published poetry under pseudonym ‘The Banjo’. He wrote the words of ‘Waltzing Matilda’, and the title-poem of his first collection, The Man from Snowy River (1895), inspired an Australian TV series (1993–6). Reviewing Paterson’s much-reprinted anthology, The Old Bush Songs (1905), ET thinks that ‘it was certainly right to save’ songs which have ‘a little historical value as reflecting naïvely the progress of the settlement of Australia’; but finds ‘little to enjoy in them without their appropriate melodies’ (DC: 22 August 1906). Paterson’s poems and ballads, often based on life in the outback, remain popular with Australians. Les Murray edited a selection (1992).

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We had, therefore, looked without much surprise at the books of verse, often with attractive photographs of the authors, which come from Australia now and then to die in England. They were bad; but we reflected that a race hardly develops a genuine poetry more rapidly than an oak achieves full majesty. Poetry is a natural growth, having more than a superficial relation to roses and trees and hills. However airy and graceful it may be in foliage and flower, it has roots deep in a substantial past. It springs apparently from an occupation of the land, from long, busy, and quiet tracts of time, wherein a man or a nation may find its own soul. To have a future, it must have had a past. It may be true, and there is much pathos in Mr Paterson’s intimation that Australia is growing, if not old, yet grey-­haired, with modern haste. He looks back upon the splendid youthfulness of the age of exploration and sings:— . . . nothing in the ages old, In song or story written yet On Grecian urn or Roman arch, Though it should ring with clash of steel, Could braver histories unfold Than this bush story, yet untold— The story of their westward march. *** But times are changed, and changes rung From old to new—­the olden days, The old bush life and all its ways Are passing from us all unsung. The freedom, and the hopeful sense Of toil that brought due recompense, Of room for all, has passed away, And lies forgotten with the dead. Within our streets men cry for bread In cities built just yesterday. . . . We follow but the beaten track Of other nations, and we grow In wealth for some—­for many, woe.

The ‘Song of the Future’ from which we quote ‘follows but the beaten track’ of English verse in form, yet is so full of distinguishing thought and emotion and has for the English reader so great an advantage from its Australian atmosphere, that it seems to us the finest poetic fruit from Australia. But with this one exception, Mr Paterson’s work has the spirit of fiercely joyous

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youth. The influence of Mr Kipling may be traced in the form of some poems; but they entirely justify themselves by their abundant new material and emotion. His ‘Song of the Artesian Water’ resembles Mr Kipling’s verse, and so far from considering the form a fault, we think Mr Paterson a Miltonic borrower, who adorns what he takes. The chorus runs:—   Sinking down, deeper down,   Oh! we’ll sink it deeper down: As the drill is plugging downward at a thousand feet of level, If the Lord won’t send us water, oh, we’ll get it from the devil; Yes, we’ll get it from the devil deeper down.

And in ‘With the Cattle’ we cannot suppose that the form would have been different, had Mr Kipling never written a line. The resemblance between two brothers is not less an imitation than this resemblance. There are nearly fifty poems in the book, and we can hardly spare one, not even among the South African pieces.2 For Mr Paterson has powerful and varied sympathies, coupled with a genuine lyrical impulse, and some skill, which make his attempts always attractive and usually successful. He is admirable in his pathetic feeling for ‘the great lone land by the Grey Gulf-­water’, for war horses in ‘The Last Parade’, for ‘The First Surveyor’ who ‘blazed’ a track through unknown country in the old days, as the aged widow tells the tale:— Then others came across the range and built the township here, And then there came the railway line and this young engineer. He drove about with tents and traps, a cook to cook his meals, A bath to wash himself at night, a chain-­man at his heels. And that was all the pluck and skill for which he’s cheered and praised, For after all he took the track, the same my husband blazed!

There is a boisterous fresh humour in the story of a fearless rider who contemptuously mounted a bicycle unaided and inexperienced; in ‘Hay and Hell and Booligal’; in ‘The Old Timer’s Steeplechase’; in ‘Saltbush Bill’s Second Fight’; in ‘Tar and Feathers’; and in ‘Father Riley’s Horse’, with such lines as— And the lashins of the liquor! And the lavins of the grub!   Oh, poor Andy went to rest in proper style.

Love is briefly but prettily represented by ‘The Road to Gundagai’. The title-­piece is a weird ballad admirably sung. Nor is the capacity to use new 2 Paterson, who reported on the Second Boer War, also wrote ‘war poems’ indebted to Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads (1892).

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ma­ter­ial a common one. Until Mr Kipling came machinery was supposed to be lifeless. Until Rodenbach3 and Mr Chesterton, street lamps had no souls. We have found one fault, and that an amiable one, in Mr Paterson’s book. He calls Lindsay Gordon4 ‘our chiefest singer’. We should have agreed with him a month ago. But now we have a singer with a healthier, grander, grasp of colonial life. He is, perhaps, not great; he is certainly fresh. He is akin to the old ballad singers. He cannot tear the heart out of the mystery of the new lands; but he leads us up to the mystery, and we experience it. To old civilisation he owes only his poetic skill, and he uses it in the turbulent, blithe mood of one who could write more if he could stop living for a while. And in these literary days it is agreeable to meet an author, like Mr Paterson, who seems to have a hand for the sword as well as for the pen, as Aeschylus and Cervantes had. DC: 8 February 

Lloyd Mifflin,1 Castalian Days; etc. It is difficult nowadays to meet a man who has not written a sonnet, and still more difficult to meet one who has not published what he has written. Each has fourteen lines, and, what is equally important, certainly not more than one idea. And in these points Mr Mifflin’s sonnets are of the usual type. But, while it used to be supposed that the sonnet called out a man’s power of compression, Mr Mifflin shows emphatically that it may also call out the power of expansion. Many of his sonnets are so long that we can scarce believe our eyes which see only fourteen lines. Nevertheless, he has a great advantage over the ordinary sonneteer in his command of subjects. Olympus, the Acro-­Corinthus,2 and the great rivers of 3  Georges Rodenbach (1855–98): Belgian poet and novelist who celebrated small Flemish towns, as in Bruges-la-Morte (1892). 4  Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833–70) published two collections of poems: Sea Spray and Smoke Drift (1867), Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes (1870). 1  Lloyd Mifflin (1846–1921): American painter and poet, who began to write poetry at the age of 51 and produced over 500 sonnets. Reviewing Mifflin’s Collected Sonnets, ET says of this ‘sonneteering animal’: ‘We have heard that he is in the habit of addressing waiters and even cabmen in sonnet form; that when he eats a bloater or sees a cat, he cannot withhold a sestet at the least’ (DC: 17 October 1905). For ET and the sonnet, see [219] and notes. 2  Rocky promontory above Corinth.

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America, are moving themes. And the poet has been moved by them, unquestionably. What is more, he has been at great pains to utter his emotion ­adequately and with dignity. With him, however, dignity always means grand­ ilo­quence, and there is his conventionality. The fault seems to us to be Rossetti’s, whose law it was that the sonneteer must write as pompously on a broomstick, as Milton on the massacre in Piedmont, Wordsworth on Venice, or Shelley on the Nile.3 Thus, Mr Mifflin makes his emotion fit the clothes which he has prepared, a plan not more dangerous to a tailor than to a poet. [. . .] DC: 16 February 

The Temple of George Herbert,1 edited by George Sampson This, the first of the ‘Chiswick Quartos’,2 is the most handsome edition of The Temple that can be bought. The frontispiece enshrines a portrait of Herbert, and makes an agreeable page on a seventeenth-­century model. The text is that of the first edition, and has been edited by Mr George Sampson, who wisely and agreeably discards the original abbreviations, and perhaps also wisely prints the ‘Easter Wings’ in horizontal instead of vertical lines. But we could wish that Mr Sampson had so far broken away from trad­ ition as to print, at the beginning of the book, the ‘sonnet’ which Herbert sent from Cambridge to his mother, the Lady Magdalen, when he was but seventeen. ‘My God’, it begins,

3  Milton, ‘On the Late Massacre in Piedmont’; Wordsworth, ‘On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic’; Shelley, ‘To the Nile’. 1  George Herbert (1593–1633) abandoned a career at court, and became an Anglican priest in 1630. The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations was published in the year of his death. ET drew on this review for what he called (2 November 1907) ‘an impudent introduction’ (LGB, 151) to the Everyman edition of The Temple and A Priest to the Temple (1908); where he also says that, by the time Herbert wrote the poems: ‘his feeling towards religion was that of the lover who possesses his love; it rises out of the calm sense of possession, as of marriage, only at rare intervals into ecstasy’; and that ‘he seems most himself when he is most an Anglican, “true to the kindred points of heaven and home”, and he rarely soars out of that gracious and well-ordered park . . . he is a religious man who is mainly a churchman and is limited by that fact’. Herbert also turns up in IPS, when ET’s ‘Pursuit of Spring’ reaches Bemerton, Herbert’s parish, on a Sunday: ‘The bells, the sunshine after storm, the elm trees, and the memory of that pious poet, put me into what was perhaps an unconscious imitation of a religious humour’ (140). 2  Short-lived series of editions of poets.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 My God, where is that ancient heat towards thee,   Wherewith whole shoals of martyrs once did burn,   Besides their other flames? Doth Poetry Wear Venus’ livery? only serve her turn? Why are not Sonnets made of thee? and lays   Upon thine Altar burnt? Cannot thy love   Heighten a spirit to sound out thy praise As well as any she? Cannot thy Dove Outstrip their Cupid easily in flight?   Or, since thy ways are deep, and still the same,   Will not a verse run smooth that bears thy name! . . .

For that is the key, and in a sense the summary to all the work of his brief life. His poems are love songs, though it happened that they were addressed to no earthly beauty. No eyebrow ever inspired more glowing praises, and that, when we consider the history of religious poetry, is no mean testimony to Herbert’s muse. His was the lover’s temperament, and Shelley’s Constantia3 hardly inspired a more perfect ecstasy than Herbert’s ‘Church Musick’ did:— Sweetest of sweets, I thank you: when displeasure   Did through my bodie wound my minde, You took me thence; and in your house of pleasure   A daintie lodging me assign’d.

He takes religion as delicately as a sensuous delight. The very words of the Church Service have for him ‘an orientall fragrancie’ like ambergris. His morality is part of the same delicacy of mind. ‘Were I an epicure’, he says, ‘I could bate swearing’. And he is an epicure, as abandoned, if you will, or as refined, as any of those who choose a life, other than Herbert’s, which by its very nature defeats the ends of the epicure and makes him gross. ‘Be calm in arguing’, he says:—        for fiercenesse makes Errour a fault, and truth discourtesie.4

What courtier has said the thing so exquisitely? He had a blithe ‘morning-­ soul’ for Matins, and again at evensong the blitheness has ripened into a golden melancholy that fills the line:— ‘And now with darknesse closest wearie eyes’.

And how like Wordsworth’s ‘Happy Warrior’ is his ‘honest man’—      Who rides his sure and even trot, While the world now rides by, now lags behinde . . . 3  Shelley’s poem ‘To Constantia, Singing’ is thought to address Claire Clairmont. 4  ET has quoted from Herbert’s ‘The Odour’ and ‘The Church Porch’ (twice).

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     Whom nothing can procure, When the wide worlde runnes bias, from his will, To writhe his limbes, and share, not mend, the ill.

He has evidently grounds for believing that there is such a man among men, of whom he finely says that they wear ‘a stuffe whose thread is coarse and round, But trimm’d with curious lace’. So fine is his language, as when he says— Death is still working like a mole, And digs my grave at each remove,5

that we cannot but wish that he had had one other mistress than his religion, to whom he might have gone when he wrote some of the tired poems of the book. Yet, on the whole, his cheerfulness is one of the most surprising qual­ ities of his devotion. He loved, but never knew ‘love’s sad satiety’.6 And even when he is condemning verse, he cannot avoid the praise which is involved in his own excellence— Verses, ye are too fine a thing, too wise For my rough sorrows . . .7

These intimate personal passages give more than half its attractiveness to the book. A narrow judge might find them egotistical, as indeed we do, but egotistical in such a manner that God is none the less revealed, since Herbert was but a melodious part of Him. DC: 23 February

The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus,1 with an English translation by Francis Warre Cornish (Cambridge, The University Press) About one part of Mr Cornish’s work there can be little question. He set out to prepare a translation; he has ended by preparing a text as well, a most 5  From Herbert’s ‘Matins’, ‘Even-Song’, ‘Constancie’, ‘Man’s Medley’, and ‘Grace’. 6  From Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’.    7  From Herbert’s ‘Grief ’. 1  ET would continue to be tough on the quality of translations from the classics: ‘At or near the lowest depth are the translators of lyrical poetry who conceal all the merit of their original and strive to prove that it was never there.’ In the same review, he praises the inspiration and scholarship of Gilbert Murray; but says, re his rhymed translation of Euripides’ Medea: ‘We are not of those who think him a poet.’ As for poet-translators: only ‘Shelley and Chapman, and perhaps Byron’ truly ‘domesticate great foreign poetry’ (DC: 13 August 1907).

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thoroughly inspected one, and has made an interesting attempt to produce a conventional orthography, viz., one which shall do for the orthography of Catullus what the best modern editions have done for Shakespeare. There will be more question about the translation itself. Let us admit at once that it is the work of a man who knows every word of Catullus and every possible meaning, and has weighed them all before setting down the corresponding English word which he prefers. Only a scholar who has cared for his author as studiously can hope to understand and praise Mr Cornish quite adequately. And his highest aim is, we suppose, to increase the number of persons who have the same intelligent love of the poet. Yet therein, too, lies the weakness of the translation. It can only be appreciated by those who have no need of anything but the text. They can read out of it the poignancy and pungency which are Catullus. But assuredly no others can. For here, in the English version, to put it in a somewhat homely way, others will see nothing but the raw material of Catullus. And what is that? What is the raw material of any lyric poet? It is a new house, waiting for a soul; a bottle without its wine. ‘Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment . . .?’2 It is as if the poems had died; and the gorge rises at the skulls in these translations of ‘Passer, deliciae’, ‘Phasellus ille’, ‘Vivamus’, the ‘Attis’, ‘Multas per gentes’. This for ‘Paene insularum’:3— Sirmio, bright eye of peninsulas and islands, all that in liquid lakes or vast ocean either Neptune bears: how willingly and with what joy I revisit you, scarcely trusting myself that I have left Thynia and the Bithynian plains, and that I see you in safety. Ah, what is more blessed than to put cares away, when the mind lays by its burden, and tired with labour of far travel we have come to our own home, and rest on the couch we longed for. This it is which alone is worth all these toils. Welcome, lovely Sirmio, and rejoice in your master, and rejoice ye too, waters of the Lydian lake, and laugh out aloud whatever laughter you have in the depths of your home.

Yet only a certain fineness is lacking to make it as good as a close translation can be. [. . .] Let him who has negligently sucked the honey of Catullus, by all means, go to Mr Cornish, and he will be able to get more. But among the best ­services done by the book is the unintended one of showing out of what 2  Quotation from Hamlet’s address to Yorick’s skull (Hamlet, V.i). 3 Catullus, Carmina, II, IV, V, LXIII, CI, XXXI.

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trifles Catullus made these poems, whose sorrows are among the bitterest and sweetest men have to experience, now that he has been dead two thousand years. DC: 20 April 

T.  Sturge Moore, The Gazelles and Other Poems; etc. Mr Sturge Moore is an artist, and by comparison with his contemporaries in this column he might well seem to be an artist of a very high order. For he alone is incapable of writing what is facile, what is showy and insincere, or what has been done before. His manner and subject are always so entirely his own that the result is unique, and in its way as distinctive as the work of bigger men. When we speak of his manner, we mean a style and not a trick. Had he acquired a trick, indeed, his work would by this time have been far more satisfying, superficially, than it is. But he will not even imitate himself, or those sides of himself which have been most praised. He is still experimenting, still sounding the capacity of language, and seeking the sufficient theme. Not that he often fails; but he falls short of his difficult aims; and in so doing produces far more interesting and beautiful work than many who achieve a negligible success. And it is so in this volume, ‘The Gazelles’, in particular, has been dreamed over and intellectually studied with great pains, and it produces a deep and rare impression. Its aim is to suggest the beauty of the gazelles, and the cruelty of their fate. We admire Mr Moore’s work, and we approach it with sympathy; and to us this poem seems little short of perfection, and that, too, in a very difficult kind. But we are more confident in the beauty of many of its parts than in that of the whole. How fine and new is this verse:— A Nimrod might watch, in his hall’s wan space, After the feast, on the moonlit floor, The timorous mice that troop and race, As tranced o’er those herds the sun doth pour . . .

And again, these lines describing the Persian women, who meet the gazelle-­ hunters at evening:—

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 Delicious ladies, with long dark hair, And soft dark eyes, and brows arched wide, In quilted jacket, embroidered sash, And tent-­like skirts of pleated lawn; While their silk-­lined jewelled slippers flash Round bare feet bedded like pools at dawn . . .

Yet the exquisite comparison in the last two lines deserves to be more clearly put. Readers cannot fail to notice the extraordinary slowness which Mr Moore gives to his lines. That has always been the most striking quality of his verse. Sometimes the slowness is admirably adapted to a languid effect; too often it might unquestionably have been improved by more liquidity. He would seem always to compose word by word, and seldom to be moved to write a whole line at one impulse.1 The ‘Lines on Titian’s “Bacchanal” in the Prado at Madrid’ are in a mood which is well suited to this slow movement, and they are excellent. But verses like this obviously lose much on account of it:— Dull brown a cloak enwraps, Don Juan, Both thy lean shanks, one arm, That old bird-­cage thy breast, where like magpie Thy heart hopped on alarm.2

‘Love’s First Communion’ contains the lovely lines:— Love lies ambushed in each bud Like a lady’s maiden hand Stowed in warm and scented glove . . .

Yet it owes some ineffectiveness to the same uneasy rhythm. DC: 21 April 

A.E., The Divine Vision and Other Poems The Divine Vision will not disappoint the admirers of Homeward: Songs by the Way, and should recommend ‘A. E.’ to those who now meet him for 1  ET ends his review of Moore’s next published work, Pan’s Prophecy, with a related comment on his rhythms: ‘if Mr Moore’s style is sometimes in danger of being over-concentrated and obscure in the more abstract speeches of Pan, we find it unsurpassed in descriptive power, now that we have overcome our prejudice against the heavy-gaited lines which are essential to this poet’s work’ (DC: 24 August). 2  This poem is ‘A Spanish Picture’.

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the first time. Some of the poems have already been printed in The Nuts of Knowledge; most are new, and all have an interest, and many a value, far above that of all but the best modern verse. For they are the work of a delicate imaginative intellect that has been played upon by noble and subtle emotions, and is capable of handing them on, often very powerfully. Some seven of the poems—‘Dana’, ‘Babylon’, ‘Aphrodite’, ‘A Summer Night’, ‘The Everlasting Battle’, ‘An Irish Face’, and ‘The Crown of Love’— seem to me to be the author’s best work. In all of these, simple themes of no worldly im­port­ance, but of a kind particularly apt to stir the modern mind, are nobly and sensitively treated. In all of them the writer’s imagination lifts us at once to his own world, takes us for one slow and level flight, and calmly deserts us at last. The first reading is just such an experience as when we first look upon some significant landscape with a sigh, but without a word. For certainly ‘A.  E.’ has an admirable mastery of each theme as a whole. He leaves us with a sense of not too little and not too much. These seven poems are above all well proportioned, and for that reason I can hardly quote short passages, and they are too long to be entirely reproduced; or may I tear away this one feather from ‘A Summer Night’?— The lawns and lakes lie in this night of love, Admitted to the majesty above. Earth with the starry company hath part; The waters hold all heaven within their heart, And glimmer o’er with wave-­lips everywhere Lifted to meet the angel lips of air.

A second reading, however, gives an unpleasant surprise. We were overcome at first by the author’s passionate will. Now we see the faults, and they are great. The poet has intellect, he has emotion, observation, imagination, but they seldom lose their identities and become what we call art. Hardly an epithet in his work has any magical inevitableness; many of them a bold reader might well say are second best, although the best may not be revealed to him. In ‘Babylon’, for instance, he is easily satisfied who is satisfied with the line— The tower of heaven turns darker blue, a starry sparkle now begins.

The details of the poems are many of them beautiful. I can hardly remember one that is set quite beautifully, or a phrase such as would have lain as nat­ ural­ly as fruit among foliage in the work of an artist, except perhaps in ‘The Message’:— They give less than love who give all, giving what wanes;

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or in ‘The Master Singer’:— The peacock twilight rays aloft its plumes and blooms of shadowy fire.

And in most of the poems which I have not mentioned these faults are at once conspicuous. Writing like this (in ‘The Secret Love’) is very often to be found there:— You and I for all his vaunted width Know the giant Space is but a myth.

In all the poems, too, and most conspicuously in the more lyrical, there is yet another imperfection, which not all A. E.’s excellent brainwork and emotion can conceal. I speak of his rhythms. They are always conventional, and not always even smooth: they are never an indispensable part of the poems. Perhaps we have been pampered in this matter by Mr W. B. Yeats. At any rate, the versification is—­versification and nothing more. WS: 7 May 

W. B. Yeats, Plays for an Irish Theatre, Vols II and III The serious criticism of bad books I can understand; for it is explained by weakness or poverty, or servility, or bad taste: but not the serious criticism of good books. The better a book is the more difficult and the more unne­ces­ sary is the criticism of it. For the one essential quality of a critic is the power to receive suggestions, to be stimulated, and in the end to advance a little way the influence of the book with which he deals. In the case of a small book, it is easy for the critic to use this power, if we may assume that he is content to deal only with what he admires. In the case of a fine book, or above all a fine contemporary book, it is most difficult and almost always immodest. For the critic, unless he be in possession of the matter in the same degree as his author, can but offer his own shrill or drowsy chirp in place of the author’s full choir, and hope that the small may suggest the great. He brings a rose and says that in his author’s garden all the flowers are lovelier. He points to a star and says, it is the least bright. He is, in short, an advocate in the surprising position of being undone by the very merits of his case. Mr W. B. Yeats, in our generation at least, cannot be advocated. The compass and quality of his powers are probably high, certainly unique. No one,

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therefore, can advocate them without in some considerable degree diluting them. I console myself in the act of diluting them, only by the thought that were they in their fullness not too strong for our generation, he would be more widely esteemed than he is, and not the idol and perhaps the victim of a ‘movement’. In these two volumes he seems to be the victim of the Irish literary movement. Were he not, I think that he would hardly have chosen none but Irish subjects, and those slender ones all. The little prose plays, The Hour-­Glass, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, and A Pot of Broth, are perfect in construction; and they are excellent for their humour, their pathos, their symbolism, their gay and easy flow and conflict of dialogue, and their simple, idiomatic, and melodious prose. But not one of them, not even The Hour-­Glass, seems to me to have drawn upon all those qualities of Mr Yeats’s mind, and especially the intellectual qualities, which I have from time to time recognised in his printed and spoken utterances. In On Baile’s Strand, also, which is part prose, part verse, I think that he is so much occupied with the rich, heavy fabric of Irish heroic life, that he has lost some of the more inward beauties in the gleam of their raiment, a gleam which makes it almost worth while. But he has done nothing finer than The King’s Threshold. The legend of the poet whom a king sent away from the high table at the request of jealous soldiers and priests; who refused to take a lower seat, in spite of the king’s offer of all other honours and goods; who would not be persuaded by a lover, a princess, or a disciple, to forgo the right of poetry; who at last recovered his place, because his disciples would rather have been strangled than grant that the king was in the right, and so persuaded the king that poetry was more powerful than monarchy; the legend alone would make the fortune of the play. It draws out to their full blossoming Mr Yeats’s imagination and command of myth. Above all, it has enabled his blank verse to come to its perfection. The blank verse is (to use a bad, intelligible word) the most realistic I have seen. No two lines are alike. There is not a convention anywhere, no mere smoothness or regularity of rhythm. Mood, sentiment, passion—­ everything that is character—­is expressed in his infinitely varied measure. In his opening speech, the king addresses the poets as those who understand— stringed instruments, And how to mingle words and notes together So artfully, that all the art is but speech Delighted with its own music . . .

‘Speech delighted with its own music’ is the best definition of Mr Yeats’s verse. He can do everything with it. He is incapable of using blank verse, as

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so many have done, as a mould with a few variations, into which anything can be poured. The thoughts and emotions of his characters may be seen to mould the verse. Here and there, of course, the blank verse comes near to prose, so various are the characters; at its best, and usually, it is simple, sincere speech that cannot be read sympathetically except as most harmonious verse, although it has a superficial appearance of being chopped prose, as here:— I said the poets hung Images of the life that was in Eden About the childbed of the world, that it, Looking upon those images, might bear Triumphant children; but why must I stand here Repeating an old lesson while you starve? [. . .]

In reading the play, I seem to find, with astonishment, that verse is the nat­ ural speech of men, as singing is of birds. WS: 18 June 

[Poetry and Audience] Readers who have not only spare time but leisure, if any such be left, will find much good in these books. For they remind us that there are many clever men and women today, steeped in fine literature and fine emotion, who give us their best in verse. They make a strong appeal to those who, caring for verse for its own sake, have a warm welcome for a scholar’s work, whether it is in Latin hexameters or English blank verse. But poetry has never been much in demand. It has usually gained an audience by inessentials. It has gained an audience through the stage, through patronage, through some irrelevant distinction of its author, or through the advertisement of critics, who, in all ages, have said that this or that is good, and have purloined the assent of a tasteless, indifferent, but fashionable, servile and wealthy public. But today the stage has nothing to do with poetry. There are no patrons—­it is not even the custom for ladies of fashion to send their footmen to purchase books, ‘when very few of the lines go right

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across the page, don’t you know!’ And our critics, with unselfishness or timidity, but, in any case, differing notably from the critics of other ages, are so much occupied with the past glories of literature that the present is somewhat harshly left to be dealt with by a possible posterity. Moreover, there is little doubt that the quantity of verse that is published is a drag upon the chances of good verse. Not only is there much work that is idiotic and affrights the reader, but there is much that is good, and the sales, if added together, would very likely equal the sales of poetry in days when there were a few popular poets and not many others. But we think that the rapidly-­extending field of prose has, in no small degree, lessened the field of verse. Whether we are right or not, the merit of modern verse, and particularly of this before us, is such that a large audience could not be gained for it without including a great many of the unfit. For, without a doubt, these volumes are academic. They are not the product of a life that accepts the modern world blithely and without loss of individuality. Mr Chesterton and Mr Davidson and a very few others have done that; but it is not the way of the authors under notice now.1 They are, most of them, probably great readers, to whom literature begins with Homer and Job, and ends with Mr Swinburne’s first two volumes. [. . .] DC: 25 July 

[Minor Poets] We are in need of a definition of minor poets, for it has almost ceased to be the same thing as lesser poetry. A lesser poet is the same in kind as the great, and when we apply the name to Campion, or Marvell, or William Morris, we intend a compliment as well as a limitation. But the minor poet is not the same in kind. He is a separate species, and not to be judged at all by the same rules. Perhaps he may best be described as a writer who is born, not made. And while some of us may allow ourselves a smile at the sight of him, we must admit that perhaps we are not fitted to 1  ET proceeds to review Alastair Buchanan, The Essence of Ecclesiastes, and other collections.

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understand him. Nothing human comes amiss to us, it is true, but minor poetry is, perhaps, another thing, to understand which one must be fed on better bread than is made of wheat.1 [. . .] DC: 9 August 

W. B. Yeats, The Tables of the Law; & The Adoration of the Magi During the last few days I have been delighted, amused, and at length disturbed, by someone who continually showers upon me a recitation of several passages from Mr W. B. Yeats’s prose.1 He has a fine voice, at once mobile, capable of magnificent monotone, and the prose compels him to use all his skill and all his passion in the utterance. The sense of complete domination by the sentences, as of a Sybil shaken by the inspiration of a god, is praise enough; and by way of conclusion he remarks mysteriously, ‘Yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove.’2 But, in the intervals of recitation, my rhapsodist tells me why I also should admire. The prose, he says, is as simple as Swift’s, and almost as free from decoration. It is also, he says, right through, aërated and made keen against the palate, as Swift’s never was, by the passionate spirit of the writer entering into it. He even tells me that if Mr Yeats and another writer had the same thing to say, though Mr Yeats were as brief, and though he used the same words as his rival, there would be something (he says this with emphasis) in our author’s work which was lacking in the other’s—­

1  There follows a dismissive review of Douglas Carswell, The Venusiad and Other Poems, and other collections. Of Carswell ET says: ‘obviously we are not worthy to deal with the work of a man who has heard the nightingale in Autumn’. 1  This may be an internal dialogue (triggered by the dialogic structure of The Tables of the Law): a critical prototype for ET’s use of an alter ego, in both prose and poetry, to represent the divided self; see his poem ‘The Other’ (ACP, 40). He was indeed divided about Yeats’s ‘stories’, telling GB (1 July and 6 August): ‘I am much puzzled by Yeats’s Tables of the Law. Does he see the point (if any) of the two stories? Or are they records of experiences to which he hopes that the reader may discover a point? I like them, especially the Adoration of the Magi, but they seem to me full of gaps, unless of course they are simply records of experiences’; ‘they have a grave & purposeful look about them which does not quite suit their real irresponsibility. And, as it stands, The Tables of the Law is not of a piece; it might easily have been longer or shorter’ (LGB, 58–9, 61). 2  ‘Though ye have lien among the pots, yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and its pinions with glistening gold’ (Psalms LXVIII.13).

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something making it as different as the knitted surface of water flowing over pebbles is different from the water in a basin.3 Here is one passage: ‘At first I was full of happiness’, he replied, ‘for I felt a divine ecstasy, an immortal fire in every passion, in every hope, in every desire, in every dream; and I saw, in the shadows under leaves, in the hollow waters, in the eyes of men and women, its image, as in a mirror; and it was as though I was about to touch the Heart of God. Then all changed and I was full of misery, and I said to myself that I was caught in the glittering folds of an enormous serpent, and was falling with him through a fathomless abyss, and that henceforth the glittering folds were my world; and in my misery it was revealed to me that man can only come to that Heart through the sense of separation from it which we call sin, and I understood that I could not sin, because I had discovered the law of my being, and could only express or fail to express my being, and I understood that God has made a simple and an arbitrary law that we may sin and repent!’

The passage describes the experience of a mystic, the hero of The Tables of the Law, who had gone far in pursuit of a theory of the thirteenth century mystic, Joachim of Flora4—that revelation in the Christian Church was continual, that the old was for ever wearing out and the new appearing, and that, finally, the Kingdom of the Father had passed, the Kingdom of the Son was passing, and the Kingdom of the Holy Spirit was about to come, and with it a life of contemplation and liberty and love. The story has many fine qual­ities. But if I am to agree with my rhapsodist’s opinion, I  must also agree with his explanation. He, when he is thwarted in his ­eulogies of Mr Yeats, falls back upon the word ‘soul’. And as that is a word which is excellently fitted for describing something great, since it means not the same to any two persons, I will fall back upon it, too. There are, as I have hinted, things in the book that one need not praise ambiguously, things which would be praised by any judge. But, like the rhapsodist, I see that the sum of these parts is not equal to the whole. Just as the landscape of shaven fields and full-­bosomed oaks, on which I am looking, was stilled and bemused an hour ago and gained a faculty, from neither light nor shade nor anything visible, which was most moving and likely to be remembered when the oaks and fields are indistinguishable 3  ‘The waters running frizzled over gravel, / That never vanish and for ever travel’: ET, ‘The Brook’ (ACP, 96). 4  Joachim of Flora/Fiore (c.1132–1202): influential and controversial Italian mystic, theologian, philosopher of history; viewed as saint or heretic.

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in the past: so there is an unnameable something in The Tables of the Law which will survive its most melodious paragraph and aptest detail, in the memory. My friend has equal praises for the other story in this book, The Adoration of the Magi. It tells of three old men who lived an unworldly, or old worldly, life in the western islands of Ireland. And one day, in a vision, they were bidden to set out for Paris, where a dying prostitute ‘would reveal to them the secret names of the gods, which can be perfectly spoken only when the mind is steeped in certain colours and certain sounds and certain odours; but at whose perfect speaking the immortals cease to be cries and shadows, and walk and talk with one like men and women’. In Paris, another vision honoured their obedience to the visionary life, and Hermes appeared and told them to bow down to the woman . . . [. . .] But the story itself is not one to be praised or blamed. It may actually be a dream. It is in any case as a child or a dream, which may suggest much to one and nothing to another, but is not to be criticised. If it is, it will certainly suffer, and Mr Yeats seems to take no responsibility for it. As for me, I remember one splendid hint at a difficult truth: ‘when people are good the world likes them and takes possession of them, and so eternity comes through people who are not good or who have been forgotten’. And I remember and can still recapture the joyous sense of being, for a time, made airy-­light, independent of many laws, and floating upon the surface of Mr Yeats’s prose, with its marvellous texture ever beneath my feet. WS: 13 August *** [. . .] Mr Yeats’s style is nowhere more admirable than [in The Tables of the Law] and in the companion story of The Adoration of the Magi. That is to say, it has a simplicity and a subtle and tender rhythm and a spirituality which are un­equalled in England today. He draws the state of the mystic as one who knows. He illustrates the slipping and disappointment of spiritual ambition, without leaving us any doubt but that it is better to have desired the highest than not to have desired, though it is certainly less easy. Nevertheless, as an invention the story seems to us among his less successful work. Parts of it—­ not, perhaps, entirely essential parts of it—­are superb. For example, the romantic history of the mysterious book is beyond discussion. But on the subject of Joachim and the contents of the book, he gives much imaginary

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detail without being explicit, and without giving any but the most fantastic reader a chance of believing that Joachim of Flora could have written such things. The language of the medieval mystic is left in its old form, and unelucidated, and, much as it may suggest to Mr Yeats, it was surely to be expected that he would tell us what it meant to Owen Aherne.5 In short, Mr Yeats seems to us to have committed no slight artistic sin, by elaborating his details, and by confining himself, in the most difficult parts of his narrative, to airy and ambiguous suggestions, without any of those homely touches and proofs of an ecstatic observation of the visible world, which are characteristic of most mystical writings, and usually of his own. His Owen Aherne was a being of flesh and blood, as well as of clouds and stars, and in leaving out the flesh and blood he has weakened the effect of the clouds and stars. DC: 15 August 

Algernon Charles Swinburne,1 A Channel Passage and Other Poems Mr Swinburne’s verse is now held in such high esteem, and his name, though he is still vigorous and scarcely past his prime, has already gained a magic so like that of the great of bygone ages, that it must be difficult for the most resolute critic to look at the phenomenon of his new volume, A Channel Passage and Other Poems, with undazzled eyes. Of course, enthusiasm, even if it is partly indiscriminate, is the most natural mood and the most ne­ces­ sary duty of contemporaries. If a great writer misses it, one may say that he is never afterwards completely understood or with due fervour appreciated, since a subsequent age is pretty sure to make common or even commonplace 5 Yeats’s alter ego in The Tables of the Law. 1  For extracts from ET’s Algernon Charles Swinburne (1912), fully reprinted in ETPW V, see [511]. In ACS, ET is harder on A Channel Passage and its title-poem: ‘as a rule either Swinburne abated his style for the sake of things known to the world, or he made an unsuccessful attempt to envelop them in it. The best example of this failure is . . . “A Channel Passage”, which is a travel sketch in verse. . . .Whenever art allows a comparison with nature, wherever nature intrudes in her own purity and majesty, art fails. Uniformity of illusion is a condition of success. In “A Channel Passage” there is hardly any illusion: it is a man being poetical on a steamer, which is no less and no more absurd than being poetical in an omnibus; but being poetical is not poetry.’ ET ultimately calls the poem ‘an inhuman perversion of language and metre’ (ETPW V, 113–14).

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the qualities which are at first peculiarly his. How glorious it must have been, for example, to have welcomed, with mind just fresh from eighteenth-­ century miscellanies, the Lyrical Ballads! And how glorious to have been so welcomed! Such has been the lot of Mr Swinburne, and such the lot of his audience. Just as, according to his own recently published words, the man himself has had just the personal friends and enemies he would have desired,2 so Mr Swinburne’s poetry has had perfect good fortune. It has nearly always been received with that ardour which the nature of it demands. And so, aware that I was likely to be overcome by the clamour of his reputation, I cast about for a means of submitting A Channel Passage to a more unbiased opinion than my own. I had the good fortune to find one who had ignored Mr Swinburne until I put this book into his hands. It was, then, a great pleasure, and, I think, a great testimony to the poet’s power in his twenty-­first volume of verse, to see one who is acquainted with the advance of English verse, from Chaucer as far as Shelley and Tennyson, amazed and delighted by poems, as he says, ‘so absolutely essential to the completeness of English verse’, repeating afterwards these lines from ‘The Altar of Righteousness’, and many more: And the girl, full-­grown to the stature of godhead in womanhood, spake The word that sweetens and lightens her creed for her great love’s sake. From the godlike heart of Theresa the prayer above all prayers heard, The cry as of God made woman, a sweet blind wonderful word, Sprang sudden as flame, and kindled the darkness of faith with love, And the hollow of hell from beneath shone, quickened of heaven from above.

That poem, by the way, presents a sublime view of the history of religion from the early gods (‘Dead are all of these, and man survives who made them while he dreamed’) down to Aeschylus and Christ and Shakespeare, by whom ‘the God that in man lay bound was unbound from the bonds he had wrought’. And here, undoubtedly, on every page, is that marvellous movement of words—­impetuous, stately, languid, elated, indignant, dejected by turns—­which is at times apt to make us think of the whole superb vocabulary of the English language as for once finding and inspiring a man and making him a passive exponent of its glory.3 Here are the old ecstasies at sight of earth and sea and sky; the same superlative memorial or encomiastic addresses to men and women, to

2  In the ‘Dedicatory Epistle’ [to Theodore Watts-Dunton] of the six-volume Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne (London: Chatto & Windus, 1904), Swinburne writes: ‘I can truly say with Shelley that I have been fortunate in friendships: I might add if I cared, as he if he had cared might have added, that I have been no less fortunate in my enemies than in my friends’ (xxiii). 3  An anticipation of ET’s poem ‘Words’, which appeals: ‘Will you . . . Choose me, / You English words?’ (ACP, 91–2).

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Mrs Lynn Linton,4 for example, and to Morris, Burne-­Jones, Aurelio Saffi, and Watts;5 the same patriotism and infuriate love of ‘liberty’, which is never separate from hate of other things, as in ‘For Greece and Crete’, ‘A Word for the Navy’, ‘Trafalgar Day’; the same denunciation and applause, as in ‘Russia’6 and ‘Cromwell’s Statue’; the same attitude towards children in poems which I feel that the poet could have written without having seen a child. Everywhere there is that spirit of immortal youth, as in the poem on the Dumas centenary,7 which becomes boyishness in the political poems. Everywhere I find that ‘unbodied joy’8 that spreads over everything spiritual and physical, a beautiful light of what I must call unreality. I do not feel in reading any of these poems, whether on the sea, or on gardens, or on men, that the poet has ever observed or reflected, in the usual sense of those words, as Keats or Wordsworth did. No one so much as Mr Swinburne finds in things what he has within himself. He seems not so much to describe the sea as to create a new and magnificent sea. The only poems, in fact, in which he deals with what many men have known are a set of splendid brief ‘Prologues’ to Elizabethan plays. There is nothing that one can call a falling-­ off, if one compares this volume with A Midsummer Holiday or even Poems and Ballads. But there is a difference. There is no ‘Leper’ here, no ‘Laus Veneris’, no ‘Félise’, no ‘Tristram’, nor any parallel to these. In those poems he challenges comparison with other men, and successfully. He had a tangible material, and one could see him at work upon it. Here one may say that he has scarcely any material. And yet he plays the same tunes and on the same subtle instrument. As when some famous lover has died long ago, and a clever actor holds us for a while, clothed with like feature and passion, but after the play we remember that the famous lover is dead: so. . . . Well, I have a similar emotion now that I have read the book. We have here the beautiful ghost of the author of Atalanta—­beautiful, but still a ghost: or, to use two lines from his ode to Burns in this volume: The roar that follows on the flame   When lightning dies.

W: 6 September

4  Eliza Lynn Linton (1822–98): novelist and journalist. Despite being the first salaried female journalist in the UK, she attacked feminism and suffragism. 5  For ET’s fullest account of William Morris (1834–96), see [486]; Edward Burne-Jones (1833– 98): painter; Aurelio Saffi (1819–90): radical Italian politician, supporter of the Risorgimento—­as was Swinburne; George Frederic Watts (1817–1904): painter and sculptor. 6  ‘Russia: An Ode’, which excoriates the country (‘Earth is hell, and hell bows down before the Czar’), echoes Swinburne’s earlier attack in his sonnet ‘On the Russian Persecution of the Jews’. 7  Alexandre Dumas (1802–70) was as celebrated in the UK as in France. Swinburne’s rhapsodic centenary-sonnet hails Dumas’s writings as ‘France incarnate, France immortal in her deathless boy’. 8  Quotation from Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’: ‘Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun’.

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T. Sturge Moore, The Centaur’s Booty, The Rout of the Amazons, The Gazelles and Other Poems, Pan’s Prophecy1 Five or six years ago a volume called The Vinedresser and Other Poems, was published by Mr Sturge Moore, and I have heard that they were written when he was a very young man. The poems had in them many, perhaps all, the ­elements of supreme excellence, in the bud. But I do not pretend to have the power of recognising new work at once and with joy. At first, indeed, I saw power in the scheme and arrangement of the whole, and beauty in some portions of it. But, above all, I saw, and was perplexed and even irritated by, the sluggish rhythms, the almost entire lack of Tennyson’s suavity and Swinburne’s movement. Consequently I remembered with most pleasure passages like this:— As, when the rain hath ceased some afternoon, Between a low and deluge-­threatening roof And the wet shining grass that coats the hills, A space of clarity, a wall of light Appears as far as eye can reach, each way . . .2

And there, true as the observation is, there is little charm in the style, little of that characteristic rhythm, which, at first repellent, I now enjoy because it is undoubtedly the result of personality, and not an affectation or an imperfection, as I once supposed it might be. Since then, in fact during the past twelve months, Mr Moore has issued four little brown paper-­covered books, which reassure the doubter and confirm the confident. The style is the same, but it is more consistent and accomplished. The most obtuse may see Mr Moore’s work, and by no possibility that of anyone else, in every line. The handling is powerful as well as fresh. There are poems and portions of poems in these volumes which make the reader forget that Time also is among the critics, so that he takes down one of them with as little hesitation as he takes down those of which even Time has approved. 1  Having already reviewed The Centaur’s Booty in a group-review the previous year [76], and The Gazelles [87] and Pan’s Prophecy [88n.] earlier in 1904, ET had remarked wearily to GB (26 August): ‘I find almost all books dull now, because I have to write about them. I have let myself in for an article on Sturge Moore’s four recent volumes, tho I really have nothing to say about them except that they are very fine and that I like them. If other critics are half as unwilling as I am, no wonder that they are so bad’ (LGB, 62). He would soon be reviewing Moore yet again [107]. 2  Quotation from ‘At Bethel’.

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Mr Moore is thoroughly modern, and should please modern taste,3 for his thought and view of things, his observation of nature, his rhythms, his eccentricities, would have been impossible a generation back. They are still strange enough to surprise or shock those who merely stand and wait for cheap reprints or standard editions. He has written charming poems which treat subjects belonging to no period of time, e.g., ‘The Gazelles’; personal lyrics; poems on pictures; translations; and a remarkable address, most intimate and new, and yet, as I think, classical, to ‘Idleness’. But the greater part of his work justifies me in describing him as a poet of Greece, and especially of the Greek myths. His first poem, e.g., purports to be ‘Sent from Egypt with a fair robe of tissue to a Sicilian vinedresser, B.C. 276’, i.e., in the age of Theocritus. The Centaur’s Booty and The Rout of the Amazons deal with stories of an age that was before, and independent of, history. Pan’s Prophecy, again, is an elaboration of an incident in the tale of Cupid and Psyche, from Apuleius. As Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, and Arnold, put themselves and their age into their poems on Venus and Adonis, Laodamia, Endymion, Prometheus, Tithonus, and the Strayed Reveller:4 so Mr Moore puts himself and our age into the poems in these books. In every epoch, the Greek myths are born again and embodied in poems, sometimes to die quickly, sometimes to survive their epoch, as in the case of the poems mentioned, and thus to remain, telling together of Greece and England in delicious anachronism, transcending time. And how pleasantly do Mr Moore’s poems tell of Greece and of modern emotion at the same time! as here in The Rout of the Amazons:— A thousand rode together, poising darts, Behind them those with other arms came on; All flaunting down a green-­sward valley came Between Arcadia’s gentle holted hills. It was for beauty like a fleet at sea, Or like an hundred swans Sailing before the breeze across a lake! [. . .]

But in what is perhaps the finest poem of all, the two Centaurs paradoxically reflect our age in nothing so much as in the fact that they are grotesque, inhuman, utterly opposed to us in practice and ideals. They are conceived in a manner that is more ethnic than is usually found in Mr Moore, and not even in De Guérin (whom he has translated) do I remember hints of a 3  The review is headed ‘A Modern Poet’. 4  Wordsworth’s narrative poem ‘Laodamia’ is based on Homeric material; Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘The Strayed Reveller’ involves Circe and Ulysses.

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c­ onception so noble and so convincing.5 The Centaurs move in a broad sunlit landscape, under a clear sky, and yet are as strange and affecting as familiar figures and trees seen (when rain is falling and night is almost perfected) through the windows of a lamplit room. And as I hear them galloping, and carrying their human foster child by turns, and singing— But first, in high valleys, When June is in blow, He shall sleep and run naked Till hairs on him grow! Or in the hale winter Shall powder their snow Till hooves on him grow! Till hooves on him grow!

admiration, nourished by not a little fear, carries me through time into the woods of Erymanthus6 and the age of Theseus. As a modern, I feel bound to say that the Centaurs have never lived so completely and vividly before today. They assure me that their creator is a poet of the highest interest and ­achievement. I should like—­if only because none of those who are more competent has troubled to do it—­to examine Mr Moore’s versification in detail, and thus to show the delicacy of his composition; to describe the form of his three plays—­The Centaur’s Booty, The Rout of the Amazons, and Pan’s Prophecy—­ and thus to show the grace and strength of his conception, and to point out such minor excellences as the beauty and visibility of his pictures in words. But enthusiasm is one’s first duty to a distinguished contemporary, and I hope I have done it, after my own fashion. WS: 1 October 

John Davidson, The Testament of a Prime Minister Mr Davidson is one of the men whom failure, or inadequate success, may have injured in ways past our finding out, but has benefited at least in an 5  Ethnic: perhaps in the older sense of ‘pagan’ or ‘heathen’; for De Guérin, see [76n.]. 6  Mountain range in southern Greece, where Hercules is said to have captured a monstrous wild boar.

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obvious way. He has never got into a rut; has never ridden a passionate death; has never made multiplication his only rule in the making of books, like those admired copyists in their own private galleries. Everything that he has written has had about it something of the fas­cin­ ation of a first book, and yet that has usually been among the least of its attractions. His Random Itinerary, his novels, his plays, his recent Rosary,1 have had nothing in common but hard thinking, sincerity, fancy, and a cultivated and naturally high gift of expression. The same can be said of few authors of today. His new book only furnishes a new proof of his unswerving originality. His motto on the title-­page is taken from the book itself:— . . . To apprehend The meaning of the adamantine reign And power of Evolution in awful terms Of God and Judgment.

And he shows us a man, whom he calls a Prime Minister, who, in his last days, came to realise, or be obsessed by, the idea of Evolution. So powerfully is this obsession described that we are not without a feeling that perhaps Mr Davidson has at some time been a victim of it, and we have to remind ourselves, more clearly than is usually necessary, that, after all, the terrible voice that speaks in it is the voice of only one unhappy man crying in the dark and in solitude. We are inclined to say, indeed, though not confidently, that Mr Davidson is a victim, and may in the future suffer for an extravagant awe, of this view of the universe. But for men of his own day, undoubtedly, his treatment of that view is lofty and most moving. It would not, perhaps, be unfair to say that it is likely to be found by many as importunate as a superstition. Evolution was a superstition in the mind of the Prime Minister. He watched a grove of beeches that were in danger of the axe:— So is it with the nations and the tribes, The classes, masses, peoples of the earth: The leaves, the men and women, die and rot; But the trees stand, Goth, Scythian, Mongol, Jew . . . The fixed idea, Humankind, remains Until the earth becomes an icicle, Or falls into the bosom of the sun.

1  Reviewed by ET [68].

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Thinking of the inefficiency and unhappiness of the Celts,2 he thought that it would have been better had they been destroyed early:— But Matter, firm that Man shall not escape While Earth remains inhabitable, knits His vehement spirit of Material stuff, Of longing infinite that will exist. [. . .]

As usual, Mr Davidson’s writing is robust, full of beautiful things, and difficult and eccentric things, too. His blank verse is that of a prose writer, and therefore rhetorical. It is unquestionably powerful, and yet we think that his own excellent prose might have been more effective, since some obscurity and some inconsequence might thus have been avoided. DC: 22 October 

The Poetical Works of Longfellow1 (Oxford University Press) It is still the fashion to laugh at Longfellow; to call his rectitude dull; to remember only his uninspired diction; and to repeat the story of how, when Tennyson had put his feet on the mantelpiece of a club, he was made to take them down hastily by a friend who told him that he ran a risk of being mistaken for Longfellow. And yet the majority reads Longfellow, buys him in the most hideous editions. I suppose that, with the exception of Dr Clifford,2 there is no one whose name is more popular with a very large and powerful section of the community. The attack on him was only to be expected from an age that loves Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Tennyson, all of them poets with a very distinct, delicate, and personal style, and all of them innovators. For, on the surface, Longfellow 2  A Protestant Scot, Davidson may have been susceptible to ‘Celticism’ in its negative aspect: i.e. as a means of stereotyping the (Catholic) Irish in ways that rendered them unfit for selfgovernment; see [68n.]. At Rhymers’ Club gatherings, Davidson clashed with W. B. Yeats. 1  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82), the most popular American poet of his day, was especially known for his epic poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and for ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’ (1861), which celebrates (or largely invents) a hero of the war against the British. Longfellow was the first American poet to be honoured at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. 2 Dr John Clifford (1836–1923): nonconformist minister and Liberal politician, then well known as opponent of the 1902 Education Act, which favoured denominational religious teaching in schools.

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has nothing in common with them. One might read him for years and at the end distinguish something of his in a collection, only because all the others had a style, and his had none. His writing does not, of course, lack character. But it lacks manner, and on the surface, it lacks style. It is not concentrated, it has not been through the furnace as much, e.g., as Keats’s has; it carries dross with it undoubtedly, and of course our tendency now is to prefer a low perfection of style to a lofty imperfection, and to those who think thus, Longfellow is full of horrors, such as this:— Meanwhile, without, the surly cannon waited,   The sun rose bright o’erhead; Nothing in Nature’s aspect intimated   That a great man was dead.3

But his popularity is equally intelligible. There are many who have travelled far from Longfellow, and yet remember ‘The Children’s Hour’ above all other verse.4 For he catches his lovers at a most tender and unresisting age, and early loves of books endure. Then, too, there are persons of all ages, of strong common sense, earnest, believing in the good powers of literature, and perhaps not without sentimentality, who can easily enjoy the ‘Midnight Mass for the Dying Year’, ‘A Psalm of Life’, and Evangeline. Then, too, a growing number of men can see that, with the exception of Browning and Victor Hugo, no poet of modern times has such a large and fresh and various subject matter. ‘The provision is human nature’, as Fielding says.5 I cannot enjoy his lyrics as I can Shelley’s, because they are never perfect. But if the perfect lyric bubble is never produced, what a lather there is! A little more of what is called in­spir­ ation would have made him the greatest of lyric poets. As it is, his material for lyric and elegiac and narrative poems is richer even than Wordsworth’s. And if, as in the ‘Haunted Houses’,6 one is continually fretted by the thought that we are reading paraphrases of very great things, as one reads on one gains a profound respect for his fecundity of ideas and imagery; and if the 3  Last stanza of ‘The Warden of the Cinque Ports’: Longfellow’s elegy for Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington (1769–1852). 4 Sentimental poem spoken by a grandfather about his grandchildren. ET recalls in his memoir The Childhood of Edward Thomas (published 1938): ‘The only poems which I remember having read aloud to me at an early age were Longfellow’s. My father used to read or recite “The Children’s Hour” very often. The pathos, or his sense of it, touched me . . .’ (ETPW I, 218). Longfellow may indeed have imprinted ET’s sensibility: see notes below. 5  ‘The provision, then, which we have here made is no other than Human Nature’: Henry Fielding, Introduction to Tom Jones. 6  ‘Haunted Houses’, which begins ‘All houses wherein men have lived and died / Are haunted houses’, has parallels with ET’s poems ‘The New House’ and ‘Gone, gone again’ (ACP, 68, 131).

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simplicity of his thought is not always well supported by his diction, how numerous are the remembered things like— And the friendships old and the early loves Come back with a sabbath sound, as of doves   In quiet neighbourhoods . . .7

And Only the Poet seemed to hear, In drowse or dream, more near and near Across the border-­land of sleep8 The blowing of a blithesome horn, That laughed the dismal day to scorn; A splash of hoofs and rush of wheels, Through sand and mire like stranding keels, As from the road with sudden sweep The Mail drove up the little steep, And stopped beside the tavern door . . .9

And River, that stealest with such silent pace   Around the City of the Dead . . .10

His gravity, his tenderness, his breadth, his eagerness, his observation, and his unfailing simplicity, are so high and so admirably combined, that one can find them so only among the greatest, all of whose powers he shared, save one. The secret of his wide appeal lies in this imperfection—­for undoubtedly to the majority a fine style is a disadvantage, since it can only be perfectly enjoyed by means of some curiosity and scholarship. Longfellow’s style has not the delicacy or scholarship of Shakespeare’s or Milton’s, but it is as easily intelligible as prose, and theirs is not. WS: 29 October 

7  Quotation from ‘My Lost Youth’, which has the refrain: ‘A boy’s will is the wind’s will, / And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts’. The title of RF’s first collection, A Boy’s Will (1913), may have reminded ET of this poem: in his own poem ‘Interval’ (ACP, 39), which similarly links wind, trees and memory, the phrase ‘gleam or gloom’ may echo Longfellow’s ‘gleam and gloom’. 8  ET’s poem ‘Lights Out’ begins: ‘I have come to the borders of sleep’ (ACP, 135). 9  Quotation from ‘Prelude’ to Part II of Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863). 10  From ‘Three Friends of Mine’.

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T. Sturge Moore, To Leda and Other Odes In reading a volume of Mr Sturge Moore’s verses, one has the pleasant but also undefined emotions of a discoverer of new lands. He sees that they are fair and new; but their proportions are not clear; their flowers and creatures outwit him by their novelty. Where towns will some day smoke and fields turn yellow with wheat, he sees only a lovely desert. And so the passages which will seem easy to later critics, those which are particularly fresh, and the rhythms which are most fascinating, in Mr Moore’s book, can only be guessed at. Of few things can one be less confident than of the special merit of really original verse when it first appears. But in this book there are passages which do not admit of much question, as for example:— And clouds will no more pause near kings’ fair homes,— Though queens watch at the casements while their combs Gleam indolently drawn through perfumed tresses— Than those swans loitered . . .

That parenthesis is characteristic; Mr Moore’s cast of mind makes such apparent irrelevancies essential. The quotation is from the ode ‘To Leda’, a poem which we are inclined to neglect as a whole, for we fail to discover the clearness of outline and sequence of emotion which are common to the best work and to much of his. He has looked at the myth of Zeus and Leda until his thoughts have flown dazzled to strange places, and while the result is often fine, the reader cannot enjoy it quite intelligently. One detail, by the way, should not be forgotten. A robin comes to look at Leda’s robe while she bathes:— Thy picture-­broidered train might be a book, And he a child enacting someone wise.

A similar imperfection is to be noticed in ‘On Death’, and also in ‘A Lament for Orpheus’, a poem sometimes most realistic and at the same time beautiful, but sometimes difficult in construction and expression, though full of lines worth pondering, as when he says, after describing the effect of the lute on beasts and trees:— So well the aim of living he expressed, His lute such escort everywhere could win.

Then, too, there is this fine picture:—

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       fishing over billows grey, On pinion slow, some lonely seamew lags Till the moon rise . . .

In the ode ‘To Loki’, things like the following seem to have hardly been long enough in the furnace, and to retain some dross of thinking about them:— Volcanic nature, passionless desire, Divine mobility, intuitive Touchstone of qualities,—enter, thou Fire, Enter our life once more,—force us to live!

In other surroundings they would do well enough, but hardly in an ode by Mr Moore. And this seems to us his one grave danger. Mr Moore rightly thinks a great deal: perhaps he does not unthink sufficiently.1 [. . .] DC: 27 November 

The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems,1 edited by Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford University Press) About a year ago we gave a warm welcome to Mr C. D. Locock’s book of newly-­discovered fragments and additional and often most useful readings, from the Shelley MSS. in the Bodleian Library.2 These helped to give us a better notion of the beauty of Shelley’s work when it left his pen, a beauty which printers and careless editors did much to destroy until Mr Buxton Forman and Mr Rossetti began to insist upon Shelley and nothing but Shelley in their editions of his poetry.3 Now the work of these men and of many 1 In ET’s poem ‘Lob’ it is said of the mythic protagonist, who personifies poetry as well as Englishness: ‘He can talk quite as well as anyone / After his thinking is forgot and done’ (ACP, 78). 1  Hutchinson’s edition has been of lasting significance. ET reviewed a reprint in August 1905 [143]. 2  Review untraced. ET would later review Locock’s edition of The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in which he finds the ‘laborious minuteness’ of the notes, sometimes useful but often ‘unnecessary’; and complains that the editor’s ‘principle of completeness’ does not extend to Shelley’s own comments on his work (DC: 5 October 1911). 3  Harry Buxton Forman edited an eight-volume Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in Verse and Prose (1880); William Michael Rossetti published several editions of Shelley, including a threevolume Complete Poetical Works (1878).

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­ thers of equal sincerity has been embodied in perhaps the most perfect and o attractive edition which is so far possible. Mr Hutchinson’s editing is careful and bold. His punctuation and spelling will meet, if not with universal acceptance, at least with universal respect. We need mention only his suggestion that ‘uprest’, in Laon and Cythna4 (III.xxi.5), is a misprint for the antique ‘uprist’, and not the mere nonce word which those who charge Shelley with flightiness would have it to be. And perhaps there is reason for a hope that the new edition will evoke a reconsideration of Shelley, which will remove greater charges of the same kind and of equally good foundation. His admirers have always laid stress upon his achievement as a poet of Nature. In many of his poems, in many of his finest, he draws upon Nature, whether for his theme, or for allusion or for puissant metaphor, or for that staging which has a way of surviving the actors themselves in our memory. Nor will this appear strange, when we consider how great an influence ‘the physiognomy and movement of the outward world’5 had upon Shelley’s life, and what a high value he set upon that influence. Nowhere is that clearer than in the preface to Laon and Cythna, where he enumerates the experiences which should, he thought, if anything could, have fitted him for poetry. He was born at a very central moment of good omen for a poet of Nature. He had the sensibility, the so-­called morbid sensibility, which has usually accompanied and perhaps inspired the bent for interpreting Nature. He also had a patient instinct for style, and the scholarship by which it is satisfied, which somewhat invalidate the charge of lack of sanity. Wordsworth himself, so niggard of praise to all save the smallest or least dangerous of his contemporaries, admitted this, by calling Shelley ‘the best artist of us all’. Finally, it is clear that the poet had a fine, though not a deadly, scalpel, know­ ledge of the facts of Nature. So gifted, he might have been expected to make ‘natural magic’ his servant. The phrase is Arnold’s,6 and there is some obscurity in his use of it, though the reader must usually admit its congruity with his quotations in ­illustration. 4 Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam (1818) was originally published under the title Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City. 5  Matthew Arnold writes in ‘Maurice de Guérin’: ‘poetry interprets in two ways; it interprets by expressing with magical felicity the physiognomy and movement of the outward world, and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man’s moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretative both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity’ (Essays in Criticism [London and Cambridge: Macmillan, 1865], 108). 6  See previous note. In On the Study of Celtic Literature (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1867) Arnold claims that English poetry has derived ‘from a Celtic source . . . nearly all its natural magic’ (135).

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He says that poetry becomes interpretive ‘by expressing with magical felicity the physiognomy and movement of the outward world’. He finds this not only in Chateaubriand and Senancour,7 but apparently in Gilbert White. Unless we are greatly mistaken, we should thus find it in scores of living ­writers of prose and verse. A class of writers so large would, therefore, we think, be large enough to include Shelley, if only by virtue of descriptions in his letters and prose fragments. Yet Arnold denies ‘natural magic’ to Shelley, except ‘in his rhythms’.8 And it seems to us that, with more than his usual animosity towards Shelley,9 he excludes Shelley because he is not Keats. How else could he refuse to place the author of such lines as:— And then the night-­wind steaming from the shore,   Sent odours dying sweet across the sea;

and these:— When light rode high, and the dew was gone, And noon lay heavy on flower and tree;

and this:— The thunder and the hiss of homeless streams;

beside the author of these:— a dismal cirque Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor, When the chill rain begins at shut of eve;

and these:— where Arno’s stream Gurgles through straighten’d banks, and still doth fan 7 François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848): French author and diplomat, a major influence on Romanticism in France; Étienne Pivert de Senancour (1770–1846): French essayist and philosopher, best-known for his epistolary novel Obermann (1804). 8  In a footnote to ‘Maurice de Guérin’ (see note 5), having praised the ‘natural magic’ of de Guérin and Keats, Arnold writes: ‘I will not deny . . . that Shelley has natural magic in his rhythm; what I deny is, that he has it in his language’ (109). 9  In the Second Series of Essays in Criticism (London: Macmillan, 1888), Arnold ends his essay ‘Byron’ by hailing Byron and Wordsworth as the greatest Romantic poets; by denigrating Shelley as a ‘beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain’ (203–4). He repeats this judgement at the end of his essay on Shelley (252). ET’s elaborate set of comparisons evinces his deep compulsion to defend Shelley. He told GB (6 August 1904): ‘I don’t read him. He is part of myself ’ (LGB, 61).

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  Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream Keeps head against the freshets.10

We have chosen at random, and are well aware that the first quotation from Keats is the most magical of all. But we will give others, which show the poets as prisms to the sunlight, lyres to the winds, still and living mirrors to catch and transform the pa­geant­ry of earth and heaven. Not to set up a comparison, but to argue a likeness, we would place this passage from Shelley:— Nor aught else in the liquid mirror laves Its portraiture, but some inconstant star Between one foliaged lattice twinkling fair, Or, painted bird, sleeping beneath the moon . . .

beside this from Keats:—        beneath the whisp’ring roof   Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran   A brooklet, scarce espied: ’Mid hush’d, cool-­rooted flowers, fragrant-­eyed . . .11

Shelley’s dew that—   Outlives the noon, and on the sun’s last ray Hangs o’er the sea, a fleece of fire and amethyst.

beside this from Keats:— And let the clouds of even and of morn Float in voluptuous fleeces o’er the hills . . .12

Shelley’s— And solemn midnight’s tingling silentness . . .

beside Keats’— And evenings steep’d in honied indolence . . .13

and, lastly, Shelley’s—

10 Shelley, Revolt of Islam, III.xxxiv.1405–6, ‘To Night’, Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude, 566; Keats, ‘Hyperion’, II.34–6, ‘Isabella’, XXVII. 11 Shelley, Alastor, 462–5; Keats, ‘Ode to Psyche’, 10–13. 12 Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, IV.435–6; Keats, ‘Hyperion’, III.16–17. 13 Shelley, Alastor, 7; Keats, ‘Ode on Indolence’, V.

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           His wan eyes Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly As ocean’s moon looks on the moon in heaven . . .

and Whose mild winds shake the elder brake, And the wandering herdsmen know That the white-­thorn soon will blow . . .

beside Keats’— Thou shalt, at one glance, behold The daisy and the marigold; White-­plum’d lillies, and the first Hedge-­grown primrose that hath burst; Shaded hyacinth, alway Sapphire queen of the mid-­May.14

If, as we believe, these examples serve to show that Shelley possessed in a high degree the power which Arnold denied to him, we may perhaps conclude that the critic lacked adequate acquaintance with the outward world. In his own verse he often uses natural objects gracefully, but seldom as one who had given some of his own life to them and taken some of theirs in return. In conclusion, we would suggest that the critic’s equipment is not seldom deficient in this matter as Arnold’s was, and that if Byron showed his carelessness by condemning a descriptive phrase of Coleridge as untrue, the unskilfulnesss of Pater is also illustrated (in his essay on Coleridge) by his praise of this same phrase, which is, in fact, very bald and such as an observer would never have praised in a form so unmagical.15 DC: 27 December 14 Shelley, Alastor, 200–2, Prometheus Unbound, I.793–5; Keats, ‘Fancy’, 47–52. 15  The phrase in question is from Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’: ‘the western sky / And its peculiar tint of yellow green’. Pater defends this effect against Byron’s calling it ‘ludicrously untrue’ (Thomas Humphry Ward [ed.], The English Poets: Selections with Critical Introductions, Vol. IV [London: Macmillan, 1894], 106).

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1905 The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,1 with Illustrations from his own pictures and designs, edited by W. M. Rossetti Some of D.  G.  Rossetti’s critics have said that his pictures are imperfect because they are poetical, and his poems imperfect because they are pictorial. For them these volumes, accompanied by reproductions of his pictures, will be confusion worse confounded; or they will be interesting specimens of a third art—­the Siamese twins of poetry and painting. For our own part, we have never been able to understand quite clearly the indictment of such critics. We acquiesce, indeed, in their regret that Millais should have called a picture ‘Speak! Speak!’ But they seem to us to have come near to spoiling their laudable concern for the integrity of art by the madness of extremes, when they have condemned the artist because he was conscious of the fact that some of his pictures told a story and that some might have an equivalent, or rather a variation in words. We have never yet seen a picture which has not, or might not at some time, have suggested a story; and certainly we have never seen one which could not be accused of containing a motive or an impulse for poetry. The late Mr Henley2 was one of the most fervid and persuasive critics of this opinion; yet we remember that in his wonderful little volume of concise art criticisms he was often most at ease when he was suggesting the atmosphere of the pictures discussed by purely literary means; one painter, for example, was ‘Virgilian’, and so on. We have, therefore, come to the conclusion 1  Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82): poet, painter, founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 2  W[illiam] E[rnest] Henley (1849–1903): poet, critic, editor, opinionated commentator. From 1889 to 1893 Henley edited the influential Scots Observer, re-named National Observer. Contributors included Shaw and Yeats, but the journal’s politics were conservative and imperialist. Henley’s best-known poem ‘Invictus’, ending ‘I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul’, gave its title to the Invictus Games for disabled soldiers. Henley wrote the poem during a long struggle with TB, which included losing a leg. ET had noted the contradiction in Henley’s argument about poetry and painting, when reviewing his Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation: Art (the ‘wonderful little volume’): ‘he shows that he has realised how all the arts stand to one another in a fixed and close and complementary relation like the stars in Orion’ (DC: 16 May 1902). Reviewing Henley’s Works, he judges that ‘the man was the chief thing, his greatest achievement’; and that he had ‘a strong desire to say something, or a number of things, instead of having something that had to be said’ (DC: 27 June 1908).

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that so long as a picture produces its effect solely by its forms and c­ olours, its integrity as a picture is unassailable, and that any accusation must rebound against the accuser. That Rossetti has preserved this integrity in the majority of his pictures we feel no doubt. On the other hand, there seems at first sight to be more reason on the side of those who condemn Rossetti as a painter in his poetry. For if, in his pictures, he does not lean upon words, in some of his poetry he does seem to lean upon pictures; and since hitherto the pictures were not to be had in company with the corresponding poems, they were often ineffectual. Here, for example, is ‘The Day-­Dream’:— The thronged boughs of the shadowy sycamore   Still bear young leaflets half the summer through:   From when the robin ’gainst the unhidden blue Perched dark, till now, deep in the leafy core, The embowered throstle’s urgent wood-­notes soar   Through summer silence. Still the leaves come new;   Yet never rosy-­sheathed as those which drew Their spiral tongues from spring-­buds heretofore. Within the branching shade of Reverie Dreams even may spring till autumn; yet none be   Like woman’s budding day-­dream spirit-fann’d. Lo! tow’rd deep skies, not deeper than her look, She dreams: till now on her forgotten book   Drops the forgotten blossom from her hand.

It seems to us to be incomplete without the picture, the first half being simply good observation somewhat violently thrust into the bonds of verse, and, without the picture, imperfectly connected with the following sextet. ‘Proserpina’, again, is a sublime labour. But the class of poems to which ‘The Blessed Damozel’ belongs is very different. That poem happens to bear the same name as a picture. But neither needs the other; in our opinion, they clash. And we fancy that those who care for Rossetti’s work in both arts will always study the two separately, will treat them as two different moods, and will probably end by regarding the form of the poem as the more perfectly inspired. Of the greater part of his work we can hardly speak, nor of the bad influence of his rhetorical diction, and especially of his sonnets.3 But if this, from ‘The Portrait’,

3  Yet in January 1912, when he had another edition of Rossetti for review [518], ET contemplated writing a book on him (ABL, 491). He would continue to berate Rossetti as a sonneteer: see [221].

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In painting her I shrined her face   ’Mid mystic trees, where light falls in Hardly at all; a covert place   Where you might think to find a din Of doubtful talk, and a live flame Wandering, and many a shape whose name   Not itself knoweth, and old dew,   And your own footsteps meeting you, And all things going as they came:

or this, from ‘The Bride’s Prelude’— The bride turned in her chair, and hid   Her face against the back, And took her pearl-­girt elbows in Her hands, and could not yet begin, But shuddering, uttered, ‘Urscelyn!’ Most weak she was; for as she pressed   Her hand against her throat, Along the arras she let trail Her face, as if all heart did fail, And sat with shut eyes, dumb and pale. [. . .]

if these things compel the mind to see, they do no more than other poets, the Welsh medieval poets especially, do; nor are they so framed as to make this their only achievement; and if, again, they compel the mind to see more vividly than other poets do, then let us be thankful for a new element in poetry, since Mr Sturge Moore’s exquisite pictorial episodes have proved that it is not an abortive one. DC: 2 January 

The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Others, being a reproduction in facsimile of the first collected edition 1532, with an introduction by Walter W. Skeat (Oxford University Press)1 [. . .] There are some poets, like Shakespeare, whom it would undeniably be comical to read only in an original or very early edition, because their work does 1  ET recycled/ adapted part of this review in SC (109–10; ETPW II, 284–5).

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not conspicuously and invariably, and in a way that cannot be neglected safely, bear the mark of the ages in which they wrote. There are others, like the poets of Greece and Rome, who wrote in an age so unintelligible and imperfectly recorded that we must read them as if they were contemporaries, but of another world; and I have heard of only one scholar who could boast that if he met Virgil, he would know him and freely talk with him. But Chaucer stands for the Middle Ages in England. His language, his ideas, his temperament above all, make it almost impossible for us to read his work, no matter in how remote a study or garden, shut out from time and change, without feeling that he and all those who rode and talked and were young with him, are skeletons or less; though Catullus and Milton can be read with no such feeling. More than the poems of some greater men, we should miss his if they were to be destroyed. He reminds us of what once we were. It is an unavoidable habit in all ages to look back at a golden age, and though today many of us seem to have come to believe that there is no time but the present, and that all things that have been are, even we look back to such an age, if not in history, at least in books. Thus, Izaak Walton has made a golden age for us. Some could say as much of Miss Mitford2 or Goldsmith. More than any other Englishman, Chaucer has made a golden age that will be for ever. He wrote before Villon3 had inaugurated modern literature, with the cry— Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?—

before men appear to us to have learned how immense is the world and time. But we, looking back, with the help of this knowledge, see in the work of this man who filled a little nook of time and space with gaiety, something apart from us, and as we read it, England becomes a happy island which his verses made and his death unmade. His gaiety! that is what bathes the island in the light of a golden age and the freshness of all the May days we can never recover. No Englishman who wrote has had it since, we think, as we read in The Legend of Good Women:— There is game noon That fro my bokes maketh me to goon, But it be seldom on the holyday, Save, certeynly, whan that the month of May 2  Mary Russell Mitford (1787–1855): prolific author, best known for her sketches of country life collected in Our Village (1824–32). 3  In the Testament of François Villon (1431–c.1463), his ‘Ballade des dames du temps jadis’ has this ‘cry’ as its refrain: ‘But where are the snows of long ago?’

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Is comen, and that I here the foules synge, And that the floures gynnen for to sprynge,— Farewel my boke, and my devocion! . . .

Or as we read of the ‘lover and a lusty bachelor’; of the Marquis Walter—‘on his lust present was all his thought’; of the effect of Cressida’s beauty; of the courteous maiden in the Romaunt of the Rose, who ‘led a lusty life in May’.4 And I find that gaiety no less in the sorrowful passages than in the joyful; when, for example, he compares the subjection of the fierce, proud Troilus to love, to the whipping of a spirited horse; when he uses what seems to us the commonplace about age creeping in ‘always as still as stone’ upon fresh youth; when he exclaims to false Jason, Have at thee, Jason! now thyn horn is blowe;

or when he cries, at the fate of Ugolino’s children, Allas, Fortune! it was greet crueltee Swiche briddes for to putte in swich a cage!

Even in Griselda’s piteous cry, O tendre, O deere, O yonge children myne,

there is an intimation that in those words her sorrow is being spent, and that, though it will be renewed, it will be broken up by joyfulness many times before her death.5 For, as Chaucer’s laughter is assuredly never completed by a sigh, so there is something hearty in his tears that suggests laughter before and after. His was a sharp, surprising sorrow, that came when he was forced to see the suffering of lovely humanity. He is all gaiety; but he has two moods. They may be seen close together in the monk’s tale of ‘the harm of hem that stoode in heighe degree’,6 and the interruption of the Host— For therinne is ther no desport ne game.7

Sorrow never changes him, any more than shadow changes a merry brook. In both moods he seems to speak of a day when men had not only not so far outstripped the lark and nightingale in heaviness as we have done, but had moments when their joy was the same as the lark’s above the grey dew of 4  Quotations from Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, 33–9; portrait of the Squire in General Prologue to Canterbury Tales, 80; ‘The Clerk’s Tale’, 80; portrait of Ydelnesse in Romaunt of the Rose, 581. 5  Quotations from Troilus and Criseyde, 218–24; ‘Clerk’s Tale’, 121 (‘always, silent as a stone’); ‘Hypsipyle and Medea’, Legend of Good Women, 1383; ‘The Monk’s Tale’, 525–6; ‘Clerk’s Tale’, 1093. 6  ‘Monk’s Tale’, 2.    7  ‘Nun’s Priest’s Prologue’, 25.

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May dawns. And thus, if we only had to thank Chaucer for the gaiety which is left behind in his book, as the straw of a long past harvest clings to the thorns of a narrow lane, we could never be grateful enough.8 DC: 24 March 

Poems of Michael Drayton1 The anonymous editor of this volume thinks that Drayton is better represented by its selection than by his whole work, and that, in the whole, these charming things would be obscured. So he excludes the Polyolbion and the Barons’ Wars. But to us, it seems that Drayton’s abundance, like Wither’s,2 is part of his charm. He was a happy spirit who was too good-­natured to refuse the smallest gifts of the Muse, and to appreciate him fairly the reader should see his complete work. For it is like a large, undulating landscape that lacks decided character, but is yet pleasant to walk in, and to the observant traveller reveals many a corner which would not be noticed in a richer and more diversified land. He was, indeed, the author of this good sonnet:— Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part,— Nay, I have done, you get no more of me; And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart, That thus so cleanly I myself can free; Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows, And when we meet at any time again, Be it not seen in either of our brows That we one jot of former love retain. Now at the last gasp of love’s latest breath, 8  Chaucer’s spirit, as defined here, perhaps also the pulse of his couplets, informs ET’s poems ‘May 23’ and ‘Lob’ (ACP, 62, 76). ‘May 23’ begins: ‘There never was a finer day, / And never will be while May is May’. 1  Michael Drayton (1563–1631), as ET indicates, was a prolific poet who wrote sonnets, songs, pastorals, narrative poems. His best-known work is Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622): a 15,000-line chorographical poem in rhymed alexandrines, which covers England and Wales with accompanying maps. ET invokes Drayton’s ‘Englishness’ in his country books, and includes an extract (concerning the Forest of Arden) from Poly-Olbion in TE. Favoured at the Elizabethan court, Drayton was ignored by James I. 2  For George Wither, see [57].

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When his pulse failing, passion speechless lies, When faith is kneeling by his bed of death, And innocence is closing up his eyes,— Now, if thou would’st, when all have given him over, From death to life thou might’st him yet recover!

But it is right that the reader should see how many sonnets Drayton wrote without reaching that height; and in fact the editor has printed them all. Even in a selection we would rather that he should have printed enough of the more lengthy work to let the reader judge what manner of man Drayton was. Here and there it is true that he has pithy passages like this:— Neat Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs, Had in him those brave translunary things That the first Poets had, his raptures were All air and fire, which made his verses clear.3

Yet his charm is not that of concentration. He is the typical Elizabethan glory­ing in the spaciousness of his age light-­heartedly and apparently enjoying himself, more even than his readers do, in his work. How indolent is his ‘Ballad of Agincourt’, for example, and yet it has a spirit which modern poets do not always capture in their more severely wrought verses, and the opening is full of it:— Fair stood the wind for France When we our sails advance, Nor now to prove our chance   Longer will tarry; But putting to the main, At Caux, the mouth of Seine, With all his martial train   Landed King Harry.

But, above all, he is the poet of the Cotswolds, its fields and men and women, and his expansive manner succeeds in presenting them to us, because it has a rusticity compared with which more self-­conscious and observant poets are apt to seem town-­bred. His verse makes us live with Nature instead of 3  From Drayton’s elegy/epistle concerning ‘Poets & Poesie’, addressed to ‘my most dearely-loved friend Henery Reynolds Esquire’. (Here ‘neat’ means ‘pure’, ‘shining’.) The spirit of this poetry-based friendship has parallels with ET’s celebration, in ‘The sun used to shine’ (ACP, 122), of his own friendship with RF. Drayton and Reynolds ‘Now talk’d of this, and then discours’d of that, / Spoke our owne verses ’twixt our selves, if not / Other men’s lines, which we by chance had got’.

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forcing us to admire it aesthetically. There is, for example, a true rusticity in his Dowsabell:— The silk well could she twist and twine, And make the fine March-­pine,   And with the needle work . . .

And in the ‘country cates’ of his eclogue:— New whig, with water from the clearest stream, Green plums, and wildings, cherries chief of feast, Fresh cheese, and dowsets, curds and clowted cream, Spic’d sillabubs, and cider of the best.4

Here, too, is an Arcadianism that goes along with his rusticity, and produces something which, with all its artificiality, smacks of the country as the later pastoral never does; as here:— There was the widow’s daughter of the glen, Dear Rosalind, that scarcely brooked compare, The moorland maiden, so admired of men, Bright Goldilocks, and Phillida the fair.5

Finally, there is often a rich sweetness in his rhythms:— Heaven on her shape such cost bestow’d, And with such bounties blest, No limb of hers but might have made A goddess at the least,6—

a sweetness which is no longer attainable, and makes it pleasant to read Drayton, even while we realise that there are half a dozen poets living today who are much to be preferred by true lovers of poetry. But he is easier to enjoy, because the more careless we are the more old-­fashioned we are in our literary taste; and if many read him for the first time in this pretty edition, it will perhaps serve the unexpected purpose of fitting some to enjoy the poets of our own day, whom an idle archaism now obscures. DC: 25 April 

4  Quotations from ‘The Ballad of Dowsabell’, which ET included in PBPS (as he did Drayton’s ‘Daffadill’), and from Pastorals: Eclogue IX. 5  Also from Eclogue IX.    6  From ‘The Quest of Cynthia’.

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Paul Elmer More,1 Shelburne Essays We do not remember to have seen Mr More’s work before, except in the Atlantic Monthly. Yet we hardly hesitate in saying that this, probably his first volume of essays, contains the best criticism that has come from America in recent years. He is familiar with classical, oriental, and English literature; he uses a temperate, lucid, weighty, and not ungraceful style; he is aware of his best predecessors, and is apparently on the way to a set of philosophic prin­ ciples which should lead him to a high and perhaps influential place in criticism. In fact, his book is chiefly interesting because it reveals part of a large and philosophic and eager mind devoted to literature, and disappointing only because at present the author has not yet so founded his judgments as to give them consistency and to make it quite clear why, for example, on one page he speaks of Tolstoy and on another of Mr Arthur Symons in the way he does. His results are always stimulating and possibly right, but we are not yet quite able to understand the mind which has produced them. His subjects are Thoreau, Hawthorne, Poe, Emerson, Carlyle, Mr Arthur Symons, Mr Yeats, Lionel Johnson, Tolstoy, Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain,2 the science of English verse, and the religious ground of humanitarianism, and the English reader is at once struck by the freedom of his mind from the traditional attitudes of our critics. In the essays on Americans, of course, this freedom is not so decided; but, even so, his appreciations, while they are happily not without enthusiasm, are obviously the work of a mind which has well considered its own natural bias in favour of what is American. That on Thoreau, for example, though it opens with some outdoor reverie which is not first-­ rate, and though it says that Gray ‘discovered the beauty of wild mountain scenery’, is remarkably full of light, as when he points out the importance of Thoreau’s ‘New World inheritance’—his lack of pantheistic reverie, his ‘memory of man’s struggle with the primeval woods and fields’, his ‘sense of 1  Paul Elmer More (1864–1937): influential (as ET anticipates) American literary and social critic, who edited the American journal the Nation (1909–14). With his Harvard contemporary, Irving Babbitt, More conceived the conservative and anti-Romantic critical movement, later termed the ‘New Humanism’: see [447] and Introduction [xlviii]. He influenced the ‘classical’ ideas of T. S. Eliot, who also emulated him in becoming a Christian apologist. Eliot called More and Babbitt ‘the two wisest men that I have known’ (Princeton Alumni Weekly, 37, 17 [5 February 1937]). More published ten further volumes of Shelburne Essays: Shelburne being the village in Maine where he discovered his critical vocation. ET’s second review of More was less favourable: see [139]. 2  In 1902 Lady Augusta Gregory had published Cuchulain of Muirthemne: a significant text of the Irish Literary Revival, in which she collates oral and written versions of the legends concerning this hero of the Ulster cycle.

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awe, even of dread, toward the great unsubdued forces of the world’, and his stoicism. In the essays on English writers his independence is free from effort and is always agreeable. We find ourselves, indeed, unable to support his preference of Lionel Johnson to Mr Yeats, or to sympathise with his very grave and sententious correction of Mr Arthur Symons’s attitude in verse; and altogether he is, perhaps, too much disposed to give very modern writing the epithet of decadent and then elaborately to condemn it. But in spite of this, and in spite of his dissatisfaction with what the Gael has made of Cuchulain and his conservatism in criticising the ‘fluttering movement’ of Mr Yeats’s verses, we find something refreshing in his lack of easy prejudice and something useful in his large humanity which would resemble Arnold’s if only he were a prig. And when he says that Wordsworth’s important in­nov­ ation is ‘not his appreciation of Nature but his humanitarianism, his peculiarly sentimental attitude toward humble life’; when he speaks of our modern ‘curious deference to the untrained individual’; when he calls Tolstoy ‘a decadent with the humanitarian superimposed’; and when he reminds us that Christ’s ‘kingdom was not of this world, and there is every reason to believe that he looked to see only a few chosen souls follow in his footsteps’, we believe that we are in the presence of a critic who must be counted among the first who take literature and life for their theme, allowing neither to be narrowed by its relations with the other, and disengaging themselves from the ‘art for art’s sake’ and the ‘moral tale’ schools. S: 29 April 

The Poems of John Keats, edited with an Introduction and Notes by E. de Sélincourt1 [. . .] The book has obviously been prepared at leisure that allowed time for all afterthoughts, by a learned, penetrating, and sympathetic reader of Keats—­ one who knows and uses the earlier editions thoroughly—­who has added not very much that is new perhaps, but has arranged the old and added the 1  Ernest de Sélincourt (1870–1943), whose edition of Keats proved durable, also edited the works of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. In 1908 he became Professor of English Language and Literature at Birmingham University. He was Oxford Professor of Poetry 1928–33.

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new in such a way that commentators can go no further for many years, let us believe. It is, in short, a triumph for the learned reader of Keats; and we can suggest only two possible improvements. Firstly Mr de Sélincourt should omit, with apologies to all men and women, and most ladies and gentlemen, his strong, repeated, and above all unnecessary remarks about the vulgarity of the poet’s origin, surroundings and early tastes. Secondly, the notes and other apparatus should be printed apart from the text, since the present arrangement, though the usual one, reminds us of a dining-­room which is a kitchen and scullery as well. The volume is interesting in many ways, and not only because it includes the poems of Keats. It shows us, for example, the developing tact and self-­ criticism of Keats during composition. It shows us how he omitted the worst things; how he changed and shaded; how he converted the good into the right. It shows us that he once wrote— Charm’d the wide casements, opening on the foam Of keelless seas, in faery lands forlorn,

and that a famous passage of ‘Hyperion’ once stood thus:— In fear and sad amaze, like men at gaze Who on a wide plain gather in sad troops When an earthquake hath shook their city towers;2

and that seven or eight changes were made before it reached its perfect form. And yet, for our part, we cannot away with this curiosity, which seems to call upon us to admire Keats, not because he sometimes did perfect things, but because he had to fight against a strong tendency to do imperfect things. But where we admire Mr de Sélincourt most is in the notes and Appendix C. There he shows Keats’s ancestry as a poet; lets us see the poet adding honour to poets long dead by walking in their gardens and gathering flowers; and proves that the poet was a god and sprung from gods. In these notes the editor is equally good, whether he is bringing forward new ma­ter­ial, or expressing an opinion, as, e.g., in his comment on ‘immortal Bird’.3 The greatest, earliest, and perhaps most perfect pleasure open to a reader of Keats lies probably in reading his poetry—­in modestly and egotistically submitting to his attitude and melody, just as we submit to that warm, 2  Keats’s finished version of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ substitutes ‘magic’ for ‘the wide’; ‘perilous’ for ‘keelless’. The finished version of ‘Hyperion’, I.198–200 is: ‘Amaz’d and full of fear; like anxious men / Who on wide plains gather in panting troops, / When earthquakes jar their battlements and towers’. 3  De Sélincourt points out that ‘the poet is not really thinking of the permanence of the songbird’s life, but rather of his song’.

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­ indless half hour in a rainy cold April day, when the sky is a dim, small w bowl that has been emptied of cream, and suddenly, for the first time in the year, the cuckoo calls among the damson trees. When we read him first it is thus that we enjoyed him, and however widely read we may be, we are no more conscious of the debts to Ovid and Spenser and Chatterton, and others, than Keats was in the glow of composition; and that glow some of us have come near to reproducing when we read ‘Isabella’ first. But when we become lecturers or reviewers and weary analytic men we enjoy him most often with another pleasure. This phrase recalls The Faerie Queene, that the Ovid of George Sandys, and this, again, the Anatomy or Paradise Lost.4 It is a great and excellent pleasure, and one of which we ­cannot tire; and it is clear that Mr de Sélincourt has drunken deeply of it. He  happens, also, to be a lecturer in English literature at Oxford, and an ­analytic man; above all, he has been struck by one of the deepest beauties of all literature—­viz., its continuity—­and has been moved to illustrate it by his edition of a poet who, without being a scholar or a learned man, lived more passionately in the company of the dead than any other man ever did. So that in this book we see the poets all as one company, which ‘knit with the graces and the hours in dance, leads on the eternal spring’.5 [. . .] DC: 3 May. 

The Poems of Ernest Dowson, with a memoir by Arthur Symons Ernest Dowson’s collected poems, viz., Verses, Decorations, and The Pierrot of the Minute, are introduced by Mr Arthur Symons, their proper editor. The introduction is perfect; and the poems need it. In the nineties they would have needed no introduction, for Dowson belonged to a considerable caste of poets with a considerable caste of readers, beyond which he could hardly then have reached. But misfortune has overtaken them all; they are dead, or their incomes are regular, or they are restoring their hair, and the man who read Dowson’s poems when they first appeared, and now at length opens 4  George Sandys (1578–1644) translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1632); for Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, see [177]. 5 Milton, Paradise Lost (IV.266–8): ‘universal Pan, / Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance, / Led on th’eternal Spring’.

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them again, will certainly be reminded that the years are full and dying, and will repeat Dowson’s verses on old age:— When I am old,   And sadly steal apart, Into the dark and cold,   Friend of my heart! Remember if you can, Not him who lingers, but that other man, Who loved and sang, and had a beating heart,—   When I am old!1

Dowson was born in 1867. He had, says Mr Symons, ‘a somewhat irregular education, chiefly out of England’, and at Queen’s College, Oxford, which he left in 1887 without a degree. Then he lived much in London, much in France. Mr Symons describes him: with ‘a look and manner of pathetic charm, a sort of Keats-­like face, the face of a demoralised Keats’; with exquisite sensibility, but ‘no outlook’ and not ‘the escape of intellect’; never robust, always reckless; consumption and a craving for drink lying in wait for him; living at one time at a house in an old East-­end dock which belonged to him; giving a supper at a cabman’s shelter; dying all the time, and dead at last in 1900. His verses are the perfect flower of that life, will be the conclusion of ­readers who are moralists; and they will repeat, with pitiful emphasis upon its languid, lengthy, slow, but restless, admirable rhythm, the poet’s ‘Vesperal’:— Strange grows the river on the sunless evenings! The river comforts me, grown spectral, vague and dumb: Long was the day; at last the consoling shadows come; Sufficient for the day are the day’s evil things! Labour and longing and despair the long day brings; Patient till evening men watch the sun go west; Deferred, expected night at last brings sleep and rest: Sufficient for the day are the day’s evil things! At last the tranquil Angelus of evening rings Night’s curtain down for comfort and oblivion Of all the vanities observèd by the sun: Sufficient for the day are the day’s evil things!

1  From ‘In Tempore Senectutis’.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 So, some time, when the last of all our evenings Crowneth memorially the last of all our days, Not loth to take his poppies man goes down and says, ‘Sufficient for the day were the day’s evil things!’2

They will talk of the connection between excess and a feeble frame, and liver, delirium, and despair; and it is likely they will end with a lament and a question as to what Dowson might have done had he been moderate, in spite of the testimony of the thousands of moderate persons who black our boots and write our reviews; he might have become an Imperialist, a picturesque grandfather, a discoverer of something less nourishing than Grape Nuts. Yet is it not clear that Dowson was simply the embodied groan of one brief stage of humanity’s long probation on the wheel of Time? No elderly person, it is true, who had met him and known his life, would have lacked the courage to try to lure him into a nice, quiet office or a home for inebriates; but perhaps not so many would have refused to be silent when they heard the voice of the poet singing his ‘Sapientia Lunae’:— The wisdom of the world said unto me:   ‘Go forth and run, the race is to the brave; Perchance some honour tarrieth for thee!’   ‘As tarrieth,’ I said, ‘for sure, the grave.’   For I had pondered on a rune of roses,   Which to her votaries the moon discloses . . . Then said my voices: ‘Wherefore strive or run,   On dusty highways ever, a vain race? The long night cometh, starless, void of sun,   What light shall serve thee like her golden face?’   For I had pondered on a rune of roses,   And knew some secrets which the moon discloses. ‘Yea,’ said I, for her eyes are pure and sweet   As lilies, and the fragrance of her hair Is many laurels; and it is not meet   To run for shadows when the prize is here;’   And I went reading in that rune of roses   Which to her votaries the moon discloses.

For, small and short and ill-­managed as were his experiences, it was yet given to this man to find melodious and moving words for some of the oldest, 2  The ‘tranquil’ mood of ‘Vesperal’ may have influenced ET’s poem ‘Good-night’, which also consists of four quatrains and (mostly) twelve-syllable lines (ACP, 66).

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deepest miseries of men; and it might be worth while for some wise man to question whether the life which enabled him to write as he did was not a great and worthy, at least a necessary, life. He who should say that Dowson made nothing new would be no lover of verse. To us he seems to have rediscovered regret and all the emotions which the inaccessible and irrecoverable arouse, since he expressed them with a beauty and simplicity which no contemporary equalled. Truly he seems to be discovering these things for the first time when he writes of this short life and how it rebukes long ex­pect­ ations; of April foreseeing, amidst her joys, ‘The burden of the days that are to be’; of the lunatic whose ‘dreams divine’— Lift his long, laughing reveries like enchanted wine, And make his melancholy germane to the stars;3

of love dreaming of when love is dead; of pleasure sicklied over by passion; of melancholy ‘tired Of everything that ever I desired’;4 of vain resolves— Yea! as it hath been, it shall ever be,   Most passionless, pure eyes!

of dreams— Dream thou has dreamt all this, when thou awake, Yet still be sorrowful, for a dream’s sake;

of impenitence if only he may hear again ‘the viols in her voice’.5 The passion in his swaying, his tortured or his simple rhythms, and in his clear, pure, and simple diction is such that although hundreds have said the things he says, none but the great have said them in a way which can appeal nearly so much to men of his own day. Deep within the dark background of them all is the comic, terrible cry of the superfluous man.6 Those of his own day should make much of him, because his language, his images, his melody, his mood, are those of no other day. And perhaps, in a little while, of all their self-­pity, self-­love, self-­hate, of that regret and hunger, for they know not what, which are their only emotions that touched the sublime, their misery that will be seen in its depth and decorativeness; of these perhaps nothing will be remembered, except as they are expressed, with the loudness of a sigh 3  Quotations from ‘My Lady April’ and ‘To One in Bedlam’. 4  From ‘Spleen’. ET’s evident sense of affinity with Dowson anticipates the relation between ‘melancholy’ and ‘desire’ in his poems ‘The Other’ and ‘Melancholy’ (ACP, 40, 85). 5  Quotations from ‘Vain Resolves’, The Pierrot of the Minute, ‘Impenitentia Ultima’. 6 In The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans (1913) Thomas again implicitly identifies with the protagonist of Ivan Turgenev’s story ‘The Diary of a Superfluous Man’ (1850) (ETPW I, 39).

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and the length only of a caress, in these poems by the most concentrated of them all, who already seems but an unbodied melancholy. DC: 26 May 

Robert Bridges, Demeter: A Mask The first excellence of Mr Bridges’ mask of Demeter and Persephone, and the most to be remembered, lies in the peculiarities of his version of the myth. For he takes away nothing from its simplicity and beauty as everyone knows it, while the cunning of his invention and the dignity of the result seem to us to make his the version which, more than any other, can be enjoyed today. He may, indeed, be said to succeed, not entirely, but still nobly, not only in expressing the myth in such a way as to tell us what it probably meant to a Greek, but in adding to it—­as martins’ nests add to some rich architrave—­a suggestion of the thoughts and emotions which have grown up around it in time. If one could suppose that the old gods, in Hades now, were to summon up their past sorrows by re-­enacting the rape of Persephone, thus perhaps it would be played, or, if not, it could be no less worthily played. For not in vain have Christ and St Francis died since Persephone was lost. [. . .] If there is anything to be blamed, it is that the purely learned knowledge of Persephone and the modern emotional estimate of her seem to have been mingled in Mr Bridges’ mind rather by a powerful intellectual effort than by a perfect ecstatic perception of their consistency. There are passages in which the two are blended well, as in Persephone’s soliloquy among the flowers; but there are passages at the end of the third act which seem to us to be too heavily burdened with reason. The verse throughout is extraordinarily interesting, and there is much that is worthy to rank with the best of modern verse, both in its novelty and in its excellence. The blank verse, e.g., is as current and simple as Fletcher’s,1 while a careful reader sees that it is as self-­conscious as Tennyson’s and far more varied. It is spoiled only by a use of accents which shows how little Mr Bridges is aware of the extent to which readers have profited by the precepts and examples of the poets of today. He will not trust us with his sense; and 1  John Fletcher (1579–1625): playwright and author of masques.

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we could point to places where his accents really tend to spoil the rhythm which a careful reader would give to his lines. The lyrics contain many experiments, but, clever as they are, and interesting and often enjoyable, we think that their imperfection is clearly shown by the fact that all of his best things are to be found elsewhere; they have troubled him so much that he has been unable to get into them his characteristic thought and observation; and their style not only always inferior to, but sometimes different from, the style of the verse which is proper to his mind. [. . .] A: 10 June *** Mr Robert Bridges [. . .] knows just why each line of his poetry is what it is, and also what effect it will have upon the reader for whom it is designed. He is, to perfection, the self-­conscious scholar. In one point only, in the not­able work before us, does he cease to be self-­conscious, and it is just where he should be most so. In the fervour of difficult versification in classical measures, he has forgotten that his fervour can only repeat itself in the reader by means which no scholar or poet has yet discovered. Otherwise he would not have written certain verses and called them alcaics. Of his verses in other classical measures we can only say that what enjoyment we have got from them has been purely critical, and that this interfered unpleasantly with the rest of the work. [. . .] DC: 4 July 

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Heretics When people think well of Mr Chesterton, they say that he sees the beauty of common things; when they think ill of him, they say that he is advertisement manager to the ugly and the absurd. His admirers call him great and strong; his enemies call him brutal and big. And all this is because he has said not only that a lamp-­post is a wonderful thing, but that it is more wonderful than a tree, and because he has said it in a manner that reminds some of the angels, others of a debating society. Yet we should not be surprised, if his portrait were not over-­familiar, to hear that he was four feet high and wore a sea-­green butterfly bow and in his buttonhole the faded rose of the tired hedonists.

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For if we can only get away from Mr Chesterton’s irrelevant fame and the fact that he is the soul of a great newspaper,1 we see that he is but the latest of the decadents, so wearied of choice confectionery and art that he must fall back upon long chains of liquorice at a halfpenny and the charms of Battersea Park Road, because these things at least have not been embittered by aesthetic verbosity. He is not one of the strong men who see and evoke the divinity in hackneyed things, but one of the frail who can be moved by nothing but novelty. That he is not strong is obvious at once, since he has decried nearly every strong man of our day, and apparently because out of their strength they have created things, whilst all his violent yearnings have brought nothing forth. This is pathetic, and not at all absurd. Many of us know that where there is nothing there is God,2 and where there is anything there is the heart of man. We know that there is something divine in the six-­ foot roundabout on a cart that slowly makes giddy a solitary poor child for a farthing in a London street. Mr Chesterton, however, says so until his voice rises to a roar—­a roar which he has probably adopted because men were deaf to his excellent verse;3 he repeats it, he insists, but never can he make us feel that it is so. He is then, not an artist, but a wonderful and pitiful cheap Jack who turns brass watches into gold by rhetoric and not by alchemy. He talks about the truth; he is never the truth itself. Where the poet writes: For the good are always the merry, Save by an evil chance, And the merry love the fiddle And the merry love to dance:4

Mr Chesterton can only say: ‘Do you not, rogues, liars, fools, see that this is so and could not be otherwise?’ and then attacks this poet because perhaps he does not pull crackers at Christmas. He is a pale schoolman in a high lonely tower, spinning truths about joy which perplex the joyful and make the miserable yet more sad. He is aware, by some purely intellectual process, that there is beauty in many ignored things; he sees the necessity for joy and ecstasy; he sees an ideal perfection, while he also sees imperfections everywhere. 1  From 1902, Chesterton had written a weekly opinion-column for the Daily News, to which he also contributed many other articles. 2  ‘Where there is Nothing, there is God’: title of short story in W. B. Yeats’s The Secret Rose (1897), of which ET reviewed a partial reprint [133]. Yeats also wrote a play, Where There is Nothing (1902), admired by ET: see [339n.]. In ET’s poem ‘The Mountain Chapel’, the wind says: ‘Till there is nothing I shall be’ (ACP, 44). 3  For ET on Chesterton’s The Wild Knight and Other Poems, see [78n.]; for his review of The Ballad of the White Horse, see [504]. 4  Stanza from Yeats’s ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’.

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But he has never seen for himself the beauty of these things, or he cannot communicate his vision. He has not joy or ecstasy, and he is plaintive at our lack of it. He does not see fairies; he merely knows that they must exist. He  sits disconsolate among believers in one or another imperfect thing, believing only in himself. He is calling out from the housetops to happier uncontemplative men, to come out and be sad, like himself, in thinking of supreme happiness. Looking up and down time and space, he finds nothing to please him truly, except the ghost of a Chestertonian man flitting here and there; in all his pages, there is no proof that he likes anything but his dreams. He praises an abstract Chestertonian man of whom he is hopelessly and ­continually in pursuit. That everything he recommends is right, we indeed believe; but he cries in the wilderness, and with no human voice, no trace of  suffering or experience at all, but only of an anchorite’s imagining. His in­genu­ity develops now into childishness, often into archangelic sense, never into humanity; except in some of his ephemeral work—­e.g. his splendid defamation of the Yellow Press—­we seem to be listening to the words of a gramo­phone that is tortured by the knowledge that it is not a man and yet tries to persuade us that it is a man.5 [. . .] A: 24 June 

The Rhymers’ Lexicon, compiled and edited by Andrew Loring;1 Arthur Maquarie, The Dance of Olives; etc. We have never seen a book that gave so stunning a notion of the barbaric richness of our language as Mr Loring’s Rhymers’ Lexicon. Every page surprises even readers of Spenser and Shelley and Keats; readers of Milton will be afflicted with nausea, when they come to beachy, beechy, bleachy, breachy, peachy, queachy, reechy, squeechy—­beady, deedy, encyclopedy, greedy, heedy, needy, predy, reedy, etc.—fantoccini, genie, greeny, Hippocrene, Selene, sheeny, spleeny, teeny, tweeny (Mr Loring’s italics), visne—­jelly, 5  ET calls Alarms and Discursions, a later collection of prose-pieces by Chesterton, ‘a brilliant harlequinade of words and ideas, we are never sure which’ (DC: 23 November 1910). 1  In another review ET notes that ‘To write verses will shortly be as easy as to pray in Tibet or to think Imperially’; and that ‘the omission of “khaki” and “harkee” as rhymes to “darky” and “oligarchy” is odd in a man who gives cliffy, jiffy, sniffy, spiffy, and squiffy in a glorious row’ (DC: 19 June).

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r­ akehelly, shelly, smelly, vermicelli, etc. In size and arrangement it is admirable; it might have been larger still, without being any better. Words (says Mr Loring) are inserted as often as there are ways of pronouncing them. Each pronunciation is a new word to the poet. There is authority, for instance, for four pronunciations of the word ‘vase’. It is therefore to be found as a rhyme for ‘ace’, for ‘praise’, for ‘Shiraz’, and for ‘pause’. Even then the editor has lagged behind the poet, for this protean monosyllable has been rhymed by the present Poet Laureate2 with ‘Mars’.

There is something pathetic as well as proud about that confession. If he is damned, he will be damned with worse men than himself, he seems to say. To illustrate his tremendous devotion to his amusement, we would point out that he has given four hundred such words as ‘tyrannous’, as rhymes for ‘us’; three hundred words in ‘er’—‘adventurer’—and over a hundred comparatives—‘lovelier’—as rhymes for ‘her’; and many present participles in ‘ing’, such as ‘carrying’, as rhymes for ‘bring’.

And his object is to relieve the poet of ‘a purely mechanical labour’, and to set him free ‘to dwell on the poetic thought’. Could he, we wonder, had he been in time, have helped Mr Maquarie, the author of this sonnet? To write a sonnet is like smoking twist:   Though wondrous easy, not all flesh succeed.   So if the raptured reader have a greed For fumy fame, first should he chain his wrist Until he feel his chilly forehead kist   By the inspiring muse [. . .]

We think not. Mr Loring can have no notion of the ease with which rhymes come; and in the case of Mr Maquarie, the lexicon could only have brought exceeding perplexity, and perhaps have been to him as good as a conscience, and more silencing, by reminding him that ‘twist’ rhymes with ‘cist’ and ‘xyst’ and three hundred ‘ists’, as e.g., ‘deuterogamist’. Nevertheless, Mr Maquarie has a vein, as in ‘Of taking things easy,’ which ends thus: Give me Petrarca and a pot of tea, And carry thou thy honourable scars,

2  The much-derided Alfred Austin (1835–1913), Poet Laureate 1896–1913.

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which might have profited by a visit to the lexicon of words without their souls. But we are not sure that it can act instead of a conscience. [. . .] A: 1 July 

William Butler Yeats, Stories of Red Hanrahan In Mr Yeats’ Secret Rose1 there were several stories of Hanrahan, the passionate and unlucky hedge schoolmaster. There were ‘The Book of the Great Dhoul and Hanrahan’; ‘The Twisting of the Rope’; ‘Kathleen the Daughter of Hoolihan and Hanrahan’; ‘The Curse’, ‘The Vision’, and ‘The Death’ of Hanrahan. The stories were full of strangeness involved in simplicity, and of all the characteristic excellences of Mr Yeats’ earlier work, not without some of that rhetoric and descriptiveness which he has now triumphantly done with. The pleasant volume before us contains all of these stories, save ‘The Book of the Great Dhoul’, which is replaced by an introductory story about Hanrahan and a game of cards and a vision of ‘Echtge, daughter of the Silver Hand’; and it is prefaced thus: ‘A friend has helped me to remake these stories nearer to the mind of the country places where Hanrahan and his like wandered and are remembered.’ Take, for example, one of the best of the tales, containing the poem: The poet, Owen Hanrahan, under a bush of may Calls down a curse on his own head because it withers grey . . .

It used to be called ‘The Curse of Hanrahan the Red’; now it is ‘Red Hanrahan’s Curse’. ‘One morning in spring’, it used to begin; now it begins with ‘One fine May morning’.2 Even so Plato changed the opening of his dialogue, but not in public. Our own feeling about the changes that follow, changes of earlier work, is that they are unprincipled and founded upon a misconception of the nature of perfection; so that one may say that one version is not better than the other, but different, in mood, aim, and result; the later version in this case being admirably chaste, but leading us to fear that the writer’s final view of perfection may be a blank. In the old version, the girl Nora was lying with her face in long grass; now she sits with her face in her hands under a thorn; and now she reminds Hanrahan of Margaret ‘Gillane’ not ‘Gillen’, ‘Maeve’ Connelan, not 1  Published in 1897.    2  ET begins a poem: ‘Early one morning in May I set out’ (ACP, 126).

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‘Maurya’. Almost every sentence is changed, often simplified, but seldom without making us feel that the new form is the work of another man, who should not have been allowed to touch the old. The book is chiefly valuable because it gathers the stories of Red Hanrahan together, and because it shows that perfection is of many kinds, and that there is no reason why a man should not write the same story in a hundred ways, all good, if he has leisure. A: 22 July

The Poetry of Today: A Crowd of Pleasant Singers But No Heaven-­Sent Choir If we were to regard the loud and general voice of readers, critics, booksellers, lovers of poetry, and lovers of what is approved, plain men and writers of letters to the papers, it would be hard not to be persuaded that the poetry of today is bad; that even were it good, it would not be popular, because, we are told, people do not care for poetry; and that, very likely, modern life makes impossible the production and enjoyment of poetry. And it is, I believe, quite true, that among poets of today—­not, of course, including Mr Swinburne—­Mr Kipling alone has a vogue at all comparable to that of the poets of the last generation, whom most people think great and established. Of Mr Kipling’s success some explanation is easily given. He has undoubted vigour, and the will to live and to persuade; his reputation in prose is to his advantage; he has new, or at least novel, material, and the appeal of his ­subjects would be strong, even if it were not strengthened by his obvious patriotism and by rhythms that are as hard to put by as barrel organ tunes. No one else has, I think, such a combination of advantages likely to be effective among great numbers of men. What I have called the will to live and to persuade is remarkably rare in poets of today. By the phrase, I do not mean the possession of a programme which is never forgotten; but a clear, dominating aim, founded upon strong principles, or consistent emotions, or a mature view of life, and supported by a desire, never perhaps quite conscious, to make an impression upon other minds. The two poets, Mr Watson and Mr Yeats, who have been nearly as effective as Mr Kipling, and one who might have been, Mr Davidson, seem to have this characteristic.

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But is poetry, therefore, bad, and is it unpopular because it is bad? When I look at my two hundred volumes of recent verse, and think of the other two hundred which have been used as spills, etc., I see no reason for thinking so. Every notable age of poetry has been succeeded by one that belongs to more or less cloistered poets, and those usually lyrical. Thus Donne, Carew, and Crashaw succeeded the Elizabethans, representing nothing like the same national stir of thought, and yet living on as surely as their predecessors. Perhaps the poets of today will some day be admitted to have occupied a similar position. They are lyrical, frequently in form, nearly always in attitude. They are cloistered. They make no nest of singing birds, but are scattered up and down a great thicket, singing aloof and seldom heard together. To a contemporary observer they seem to have no great striking characteristics in common. They have little of the hearty confidence of older poets; they are pathetically conscious of their solitude. When the work of a number of them is printed together, there is no such harmony as there is in Elizabethan song books or eighteenth-­century miscellanies. The result of this variety and of the intense individuality of much of their work, is that many of them are followed by small groups of readers of remarkable devotion. They are not so covered with praise and admiration as used to be fashionable. But they are, perhaps, cared for more intimately. It would be easy to mention ten or twenty who have such a following. Some of them are men who have made innovations in style that are likely to be as important as the Spenserian stanza or the couplets of Coleridge and Shelley. Were their readers gathered together, they would make a public, not as large as the public of Tennyson, Browning and Mr Swinburne, but considerable. Not more than one of them, perhaps, is likely to gain a similar pos­ition to that held for fifty years by these men. Yet more than one or two are likely to endure, as Donne and Carew and Crashaw endure, since it cannot be that such intimate and passionate attachment as is given to them will leave no legacy behind. But it is unnecessary to talk of immortality. It is a writer’s business to serve his age nobly. Immortality is a possibility, and not to be calculated: it may even be wisely regarded as an irrelevant accident, and those who have survived their age have not always served it. This view may seem to support the current one, that poetry as poetry is unpopular. But such a statement is unsatisfactory. Looking back at the successes of poetry in the past, I seem to see much servility in the popular approval, and, if not servility, an amazed and not very intelligent bewitchment, not unlike that which explains the popularity of music. The use, in poetry, of language which is not that of every day, must often have overturned the

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judgment of those who never considered the nature of its ef­fect­ive­ness. Thus, sentiments on mourning cards which would be ridiculed in prose, in verse are accepted reverently by persons ‘perplexed in the extreme’.1 Similarly, readers of country newspapers are annually bewitched by unrhythmical and ill-­rhymed groups of words about robins, the poor, plum-­pudding and the birth of Christ. But such persons are becoming sophisticated, and read little verse. For this kind of thing, and also the kind of thing which it parodies, are to be found in prose everywhere. The old-­fashioned prose differed much in subtle ways, but little in apparent ways, from current speech. Modern prose, for better or for worse, is farther removed, and or­din­ary persons venture upon flights in print which never pass their lips in speech. Goldsmith and Fielding never did. So, seeing so-­called ‘poetical’ matters in prose, many good men and women stick to prose, and probably do not see much difference. I am inclined, therefore, to think that, among people who do read verse today, there are fewer than ever who are ignorant of the nature of verse, and I would conclude that prose has taken readers from verse,—readers who are really not needed. If they are to be brought back, it must be by narrative, and narrative is no longer a favourite form. Hopeful men might suppose that the dramatic form, with its wide appeal, and old traditions of popularity, will some day restore the fortunes of poetry. But have they noticed the fate of Mr Newman Howard’s Savonarola in print, or of Mr Davidson’s Queen’s Romance on the stage?2 Have they noticed that, where the drama used to be an excuse for the stage, the stage is now the excuse for the drama? Have they noticed that the tendency of the stage is towards a time when actors will frankly give renderings of the ways of actors, and not of men, as indeed is now commonly, but not frankly done? This is not the place to discuss, i.e., to condemn, the question as to the possibility of great poetry today. We are told that it is an age of science, and unpropitious to poetry. But there is no reason why science, which is always moving, and yet perhaps never nearer a conclusion, because its field is in­fin­ ite, should oppress the poet; nor any reason to suppose that science is now to be considered more important, or at least more hostile, in its relation to poetry 1  Quotation from Othello, V.ii. 2 Reviewing Howard’s Savonarola: A City’s Tragedy, ET had praised his ‘lofty and intellectual’ treatment of the subject, but found that his blank verse ‘usually lacks charm’: ‘Mr Howard writes for those who believe in the literary drama and posterity, not for the stage and oblivion’ (DC: 8 March 1904). Reviewing Howard’s later ‘tragedy’, Constantine the Great, he says of the verse-drama vogue: ‘For better or for worse, a great deal of fine work has been put into plays which have not been played, and though we may admit that the best plays on the stage are the best plays for the study, it is not by any means certain that an emancipated stage will not some day prove the converse to be true’ (DC: 10 December 1906). John Davidson’s A Queen’s Romance (1904) is a version of Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas.

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than it was in the day of Callimachus3 or of Milton, upon whom it had no oppressive effect. Evolution need kill no more poets than phlebotomy4 did. The question as to the possibility of enjoying poetry today is equally unimportant. People are said to be looking in vain for a poet who has absorbed and rejoiced in all modernity. Surely that is nothing more than to say that they are looking for some verses from Mr Chesterton. But, among the many things which I have passed over, there is one which cannot be altogether omitted. The majority has its rights, and they must be respected. And the majority of modern poets deserve a word of recommendation, especially as one cannot be sure that any man one meets in the or­din­ ary ways of life, the man who sells one a hat or a cheese, is not one of them. For they are a most diverse company of men: virtuous, or not; modest, flamboyant; deserving laughter, deserving tears; pilferers, parodists, and men for whom the happy past furnishes no sort of precedent; men deep in classic lore, and men who have never studied anything; writers of epics, plays, romances, lyrics, epitaphs, odes on the coronation of Edward VII;5 men who do not prefix their photographs to their works, and men who ought to imitate them. Sometimes their volumes are called pages from a busy life; they might all have similar titles, since it is evident that their chief quality is haste. The purposes which these serve are many. Their best purpose is to show us for how much the theory of inspiration is responsible, when inspiration is taken to mean a combination of ignorance, carelessness, and effrontery. The Book Monthly, 2: August 

Samuel Butler, Hudibras: Written in the Time of the Late Wars, edited by A. R. Waller (Cambridge University Press)1 The greatest literature survives because it appears to have had, from the first, not only a simplicity which strikes the learned and unlearned alike, but 3  Callimachus (c.305–240 bce): Greek poet of the Alexandrian school. 4  Bloodletting: the medical practice, with ancient Greek roots, of removing blood from a vein. 5  For ET on William Watson’s ‘Ode’, see [26]. 1  Samuel Butler (1612–80) published Hudibras, a mock-heroic satirical narrative poem on the Civil War (written from a Royalist angle), in three parts (1663, 1664, 1678). A[lfred] R[ayney] Waller (1867–1922): scholar and man of letters, who became co-editor of The Cambridge History of English Literature (see [268]). Between 1905 and 1907, ET also reviewed Waller’s editions of Cowley, Prior, and Crashaw.

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also a subtlety, an ambiguity, by means of which, from age to age, it adjusts itself to the needs of new minds. It is always growing, and when we take up an old Beaumont and Fletcher or a Religio Medici we are perhaps not wholly fantastical in thinking that something of the souls of all its dead readers may linger in the book, and give it a richness which there is not in the finest modern work. But there is also an important body of literature which survives as long in a kind of life in death. It may have the simplicity but it has not the subtlety of which we speak. It bears the marks of the very ages at which it was composed, and of no others. Very often such work had its reward at once: it was immensely popular; the author strutted; but as soon as it was born it began to die, and when we look at it we think of it as part of the epitaph of a buried age which we can never quite understand. Among such books are the emblems of Quarles, the poetry of Gower, the characters of Overbury,2 and the greater part of the poetry written between 1630 and 1750 in England—­ Carew’s, for example, and Young’s,3 and, we think, Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, which Mr A. R. Waller has edited with his usual care, and reproduced according to the best texts. To understand this gross and bitter laugh at the godliness of the Puritan, we must be thoroughly well acquainted with the whole history of States and men and manners of the seventeenth century in England; and the more we know of that history, the more we shall admire Butler, since every page of his reflects the public events, the taste, the learning, the fashion of that age and of no other age. But, though perhaps great literature does not wholly reveal itself except to the scholar, yet it is not disdainful of the attentions of the idlest dreamer or the busiest man of the world. Hudibras reveals hardly anything except to the scholar. Here and there are phrases which are still c­ urrent; the whole is a book sealed to most of us today. Butler has the same childlike joy in rhyme as Mr Bernard Shaw has in logic. He seems to think he has discovered it for the first time. He says somewhere that the rhymer makes one line because he has something to say and one for rhyme. It would be harsh to say that of him; and yet, if he had not been fond of rhyme for its own sake, he would never have written Hudibras. Some of his most amusing things were forced out of him, as they were out of 2 Francis Quarles (1592–1644): author of Emblemes, Divine and Moral (1635), Christian homilies illustrated by etchings; for ET on John Gower, see [11]; Overbury’s Characters: Theophrastian sketches attributed to the poet Sir Thomas Overbury (c.1581–1613), and published after his death (by murder). 3  Thomas Carew (1595–1640): author of a powerful elegy for John Donne; Edward Young (1683–1765): chiefly known for The Complaint: or, Night Thoughts (1742–5).

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Byron, by the need of a rhyme. He was like those talkers who reach their greatest height of extravagance one moment and beat it in the next. Perhaps if his book had been half as long, it would have been twice as good. Here and there, at least, are things which suggest that he was on his way to becoming a great humorist, as when, for example, he writes in his First Part of Animals:— Th’ Egyptians worshipp’d Dogs, and for Their faith made fierce and zealous War. Others ador’d a Rat, and some For that Church suffer’d Martyrdom. The Indians fought for the truth Of th’ Elephant, and Monkey’s Tooth: And many to defend that faith Fought it out mordicus to death. But no Beast ever was so slight, For Man, as for his God, to fight. They have more wit, alas! and know Themselves and us better than so. [. . .]

DC: 15 August 

Paul Elmer More, Shelburne Essays: Second Series We were much taken with Mr More’s first volume of Shelburne Essays.1 He used a plain philosophic style with careful ease and fair precision. He wrote on Thoreau, Hawthorne, Carlyle, Tolstoy, Mr Arthur Symons; and showed training, reading, and a grave interest in literature, which were remarkable in what we believed to be a first book. The essays in the second volume are of the same order. He writes of Lafcadio Hearn, Lamb, FitzGerald, Crabbe, Mr Meredith and Mr Kipling, Hawthorne again, and always with the same lofty reasonableness, yet with a monotonous severity and respectability that have in the end the same effect as a nasal unctuousness in the voice—­that is, laughter. If the whitened statue of Cobden,2 which looks seriously upon the 1  See review [121] and Introduction [xlviii]. ET’s re-think here lays down his subsequent attitude to More. Reviewing the fourth series of Shelburne Essays, he respects More’s ‘soundness and breadth’, but not his ‘temperate decorum’ (DC: 3 July 1907). 2  Richard Cobden (1804–65): Manchester manufacturer and radical Liberal MP, who, in the 1840s, led the successful struggle for repeal of the Corn Laws.

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Hampstead trams, were to speak, even thus would he comment upon books and life, after so many days and nights of elevated and solitary immobility. Mr More would not deny this; for in his title page he has put some words from The Republic which insist that a man must not be considered in preference to the truth. Also, in his essay on Mr Meredith, he has pointed out with disgust, which is as near animation as dignity would allow, that Stevenson and Mr William Watson and others have expressed diverse views of the ­novelist, without giving ‘a rational explanation of their opinions’; and has asked ‘in amazement’ whether this ‘irresponsible impressionism’ is to oust the judgment from criticism. Many other passages in Mr More’s two volumes would lead us to attribute this attitude to a belief in Matthew Arnold and the dignity of criticism, as much as to a regard for the truth. Arguing in an abstract way, we should not care to urge that ‘irresponsible impressionism’ is to supersede reasonable judgments; but we think that reasonable judgments have caused more waste of paper and more of that tedium which is sapping the vitality of the old races, than all the irresponsible impressionism. Reasonable judgments are so often related to obesity of mind, to unconscious hypocrisy and a retarding respect for authority, whether conventional or not, that we are disposed to pass them over eagerly in search of the voice of a human being. We are weary of hearing a man saying, without a smile or even a vigorous frown, that ‘Ibsen has violated the law of tragedy by descending to trivialities and by using prosaic language’; that Macbeth ‘purges the passions’; that ours is a ‘prosaic civilisation’. But leaving these little matters, it is useful to see to what discoveries Mr More’s judgment leads him in the study of Mr Meredith.3 He reminds us that ‘an eminent critic’ has said that the novelist cannot tell a story, has distorted language ‘in order to surcharge it with thought and sensation’. But let that pass. Then he compares Henry Esmond4 (which, like Pater, he calls ‘the most perfect specimen among English novels’, etc.) with The Egoist, and concludes that ‘In any true sense of the word there is as much depth of reflection’ in the old book as in the new—­a remark which is unsupported. Of Mr Meredith’s style he says: there is after all a note of sincerity in it, something so naturally artificial, if the paradox may be pardoned, that we are prone to overlook its extravagances, and can even appreciate its fascination for certain minds. It may be pretty well 3  For George Meredith, see Appendix [707]. 4  The History of Henry Esmond (1852): novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, as is Pendennis (1848–50).

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characterised in his own words as ‘the puffing of a giant; a strong wind rather than speech’.

His authority, the ground for his reasonable judgment against Mr Meredith, is a careful study of two books, Henry Esmond and Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano.5 It follows, then, that he finds Mr Meredith ‘uncomfortable’, and full of ‘dreary affectation’, and guilty of showing ‘unusual genius in a wrong direction’. The problem in Richard Feverel is to him ‘a fairly disagreeable one’: the book ‘remains perfectly decent throughout’, he remarks with approval. Later, he goes to the trouble of quoting, in order to show that the novelist has observed the movements of the eyelids in women; and, instead of admitting the observation, he is disturbed, probably because it is not in the Psalms, laughs and passes on, leaving us pleased by this fall into half-­hearted impressionism. In the end he takes leave of the ‘perilous subject’ of Clara Middleton and Diana, having given us something to ponder on, in the remark that ‘the infinite variety of human activity is unrolled before us’ in Pendennis and Tom Jones. All this seems to us, whether it is reasonable judgment or not, to be really timid impressionism. Mr More has received some impressions from Mr Meredith’s work. It is not like Penn or Washington Irving6 or Confucius. Therefore, he has run to his old books and set them to the ungracious labour of abusing the new. Our own feeling is that a reasonable critic would have refused to say a word on one so antipathetic. It is a truism that a critic, as distinguished from a reviewer, should praise. The truth seems to us to be that he should be enthusiastic—­should see a book, as a man who is not a critic sees a landscape or a character—­ should, in short, be inspired by it. Arnold was, in a measure, inspired in his ‘Maurice de Guérin’, which is good; but not in his ‘Shelley’, which is indifferent. Pater was inspired in his ‘Aesthetic School’,7 which is good; Stevenson was not, in his ‘Thoreau’, which is indifferent. But Mr More does not see that the pure intelligence can never exhaust a subject or produce a perfect impression, while the enthusiasm, of which we have spoken, means to us a power which, perhaps wilfully, but divinely too, makes one aspect of a

5  Il Libro del Cortegiano/The Book of the Courtier, by Count Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529), was published in 1528. 6  William Penn (1644–1718): English Quaker who oversaw the establishment of Pennsylvania as a refuge for Quakers and other Christian minorities; author of religious and political works. Washington Irving (1783–1859): American writer, man of letters and diplomat, best known for the short stories ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. 7  Walter Pater’s influential essay, ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ (Pre-Raphaelite poetry), was published in 1868.

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thing entirely its own. The difference is as the difference between a man going about with a lantern in a dark wood, and a man sitting afar off and seeing it in the glimpses of the moon. In Mr More, this fatal ignorance of the true value of impressionism is everywhere illustrated. Would he, otherwise, have wished that Lamb could more often have ‘laid aside his pose’ and have found confidence ‘to lose his wit in the tragic emotions that must have waked with him by day and slept with him at night’? We think not, and in his strange willingness to record in print his laboriously but incompletely considered antipathies, we see a grave fault. In criticism it is so grave as often to refuse admittance to any of the virtues or the graces. Anger is bad enough, but at least it is a passion; contempt is worse, but at least it may be allied to irony; but reasonable judgment is barren, like the critical exercises of schoolboys and professors. For it is in reading such criticism that we see the grain of truth in the vulgar remark that many ­critics have less knowledge than the men criticised. It is, then, the duty of a critic to be open, passionately open, to impressions, to have a personality, just as it is his duty to detect the same ­openness, the same personality in writers of books. When Mr More not only fails very often to have the rich and joyous perceptions of an enthusiast, to have a personality, but fails also to detect the personality in his author, he seems to us condemned. He sees that Mr Meredith is extraordinary, and he merely complains. Our critic is thus one of the immense number of men who do not know what they like, or if they like a thing cannot like it heartily, and go about the world trying to be interested. He likes Hawthorne and Lafcadio Hearn; he can write of them like an educated man; but he has so wasted his abilities in pondering his dislikes that he is very nearly dull. The result is that he—­a man of many remarkable and rare abilities—­has become little more than a ‘cultured’ talker about books to persons who like a ‘cultured’ man. Such readers will find much to enjoy in his essays. They are full of educated, shrewd comment, gracefully expressed, on interesting subjects. In ‘Lafcadio Hearn’ he shows a knowledge of East and West so great, that we reflect sadly that, had it been a little less professorial, it might have pleased lovers of Hearn by other means than mere critical explanation, i.e., by original com­pos­ition.8 Then his essays on ‘Delphi and Greek 8  Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904): Irish author and translator, who (from 1890) lived in Japan and wrote about it. ET reviewed several editions of Hearn’s work; and his short book (for a biographical series), Lafcadio Hearn (London: Constable, 1912), values his achievement as a cultural go-between: ‘Personality of the vivid militant kind is just now worshipped, and the silver grey is hidden from us. . . . To impute observation to his mature work is an insult; he had become the thing observed’ (90–1).

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Literature’ and ‘Nemesis, or the Divine Envy’ are grave and learned enough to accuse us fairly of violating our own laws of good criticism, by refusing to see the full and peculiar value of Mr More’s work. But then we are only reviewing. A: 19 August

The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems, edited by Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford University Press)1 Mr Thomas Hutchinson, the editor of the text, and Mr C. D. Locock, who has supplied many new readings and some valuable fragments from the Shelley MSS in the Bodleian, are to be thanked for giving us an edition of Shelley so near to perfection as this. [. . .] The only blemish, we think, is the minute footnotes which often remind us importunately of the labours of Shelley’s editors. Such footnotes are painful enough in school books, tolerable in an edition of Cowley’s Davideis, pleasant only in The Anatomy of Melancholy.2 In Shelley’s poetry, they are especially unpleasant. For much harm may be done to the poet, and to the youthful lover whom we will suppose to be reading it, if he reads— We two will rise, and sit, and walk together, Under the roof of blue Ionian weather, And wander in the meadows, or ascend The mossy mountains, where the blue heavens bend With lightest winds, to touch their paramour; Or linger, where the pebble-­paven shore . . .3

and suddenly finds, before he turns over the page, and separated by no greater space than a line of the text, this footnote:—

1  Seemingly a reprint of the edition, published in 1905 but reviewed by ET in December 1904: see [108]. ET would recycle/ adapt the fourth paragraph of this review in Chapter VII of SC (112; EFPW II, 286), and part of it in FIP: see note 7. 2  Davideis: unfinished biblical epic, A Sacred Poem of the Troubles of David (1656), by Abraham Cowley: see [167]; for ET on Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, see [177]. 3 Shelley, Epipsychidion (1821), 541–6.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 501 many twining] many twining ed. prin. 1821. 504 winter-­woof] inter-­woof Rossetti cj.

We need Shelley’s pages undefiled; we resent a page like that just mentioned, as we should resent a lily with a page from Hooker’s Botany4 tied to its stem or a microscope left in its chalice. Just as oaks and roses do not abound entirely to make a botanist’s holiday, but partly for birds to nest in, for schoolboys to climb in, and for young men and maidens to make garlands of; so Shelley’s poetry is by no means entirely designed to provide amusement and advancement for critics, grammarians, lexicographers, professors of poetry, reviewers, collectors, spiders, etc. Keats may be a greater poet, Wordsworth and Byron may be more effectual. Matthew Arnold has said as much, and there are many who believe in the efficacy of repeating it, although it is not clear whether the critic condemned Shelley for any better reason than that he did not wear side-­whiskers; but, as the satirist says, only so long as poets are under the direction of the Muses do they speak the truth.5 Shelley is an immortal sentiment. Men may forget to repeat his verses; they can never be as if Shelley had never been. He is present wherever youth and love and rapture are. He is a part of all high-­spirited and pure audacity of the intellect and imagination, of all clean-­handed rebellion, of all infinite endeavour and hope. The remembered splendour of his face is more to us than the Houses of Parliament; the story of his life is mightier to move us than the eloquence of Bright or the energy of Faraday; one strophe of the ‘Ode to Naples’ is more nourishing than Mr Carnegie’s gold.6 How many times has Shelley (and the violets of Devon or the olives of Italy) been the half of a great passion?7 To how many does he not seem, during a great and lovely tract of life, to have been the half of spring and summer days, of autumn when it lays one finger on the land and the bryony leaf is suddenly burnt purple in the hedge; of night and dawn and noon; of youth enjoying these things? To such it comes as the final defeat, when Shelley is 4 (Sir) Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911): celebrated botanist, author of Handbook of the British Flora (1858) and The Student’s Flora of the British Islands (1870). 5  For Arnold’s view of Shelley, see [110]; ‘satirist’: ET may allude to Thomas Cooke (1703–56), author of The Battle of the Poets and translator of Hesiod (fl. 700 bce), including Hesiod’s Theogony, in which the Muses declare: ‘’Tis ours to speak the truth in language plain, / Or give the face of truth to what we feign’. 6 John Bright (1811–89): Liberal politician, associate of Richard Cobden (see [139n.]), renowned for his oratory; Michael Faraday (1791–1867): pioneer in field of electromagnetism; Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919): Scottish-American magnate and philanthropist. 7  ET used or adapted parts of this and the next paragraph in FIP (78): see [417–18].

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left dusty on the shelf; and the defection of a poet from the tribe of Shelley is the great apostasy of the nineteenth century. They remember the passage in Queen Mab, beginning:— Hath Nature’s soul, That formed this world so beautiful, that spread Earth’s lap with plenty, and life’s smallest chord Strung to unchanging unison, that gave The happy birds their dwelling in the grove, That yielded to the wanderers of the deep The lovely silence of the unfathomed main, And filled the meanest worm that crawls in dust With spirit, thought, and love . . .8 [. . .]

And even if we grant that it is true, and sometimes true it is, that Shelley fades, as the love of watching all the dawn will fade and give way to a liking for—­let us name no names—­and sunsets seen from a drawing-­room; yet youth remains, if youths must pass, and it is surely much to be said for a poet that, at the moment when youth is most exultant, his poetry is thumbed night and day; that a page of his book is opened at random, as Virgil used to be opened, for a word big with fate; that his words come to the lips, seeming as suitable to light and darkness as Cassiopeia’s crown, or as the sun when it works exquisitely in precious cloud and radiance on the hills; that when he sings:— We lived a day as we were wont to live,   But Nature had a robe of glory on, And the bright air o’er every shape did weave   Intenser hues, so that the herbless stone,   The leafless bough among the leaves alone, Had being clearer than its own could be . . .9

then the heart leaps up as at the presence of more than words; that when he sings— Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood By all, but which the wise, and great, and good Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel . . .10

8  Queen Mab (1813), IV.89–97.    9  The Revolt of Islam (1818), III.iii. 10  Mont Blanc’, 80–3.

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then all misfortune and contumely, and even error, seem endurable while that song echoes in the brain, and the continued enjoyment of it is better in anticipation than ‘a dormitory amongst the ashes of kings’.11 [. . .] Because spring is still glorious, as glorious to us as it used to be to a less subtle and less needy world, Shelley is great. So youth says, and will not be denied. DC: 29 August 

Harrold Johnson, Ellan Vannin: Ballads and Verses of the Isle of Man; Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, The Nets of Love; etc. Men and women talk much today about a return to Nature; and they mean, very often, a flight from the city to the fields. There everything will be more simple, more just, and beautiful, they think; there they will easily be able to make terms with life. John Burroughs, in his last book, claimed to have proved it.1 As if, in an age that is not at all simple, it were possible, even were it good, to be simple, except in clothing and food! Society makes character; solitude makes soul; and it is just possible that life in the country may give a wise man the opportunity for that combination of character and soul which a good man possesses. But a country life is neither more easy nor more simple than a city life. If it were, the world would now be ruled by the brewers, bankers, and journalists who are taking the place of hops in Kent. And just as, in thinking about life, we cry out for a return to Nature and her beneficent simplicity, so we are apt to cry out for a return to simplicity in literature. Men ask us to look at the Odyssey, and see how large and simple, how moving even, today it is. A critic has lately spoken of Tom Jones and Pendennis as unrolling ‘the infinite variety of human nature’ before us, and

11  It was reported of Oliver Cromwell that he desired, not a material memorial, but ‘a more glorious monument in the hearts of good men’: ‘a far greater honour to his memory, than a dormitory amongst the ashes of kings’. 1  For ET’s review of John Burroughs, Literary Values and Other Papers, see [61]. Burroughs states, for instance: ‘It is always in order to urge a return to the simple and serious, a return to nature, to works that have the wholesome and sustaining qualities of natural products,—grain, fruits, nuts, air, water’ (Burroughs, Literary Values [Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1902], 209).

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has compared Mr Meredith most unfavourably with them.2 They are simpler, and they do not disturb. Nothing could be more false than this attitude. If it were also strong, it might endanger much that is most characteristic of our age. If a reply were necessary, we need but point out how much less simple the Argonautica and the Aeneid are than the Iliad; how much less simple the Divine Comedy than its predecessors, and Paradise Lost than them all. The Henriade is simple, but it is not therefore great.3 Here, before us, are many views which would seem to have been inspired by a cunning search for simplicity. These men are trying to write as if there were no such thing as a Tube, Grape Nuts, love of Nature, a Fabian Society, a Bill for the reform of the Marriage Laws;4 nor do they show that they are in possession of any grace or virtue which can be set up against those wonders of our age. There is Mr Harrold Johnson, for example. Was he simple in his grave and interesting Road Makers?5 There, he reflected much that is peculiar, not only to modern times, but to our own day, and he was often good. The subjects were in keeping with his unvarnished, puritanic style—­a style, it must be confessed, which really betrayed the writer of prose. But now he attempts a simplicity which often proved too difficult for Wordsworth, who had a bent towards simplicity. The result is that he is not only ineffectual, but has the probably deceptive air of condescending to the multitude, as here:— I have crossed the Rocky Mountains   And the vast Sierras’ land, But the little hills of Mona   It is these I understand. [. . .]

That this is simple, and not admirable, there can be small doubt. Mr Gibson is also in search of simplicity. He knows the North Country; and he has a good eye and ear, as is shown here:—

2  See ET’s review of Paul Elmer More, Shelburne Essays: Second Series [139]. 3  Argonautica: epic by Apollonius of Rhodes, third century bce; La Henriade (1723): epic by Voltaire. 4  Grape Nuts: breakfast cereal invented in 1897; Fabian Society: founded in 1884. In the early 1900s there was pressure for the reform of Divorce Law. 5 ET had reviewed Johnson’s The Road Makers and Other Poems (DC: 1 August 1903). Reviewing Ellan Vannin again (in the review of Moore, etc. below), he writes similarly of Johnson: ‘He used verse in his Road Makers, as a modern Welsh preacher sometimes uses the hwyl, almost deliberately to add glamour or severity to his thought. . . . But in the “ballads and verses” of this volume, we can only admire his self-sacrifice in using . . . certain simple measures with some delicacy, some temerity’.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 I see the peewit rise and wheel Round them with creaking wings and slow . . .

And he knows something of love, from the poets and elsewhere. But when he wants to draw a lover, instead of taking a modern man, one of his own circle, let us say, he chooses a cowman, a shepherd, or a hay-­maker, and falls between fiction and truth. He will begin a poem thus:— The warm milk swishes in the pail; The kine’s warm breathing fills the byre; My brow, against the hot flanks pressed, Throbs, aching, as, with hands that tire, I ease the straining teats, nor rest Until the teeming udders fail.

That is well; but he ends:— O big, brown kine within the byre, Life stirs no tumult in the pools Of your brown eyes that gaze on me; But I, within the net of fools Entangled, must for ever be The prey of passion’s prisoned fire.

Which is perhaps simple, certainly facile, and a waste of Mr Gibson’s powers. Nevertheless, there is more observation and truth in this book than in his more ambitious work; and in pieces like ‘Roman’s Leap’ there is form as well; so that his ease and sweetness should soon help him to good things. DC: 30 August 

T.  Sturge Moore, The Little School: A Posy of Rhymes; E. Nesbit,1 The Rainbow and the Rose; etc. Nothing is more unprofitable than disputing about tastes. Fortunately there is still one field that must always be free from such discussion—­the field of  poetry for children. The children are inexorable masters in this field. 1  E[dith] Nesbit (1858–1924): better known for her children’s fiction, such as Five Children and It (1902) and The Railway Children (1906). She also published other verse, and was a founding member of the Fabian Society.

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Authority has never ventured to pitch one tent there. There are only two rules: first, children like what they will, and for what reason they choose, and leave the rest; secondly, poetry cannot be written for children by design or good-­will aforethought. These two, it will be seen, are twin and inseparable. There are children to whom this poem, ‘Lubber Breeze’, by Mr Sturge Moore, may be something as engrossing as an ant’s nest, an old doll, a wild swan’s feather, or a man with a beard like Lodore:2 The four sails of the mill Like stocks stand still; Their lantern-­length is white On blue more bright. Unruffled is the mead Where lambkins feed, And sheep and cattle browse, And donkeys drowse. Never the least breeze will The wet thumb chill That the anxious miller lifts, Till the vane shifts. The breeze in the great flour-­bin Is snug tucked in; The lubber, while rats thieve, Laughs in his sleeve.3

And there are children who would call, not for that, but for a singing of the ballad of Sir Hugh of Lincoln; or for a hundred lines of Paradise Lost. There are others who may succumb to a reading of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, and appear to have been bewitched by it, sent far and deep into strange waters from which they have not the power to bring any treasure back; and then, in a day or two, the loud sweet voice of another child in the solitude of night reminds them of the hermit good in the wood that ‘slopes down to the sea’, and they exclaim, with their first quotation: How loudly his sweet voice he rears! He loves to talk with marineres That come from a far countree. 2 Lodore: massive Lake District waterfall, celebrated in ‘The Cataract of Lodore’: Robert Southey’s onomatopoeic poem for children. 3  ET included this poem in PBPS. Moore’s ‘lubber’ may have contributed to his own ‘Lob’ (ACP, 76).

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Sympathy with children, especially if it be of the conscious sort, seems to be of uncertain value to the man whose poetry they read or hear. Perhaps they suspect sympathy, with their keen and hostile eyes for clergymen and coated pills. The intention of the author is certainly of no importance to them. They treat his work as some lovers of art treat pictures: they are open to suggestions and impressions, not much to the artist’s intention as interpreted by the best critics. They read, in the The Little School: Kate has sown candy-­tuft, lupins and peas, Carnations, forget-­me-­not and heart’s-­ease; Jack has sown cherry-­pie, marigold, Love-­that-­lies-­bleeding and snap-­dragons bold; But who knows What the wind sows?

and they ask, grave and entirely pleased: ‘What is cherry-­pie?’ Just so, when you read: O Mary dear, that you were here . . .4

they are apt to talk about some friend of that name. The rich, suggestive epithet, the puissant verb steeped in the souls of five centuries and a hundred poets, may mean nothing to the child; but the univocal plain word may be as a tower of ivory to his mind. Mr Sturge Moore would be unlikely to write verse for any reason except that it was dictated to him by the spirit that gave him Absalom and Medea.5 That he calls these latest verses The Little School, and tells us that they were ‘made for, and brought home to children’, means only that certain children have loved his work. The turn for expressing views of meals, new clothes, liberty, washing, picture-­folk, as a child who set value on its childishness might express them, was probably not due to the prospect of a particular audience of children. That might approach condescension: there is no condescension here. But there is a quaint limitation and a happy emphasis on unexpected things, which suggest that Mr Sturge Moore had been enchanted and compelled to ‘leave yon crowd of spies’6 and to live with children, before he wrote these pieces. We see the child in some of the rhythms; they dance, where this poet’s rhythms usually march as in heavy ground. More often, we see the rather elvish than adult wistfulness of an alien watching the child. The ‘Lullaby’, which is one of the best of the poems, is full of this. It hardly 4  First line of Shelley’s ‘To Mary’. 5  Moore published Absalom: A Chronicle Play in Three Acts in 1903. Thomas had recently reviewed his Theseus, Medea, and Lyrics: ‘His material is often old; it has often been used by others; and yet his attitude and style are so perfectly proper and sincere that the material also seems to belong to him alone’ (DC: 5 January 1905). 6  Quotation from ‘The House We Built’.

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matters whether many children like them or not. It is enough that they are a charming imaginative (or—­shall we say?—enchanted) effort of Mr Moore’s; within their limits as good as all his work, if we except one or two most naïve concessions to rhyme in ‘Leaf-­land’. The poems, the paper, the decoration and the binding of the volume should teach children a scrupulous affection for books. There is an odd contrast with The Little School in E. Nesbit’s verses to and for children in The Rainbow and the Rose. They are full of clever things in the conventional condescending mood which ought not to succeed, but unquestionably does. For the rest, E. Nesbit is not a poet, not a minor poet, not even an exquisite maker of verse; but all that an able woman who is not these can do by means of verse, she can do. She uses verse as a rhetorical aid to the effectiveness of her thought, and it is wonderful how well verse serves her. Hardly anything of hers could be imagined in prose; which we take to be proof of her perfect command over the superficial qualities of verse, and its neatness, brevity, and emphasis, and so on. Rarely, she falls into the jargon of minor poetry. In short her work is that insidious thing which makes the contemner of poetry think better of his contempt for a while. She is so intelligible, so informing, so sensible, so sincere, and yet so poetical—­we can hear plain men and women saying it. A: 2 September 

J. S. Smart, James Macpherson,1 An Episode in Literature Nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, when the world consisted of Gray, Sterne, Johnson, the dying Collins, and a child named Chatterton,2 and millions of other people whom we know nothing about, a young Scotsman of 1  James Macpherson (1736–96) created a sensation when, in the early 1760s, he began to publish what he claimed were translations from the epic poetry of the ancient Gaelic poet, Ossian. Macpherson’s work had a huge European vogue, although its authenticity as ‘translation’ was contested; as was its Scottish (rather than Irish) provenance. Later opinion sees Macpherson as having been, at least, genuinely in touch with the Gaelic poetry and folklore of the Highlands. Ossian lies behind Romantic ‘Celticism’: see [68n.]; and it is no coincidence that W.  B.  Yeats began his poetic career with The Wanderings of Oisin (1889). 2  The poets mentioned here, often viewed as precursors of the Romantic poets, are Thomas Gray (1716–71), see note 7 below; William Collins (1721–59), who wrote odes and suffered from alcoholism and mental illness; and the precocious, impoverished Thomas Chatterton (1752–70): the object of greater academic interest in ET’s day than is the case now. Chatterton committed suicide, aged 17, having caused a stir with his proto-Gothic poems, supposedly the work of a fifteenth-century poet, Thomas Rowley, whom he invented. In ‘Resolution and Independence’ Wordsworth celebrates ‘Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, / The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride’.

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twenty-­two began to write extraordinary things. He disregarded the fact that all these people were reading verse like this:— Say, why was man so eminently rais’d Amid the vast creation; why ordain’d Thro’ life and death to dart his piercing eye, With thoughts beyond the limit of his frame; But that th’Omnipotent might send him forth In sight of mortal and immortal pow’rs, As on a boundless theatre . . .3

He did not care that hardly any man of his day ventured to put down anything on paper, whether in prose or verse, which might not have been said at a dinner table. He did not scorn to write as if Johnson had never been born. He not only made no pretensions to being a gentleman, but, at the moment when Sterne was publishing Tristram Shandy, he gave out that the extra­or­ din­ary things he wrote were translated from the original poems of Ossian, the bard of a kingdom in the West of Scotland, who died long before the discovery of knee breeches and the circulation of the blood— Whilst Folly clapp’d her hands, and Wisdom stared.4

He was a Highlander; he knew some Gaelic; he had spent a little time in seeking old literature in the Highlands. In spite of his writings, he may be supposed also to have known something of human nature. For, setting aside the rash thought, if he ever had it, of offering his fancies modestly to the world for its amusement and contempt, he announced that he was the learned translator of ancient poems ‘calculated to please persons of exquisite feelings of heart’. How learned men, authors, and lovers of literature, throughout the world, responded to his appeal is well known; and how he enlisted upon his own side the patriotism and partiality of his countrymen. And Mr Smart here tells the story in a forcible and agreeable way, reminding us of the ‘superb compliment to the Celtic epics paid by one of the most Teutonic of nations’, Sweden, in electing Oscar I, whom his father had named after the son of Ossian.5 It warms the blood even now to think of men in wigs, who had enjoyed the Rosciad,6 reading and growing tender over a page like this:— Old Carril went, with softest voice. He called the king of dark-­brown shields! ‘Rise from the skins of thy chase, rise, Swaran king of groves! Cuthullin gives 3  Quotation from The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) by Mark Akenside (1721–70). 4  From the Rosciad: a satire on the London theatre by Charles Churchill (1731–64). 5  It was Napoleon, a fan of Ossian, who suggested to his general, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (1763–1844), later King Charles XIV John of Sweden, that he should call his son Oscar. 6  See note 4.

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the joy of shells. Partake the feast of Erin’s blue-­eyed chief!’ He answered like the sullen sound of Cromla before a storm: ‘Though all thy daughters, Inis-­fail, should stretch their arms of snow, should raise the heavings of their breasts, and softly roll their eyes of love; yet, fixed as Lochlin’s thousand rocks, here Swaran should remain; till morn, with the young beams of the east, shall light me to the death of Cuthullin. Pleasant to my ear is Lochlin’s wind! It rushes over my seas! It speaks aloft in all my shrouds, and brings my green forests to my mind: the green forests of Gormal, which often echoed to my winds, when my spear was red in the chase of the boar. Let dark Cuthullin yield to me the ancient throne of Cormac, or Erin’s torrents shall show from their hills the red foam of the blood of his pride!’

It is easy to explain the success of Ossian now. The resurrection of old English and Celtic things had already begun. Macpherson used them, and his tactics were admirable. In England, the usual servility to a reputation and also the preparation made by Milton’s ‘Satan’, Gray’s ‘Bard’,7 and the sentiment of Young’s Night Thoughts, laid men open to Macpherson’s attack. Abroad, his lofty vagueness lent itself to sublime interpretation and fell upon a good soil. Nevertheless, it seems to be certain now that what so moved the heart of the eighteenth century was not the voice, not even the spirit of a shaggy, tender-­ hearted Celt of Caracalla’s time.8 Mr Smart shows, what translations from the Welsh and Irish are always illustrating, that to be graceful and sweet-­voiced in despair is not invariably to be a Celt. The figure, in fact, dimly seen through mountain mists and waveringly mirrored in wild lakes, which was mistaken for a refined and ancient Caledonian, was really the ghost of a long-­haired, wan, romantic Englishman of the end of the nineteenth century. When Johnson told Dr Blair that ‘many men, many women, and many children’ could have written Ossian, he was, in truth, beating our own heads. When Voss said that Ossian was greater than Homer, he was complimenting us.9 For, until our own day, there was no prose or poetry that had much in common with Macpherson’s vagueness and ethereal apostrophe. His men, who are but a confection of epithets towering thinly in a Highland storm, might, with a little ingenuity, have found a place in the Yellow Book. They are at home with no one so much as with M. Maeterlinck’s 7  In ‘The Bard: A Pindaric Ode’ (1755–7), Gray created a prototype for the melancholy CelticRomantic poet. Perched on a Welsh crag, Gray’s suicidal bard laments a Welsh defeat by the English: ‘Rob’d in the sable garb of woe, / With haggard eye the poet stood; / (Loose his beard, and hoary hair / Stream’d, like a meteor, to the troubled air) . . .’. 8  Caracalla (Antoninus): Emperor of Rome, 198–217. 9  Hugh Blair (1718–1800), Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Edinburgh, defended Macpherson (attacked by Samuel Johnson) in A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763). The German poet and classicist, Johann Heinrich Voss (1751–1826), like other German literati (e.g., Goethe and Herder), saw Ossian as ‘the Gaelic Homer’ or ‘Homer of the North’.

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‘Pelléas’ and Mr Yeats’s ‘Forgael’.10 Macpherson can be sublime, as when he writes:— The sons of Erin appear, like a ridge of rocks on the coast; when mariners, on shores unknown, are trembling at veering winds.

He can always be ridiculous with ease. But his good and bad is like that of a man of our own day, somewhat bewildered by the proximity of Gibbon and Hume. He has not our language at his finger-­tips; he is without the advantages of Lady Gregory or Mr William Sharp; but he is of their age; and when I hear him saying that ‘the music was like the memory of joys that are past, pleasant and mournful to the soul’, I think not of Wordsworth’s ‘impudent Highlander’, but of some elegiac littérateur from the suburbs, with streaming hair and impaired digestion, declaiming to melting Bedford Park.11 Yet, so far, no modern has given us so magical a picture of humanity dwarfed by mountain and sky and sea, and owing its sublimity to them, as Macpherson has done. There is something wonderfully impressive, not, it is true, in any isolated passages, but in a long drink of his work; a power in his lack of precision which suggests the wild young poet who has smeared his hasty page with earth and rain, in contempt for the limitations of words; a contagious light-­hearted rapture in all this abandoned prose of a man who, if he could not describe nature, at least made it perpetually clear that she left with him an everlasting and profound impression. Mr Smart’s account of him and his most famous work and its results is fair, complete, and readable. DC: 8 September 

T. F. Husband and M. F. A. Husband, Punctuation: its Principles and Practice This book is in two parts; the first, historical; the second, modern, and sometimes abstract, but usually practical. The first is almost wholly admirable. 10  Protagonists of Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas et Mélisande (1893) and Yeats’s dramatic poem The Shadowy Waters (1900). 11  For the Celticist William Sharp/Fiona Macleod, see Appendix [706]. Wordsworth was no fan of ‘Ossian’: in a polemic against ‘the falsehood . . . imposed upon the world’, he calls him a ‘Phantom . . . begotten by the snug embrace of an impudent Highlander upon a cloud of tradition’ (‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’, 1815). ET also alludes to Gray’s streaming-haired ‘Bard’: see note 7.

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The authors begin by reminding us, how much a writer must now depend upon artificial devices of more or less recent invention, for the intelligible self-­expression which he may achieve. The very spaces between word and word are hardly ten centuries old: their importance is grotesquely illustrated here, by a passage from the Opium Eater, printed without such spaces. A very early interesting example of the separation of words is to be found in a Greek inscription which is thus translated: SAOTIS. GIVES. TOSIKAINIA. THEHOUSE. ANDTHEOTHERTHINGS. ALL.

These three single words and three groups of words are divided by dots, which, it must be seen, give the sentence clearness and emphasis: it might almost have been tabulated for parsing. At an early date, the text was broken up into paragraphs by a blank space or by exposing the first letter of a new paragraph conspicuously in the margin. As early as the third century bc, in the schools of Alexandria, a system of punctuation was developed, and the points, though their values were irregular, corresponded to our comma, semicolon and full-­stop. But the highly inflected classical languages nat­ ural­ly had no need for such a system as could have been handed on unchanged to our own. Nor is such punctuation as they used quite intelligible. Why did it exist without word-­separation? Whether it were to make the sense unquestionable, or to indicate pauses for the guidance of a public reader, is not clear. But our authors give useful particulars of a number of manuscripts, beginning with the fourth century of the Christian era; and from the early English practice, they conclude that punctuation was meant ‘to ensure a correct rendering’ when sacred works were read aloud. Poetry, they say, was punctuated metrically rather than logically; but to make such a rude distinction is to ignore the fact that the metre of all good poetry, especially poetry of ancient date, is always a guide to the sense. Prose, however, as early as Alfred the Great, was so divided that we should not wish to make a single change, except in so far as it would be possible to give each point an invariable value. Wycliffe’s Bible, again, reveals principles inseparable from English syntax. But, ‘with the gradual loss of inflections from the vernacular and the growth at the same time of a richer and more complex style’ (especially in the ­sixteenth century), ‘there came what we might call a native need for more exact punctuation’. We have, therefore, in the great body of English composition, two modes of punctuation, usually side by side, though in unequal degrees: the first and newer for explaining construction; the second, which the authors call ‘rhetorical punctuation’, for the aid of the careless or illiterate in exacting pauses, and, at its finest, for representing the writer’s own emphasis perfectly. As the authors say: ‘the voice of an intelligent reader ignores some

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of the textual pointing, and introduces breaks at places other than those where there are points’. The most careful modern writers seem disposed to forestall these adventures of the intelligent reader. Lionel Johnson, for ex­ample, left no subtlety unmarked. It may be worth recording, too, that we have noticed, in the handwriting of a scrupulous man, that he recognised pauses which no printer ever indicated: that, for example, if he had to write ‘Matthew Arnold says’, he would, in accordance with the practice of his own voice, run the first two words almost into one, and cut them off decidedly from the last by a space; and that, instinctively, where writing too hastily for stops, he marked all rhetorical pauses by spaces of varying length.1 The second part of the book is too full of little, but pregnant, matters for us to discuss adequately. The uses of each stop are dealt with; and, let us say at once, with admirable precision and fullness. If anything more than the example of illustrious men is needed to show the importance of a logical order in sentences and in the concatenation of sentences, this book supplies the need. It has several sayings, as that ‘there is a somewhat narrow limit to the power of punctuation to free a sentence from the ambiguity that arises out of vagueness of connection’, which should be taken to heart. Nevertheless, we have been most interested in the abundant expression of an opinion, in the theory and practice of Messrs Husband, which is at odds with some admired authors and our own preference. By their quotations, indeed, they show themselves to be aware of the utmost diversity in styles, and to be catholic in admiration and acute in dissent. But, by their practice, they seem to us inclined to a frugality of punctuation that is somewhat rash and surprising in men who know how the spoken word, and more so the written word, is open to misinterpretation. Everywhere we have noticed such sentences as this: The defect of which we are most vividly aware in reading such a passage as this is the want of word-­separation—

It is our opinion that such a lack of punctuation is in conflict with the modern tendency, which is expressed in so characteristic a writer as the author of the following piece: No writer escapes, or should desire to escape, the influences of his age: but it is not merely by recording them, that he will live: it is by showing that in them, which is of no time or country, but old as the human race. Partial success in that endeavour marks a writer for a humanist; perfect success, for a classic: the

1  ET may refer to some aspects of his own handwriting.

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humanist may be recognised by his contemporaries; the classic must have faith in himself, whilst his contemporaries can have no more than hope on his account. If Mr Hardy have deserved the perfect success, he will command it also: when, matters not at all.2

With this and similar work, we would reply to Messrs Husband’s practice. We would also point out that too little punctuation is bad, because it renders bad writing more troublesome than it need be; good writing, sometimes ambiguous; and the best writing, always liable to misconceptions which may handicap its chance of a perfect effect. We know the beauty of a sentence that sweeps without impediment in one gracious curve to its full stop, and the beauty, too, of a complex sentence in which the stops are as valuable as the division of a stanza of verse into lines, or as the hedges and littered crags and out-­cropping rock by which the eye travels up a mountain to the clouds.3 Messrs Husband appear to be too sensitive to the look of stops, to the suggestion of a skeleton, and their own sparing use of them is the one fault in a good book. A: 23 September 

Poetical Works of Robert Bridges: Vol. VI The sixth volume of Mr Bridges’ poetry contains The Feast of Bacchus and Nero, Part 2.1 Like most of his other work, these plays persistently divide the attention. Thus, we are prepared at once to read a play in verse. The metre reminds us that Mr Bridges never does anything good or bad by accident. The accents, which are printed here and there, continually award the poet’s praise or censure for our manner of reading his verse. [. . .] 2  Quotation from Lionel Johnson, The Art of Thomas Hardy (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1894), 88. 3  ET’s poem ‘The Lofty Sky’ begins with ‘a complex sentence’: an interplay between syntax and metre, which dramatises the eye travelling skywards to ‘The tops of the high hills’, and ‘Past all trees, past furze / And thorn . . .’ (ACP, 53). 1  In another review ET says of The Feast of Bacchus: ‘it is a little depressing to think of a poet writing a play which contains so little of our own age except its language’; but again stresses the educational value of Bridges’s blank verse in Nero: ‘it seems to be the conscious effort of a scholar to remind us as far as possible of all the beautiful, but apparently irregular, varieties of blank verse which have been used by poets’ (DC: 17 January 1906).

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Mr Bridges expects much opposition to his extraordinary metre; or he did, ten years ago. He has been told that the critics will call it prose; but that if he called it prose, they would have it to be verse. It is a line of six stresses, and of course lacking in ‘conventional, or merely metric’ stresses. We have found it not unpleasant, easy to follow and well suited to the matter in hand: yet it hardly justifies itself, since its effect is always vague and at the same time surprising in its lack of euphonious cadences; and it also seems to us to be open to the most serious charge of all—­that it does not admit of the compact, allusive, elliptical and novel quality of style in which poetry differs from prose; at least, there is hardly a line in the whole, with a value or charm which could not easily be attained by an equal length of prose. The metre creates no illusion at all, as even poor blank verse—­a native and known medium—­can do. The highest praise we can give it is that it never offends the idiomatic pronunciation, and that when read aloud by a good man, lines like these: Now save me from my friends! Indeed this Pamphilus Will be my ruin—­I wish to heaven I had never met him. He’ll tell his father next, this old Ionian huckster, Sponge-­mongering Chremes; the gods defend me from him, And his family feast, and his prosy wisdom! I thought to spend This day of my return with sweet Antiphila . . .

a hundred lines of it—­not more—­produce a new and agreeable impression. In Nero Mr Bridges uses blank verse, and it is so consistently careful and founded upon wide and acute scholarship that the play would be an excellent school to writers of verse. Of course, the verse is not infinitely varied like that of Hamlet nor wanton and beautiful like that of The King’s Threshold:2 but Nero has this advantage, that neither the diction nor (except once or twice) the sentiment takes the breath away, and the student is thus more continually aware of the merit of the verse. We would give these lines as an example: Of late I have passed my life half in a dungeon, Half in the garden, where thou bidst me forth To bask in my love’s joy: which in my duty I had spoken of to thee openly, but all Hath come so quickly: now, a happier way, I meet thy favour unsolicited. [. . .]

2  For ET on this play by W. B. Yeats, see [91].

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In this metre Mr Bridges is at liberty to use the diction of a poet, though we cannot but think that he has sacrificed some of his liberty in order to display his observation and so to puzzle the conservative. [. . .] A: 14 October 

William H. Davies, The Soul’s Destroyer and Other Poems Mr William Davies is a Monmouthshire man. He has been active and passionate. He has been poor and careless and hungry and in pain. ‘I count us’, he says in his ‘Lodging House Fire’, which is as simple as a cave man’s drawing on bone, and yet of an atmosphere dense with old sorrow:— I count us, thirty men, Huddled from Winter’s blow, Helpless to move away From that fire’s glow.

He has travelled: he knows Wales, London, America, and Hell. These things and many more his poems tell us; and to see him is to see a man from whom unskilled labour in America, work in Atlantic cattle boats, and a dire London life, have not taken away the earnestness, the tenderness, or the accent, of a typical Monmouthshire man. I have often wondered idly how I should meet the apparition of a new poet—­it was so easy to praise small or middling w ­ riters of verse—­and now all that I can do is to help to lay down a cloak of journalists’ words, over which he may walk a little more easily to his just fame. His greatness rests upon a wide humanity, a fresh and unbiased observation, and a noble use of the English tongue. His humanity is so wide that, though he writes much about himself, he is less egoistic than another man who writes of fair Rosamond or Medea. He can write commonplace and inaccurate English; but it is also natural to him to write, much as Wordsworth wrote, with the clearness, compactness, and felicity which make a man think with shame how unworthily, through natural stupidity or uncertainty, he manages his native tongue. In subtlety he abounds; and where else today shall we find simplicity like this?— No man lives life so wise But unto Time he throws

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 Morsels to hunger for At his life’s close.

Where else shall we find the song as simple and passionate as here?— Where wert thou, love, when from Twm Barlum turned The moon’s face full the way of Alterreen, And from his wood’s dark cage the nightingale Drave out clear notes across the open sheen? [. . .]1

On the first page of his first poem2—on London and his own experience there and his walk to Wales—­he speaks of the City as richer ‘Than that proud temple which made Ophir poor’. But his power is better shown when he says that Genius— raises spirits that It cannot lay until their will is wrought.

On the second page, in a few lines on a London fog, there is this piece of fine observation and great simplicity:— and only blind men know their way.

On the third page, recollection moves him to this passage, of which the charm is a secret that we had thought to be long ago lost:— We went together side by side to school, Together had our holidays in fields Made golden by June’s buttercups; in woods, Where under ferns fresh pulled I buried her, And called her forth like Lazarus from the grave; She’d laughing come, to shake her curls until Methought to hear full half a hundred bells. A grown-­up world took playful notice soon, Made me feel shame that grew a greater love . . . [. . .]

Of another order of felicity is his account of ‘falling here and there To drink the various ales the Borough kept From London Bridge to Newington’. In this same first poem, he sets out on foot for Wales, and sees the sky:

1  ET has quoted from ‘The Hill-side Park’ and ‘Love Absent’ (later editions print ‘Alteryn’). Writing to GB (24 January 1906), ET calls this review ‘my page of quotations from Davies in the Chronicle’, and says: ‘I wonder what you will think of his best things. I think he has immortal moments’ (LGB, 102). 2  The title-poem: Davies’s ‘Destroyer’ is alcohol.

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A blue grass field, thick dotted with white tents Which Life slept late in, as ’twere holiday.

The hawthorn, he says, with a quaintness which is one of his pleasant ­weaknesses: The hawthorn it caught slippery Mercury, And smothered him to smell of where he’d been. [. . .]

After this poem of around four hundred lines, follow many shorter pieces and two others of some length. Of these two ‘Beauty’s Quest’ is full of beaut­ ies, but hardly of beauty; it is on a plan and in a stanza form that are at present alien to his powers: ‘The Devil’s Guest’ is a wanton vision of Hell—­where he has the pleasure of meeting Keats’s reviewer and of chasing him (Mr Davies’ wooden leg going ‘bump for bump close at his heels, like bombs’) down the infernal street, and the pain of missing him by a foot; there also the form has not quite suited the poet’s genius.3 [. . .] But the shorter poems would, with a few exceptions, make an anthology of quaint or lovely or noble things; and even the exceptions would be full of commonplace that is not easily put aside, like:— Who thinks that tyrants shall lie down To sleep in children’s quiet ways.

Perhaps the most perfect of all the poems is addressed to a sparrow. It opens with a repetition, of an excellent brevity, of what has been said against the sparrow. Then it ends:— Man cannot shake thee off: as though A billow reared and plunged to throw The wind that on its archèd crest Jockeyed from shore to shore, and rest Not for a moment gave—­e’en so Thy triumph none can overthrow. With all this fuss of thee, I doubt Thou art all bad, as men make out; Not Cocky Sparrow, nor Jim Mouse,

3  John Wilson Croker (1780–1857), critic and Tory politician, wrote such a severe review of Keats’s Endymion in the Quarterly Review (April 1818), attacking ‘Cockney poetry’ as ‘the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language’, that he was reputed to have contributed to Keats’s death: ‘snuff ’d out by an article’ (Byron, Don Juan, XI.lx). Davies may have heeded ET’s opinion here: neither poem appears in subsequent editions of The Soul’s Destroyer, which were not self-published like this one.

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O foolish man, that robs thy house: If thou wouldst know what takes thy feed, Set trap for hand of human greed; ’Tis not that sparrows, mice are sly— On men who govern men keep eye. Brown Sparrow, with us everywhere, Go, multiply without a care: When larks sing over fields unroamed, And sealèd woods by night are stormed, Surrendering unto nightingales— When cuckoos call to hills from vales, Thou, Sparrow mine, art here and near, To find all times, come year, go year.4

Mr Davies has another book almost ready. The first edition of The Soul’s Destroyer has been sold out; the second is not yet to be obtained, I believe. It is to be hoped that such a poet of experience will not suffer for his inexperience in the selling of books. He wants to go back to Monmouthshire. DC: 21 October 

English and Scottish Popular Ballads, edited from the collection of Francis James Child1 by Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman Kittredge This is a useful and attractive abridgment of F. J. Child’s collection of English and Scottish popular ballads.2 It contains all but four of the three hundred and five ballads in that collection, but it gives only a few versions of each, where Child gave as many as eight-­and-­twenty, and the notes and introductions to the ballads are very brief. Mr Kittredge’s introductory essay, on the 4  ET interweaves house, sparrow, and mouse with the human condition in his poem, ‘The long small room’ (ACP, 136). 1  Francis James Child (1825–96): American folklorist, literary scholar, and ballad-collector. The Child Ballads, an indispensable resource, was published in five volumes, 1882–98. 2 For ET and folksong, see, too, his reviews of Cecil  J.  Sharp, English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions and Francis B. Gummere, The Popular Ballad, and notes [271]. ET developed parts of this review, such as the concluding images of hearth and swan, for a chapter in HE, which begins by evoking a ballad-singer at an inn (ETPW II, 211–13).

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other hand, is new, and it is a clever essential statement of the ballad controversies. Briefly, the facts are that what are called genuine popular ballads are impersonal in style, are based upon some simple, often widespread and ancient tale, and, having been transmitted orally for centuries, are not the pure work of one man. The conjecture is that they were often made by groups of people in collaboration. The evidence is small, and as the matter is in the hands of psychologists, and of psychologists dealing with people who never heard of psychology, it is likely that it will never be made clear; which need alarm nobody. Meantime, Mr Kittredge’s epitome is worth reading. A poem implies a poet, a modern poem a poet with what we call individuality. But the author of the ballad ‘is of no account’; ‘Until we begin to reason, we have no thought of the author of any ballad, because, so far as we can see, he had no thought of himself ’, which, by the way, is only as much as to say that he was not a nineteenth-­century person, for the ballad-­maker who first gave his heroine green sleeves no doubt had his individuality. But it seems to be true that the ballad ‘belonged to the whole people’, that the mere act of com­pos­ ition was only the beginning of the history of a ballad, and that the refrain, the commonplaces and recurrent passages point back to ‘the singing and dancing throng’ which kept the poem alive and always growing. Finally he contrasts the ballad-­maker ‘improvising orally’ before an audience and ­‘taking no credit to himself ’ with the modern poet in his ‘sound-­proof study’, uncertain who, and if anyone, will read his work. But if there is one thing about which not even psychologists will differ, it is that ballads should be read. They have lived in a most lively way—­by oral tradition—­among English and kindred races for centuries; if anything is national in literature they are, especially when compared with our written literature by persons of partly English blood whom their contemporaries reject. And, by the way, it troubles one to think how few poems of literary and not popular origin could make their way in the world if they had to do so in the same way, since printing has spoilt the conscious memory of the race. Above all, the ballads, at their best, have the extraordinary qualities of simplicity, of integrity, and of containing excellent material. They have also the merit of showing very clearly how verse differs from prose, and, incidentally, how good, weighty, English verses can be pleasant without rhyme. So rich are they in these qualities that the reader never ceases to marvel that these things were once popular poetry which are now kept alive by two very small classes—­those who still remember them traditionally and those who care for poetry as distinguished from Longfellow.3 Possibly, in the beginning, 3  For ET on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, see [104].

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the ballad of ‘Willie and Earl Richard’s Daughter’, of ‘King Estmere’, was no better than things like ‘Dolly Gray’ or ‘Getting Larger’,4 which have a cor­res­ pond­ing popularity in the suburbs, at lonely inns in the Kentish hills, in Wales, and on the veldt, a popularity once accorded to: The Persë leanyde on his brande   And sawe the Duglas de; He tooke the dede mane by the hande,   And sayde, ‘Wo ys me for the! To have savyde thy lyffe, I wolde have partyde with   My landes for years thre, For a better man, of hart nare of hande,   Was nat in all the north contrë.’5

But our modern popular things that truly live in the mouths of men, like ‘Dolly Gray’, last as many years as the other lasted centuries, in spite of print, and so lose their chance of reaching a perfect form. The ballads, then, show how good, if limited, is the popular taste, untroubled by print or by anything else which makes us unintelligently familiar with many things. But that they once were popular does not explain our liking for them today. Their sim­pli­ city may remind us of statuary or of a green hill shining in sun after rain. But we do not, once a ballad has stabbed or caressed us with its first bright appeal, like it for its simplicity alone. We like it because it relieves us of all the effort of thought and fancy which modern poetry often demands, and because it comes to us so nakedly that we can clothe it as we will and interpret it en la perfectissime partie,6 so that we make it bear meanings of which the early chanters of it never dreamed. To open a book is ever to go on a voyage of discovery. The anchor is up; we sleep before the wind; this is virgin soil we find. With our discoveries we deal as discoverers have always done; we take possession of them in the name of the King—­ourselves; our possession is confirmed by a bull from the Pope—­ourselves; we are Columbus and Ferdinand and Alexander in one. This is true of all books that live. They are born again and renewed by the help of generation after generation of ­readers. 4  ‘Goodbye Dolly Gray’: music-hall song (1897) with a patriotic motif, popular during the Spanish-American war, the Boer War, and (perhaps to ET’s dismay) once again in the Great War: ‘Hark, I hear the bugle calling, / Goodbye Dolly Gray’. ET may even criticize ‘Dolly Gray’, as well as Rupert Brooke’s sonnet beginning ‘Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!’, in his ironical poem on a bugle-call: ‘No one cares less than I’ (ACP, 123). ‘Getting Larger’: untraced. 5  Quotation from ‘The Hunting of the Cheviot’, later known as ‘Chevy Chase’. 6  ‘In the most perfect sense’: quotation from Prologue to Gargantua by François Rabelais (c.1494–1553).

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Shakespeare means something to us which he did not mean to the contemporaries of Wordsworth or Milton. But great literature by known authors enables us to deal thus with it by virtue of its subtlety: ballad literature forces us to do it by its simplicity. Its rhythm and stirring story move us suddenly, and then its antiquity, like music, launches us into an unknown. Now and then, as in ‘The False Lover Won Back’— ‘But again, dear love, and again, dear love,   Will ye never love me again? Alas for loving you sae well,   And you nae me again!’

there is no need of anything which the words do not imply. But what is there in the words alone of the majority of the ballads to justify our liking for them, unless the strangeness of forgotten things and forgotten singers works as mere time will do in an old wood?7 They are not art, and the reader may perhaps be excused if he finds about them something which they have not of themselves, as he does about an entry for one year in an old chronicle—­dies tenebrosa sicut nox;8 a black hearth stone among the nettles; or the clangour of the joyous wild swan, invisible overhead in the winter dawn. S: 28 October 7  This simile anticipates ET’s poem ‘The Green Roads’: ‘That oak saw the ages pass in the forest: / They were a host, but their memories are lost’ (ACP, 129). 8  ‘Day as dark as night’: description of year 447 from Annales Cambriae, a set of medieval chronicles in Latin, not only concerning Wales.

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1906 Abraham Cowley, Poems, edited by A. R. Waller (Cambridge University Press)1 In the year 1667 the poet Cowley began to die. He has been rapidly dying ever since, in spite of Dr Johnson’s destructive criticism and Canon Beeching’s ingenious and delightful praises.2 The present edition, which, like the rest of this Cambridge series, is excellent in its accuracy and appearance, is likely to convince most of us that Cowley is dead at last. If anyone wishes to know what two hundred and fifty years can do for a famous but mortal man, let him read this book. Cowley was, in a high and sublime and terrible degree, a writing animal. He was a prodigious child, a learned man, who had some experience of life, and was of such a good heart that, as Aubrey3 says, he settled his estate by his will in order that ‘every yeare so much is to be pay’d for the enlarging of poor prisoners cast into gaole by cruel creditors for some debt’. Yet he wrote verses as if he had been locked up in an immense library with a mirror upon which minute reflections of men and women and Nature sometimes fell. Only once do we remember to have felt quite certain that Cowley had seen a man, and that was in reading the beautiful verses ‘On the Death of Mr William Hervey’—these two especially:— Say, for you saw us, ye immortal Lights, How oft unweari’d have we spent the Nights? Till the Ledæan Stars so fam’d for Love,   Wondred at us from above. 1  Abraham Cowley (1618–67) had indeed ‘some experience of life’. A Royalist in the Civil War, he spent years of exile in Paris, where he aided the royal family. For A. R. Waller, see [137n.]. 2  Samuel Johnson, whose opinion accords with ET’s, says of Cowley in his Lives of the Poets (1779–81): ‘In the general review of Cowley’s poetry it will be found, that he wrote with abundant fertility, but negligent or unskilful selection; with much thought, but with little imagery; that he is never pathetick, and rarely sublime, but always either ingenious or learned, either acute or profound.’ The writer Henry Charles Beeching (1859–1919), then Canon of Westminster Cathedral, has a chapter on Cowley, ‘A Forgotten Poet’, in his Conferences on Books and Men (London: Smith, Elder, 1900). 3  The vivid Brief Lives by John Aubrey (1626–97) was assembled from his papers after his death. A notable edition had appeared in 1898.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 We spent them not in toys, in lusts, or wine;   But search of deep Philosophy,   Wit, Eloquence, and Poetry, Arts which I lov’d, for they, my Friend, were Thine. Ye fields of Cambridge, our dear Cambridge, say, Have ye not seen us walking every day? Was there a Tree about which did not know   The Love betwixt us two? Henceforth, ye gentle Trees, for ever fade;   Or your sad branches thicker joyn,   And into darksome shades combine, Dark as the Grave wherein my Friend is laid.

And the eighteenth verse, with its exquisite brevity and suggestion of ‘Adonais’,4 is perfect. But in the other poems, even in the famous ‘Chronicle’,5 we seem to see merely an adroit and energetic man whose acquaintance with the English vocabulary was profound. If this were not so, someone before now would surely have been tempted to use again the splendid metrical scheme of some of his Pindarique Odes.6 No man ever wrote so exquisitely about nothing and all its intricacies. By means of words alone he created a sort of world which resembled what he must have seen as much as a globe resembles the face of the earth. We cannot but admire the logical skill with which he built up this world, the neatness, the grace, the perfection of his descriptions of it. The nature of his logic may be seen on almost every page. For example, in ‘The Tree’ he tells us that he has carved his love of ‘the flourishingst Tree in all the Park’, and that in three days the tree died. His very ‘written flames’ (excellent phrase) had withered the tree. How, then, he continues, can he live, when his heart is graven with wounds larger than any tree could bear? He commonly thinks by means of metaphor and ‘odd Similitude’. If a thought lends itself to a metaphor, for him it is true and straightway clothed in words. ‘A curse’, he says in one place, ‘on all your vain Philosophies, Which on weak Nature’s Law depend’, and the curse was from his heart.7

4  Cowley’s vision of heaven’s ‘white and radiant crew’ resembles Shelley’s lines: ‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity’. Like Michael Drayton’s epistle on ‘Poets & Poesie’ (see [119n.]), Cowley’s elegy for Hervey has affinities with ‘The sun used to shine’: the poem in which ET celebrates his friendship (and walks) with RF (ACP, 122). 5  ‘The Chronicle’ is an amusing ‘Ballad’, spoken by a philanderer who lists his many mistresses. 6 In Pindarique Odes (1656) Cowley created a looser version of this classical poetic genre. His Anglicization of the ‘ode’, rather than his specific metres, influenced later poets. 7  ET has quoted from Cowley’s ode, ‘Of Wit’, and ‘The Soul’.

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The whole of The Davideis, a sacred poem of the troubles of David, is a magnificent, eloquent, and touching tribute to the value which he set upon words. It is without observation, and without any thought that arose from observation or experience. So consistent is he that he really seems to think that in using ‘an Invocation of some God for his assistance’, after the manner of earlier poets, and in proclaiming his originality, the words themselves were a kind of establishment of his claim to a place with the great men who had used them before him. [. . .] DC: 6 January 

[Poetry and Biography] When the first careless enjoyment is over, there are few pleasures which poetry can give equal to that of tracing the experience and observation of the poet in the worlds of men and nature and literature. So richly do some poets reward us, in this kind, that we distrust the biographies which affect to show us the existence out of which the poetry arose: the difference between the biography and the poetry is as great as between a tree in June and the same tree in January. Others have so refined their experience, or apparently disregarded it, that we see in their lives (as they are written) no greater resemblance to their work than there is in a box of paints to a finished picture. In short, except to a patient philosophic mind, the biography is apt to seem but an impertinent comment on the poetry. The two are often in irreconcilable contrast, and though at their best—­as in Byron’s case—­they may be harmonised into an incomparable portrait of a man, yet we often wish back again the first intuitions which came when our minds had free play among the poems. How splendid it was to wanton thus with Shelley and Keats! Hence, perhaps, a great part of the unique pleasure which contemporaries can give—­we see and admire, but seldom know ‘how change the moons’.1 We gain a more or less definite vision of the poet’s landscapes, his reading, his preferences and so on; we rejoice partly at the beauty and partly at our own recognition of it. And unless we are able to convince ourselves, in some 1  Quotation from Keats’s ‘Ode on Indolence’.

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degree, that our poet is either a pure singer whose course is indistinguishable in mist, or a man whose emotions and experience we can be fairly sure of, he writes, for us, in vain. He writes the ‘songs of innocence’ of the ordinary verse-­writer—­songs which may have charms, but leave us uncertain whether the writer has ever done anything but read. We have several such before us today.2 [. . .] A: 20 January 

Poems in Prose from Charles Baudelaire, translated by Arthur Symons ‘Who of us’, quotes Mr Symons from Baudelaire, ‘has not dreamed, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme, subtle and staccato enough to follow the lyric motions of the soul, the wavering outlines of meditation, the sudden starts of the conscience?’ And to us it has always seemed remarkable that, although men of something like the poet’s mind are not uncommon, who only lack his training in the use of verse and his impulse towards that form, yet the so-­called prose poem is very rarely attempted.1 Philostratus2 made it classical and venerable. Ossian, De Quincey, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and some English writers of the Yellow Book period restored it, and even gave it popularity.3 We believe that Sir Thomas Browne was born for it, and that Lamb lost something by missing it. Today no one speaks of it; no writer of repute has anything to do with it. 2  The books reviewed include works by two American poets: Odes and Elegies by Clinton Scollard (1860–1932) and Collected Sonnets of Lloyd Mifflin. ET says of Scollard: ‘His rhythms are raised above mediocrity only by their almost unvaried pomp’; of Mifflin: ‘Three hundred and fifty times, in this volume, the sonnet has made him say grandiose or vague or sweet things which reveal nothing, except that the writer has been in the habit of reading poetry.’ For Mifflin, see [82] and note. 1  For ET’s interest in the ‘frontier’ between prose and poetry, see [1]. He calls some of his own prose ‘prose poems’, as when he tells GB (6 August 1904): ‘Tonight I am going to sketch 300 words for a petite poème en prose [Baudelaire’s definition]: but it is not for me to be “concise, carven, jewelled”, my dear Gordon!’ (LGB, 61). See Jeremy Noel-Tod (ed.), The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018). 2  Philostratus (c.170–247): historian, biographer, and essayist, celebrated for his Greek prose-style. 3  For Ossian, see [151]; the Yellow Book (1894–7), to which Symons contributed, was the housemagazine of fin-de-siècle Aestheticism.

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It has never yet been accepted, it has never had a real vogue; certainly it has never been immersed in that bath of common practice out of which other forms have successfully emerged. Such prose poems as survive are of so high an excellence that it may have seemed hard to their admirers to use a similar form without a similar material. The man who reads Milton and writes, however much he may wish to possess a blank-­verse style not utterly unworthy of his master, has seldom any wish to write of man’s first disobedience. But many who have read Baudelaire must have been at once moved to imitate both his medium and his material, though not many are born with his power of sincerely living on air. And this seems to us to point to the beautiful way in which the prose poets have made their form and substance one. It is certainly true that the verse form is still a surprise to us. It is recognised as part of the decorations of an hierarchy, which the plain man may not use. There are few who could honestly say, after reading a great poem, that it could not have been equally great had the stanza form, for example, been different; to that extent we do distinguish between matter and form in poetry. Prose, on the other hand, is familiar to us. Everyone thinks that he can write prose, if only because he can write nothing else. Thus most of us come to prose with a predisposition to real enjoyment, and we should be inclined to think that here, then, is some encouragement to the poet in prose. But familiarity breeds a hypocritical sort of contempt. It is so easy to read prose. A lazy man gets through the prose poet’s thousand words or so without effort, but comes suddenly to the end and merely asks, ‘Is that all?’ Yet apparently it is true that any kind of literature which is to succeed must at least silence, if it does not please, the lazy man. Will the prose poem ever silence him? We believe that it will, and this book should be distributed by a charitable society with this end in view. We believe that a prose form as honest, as consistent, as impressionistic as Whistler’s painting must arise. We have only to read a good novel to see that the mind of even a very clever man is not equal to such spacious work; we can often extract exquisite pages from it which are, as they stand, good prose poems. Borrow4 really wrote about six prose poems; yet he now wearies us with six bad books. So does De Quincey—­and a hundred more. Economically, 4  George Borrow (1803–81): travel-writer and novelist, known for his links with the Romany people. His works include The Bible in Spain (1843), Lavengro (1851), and The Romany Rye (1857). ET wrote introductions to the Everyman’s Library editions of The Bible in Spain (1906) and The Zincali: An Account of the Gipsies of Spain (1914); edited The Pocket George Borrow (London: Chatto and Windus, 1912); and published a critical biography: George Borrow: The Man and his Books (London: Chapman and Hall, 1912).

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therefore, the prose poem is to be recommended. Artistically, as Mr Symons shows in his perfect renderings of ‘Which is True?’ and ‘Be Drunken’, and ‘A Heroic Death’, it is admirable. Also, it is natural and difficult, and it is an appropriate receptacle for most thoughts which are not of the highest kind. By a careful elimination of the obvious, the facile, the irrelevant, the prose poet may thus not only stay the multitudinous tide of books, but even silence the lazy man. DC: 25 [possibly 15] January 

The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, edited with a memoir by Ernest Hartley Coleridge1 [. . .] Every edition of Byron’s poetry should be accompanied by his life. The letters and journals and contemporary memorials are quite inseparable from his verse. There should be all the possible portraits as well. For Byron’s life is the only life of a poet, except FitzGerald’s,2 which it was ever necessary to write. His life embraced epitomes of all men’s lives. His acts were representative; from his Harrow meditations on a grave,3 to his death on the superb pedestal of Missolonghi, they are symbolic. But, what is more, his life explains nearly everything in his poetry; it gives us his material, his motives, his moods, everything except the mysterious impulse which enabled and compelled him to write in verse. And the life and the poetry together make an incomparable whole. Most lives of poets stand to their work as a block of unhewn marble stands to the statue finished 1 ET incorporated passages from this review, and from his recent reviews of editions of Chaucer [115] and Shelley [143], into Chapter VII of SC (ETPW II, 277–92). 2  Presumably Edward FitzGerald (1809–83). In 1859 and subsequently, FitzGerald published a much-imitated translation of the Rubáiyát [quatrains] of the Persian poet Omar Khayyám (1048–1131). His translation followed one of the traditional Persian rhyme-schemes: AABA—­ which may have influenced the scheme of ET’s poem ‘The Ash Grove’ (ACP, 108). The comparison with Byron appears paradoxical, since FitzGerald lived quietly in rural Suffolk; but ET seems to have been intrigued by a writer, of whom he says in a review of his letters (a centenary publication): ‘life was his art. His one creation was the image in his letters of himself ’ (SR: 3 April 1909). He also thinks (accurately) that ‘The Rubaiyat . . . has seen its best days’. 3  As a schoolboy at Harrow, Byron composed poems while sitting on a tomb in St Mary parish church.

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and unveiled. Byron’s poetry without his life is not finished; but with it, surely it resembles a statue by Rodin or Michael Angelo that is actually seen to grow out of the material. Perhaps it is true of many another poet, as it is certainly true of Byron, that he was a man before he was a poet. But how few lives there are which in any way establish this. They may have once been men; they are not so now. It is impossible satisfactorily to connect Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell—­even Keats and Tennyson—­with their work. We read their lives after their poetry, as a rule; we forget them, or remember them apart from the poetry. It is by their poetry that they survive—­blithe or pathetic or glorious, but dim, ghosts who are become a part of the silence of libraries and lovers’ hearts. They are dead but for the mind that enjoys and the voice that utters them. I have not the smallest curiosity about Mr Swinburne, though he is alive and visible. When I think of him, I think of Rosamund speaking to Eleanor or Tristram to Isoud; he has given up his life for them and for his songs.4 But with Byron it is different. If all record of him could be destroyed, if all his portraits and all recollection of them were to disappear, more than half of him would be lost. For I think that it is upon the life and the portraits and the echoes which are still echoing in Europe, that we found our belief that he is now the largest and most splendid Man who is remembered. Without them, he would be an interesting rhetorician, it may be. So long as we have them, he is, at least for another age yet, the ‘Pilgrim of Eternity’,5 the sublime showman of the earth, of times present, past, of Nature and men and women. As he is in life and poetry together, he seems to be the equal of all men and things of which he wrote. When he writes of Greece, he seems, more than all statesmen, generals, historians, philosophers, to be in some sense worthy to think in masses and numbers. When we read onward from ‘The spouseless Adriatic mourns her lord’, he seems the peer at least of the noblest of the Doges, just as he is the peer of Napoleon when he exclaims:— But thou, forsooth, must be a king   And don the purple vest, As if that foolish robe could wring   Remembrance from thy breast. Where is that faded garment? Where 4  Among the works of Algernon Charles Swinburne are a verse-tragedy, Rosamond (1860), and the epic poem ‘Tristram of Lyonesse’ (1882). 5  Shelley’s name for Byron in ‘Adonais’.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 The gewgaws thou wert fond to wear,   The star, the string, the crest? Vain froward child of Empire! say, Are all thy playthings snatch’d away?6

How majestic his contempt for Alfonso d’Este7—not the intellectual or emotional contempt of a literary man for a duke, but a great man’s rebuke to a lesser:— Thou! formed to eat, and be despised, and die, Even as the beasts that perish—­save that thou Hadst a more splendid trough and wider sty.

Even of Rome he is more co-­founder than casual inhabitant. He holds her in his hand, as, in an old picture, a bishop holds his cathedral; he might say, with Bourbon in The Deformed Transformed:8— Through every change the seven-­hilled city hath Retained her sway o’er nations, and the Caesars But yielded to the Alarics, the Alarics Unto the pontiffs. Roman, Goth, or priest, Still the world’s masters! Civilised, barbarian, Or saintly, still the walls of Romulus Have been the circus of an Empire. Well! ’Twas their turn—­now ’tis ours.

There are finer poems than his Mazeppa: but in the zest and fury of the narrative he is the equal of that wild lover and Centaur, as he is the equal of the great King who slept while the tale was told.9 The criticism of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, the thought of The Age of Bronze, are not great, and should the day come when Byron dies, their readers may be little moved;10 but the rage of Juvenal is not to be compared with Byron’s rage today. 6 Line (IV.xi) from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18); stanza from ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’. 7  ET continues to quote from Canto IV of Childe Harold (xxxviii); where Byron depicts Alfonso II d’Este (1559–97), Duke of Ferrara, as a ‘miserable despot’ because he had locked up the poet Torquato Tasso (1544–95). Byron’s attack is not entirely fair: Tasso was mentally ill and confined to an asylum where he was well treated. 8  Play by Byron (1824). 9  Mazeppa: narrative poem about a Ukrainian hero, tied to a wild horse by an elderly count whose young wife he has seduced. ET’s poem ‘Health’ (ACP, 83) names Mazeppa, along with Caesar, Shakespeare, and other worthies, in a catalogue of men who personify ‘power’. 10  English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809): satirical poem in which Byron attacks the Edinburgh Review, edited by Francis Jeffrey (see [456]), for its scathingly dismissive review of his

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What is praise of Byron as we feel him now is not all praise of Byron the poet. For he treated poetry cruelly, and like a giant. There are few pages in his work where the thought and emotion are transfigured into unquestionable poetry. His thought and emotion are usually developed not gradually and by imperceptible degrees as in the greatest poets, but by sudden starts. We see him building up his impression, binding the lovely verse, not as Keats does, with flowers and such painless bonds, but with chains that cut. Take a stanza like this, which is far from being the worst in Childe Harold:— I can repeople with the past—­and of The present there is still for eye and thought, And meditation chastened down, enough; And more, it may be, than I hoped or sought; And of the happiest moments which were wrought Within the web of my existence, some From thee, fair Venice! have their colours caught: There are some feelings Time cannot benumb, Nor Torture shake, or mine would now be cold and dumb.11

Such stanzas are countless, and they show us Byron crushing his thought into the verse before it has reached its final shape, and has consented to wed the verse. No other great poet suggests so often that his work can be paraphrased without fatal loss. In Don Juan, even in much-­praised passages, there is not one verse in a hundred which can be read without an in­stant­an­eous sense of the writer’s ingenuity and brute force. His was a crude eighteenth century stomach with a genuine craving for nineteenth century food, and the result could not invariably be admirable.12 Should his life be forgotten, these things will tell heavily against him, and it may not be so clear that he was a Titan as that he was a gentleman who wrote with ease and a rhymer’s lexicon. DC: 13 February 

first collection, Hours of Idleness (1807). He also attacks Wordsworth and Coleridge; but later suppressed the poem because he regretted sentiments expressed when (as he told Walter Scott) ‘very young and very angry’. The Age of Bronze; or, carmen seculare et annus haud mirabilis (1823) is a satirical poem about the political and economic fall-out of the Napoleonic wars. 11  Childe Harold, IV.xix. 12  Despite Byron’s suppression of English Bards, he commands in the first canto of Don Juan (1819): ‘Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope; / Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey’.

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Gordon Bottomley, Midsummer Eve,1 with drawings by James Guthrie Of the thousands who read such plays as Romeo and Juliet, how many have admitted to themselves that its fairest speeches owe at least half their interest to the fact that they suggest Shakespeare’s view of the way in which perfect and gallant and youthful love would express itself were the world less pitiful than it is? Admiration for Shakespeare’s knowledge of men and women has too often drowned the admiration no less demanded for his superb and lovely egoism, that sets him as high in their own kingdom as Spenser and Sidney and Shelley and Keats. We read, ‘O speak again, bright angel’,2 and too seldom we think of Shakespeare, too often of an incredible and long ago perished Italian. But until we realise how much of this ‘impersonal’ poet there is in his characters, we shall be prone to express a bewildered and angry astonishment at Mr Gordon Bottomley’s obsession of the characters in his new play, Midsummer Eve. Here, as in his other poems, whether in lyric or dramatic form, he has gone to the deepest wells of his own personality, and though the draughts glimmer a little in the light of sun or moon or stars, they retain the in­cal­cul­ able and haunting gloom from which they came. His characters are five kitchen and dairy girls—­Nan, Bet, Ursel, Maudlin and Lib; Roger, a carter, and Mease, a cowherd. His scene is ‘a long time ago’ in ‘an old barn on a knoll’, looking upon ‘a solitary, fruitfully overgrown valley shut in from everywhere’. It is Midsummer eve; and almost as if he were bent on an extreme and glorious assertion of the poet’s right, of which we have spoken, to appear through his characters, as a strange and beautiful spirit sometimes appears through unpromising eyes and lips, so he makes these men and women the medium for his expression of many of the moods which summer and night and rich landscapes, bringing many gifts, have brought to him. Ursel’s first speech, for example, is this: 1  ET commented on Midsummer Eve in letters to GB (3 May 1905, 11 January 1906): ‘Are you wanting Midsummer Eve? I read it once, ten days ago, & that is not enough to make sure of my likes & dislikes. I took a sinister joy in the names of your persons and the gross rusticity of some of the detail & conversation, as contrasted with the pure Gordon of the greater part. Of course like anybody else, I quarrel (on first reading) with the dramatic form, and enjoy the lack of any sense of time & place. At present I don’t like—­or rather I don’t see—­the whole, but I like most of the lines. But the fact is I am only moved to say I like many lines & believe I can like the whole in time’ (LGB, 83). ‘I read Midsummer Eve the other day with complete delight & shall struggle to say so in a way that will please you. I shall not review you with the Multitude: so you may have to wait. The Academy sent your book elsewhere in spite of my request & their promise’ (LGB, 101–2). 2 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, II.ii.

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September, O, September’s in the song— I will not have September in my heart, The ending of so much deliciousness, The year’s sad luscious over-­ripening. Yet here’s the haysel done with: how it hurt To rake behind the last dim cart; and now My soul creeps in me like the low pale night-­mist To know that in a moment past this moment We shall not hear it slowly any more Down in the lane where, wisping the close trees, It follows us like a mournful sound of change. [. . .]

And throughout the play the writer allows no dramatic conventions to deflect his purpose of expressing midsummer nights as he has known them, and as he has pleased himself with dreaming that they may be in the unknown spirits of men and women who are part of them. Not that he neglects his characters, though he has hypnotised them, and filled them with his thought; they are, in fact, delicately distinguished; but he treats them, as everyone admits that Lancelot and Tristram and Palamedes3 may be treated, and as many people do in truth treat the men and women among whom they live—­skeletons whom we must clothe with our own flesh, and lose some of our own breath and vitality in giving life to them. To everyone who ac­know­ledges not only the legitimacy, but the naturalness, of such an attitude, the play, with its own fine and appropriate drawings by Mr James Guthrie,4 will be a joy, summer and winter. DC: 26 February

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 3 Vols [no editor given] [. . .] The Anatomy of Melancholy gives us the joy of reading, beyond all other books. When we have once opened it, we are not called upon to watch a 3  Knights of the Round Table. 4  James J. Guthrie (1874–1952), also publisher of Midsummer Eve, had founded The Pear Tree Press, in 1899. Guthrie was a painter, illustrator, and printer, influenced by William Blake and William Morris. When ET moved to Hampshire in November 1906, GB told him that Guthrie lived nearby. ET and Guthrie became friends. In 1916 The Pear Tree Press would publish Six Poems by Edward Eastaway (ET’s pseudonym). For ET and Guthrie, see JMW, 163–5.

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c­ haracter or a theory, or to submit to another man’s view of life. But we go to it, as persons belonging to a highly civilised or consummately depraved gen­ er­ation, to take in its most perfect form one of our characteristic pleasures. As Burton himself says: King James, 1605, when he came to see our University of Oxford, and amongst other edifices now went to view that famous library, renewed by Sir Thomas Bodley, in imitation of Alexander, at his departure brake out into that noble speech, If I were not a king, I would be an university man: and if it were so that I must be a prisoner, if I might have my wish, I would desire to have no other prison than that library . . . Heinsius, the keeper of the library at Leyden, in Holland, was mewed up in it all the year long: and that which to thy thinking should have bred a loathing, caused in him a greater liking. I no sooner (saith he) come into the library, but I bolt the door to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices, whose nurse is idleness, the mother of ignorance, and melancholy herself, and in the very lap of eternity, amongst so many divine souls, I take my seat, with so lofty a spirit and sweet content, that I pity all our great ones, and rich men that know not this happiness.

The book is itself such a prison, a wood beyond the world in which we meet the spirits of all ages.1 We abdicate, for the time being, our right to experience, to start long thoughts, to be troubled by the difficulty of filling in some comely manner whatever years or hours of life are left to us. We do not even, as we try to do, in reading history, venture upon the awful task of contemplating times past, of understanding them, of seeing from whence we came. We do not, as in reading some poet, give ourselves into the hands of a conductor who is to show us his own heaven and hell. But, for the most part, we surrender to the strange indulgence of noticing what men have said and done in all ages and places, yet without any corrections from history or geography. The probably true, the ludicrously false, the busy careless ingenuities of bookmen spinning webs from one book to another, and the heart’s cries of great men, endless assertions, conclusions, arrangements of words, are here all mingled with the mysterious smiles and sighs of an old bachelor of divinity and fellow of Christ Church, of whom nothing is known.

1  Here ET celebrates the comprehensiveness of the Anatomy, ostensibly written by ‘Democritus Junior’, but actually by Robert Burton (1577–1640): an Anglican clergyman who led a reclusive life as scholar, administrator, and librarian at Oxford University. Burton’s subtitle begins: ‘What it is; with all the Kindes, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it’, and promises that the three volumes are ‘Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically Opened and Cut up’. ‘Wood beyond the world’ alludes to William Morris’s novel The Wood Beyond the World (1894): a pioneer work of fantasy fiction.

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Burton was an excellent master of the English tongue. Some of his writing, in ‘Exercise Rectified’, and the ‘Digression of Air’, for example, is not only fluent and rich, but it comes up from the deeps of a man who had searched the world and himself. His laughter is good. His irony is of the best kind, apparently unconscious and true to the man’s nature and not merely to his knowledge of what will cause a smile, as when he says: In former times they had but seven wise men, now you can scarce find so many fools.

Or (of lawyers): they . . . are so litigious and busy here on earth, that I think they will plead their clients’ causes hereafter, some of them in hell.

But, above all, Burton is the great reader, the great example and patron of reading; a man who has moved among books in an enchanted contentment, which he invites us to achieve. ‘I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy.’2 He calls the book a ‘Cento out of divers writers’; ‘here and there I pull a flower’. He seems to have been a man to whom gradually, and no doubt not quite consciously, multitudinous books of the past had come to be so powerful as to entangle his own personality inextricably, with the host of passions, virtues, vices, desires, successes, failures, beautiful, splendid, ugly, terrible things of which he had read. No book so much as his gives us a sense of the immensity of the past, of the infinite numbers of the dead, the littleness of the living generation, the brevity of now. On one page he quotes from, or refers to, Virgil, Juvenal, Horace, Seneca, Petronius, Euripides, Philip Gaultier, Cardan,3 and three or four others with whom he familiarly lived. What wonder, then, that on the same page he says: Our villages are like mole-­hills, and men as so many emmets, busy, busy still, going to and fro, in and out, and crossing one another’s projects, as the lines of several sea-­cards cut each other in a globe or map.

There are old libraries where we can sometimes meet with perhaps a child or a foolish learned man or a spider, yet even these trifling living things are not so drowned by the mass and complexity and obscurity of the ancient books 2 As both ‘reading animal’ and his own psychoanalyst, Burton evidently appealed to corresponding qualities in ET. ‘Melancholy’ is the title of a poem by ET, and he reflects on the word in ‘The Other’ and ‘October’ (ACP, 85, 42, 101). It’s interesting that this review should anticipate several poems. 3  Philip Gaultier: thirteenth-century French poet, author of Alexandrics; Cardan: Gerolamo Cardano (1501–76), Italian physician and polymath.

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as to us, while we read, the dead old reader, Burton, is drowned, obsessed by thousands of authors, generals, beautiful women, wizards, kings, prophets, gods, etc. The book is a most powerful allegory of the age and density of the world. The writer is but as a yellow poppy by a great and angry sea, or a little wood-­sorrel plant in an old, dead and dripping oak-­wood4 far from men. And he invites us to become like himself. We open the book, and straightway we are even less than he, entangled and of dubious personality. For of his thousands of authors, we do not in any sense know a hundred. They are little more than names; and yet here are their words; they once lived. They are less than the ghosts who fluttered about Ulysses, except that they speak Latin and Greek. Burton has put up tombstones for them, written their epitaphs; the dead, the living, the eloquent, the commonplace, the passionate, the dull, are mingled as when children walk among the tombs in a country churchyard. There are pages that seem to have been torn from the book of the recording angel, so impartial and brief is he. Only now and then a piece of lovely rhetoric or a true, sweet cry makes a glade in the dark wood, and gives us a sudden sense of life, such as must come to a man who lays bare the gods and monkeys and corpse and gold of an ancient Egyptian tomb.5 To look up, after being long alone with Burton, and to see the shop-­window or dung-­cart or purple mountain outside the window, is to taste most sharply the reality of books, as contrasted with the unreality of other things. Such moments are the topmost of a man’s life as a reading animal. DC: 3 March 

The Poems of William Cowper, edited with an introduction and notes by J. C. Bailey [. . .] At the beginning of his introduction, Mr Bailey reminds us that Young and Churchill1 and other clever contemporaries of Cowper’s are nearly extinct, 4  A dead oak tree symbolizes age and oblivion in ET’s poem ‘The Green Roads’ (ACP, 128). 5  ET’s poem ‘Swedes’ evokes a boy who ‘crawls down into a Pharaoh’s tomb’, and ‘beholds the mummy, / God and monkey, chariot and throne and vase, / Blue pottery, alabaster, and gold’ (ACP, 54). He also employs this image in HE (18). 1 Edward Young (1683–1765), best known for Night Thoughts (1742–5); Charles Churchill (1731–64), author of The Rosciad: a verse-satire on the theatre.

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and asks, why should Cowper survive? In his answer he says several good things. Cowper’s poetry, he says, ‘is a kind of Divine accident’, because it came without any of the ‘obvious calls’; his work was great ‘by simple effluence of the poet in him’, and was made out of ‘just what came into his head’. He is ‘an accidental, occasional, only half-­conscious poet’. Where others (writes Mr Bailey) made their poetry out of passion, he was able to make his out of a quiet affection, which is rather tenderness than love: where others looked to the grand or the sublime for inspiration, he turns always, from the beginning, to simple and humble things. . . . He will be the poet of the country and the home.

But the editor appears to believe that there is something, and something valuable, in Cowper which is not to be found in Wordsworth; he fears that it is possible that Cowper will be superseded. That Cowper will die is possible. But we believe that he will live, first, through the association of his poetry with his body of letters, the one continually helping the other and sending readers to the other;2 and secondly, through the wonderful epitome of a whole age, of a transition from one age to another, which his work contains. Apart from these conditions, it is not likely that his poems, except as undoubted pieces of antiquity, will very long survive the probable advances in the kinds of poetry of which his were the prelusive notes. Perhaps the lines to his mother’s picture alone could not be replaced in any age. The first condition of Cowper’s immortality, to use a comprehensive term, we believe to be evident. Together, the letters and the poems make up a record of a man’s life not easily to be paralleled. The number of men who have two such powerful holds upon life is so few that men and women will not soon cease to acknowledge this one. The second condition is perhaps less acceptable; yet we are inclined to think that no one who reads much poetry can fairly enjoy Cowper without at some time admitting it. It is quite true that in his early poems, as Mr Bailey says, he reveals the nature which in the end expressed itself freely by means of some very fine poems. It is also true that his mature work is admirable in itself. But to one who has read all of Cowper, and has had the luck to read him at leisure, how incomparably the early promise and the mature achievement gain by being brought together in the mind! Cowper’s poems take us right out of a country ruled by Prior to the Lady of the Lake— 2  Reviewing an edition of Cowper’s Correspondence, ET had called the letters ‘his refuge from the dignity of literature’, and said: ‘His own temper destined him to make a particularly fine instrument of the letter’ (DC: 5 April 1904). ET drew on both reviews for his chapter on Cowper in LPE (203–11).

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 Sole-­sitting by the shores of old romance.3

Lines like those written to ‘C. P., Esq. ill with the rheumatism’ are good: Grant me the Muse, ye gods! whose humble flight Seeks not the mountain-­top’s pernicious height; Who can the tall Parnassian cliff forsake To visit oft the still Lethean lake . . .

And so are: For thou art born sole heir, and single, Of dear Mat Prior’s easy jingle.

These from his earliest work, while from his later it is easy to take passages like the— How then should I and any man that lives Be strangers to each other? . . .

And: For I have loved the rural walk through lanes Of grassy swarth, close cropped by nibbling sheep, And skirted thick with intertexture firm Of thorny boughs . . .4

But when these occur, not in two different authors, but with an interval of a generation, in the work of one man, the sense of growth adds to their charm. And not only is his later work to be connected with his earlier, and his earlier with that of his conventional contemporaries, but the later itself fills its ne­ces­sary place so pleasantly in the genealogical tree of English poetry. Take, e.g., this passage from ‘The Sofa’: There often wanders one whom better days Saw better clad, in cloak of satin trimmed With lace, that was with splendid riband bound. A serving-­maid was she, and fell in love With one who left her, went to sea, and died. 3  For ET on Matthew Prior (1664–1721), see [252]. He places Cowper (1731–1800) between Prior and the date of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), which includes Wordsworth’s ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’. The line quoted, depicting a ‘Lady of the Mere’, is from the fourth section. 4  ET has quoted from ‘An Epistle to Robert Lloyd’; ‘The Garden’ (The Task, Book III, 200–1); and ‘The Sofa’ (The Task, Book I, 109–12), from which he proceeds to quote at greater length (534–56).

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Her fancy followed him through foaming waves To distant shores, and she would sit and weep At what a sailor suffers . . . She heard the doleful tidings of his death, And never smiled again. And now she roams The dreary waste; there spends the livelong day, And there, unless when charity forbids, The livelong night. A tattered apron hides, Worn as a cloak, and hardly hides, a gown More tattered still; and both but ill conceal A bosom heaved with never-­ceasing sighs. She begs an idle pin of all she meets, And hoards them in her sleeve; but needful food, Though pressed with hunger oft, or comelier clothes, Though pinched with cold, asks never.—Kate is crazed.

That sends us to Wordsworth with no uncertain call5 as ‘Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness’ sends us to Keats.6 There is something a little pathetic in Cowper’s position between, but not of, two great ages of a poetry, unless we remind ourselves clearly that we are assisting at the growth of English poetry as we turn his pages; that in him the future and the past seem to have combined to make a singular and delightful present. DC: 21 March 

Charles M. Doughty, The Dawn in Britain, Vols I and II1 These two volumes contain a large part—­the first half, we believe—­of a poem on the beginnings of Britain. We are hungry for the rest; but this instalment,

5  ET was drawn to ‘those mad maids and their songs that are so characteristic of English poetry’, as in Wordsworth’s ‘Ruth’ (FIP, 87). His own poem ‘She dotes’ belongs to this genre (ACP, 84). He may also imply that Cowper’s fine blank verse anticipates Wordsworth’s. 6  First line of Book II (‘The Time-Piece’) of The Task. 1 During 1906 ET argued with GB (and himself) about Doughty, writing on 3 May: ‘Doughty—­I am reading him again & find hardly any difficulty in the performance. No doubt he is wrong, tho I believe he could not have done otherwise. I feel that his total effect is finer than that of any long English poem except The Faerie Queene; but I haven’t time to find out why’ (LGB, 108). See review of Vols III and IV [208].

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if not complete in itself, is at least as satisfactory as would be the first six books of the Aeneid without the rest. Nor do we mention the Aeneid carelessly, or merely because in both there is an under-­world. Mr Doughty seems to us to regard the early history of Britain with a reverence as solemn and royal as Virgil’s for Rome, and to sing of it with a use of history and legend, and under the guidance of a large and tender muse, which are not unworthy of the high comparison. But Mr Doughty is a man of immense reading, of preferences that he follows in a quite unclassical discursiveness, and whims also. In place of the simplicity of the Roman poem, here is a strange and dark intertexture which was only to be expected, both from the character of our age and from the nature of early history, to which the mythopoeic spirit no longer can, and science will not yet, give any clear unity. In fact, it is one of the many fas­cin­ at­ing qualities of this poem that it presents to us the uncertain immensities of the pre-­Roman age by means of many details from myths and legend in themselves quite blithe and clear and desirable. Just as a man might succeed in impressing us with the dense mist of birds’ songs at dawn in May, at the same time that he revealed to us what the songs were, and where the blackbird was hid, and where the thrush; so Mr Doughty sets down nothing that is not clear and in its place, and yet rather adds to than takes away from the paramount strangeness of the dawn in Britain. ‘Record’, he says to his muse— What antique wights dwelled ere in this sweet soil; Who kings, of sacred seed, bare o’er them rule; What gods adored then the blue-­pictured Britons. Sith tumults, great war-­deeds of Britain’s sons; And erst of glorious Brennus in Mainland. Who conquered Rome, and Italy did burn; And arms of his great seed, still turned gainst Rome . . .

And after hinting at the ‘land of cloud and frost’, which earliest Britain was, he goes on to the immigration of a noble race from Gaul—­the intercourse of Britain with Gaul—­the immense war journeys of Britons and Gauls under Brennus to Spain and Italy and Rome, under a second Brennus to Macedonia and Greece, under Britomart to Galatia.2 Caesar’s invasion of Gaul and Britain follows. Then, in ‘Mona’s temple-­cave’, is heard a voice saying: ‘Him worship, all ye Briton gods!’ The birth of Christ, the sailing of Joseph of 2  Brennus: Gaulish chieftain whose army defeated the Romans and occupied Rome (387 bce); Britomart: not Spenser’s warrior-princess, but a ‘stout’ and ‘warlike’ male Gaulish leader.

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Arimathea for Britain, and his landing there, conclude the published half of the poem. And in all this, there is no trace of mere untransfigured antiquarianism. If that is any recommendation, it is as easy to read and enjoy as Marmion.3 There is no history like it, except in the best of Livy. In poetry it reminds us of the Aeneid, and, in its quaintness and lack of arbitrary unity, of Firdausi’s Shahnama.4 If we may hazard a somewhat sacrilegious guess, only Milton’s unaccomplished Arthurian poem could have equalled this. Of its great movement we can give no idea. It befits the beautiful heroic characters pursuing great dim ends and enjoying, which are its subject. A hundred examples of Mr Doughty’s narrative and pictorial power crowd upon us at once, and forbid us to try to hint at any of his breadth by quota­tion. Malory’s largeness and unconsciousness—­Drayton’s loving and ambitious patriotism—­Mr Sturge Moore’s grip, and absolute honesty of vision—­no! Neither will comparisons help us. The voyage of Joseph of Arimathea is in itself a great poem. It has the life of Mr Conrad’s ‘Youth’; and it has a pre-­Raphaelite strangeness and truth for which we can find no parallels except in the best of Morris. But a poor bookish reviewer, bewildered by an apparition of new greatness and beauty, might go on thus with imperfect comparisons for ever, and do Mr Doughty small justice. He might quote hundreds of lines to illustrate Mr Doughty’s exquisite use of blank verse and yet never praise adequately its variety, its dignity, and its perfect harmony with his thought. He might also show how easy it is for anyone to ridicule the poet’s astonishing classicisms of construction and apparent fantasies of spelling. We will simply quote one example of his narrative, which will come familiarly to those who have read Livy’s account of Brennus’s capture of Rome: Were some, which entered in a temple court, Helvetians: there they marvel see one sit, Old reverend sire, on throne of ivory! Whose eyes like coals, under his frozen brows; Them seems some ancient purpled magistrate, Of Rome’s forsaken city. Ingenuous Gauls, Such deeming, gin salute him in their guise.

3  Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field (1808): narrative poem by Walter Scott. 4  Firdausi (also Ferdowsi and other versions) was the adopted name of the poet (c.935–1020) who created the Persian national epic, Shahnameh (usual transliteration), ‘Book of Kings’, which remains fundamental to Iranian culture. ET was then reviewing a translation. He calls it ‘one of the great books of the world’ (DC: 5 April).

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Some, touched his raiment, ask, in their land’s speech, What be’st thou for a man, that thus here sittest? Recording one, with sigh, his father old, His long, long hoary beard, gan gently smooth. That sullen Roman lifts his sceptre rod, Of glancing ivory, and the young warrior smote. [. . .]

When we have the whole book before us, we expect to find it a noble English epic. DC: 30 March

The Poetical Works of William Blake: A new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals, edited by John Sampson (Oxford: Clarendon Press); The Lyrical Poems of William Blake, text by John Sampson, with an introduction by Walter Raleigh (Oxford: Clarendon Press) Messrs Sampson and Raleigh put us all under an obligation to them in these two books—­Mr Raleigh by the most careful and sympathetic essay which an uninspired admirer of Blake could write, and Mr Sampson by the text and introductions and notes to which he has devoted immense and subtle labours. Mr Sampson’s work, to be honest, appals us by its immensity, while its subtlety confuses us, so that we can only with some hesitation express our opinion that this is the most perfect edition of Blake’s poems which can be got. It includes everything—­down to the most fragmentary or rudimentary pieces—­except the Prophetic Books, and from them it has rifled, if not all the lyrical passages, at least all that a majority of critics would agree to call poetry.1 The aim of some of the other editors seems to have been to get as much ordinary ‘sense’ as possible into the text of Blake’s poetry; Mr Sampson’s aim has been to get as much as possible of Blake. And this perfectly faithful text is a necessity, if Blake is in the end to be interpreted by his written words. The keynote of Blake’s poetry is to be found in a little poem, included in the Rossetti MS., ‘The Angel’. He says: 1  See ET on The Prophetic Books of William Blake: Jerusalem [77].

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The Angel that presided o’er my birth Said ‘Little creature, form’d of Joy and Mirth, Go, love without the help of anything on Earth.’

For it is as a man loving and seeing ‘without the help of anything on earth’ that Blake is remarkable. It is true that he read a good deal; that he came at  one time or another under the influence of the Bible, the Elizabethans, Milton and Swedenborg.2 It is true that he says himself: Milton lov’d me in childhood, and shew’d me his face; Ezra came with Isaiah the Prophet, but Shakespeare in riper years gave me his hand; Paracelsus and Behmen appeared to me . . .3

It is even true that, as Mr Raleigh says, poems like ‘My silks and fine array’ might almost be Elizabethan. But he was indebted to these men and books only as Columbus was indebted to a king. In spite of them, he stands and works alone. He is out of the stream of English literature. His one true predecessor, Thomas Traherne,4 he never knew. His most characteristic work seems to owe nothing to anyone else, but to spring straight from the brain of Blake or from the universe which he contemplated, or from an electric union of the two. Here are few chances for the editor who delights in revealing parallel passages. He belongs to the reign, not of Jupiter, but of Saturn, and he has the ‘large utterance of the early Gods’.5 Convention persuades us that he could not have come anywhere in our literature except with Cowper and Wordsworth; but his place is probably as much with unborn generations as with them. For, if in many things he is as old as the Psalms, the still vague and small appeal of other parts of his work suggests that he is younger than us all. He faces the world free from all the influences of race, rank, profession, tradition, epoch, to which other poets are subject, however great. And his poetry has two uses. It is to be enjoyed by all those fettered generations who have followed him. It is to urge one or two here and there in each of these 2 Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772): Swedish Lutheran scientist, inventor, theologian, philosopher, and mystic, who believed that he could talk with angels and demons in heaven and hell. 3 Quotation from ‘To my Dearest Friend John Flaxman’. Paracelsus [Theophrastus von Hohenheim] (1493–1541): Swiss physician, innovator in field of medical science, philosopher, and alchemist; Jakob Behmen [Böhme, Boehme] (1575–1624): German Lutheran philosopher and mystic. 4  For Traherne, see [58]. 5  Phrase from Keats’s ‘The Fall of Hyperion’ (I.353).

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generations to stand aside, as he did, and to see how the world looks, without the prodigious telescope of tradition, or, worse still, the glass of fashion streaming and obscured with the vapour of a multitude’s breath, through one or other of which we usually look out. Yet no man could have cared less for proselytising. He asks to be understood, not that those who understand may follow him, but that they may follow no man. As might have been expected, the result of this strange use of his own eyes was simplicity mingled with subtlety. Both shame the results of the visions of common day. Consider, for example, the simplicity of his ‘Laughing Song’: When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, And the dimpling stream runs laughing by; When the air does laugh with our merry wit, And the green hill laughs with the noise of it; When the meadows laugh with lively green, And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene, And when Mary and Susan and Emily With their sweet round mouths sing ‘Ha, Ha, He!’ When the painted birds laugh in the shade, When our table with cherries and nuts is spread, Come live, and be merry, and join with me, To sing the sweet chorus of ‘Ha, Ha, He!’6

It seems to contain hardly more than would a child’s babble of its happiness; and yet, if we except several more by the same poet, it is the only poem in English whose pure joy is unstained by anything in the words or thoughts; it is one of the few proofs in literature that there was once a golden age. Then consider the poem which begins thus:7 To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour. A Robin Redbreast in a Cage Puts all Heaven in a Rage. A dove-­house fill’d with Doves and Pigeons Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions. A dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate Predicts the ruin of the State. A Horse misused upon the Road 6  ET included ‘Laughing Song’ in PBPS.   7  ‘Auguries of Innocence’.

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Calls to Heaven for Human blood. Each outcry of the hunted Hare A fibre from the Brain doth tear. A Skylark wounded in the wing; A Cherubim does cease to sing.

The unity of the world was never expressed so dearly or so terribly; this poem and its marvellous pendants in Jerusalem and elsewhere make us tremble with mingled regret at the thought of how much the schoolmaster and parent and the conspiracy of fate can take away or withhold, and ex­pect­ation at the thought of how much less powerful they may some day be. It is clear that Blake feels that ecstasy in the presence of all life which we feel, or are compelled to feign, in the presence of its most grandiose mani­fest­ations—­a beautiful form, a lily, a sunset or a tragedy. He sees the alehouse, ‘healthy and pleasant and warm’, which the little vagabond prefers to the cold church.8 He sees the earth full of— . . . all that has existed in the space of six thousand years: Permanent, and not lost (not lost) nor vanish’d, and every little act, Word, work, and wish, that has existed, all remaining still In those Churches ever consuming and ever building. . . . Shadowy to those who dwell not in them, mere possibilities: But to those who enter into them they seem the only substances . . .9

He sees ‘Pancrass and Kentish-­town repose Among her golden pillars high’ in Jerusalem. And he sees them all with that direct and joyous communion which we can sometimes have with the eyes of a child. His work persuades us to this communion. His message seems to be—­character, which either disregards or overthrows all barriers between desire and the desirable. He says to us: He who knows what he desires shall achieve it. That is why his appeal is so small, and may one day be universal. For the world is made up of the many who have suffocated or perverted desire, and the few who are in some prison of spirit or stone for the imperishableness of their desire. But as the individual lives on the hope of restoring or setting free his desire, so the aim of the race is that desire shall be unfettered, the desirable unforbidden in a marriage of heaven and earth. And of that hope Blake is the prophet, of that aim the pledge. DC: 31 March 

8  This poem is called ‘The Little Vagabond’.    9  Quotation from Jerusalem.

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Edward Carpenter,1 Days with Walt Whitman, With some Notes on his Life and Work Mr Carpenter’s work is made out of impressions received during visits to Walt Whitman2 in 1877 and 1884, and some critical notes on Whitman as prophet, on the poetic form of Leaves of Grass, on Walt Whitman’s children, and on Whitman and Emerson. The impressions are charming in their matter and easy, serious style. Whitman began talking about the war between Russia and Turkey, about friends in England; but in the first ten minutes, says Mr Carpenter— I was becoming conscious of an impression which subsequently grew even more marked—­the impression, namely, of immense vista or background in his personality. If I had thought before (and I do not know that I had) that Whitman was eccentric, unbalanced, violent, my first interview certainly produced quite a contrary effect. No one could be more considerate, I may almost say courteous; no one could have more simplicity of manner and freedom from egotistic wrigglings; and I never met any one who gave me more the impression of knowing what he was doing than he did. Yet away and beyond all this I was aware of a certain radiant power in him, a large benign effluence and inclusiveness, as of the sun, which filled out the place where he was—­yet with something of reserve and sadness in it too, and a sense of remoteness and inaccessibility.

The poet ‘seemed to fill out Leaves of Grass, and form an interpretation of it’. He speaks of Whitman’s ‘knack of making ordinary life enjoyable’. This comment is significant: 1  Edward Carpenter (1844–1929): socialist, believer in the cultural ideals of William Morris, pioneer of gay rights, advocate of new sexual and spiritual freedoms. His publications include Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure (1889), the epic poem Towards Democracy (1883–1905), and The Intermediate Sex (1908). Whitman’s Leaves of Grass had inspired Carpenter to change his life in 1874: to abandon his position as Cambridge Fellow and Anglican clergyman. Carpenter’s house at Millthorpe, Derbyshire, where he lived in a gay relationship, was a proto-commune dedicated to traditional crafts and the ‘Simple Life’. His ‘Uranian’ ideas influenced E. M. Forster and D.  H.  Lawrence (he can be seen as an intermediary between Whitman’s poetry and Lawrence’s). In Days with Walt Whitman Carpenter notes that Whitman’s ‘intimacies with men’ are ‘close and ardent’. 2  Reviewing another book on Whitman (1819–92), Walt Whitman: The Man and the Poet by James Thomson (‘B. V.’), ET calls Whitman ‘part preacher, part man of action, and part poet’; and disputes representations of him as a moral force: ‘Whitman was no saner or more wholesome or more virtuous than Shakespeare was. Neither is separable from the crude weltering confusion of life itself which is neither good nor bad. Both are on the side of life, Whitman still more so than Shakespeare. He accepts everything with an inhuman excess of humanity . . .’ (MP: 12 September 1910).

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Whitman, as I thought, preferred to let conversation turn on the pivot of personal relationship. Often as not he would have his listener by the hand; and his words too had an attractive force, from their very simplicity and purity from affectation or display. I think he did not really care to have conversational dealings with people except on such a basis of personal affection.

He read ‘Ulysses’ aloud, and thought it ‘about the best Tennysonian poem’. The chapters are full of good things, good because they express something of a great man, good also because they come obviously from one of his peers. When Mr Carpenter comes to criticism, he is good, though, if anything, he is at this late day a little too much the disciple of a writer who, after all, condemned disciples. The most noticeable point is the writer’s insistence upon ‘the world-­wide and universal character of his message’. In that, thinks the critic, he excels other prophets. For the first time, he says, here is one ‘who really knows and really accepts the whole range of human life’. With the appearance of Leaves of Grass, the ‘hour has struck for mankind of liberation, of emancipation, from mere outer rules and limitations’: He comes, not as a man who abandons his former mode of life in order to seek a literary ideal, but as the master-­workman who stays where he is and uses literary form for his own expression—­and with the same directness and mastery that he uses towards life.

Obviously Mr Carpenter assumes that it was to Whitman’s advantage that he avoided ‘the literary taint’. Whitman himself acknowledges, in a noble manner, the greatness of the poets of other ages, and America’s great debt to them; yet speaks of their ‘petty environage and limited area’. Is there any of their poems, he asks, ‘consistent with these United States?’ He thinks not. He stands alone in answering the challenge of ‘science and democracy’, to use them as the old poets used the myths—­to deal not with ‘splendid exceptional characters’, but with ‘the democratic average and basic equality’—and to do this by putting on record an American person of the latter half of the ­nineteenth century, himself.3 That he has achieved a marvellous success is certain, whatever posterity may say. Here and now, and for many years past, two of his ideas have diversely and effectually invaded the minds of living men, the idea of multitude, and the idea of the vastness of each human personality; a third idea, of the harmony between the other two, equally important to Whitman, has probably not been so effectual. To him each individual is so great, in his 3  ET has been quoting from Whitman’s essay, ‘A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads’, in Walt Whitman, November Boughs (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1888), 5–18.

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­ owers and activities, in what he is and what he inherits and transmits, in p what he gives life to, that the poet seems often not to admit any differences; so great at this present moment, that it is no wonder he neglects the dead. All of the past— If you were not breathing and walking here (he says), where would they all be? Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth is solid and liquid, You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky, For none more than you are the present and the past, For none more than you is immortality.4

Opening any page of him, what a sense the reader has of the immensity and diversity of the world! Each page is at first as complex and confusing as the pages of a daily newspaper, and yet in the end, in some degree, made intelligible and pleasant, as the paper is not, by a benign human spirit—­in some degree. That he has not entirely succeeded seems to me due to just that universality, that novel method, that frankness and indecisiveness, which are most praised in him. He is a man who, denying the value of words, is yet forced into a situation of unequalled pathos by the necessity of using them in his isolation. He possesses enough humanity to admit as an abstract idea and an emotion the greatness and sovereignty of the individual, but not enough humanity to use the poor medium of speech, as Shakespeare and Shelley and Wordsworth did, so as to drench them with his ideas, so as to make them seem born and waiting to express just what he has to say: Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity, When I give I give myself.5

So he speaks, forgetting, for he knew, that it is not easy to give oneself. He has, of course, hundreds of phrases which are those of a master, but he seems, in a thousand places, to rise from his paper and from the cunning manipulation of words, to shriek aloud the awful consciousness that he is filled with a knowledge which can bless mankind, but mankind can never know; and then he sits down and writes something incommunicable. He only claims ‘suggestiveness.’ But life is suggestive; yet how many find it so? With the hush of his lips he can confound the sceptic—­when the sceptic is there; but when the sceptic is away? And so, in one of his poems, he says he has made a book: 4  Quotations from ‘A Song for Occupations’ (4) and ‘A Song of the Rolling Earth’ (2). 5  From ‘Song of Myself ’ (40).

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The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing.6

Speech says to him, he confesses, sarcastically: Walt, you contain enough, why don’t you let it out then?7

It is not for ‘what I have put into it’ that he has written a book. He deals only in a faith that ‘leaves the best untold’, and exclaims—­pathetically, or is it ironically?— Have you no thought O dreamer that it may be all maya, illusion?8

He longs for the voices of animals, the swiftness and balance of fishes, and a thousand things, to inform his song. Had I, he says again: Had I the choice to tally greatest bards, To limn their portraits, stately, beautiful, and emulate at will, Homer with all his wars and warriors—­Hector, Achilles, Ajax, Or Shakespere’s woe-­entangled Hamlet, Lear, Othello—­Tennyson’s fair ladies, Metre or wit the best, or choice conceit to wield in perfect rhyme, delight of  singers; These, these, O sea, all these I’d gladly barter, Would you the undulation of one wave, its trick to me transfer, Or breathe one breath of yours upon my verse, And leave its odour there.9

And how ‘beggarly’ seem arguments to him beside a defiant deed!10 Many of his lines are literary. They are not natural speech, but that speech corrupted by an imperfect understanding of poetic diction or rhythm. The whole is not literary enough. ‘Pioneers! O Pioneers!’, for example, or the fine ‘Behold This Swarthy Face’, really does not meet the challenge of conventional poetry. He should have lived a thousand years, and not written until he was near death. He has made memoranda for the use of many gen­er­ations, but only memoranda. And to me, at least, the supreme value and fascination of his work lies in its ineffectiveness, in its sublime record of a great man crying unintelligible things, in the heart and face and limbs and deeds of a strong man cramped

6  From ‘Shut Not Your Doors’, of which the first line is: ‘Shut not your doors to me proud libraries’. 7  From ‘Song of Myself ’ (25). 8  From ‘Whoever You Are Holding Me Now In Hand’, ‘A Song of the Rolling Earth’ (3), ‘Are You the New Person Drawn toward Me?’ Maya: the illusion that the world is as it appears to the senses. 9  This poem is ‘Had I the Choice’. 10  Part 3 of Whitman’s poem ‘Song of the Broad-Axe’ begins: ‘How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!’

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violently between the lines of a book, and surviving there in the form of hallowed, partly recognised, dust—­surviving for how long? It is as if the divine sun, in which he often read and wrote, had put out the little fires of the words, and yet left something of itself there instead. DC: 7 June 

George Crabbe,1 Poems, Vols I and II, edited by Adolphus William Ward2 (Cambridge University Press) This edition is to contain all the poems written by Crabbe which have survived and been recognised, in manuscript or print. They include some which have never been published before; but of these only one, called ‘Midnight’, finds a place in the two volumes before us; the rest will be in the third and final volume of the edition. When that appears, it is clear that we shall have Crabbe’s poetry in a more complete and satisfactory form by far than we have had it before. [. . .] First come a number of early poems, hitherto little known or not known at all, which have only to be known to be forgotten. They consist of magazine verses in lyric and elegiac form, two long, didactic poems, Inebriety and ‘Midnight’, and some fragments; and they are interesting only because they show a curious mingling of the conventionally poetical with that slowness, harshness, and gravity which became the lasting qualities of the poet’s style. A poem on ‘Solitude’, written at seventeen, reminds us what strange stages great men pass through. ‘Midnight’, written in or about his twenty-­sixth year, has some blank verse lines of a vague, elaborate gloom such as is not to be found in Crabbe’s later work, except in ‘Sir Eustace Grey’ and a few other

1  George Crabbe (1754–1832), clergyman-poet, grew up in Aldeburgh. Benjamin Britten based his opera Peter Grimes (1945) on Letter XXII of The Borough (1810): one of Crabbe’s narrative poems. Crabbe wrote The Village (1783) partly to counteract the idyllic aspects of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770). Reviewing Vol. III of Ward’s edition, ET refers to ‘that compressed and sternly moulded prose in couplets, by means of which the writer forced his dreadful and deeply-rutted way on to Parnassus’; and stresses ‘the difference between poetry and the verse of even a very serious and highly-gifted observer of life’ (DC: 27 April 1907). He drew on both reviews for his chapter on Crabbe in LPE (212–23). 2  (Sir) Adolphus William Ward (1837–1924): historian and literary scholar, co-editor of The Cambridge History of English Literature (see [268]).

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pieces where Ainger believed that the influence of opium could be traced.3 A year later, in The Candidate, he still can be fervid— A summer morn there was, and passing fair; Still was the breeze, and health perfumed the air; The glowing east in crimson’d splendour shone, What time the eye just marks the pallid moon—

and announce that, on this day, by a ‘pine-­prest hill’s embroider’d base’ the Muse approached—           her syren-­ song I heard, Her magic felt, and all her charms revered; E’er since she rules in absolute control, And Mira only dearer to my soul.4

Then come the well-­known poems—­The Library, The Village, The Parish Register, The Borough, the Tales, and Tales of the Hall. Here there is no longer anything about the Muse’s ‘soft, but strong control’. The poet will write in verse, indeed, and in verse of a kind which hundreds of his age had used; but he has, or thinks he has, a new aim; his aim is truth. ‘With fiction’, he asks, in The Library— With fiction, then, does real joy reside, And is our reason the delusive guide? Is it, then, right to dream the syrens sing, Or mount enraptured on the dragon’s wing? No, ’tis the infant mind, to care unknown, That makes th’ imagined paradise its own; Soon as reflections in the bosom rise, Light slumbers vanish from the clouded eyes; The tear and smile, that once together rose, Are then divorced; the head and heart are foes: Enchantment bows to Wisdom’s serious plan, And Pain and Prudence make and mar the man.5

In The Borough he says that the men and women of other authors are ‘but the creatures of the author’s pen’—

3  Alfred Ainger (1837–1904) wrote a study of Crabbe for the English Men of Letters series (1903). 4  ‘Mira’ was Crabbe’s name for his wife Sarah, who became mentally ill. 5  The Library, 583–94.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 Nay, creatures borrow’d and again convey’d From book to book—­the shadows of a shade.6

His method is to be different. In one of his prefaces7 he tells us that he will try to describe village manners— not by adopting the notion of pastoral simplicity or assuming ideas of rustic barbarity, but by more natural views of the peasantry, considered as a mixed body of persons, sober or profligate, and hence, in a great measure, contented or miserable.

He is for truth and justice. And it is widely claimed that he succeeds. In his pages there are good and moderately good and bad and very bad men and women, whom Crabbe in his life in the country, in the towns, and on the coast had the opportunity and the ability to see. The reader who has patience with him admits that he has put in nothing that is not true; and not only this, but that probably in no poet, except Shakespeare, is there such diversity of truth. He was, perhaps, the first poet to think so highly of his art as to believe that it could deal not only with the very good and very bad, but with the mixed and diluted natures, and those, too, whose power and wealth and fame were infinitely small. His practice asserts that there is nothing in nature which poetry cannot use. His method is still more remarkable. He does not distinguish his subjects by contrast or any other rhetorical trick. Nor does he use them as puppets to illustrate a theory or point a moral, clothing them with ridicule or praise. He merely describes them; and word by word—­a thought or something seen or a judgment, in every line—­he builds up his images— Man as he is, to place in all men’s view, Yet none with rancour, none with scorn pursue.8

Just as he gives plants their proper names, instead of alluding to them ‘poetically’, so he describes men and women, as he believes, without bias or facile conventionality. So afraid is he of misrepresentation that in a note to these lines— In three short hours shall thy presuming hand Th’ effect of three slow centuries command,9

6  Letter XX: ‘The Poor of the Borough’, 19–20.    7  Preface to The Parish Register. 8  The Borough, Letter XXIV: ‘Schools’, 440–1. 9  The Borough, Letter II: ‘The Church’, 55–6.

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he says: ‘If it should be objected that centuries are not slower than hours, because the speed of time must be uniform, I would answer, that I understand so much, and mean that they are slower in no other sense, than because they are not finished so soon.’ For his love of truth, for his principle that truth is desirable, and for the truthfulness of his observation, he is much to be admired. As a lucid, pungent, terse record of life his books stand high, and stand alone in poetry. His best stories—­e.g., ‘Procrastination’, ‘The Brothers’, ‘Ruth’—have no rivals of their kind in verse or prose. And altogether his poetry contains more of tangible and recognisable human life than all the other poetry of the eighteenth century put together. But ‘The best description must be incomplete’,10 sings Crabbe himself, and his work seems to be of a kind which is doomed to incompleteness; for not only is his belief in accumulation in verse of what appeared to him to be plain truth a questionable one, but his style is one that defeats his end. At first sight it appears to be an impersonal style, because it is commonplace and full of statements. It is really one of the most personal styles ever written. It is the proper style of a man without illusion or disillusion, and its total effect, when we have read a thousand pages of it, is to reveal, not so much the truth about peasants and sea-­faring men, as the large, just, grey soul of Crabbe. Sometimes we feel, as we rise from two hours with him, that perhaps men and women are to be summed up thus by one who knows many of them, a recording angel who would hide their deeds, but cannot—‘I sigh and I ­proceed’.11 The drab, monotonous verse is at times so dismal in effect as to approach sublimity in its kind, and, unfantastic though it is, it has the effect of a nightmare. This drab, monotonous verse, only not drab when it is fierce, is a large part of the personality of Crabbe, which is what fatally affects these truthful records of mankind. He is large-­hearted in admiration or condemnation, he is hardly ever unjust, but he is never dramatic. He pities, he sympathises perhaps, he tries to understand, but he treats all his characters like a village schoolmaster or clergyman, conscious, in spite of himself, of their littleness. In the Parish Register, we hear him, when he is asked to baptise a child in a fantastic name: ‘Why Lonicera wilt thou name thy child?’ I ask’d the Gardener’s wife, in accents mild.12

10  The Borough, Letter I: ‘General Description’, 298. 11  The Parish Register, Part I: ‘Baptisms’, 280. 12  Ibid., 611–12: ‘Lonicera’ is the botanical name for honeysuckle.

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His accents now mild, now stern, he is ever thus. What is miserable is so because that is his opinion of it; what is good is so because he approves; and even where it is not his sole business, he is always hastening on, to decide whether a character is good or bad, succeeds or fails. He is the censor of mankind; he weighs them in the balance; he seems even to award their punishment—­and what punishment could be greater than a dozen of his terrible Rhadamanthine couplets? Such a personality, pervading work of great bulk, is bound to make it grey, even dull, perhaps second-­rate, and, after all, it only achieves a species of truth. DC: 4 July 

Alfred Noyes, Drake: An English Epic, Books I–­III Mr Noyes has hitherto been known chiefly for a power of fantastic, light-­ hearted narrative. But he has translated Baudelaire, and he has written lyrics that show great vigour in emotion and skill in various rhyme. We still remember lines from his first book, The Loom of Years.1 Of the men of his own age—­poets ought to let us know their ages when they begin—­only Mr Masefield, so far as we know, can rival him in originality and claims to popularity. But we were alarmed a few months ago to hear that he had written an epic beginning, ‘Now through the great doors of the Council-­room’, a line which could not possibly begin an epic of any note, we thought. Mr Noyes explains that he hopes to complete this poem in twelve books,2 but that each part, of three books, will be complete in itself—­two inconsistent statements. But since the first part is now published in a volume, at a high price,3 without any argument or scheme of the whole, we must treat it as ‘complete in itself ’. So we shall omit to consider what an epic is, and whether Mr Noyes’s poem can be one eventually. His subject is Drake’s expedition of 1577, and he takes us down to the execution of Doughty in 1578. In the first place, we have just read this poem of about 2,500 words through in three hours without any sense of fatigue, and what is more, with great ­sudden enjoyment at times, and a continual satisfaction. That, we humbly

1  For ET’s review of The Loom of Years, see [51]. 2  For ET’s review of Books IV–­XII, see [324].    3  Six shillings.

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s­ uggest, is a proof that Mr Noyes’s narrative and his pictures and metaphors are of unusual power. It is the only proof we can give of his narrative skill within our short space. Of his pictures we are ready with many instances, as this of a Spanish ship— For through a mighty zone of golden haze Blotting the purple of the gathering night, A galleon like a floating mountain moved To meet them, clad with sunset and with dreams. Her masts and spars immense in jewelled mist Shimmered: her rigging, like an emerald web Of golden spiders, tangled half the stars! [. . .]

If that is good, then the book is remarkable, for in that vein it is very rich. In our opinion, passages of this kind of merit abound so that the book is already justified; it stands high in the class to which Tennyson’s Idylls of the King belong. And such action as there is—­the two sea fights, Drake’s pursuit of the mutinous Doughty, and his banquet with the same mutineer before cutting off his head—­is described in a competent, pleasing manner, which again we must compare with Tennyson’s descriptions of tournaments, etc.; they are bland, decorative, terse, but as certainly lacking in any strong breath of life. But it must be admitted that Mr Noyes has not created much. He has simply taken a fine story, or part of one, which is still glamorous to many persons, and has embellished it charmingly after his own fashion. His main business has been to show us in what way Drake’s adventures have struck him in the beginning of this century. Elizabeth speaks ‘with distant empires in her eyes’. The knights on a piece of her tapestry ride— for ever on their glimmering steeds Through bowery glades to some immortal face Beyond the fairy fringes of the world.

The inn where Drake’s men drink before they start is a ‘marvellous’ inn; their talk of ‘pieces of eight’ is ‘magic’—magic to Mr Noyes. Drake as a child, along by the sea, lies awake and hears— Mysterious thunderings of eternal tides Moaning out of a cold and houseless gloom Beyond the world, that made it seem most sweet To slumber in a little four-­walled inn Immune from all that vastness . . .

Gibraltar, which Drake passes, is—

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916          .  .  .  not yet clothed With British thunder, though, as one might dream, Gazing in dim prophetic grandeur out Across the waves while that small fleet went by . . . [. . .]

We mention these things because Mr Noyes has not had the power to knead his own love of Elizabethans and adventure and pirates and pieces of eight into his narrative in such a way that it may seem an essential part of it instead of being, as it is, a charming addition from outside. It is this love, a hearty and delicate one, which makes the book as good as it is; but the unimaginatively egotistic nature of it also keeps the poem decidedly below the level of the best, we submit. The only real fault we have to find with Mr Noyes is that he too often allows himself to be lured into vagueness without noticing it, by his attempt to inoculate the Elizabethans and their times with his own modern yearning sentiment. [. . .] DC: 11 July 

John Davidson, Holiday and Other Poems We come to this book fresh from the grim Prime Minister’s Testament1 and the monstrous Theatrocrat,2 and the change is a comfortable one. Mr Davidson cannot cease to be vigorous any more than he can cease to be himself; but in this book we cannot help fancying that we see the influence of this excellent summer in his subjects and his style, and so far we have seen nothing more fit to go down to duller and later years as the monument of the past four months. ‘Like a god I come again, And with an immortal zest Challenge Fate to throw the main,’ says the poet at the end of his first poem; and though it begins grimly enough, the greater part of the pieces that follow are full of a joyous vigour, hearty, ecstatic, riotous at times, and exulting in a peculiar floridity of rhyme. The first of three notable pieces is a hunting poem, a really good one that can be read and re-­read, standing in no need of a tune, and yet wedded to a tune fit to rank with the best of its kind.3 It begins: 1 Actually, The Testament of a Prime Minister (1904): for ET’s review, see [102]. 2 In The Theatrocrat: A Tragic Play of Church and Stage (1905) Davidson ferociously attacks ways in which both religious and theatrical conventions stifle new thinking. 3  The poem’s title is ‘A Runnable Stag’.

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When the pods went pop on the broom, green broom,   And apples began to be golden-­skinned, We harboured a stag in the Priory coomb,   And we feathered his trail up-­wind, up-­wind,   We feathered his trail up-­wind—     A stag of warrant, a stag, a stag,     A runnable stag, a kingly crop,     Brow, bay and tray and three on top,     A stag, a runnable stag.

For ten verses that movement and picturesqueness and simplicity are maintained, the last four lines being slightly varied in each. Then follow several shorter poems, among them six November pictures in London and the country, and all of them blithe; and lastly eight eclogues. In these eclogues, where the familiar Sandy, Brian, and the rest converse, Mr Davidson’s high-­spirited Muse is in her happiest and most fantastic vein. If any modern poems are full of that ecstasy which Mr Machen has written about so brilliantly,4 it is these. They are the very essence and sublime of youth and summer and wine, breathing of those golden London evenings in a friendly dining-­room, when town and country are one; when the air is gently iced at sunset, and the wine glows in cheek and eye, and no man pours speech that is not pure crimson or pure gold. Mr Davidson’s divine audacity must be astonishing to those who do not know such nights. For his eclogues are perfectly lyrical, aerial, fantastic, with hardly a touch of the dramatic or the ‘real’. Each man has as much character as a bell in a noble peal; in fact, the way in which they carry on one another’s ecstasy, sinking themselves in order to produce the final lyrical effect, has several times reminded us of bells. Here, for example, five men talk, in ‘The Ides of March’: H.: The listening air is stirred. S.: The sounds are in the street. B.: I hear a murmuring flood. P.: I hear a trembling string.

4 Reviewing Arthur Machen’s critical book, Hieroglyphics, ET quotes Machen as calling ecstasy ‘the touchstone which will infallibly separate the higher from the lower in literature’, and comments: ‘we dislike his word “infallibly”. A man who eats porridge, chops and marmalade for breakfast will not find ecstasy in the same books as the man who takes a cigar, a liqueur, and a peach or two’ (DC: 11 April 1902). ET later worked on an unfinished and unpublished book, Ecstasy, and the word signifies poetic inspiration in his poem ‘Words’ (ACP, 93).

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 N.: The sounds are in our blood. B.: The sounds are of the Spring. H.: The throstle in the brake, Alone, and hid away, Beginning to rehearse His long-­considered lay, Because the blossoms wake On the elms, the first in flower, Repeats a broken verse And tunes it by the hour. P.: And his cousin thinks him a dunce, The blackbird, he who sings At the top of his voice at once While the startled woodland rings: He peals his splendid song Loud and fluent and clear, For echo to prolong And all the world to hear. H.: Now like a golden gong; Now like a crystal sphere. P.: For echo to prolong And all the world to hear. . . .5

Each of the eclogues is ‘A tissue of rhythmical words—­Of jewelled, di­aph­ an­ous words’, harmonising with the cuckoo’s ‘golden dulcimers’ in ‘the echoing woodland street’.6 They have the air of being spontaneous, exuberant improvisations. Not since Elizabeth’s day, or, at any rate, not since Shelley, have lyrics been assigned thus happily, and never before so boldly, to a set of speakers. Not the least ecstatic thing in the book is the essay ‘On Poetry’ at the end. It touches a hundred matters with something of the recklessness of an uninterrupted monologue. We cannot criticise it here, but merely point out that it has some noble things on poetry, as the affirmation of the will to live, and some dashing things on rhyme. DC: 1 August 

5  The speakers are Herbert, Sandy, Basil, Percy, Ninian. 6  Quotations from ‘Bartlemas’ and ‘St. Mark’s Eve’.

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Walter W. Greg,1 Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama: A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-­Restoration Stage in England Mr Greg’s book is a most tangled, neglected wood, thorny and thistly at the edge, choked in the midst by fallen, falling, and fantastically growing trees that conceal I know not what desirable nymph. It is a splendid, overhanging, rude and crumbling cliff of facts, fascinating, unscaleable. But it is a few other things as well. It is, for example, a unique abridgment and bibliography of the greater part of European pastoral literature; it contains much wisdom on the pudor of Tasso’s Aminta and Milton’s Comus; it is a monumental pledge of labour, and probably of the strange passion of love also. But what a passion! In order to explain ‘Come live with me and be my love’ he must needs erect vast woods and craggy mountains of crabbed fact, and send our tortured spirits to wander there, and coming back, enjoy the lyric as before. That in effect is his aim. The book grew out of an essay on English pastoral drama. After writing that he was forced to study the history of pastoralism, its origin and its development abroad, and especially in Italy. He ends abruptly with the triumph of new stage traditions in England, which first announced themselves authoritatively in 1660. But down to that date, though his aim is really to trace the ancestry of our pastoral plays he holds nothing alien to his purpose that is pastoral; and while he disclaims any pretence of writing a general history of pastoral literature or even of pastoral drama, it is only in so far as he does write something of the kind that his book justifies itself. For the scent in pursuing such an object as pastoralism—­a form—­an attitude or sentiment, rather, is so intermittent and treacherous that it can only be made good by an ­imaginative faculty which seems to be lacking in Mr Greg’s various and remarkable equipment. At least, only by the lack of this faculty can we explain the fact that his work not only fails to produce a sense of progress, but is in great tracts of it without any lucid purpose at all. Each period is treated with undoubted learning and thoroughness, it must be admitted. There is, however, no interpenetrating, vivifying power that relates them together. In short, here are the materials, arranged chronologically; but the reader must do an ­unexpectedly large bout of work before they have any satisfactory meaning. 1  (Sir) Walter Wilson Greg (1875–1959): noted textual scholar, editor, and bibliographer, who specialized in Renaissance theatre. A founder-member and General Editor of the Malone Society, Greg is particularly known for his Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (1939–59).

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A definition of pastoralism, he thinks, is impossible; yet no one can read the book without finding that it is ordered by an extremely strong prejudice as to what is pastoral and what is not. In his introduction he says em­phat­ic­ al­ly that ‘the form is the expression of instincts and impulses deep-­rooted in the nature of humanity, which, while affecting the whole course of literature, at times evince themselves most clearly and articulately here’; yet so little does he allow of these ‘instincts and impulses’ to appear that an intelligent and unlearned reader might well be justified in dismissing the subject with contempt and suspecting that the critic had no very different sentiment. He seems to regard pastoralism as the attitude of sophisticated men looking through carefully coloured spectacles and expecting their audience to do the same, sometimes in order to give a deceptive, romantic joy, the reverse of Lucretius’ suave mari magno;2 sometimes for political, philosophical, or theo­logic­al purposes, by means of an allegory which deceived nobody; sometimes for the sake of the burlesque or truly humorous effect to be gained through an imperfect and light-­hearted self-­deception. He begins with Theocritus. But that poet’s art is ‘based on an almost passionate sympathy with actual human nature’. Mr Greg includes him not so much because his attitude is pastoral as because he appears to have begotten the Latin eclogue. Here, as it seems to me, is Mr Greg’s fatal indiscretion. He excludes realism. He goes further: he neglects the O fortunatos nimium, the Hoc erat in votis, the Corycian old man, the Veronese old man, probably because these passages are too genuine to belong to an ‘artificial’ form of literature such as the pastoral.3 By so doing he has removed his subject too far from that humanity which even a literary convention cannot conceal. All through the book he pays too little attention to those many tributaries of hearty rural feeling that refreshed the waters of pastoralism, in Theocritus, in Virgil, in the Pervigilium Veneris, and later in René of Anjou’s description of his rustic bower, in Lorenzo de Medici’s peasant poems, in Tasso, in the English ballads and

2  Book II of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura begins: ‘Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis, / e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem’ (‘It’s pleasant, as winds churn up waves on a great sea, / To contemplate from the shore another’s peril’). This is, in fact, a metaphor for the inner security provided by a sound philosophy. 3  ET alludes to Latin poems which involve desire for, or celebration of, a happy country life: ‘O fortunatos nimium’: opening words of a passage about the farmer’s good fortune in Virgil’s Georgics (II.458); ‘Hoc erat in votis’: opening words of a Horatian Satire (II.vi); Corcyrian old man: contented countryman evoked later in the Georgics (IV.125ff.); Veronese old man: similar figure depicted in Claudian’s Carmina Minora (XX), a poem often imitated or translated. ET’s poem ‘For These’ (ACP, 99) subverts this classical genre, although it lies behind his depiction of old countrymen in his poems.

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shepherd plays, in the Elizabethans, and especially in Jonson.4 Pastoral ‘is already on the high road toward ceasing to be pastoral at all’ he says when he finds naturalism in William Browne.5 It is true that in Virgil even there are three distinct phases of pastoralism—­an urbane joy in the country and the country life as a spectacle and perhaps a refuge, a more sophisticated joy in it as retaining something of the golden age, and a use of countrymen as hardly more than lay figures in an allegory; but it is arbitrary and unne­ces­ sary to exclude the first phase altogether. The three survive and develop right through the period covered by this book. It has been Mr Greg’s thankless task to follow the last two phases and a gleam of the first, to show how they were modified, elaborated, mingled, grafted on the mythological and chivalric forms, and how they reached their supreme expression in Tasso, in Lorenzo, in Spenser, in Sidney, in Fletcher.6 But, obviously, by stiffening himself against naturalism and even against the ‘idyllic borderland’ between it and pastoralism, he has had to neglect some of the finest English poetry which a larger view must certainly have reached. S: 4 August 

Lyra Britannica: A Book of Verse for Schools, in two parts, elementary and advanced, selected and arranged by Ernest Pertwee, two vols; English History in Verse, edited by Ernest Pertwee It is not often that anthologies are published with such lofty aims as these. Their editor, Mr Pertwee, professor of elocution at the City of London School, trusts that the poems will ‘contribute to the building up of character and the inculcation of those qualities of life which are noble and inspiring, and to the realisation of the responsibility of every boy and girl born to the heritage of 4  Pervigilium Veneris: poem of unknown authorship, possibly from the fourth century, which represents a Sicilian Spring-festivity dedicated to Venus, and contains the well-known line: ‘Cras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit cras amet’. ‘Rustic bower’: Greg mentions a poem by René d’Anjou (1409–80), French duke and briefly king of Naples, to which he ascribes a ‘real and lively love of the country, rather than any idealisation of the actual shepherd class’. 5  William Browne (c.1590–1645): English poet, author of unfinished long poem, Britannia’s Pastorals (1613–16). 6  John Fletcher (1579–1625): probably an allusion to his influential ‘pastoral Tragicomedy’, The Faithful Shepherdess (c.1609).

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the glory of Britain’. Furthermore, he hopes that they will ‘provide teachers with just that material they require in conducting school declamation classes’. What is too sentimental or mawkish has been kept out. Writing a preface to English History in Verse, Mr A. T. Pollard says: Herein the student gets the facts which have built up England as it is today, dealt with in a picturesque manner. The story of a nation’s life as seen by the Poet must always be fascinating, and serve to make the men and actions of the past live again with a reality that prose cannot equally impart . . . I therefore welcome a volume, such as this, which approaches the Glories of our National Inheritance from the human, imaginative and sympathetic point of view.

These aims are beyond dispute. Poetry brings many gifts, and it is certain that children will accept some of them. Through it, for example, they may perhaps receive the gift of spiritual beauty and strength, and the power of seeing and desiring them, and, whether successful or not in their desire, of reverencing them in others. They may have the gift of unworldliness in a perfectly noble sense, through poetry— thou sweet’st content That e’er Heav’n to mortals lent, Though they as a trifle leave thee Whose dull thoughts cannot conceive thee, Though thou be to them a scorn That to nought but earth are born . . .1

They may learn something of the true richness and the true economy of speech, since all sincere and passionate speech tends towards the state of poetry; something, too, of that difficult, fair, and mighty thing—­melody. Nor, I think, is there any truly good music of lovely words which passes into a child’s ear in vain. These things Mr Pertwee may or may not acknowledge. Probably he does acknowledge them, since he has included ‘Kubla Khan’ in his elementary anthology. But he seems also to make claims which are bolder than any of which I ever dreamed. He virtually claims that verse is good for children, and not merely honest scholar’s verse and joyous nonsense, but cheap and easy arrangements of words by men and women whom great poetry can never have impressed. His Lyra Britannica begins with Addison’s ‘The Spacious Firmament on High’, which, difficult though it be in subject and expression, must be allowed

1  A tribute to ‘poesy’ from Eglogue IV of The Shepherds Hunting (1615) by George Wither (see [57]), written when Wither was in prison.

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to pass on account of its reputation.2 The next piece is ‘The Burial of Moses’, by Mrs C. F. Alexander,3 in this style: By Nebo’s lonely mountain,   On this side Jordan’s wave, In a vale in the land of Moab,   There lies a lonely grave; And no man knows that sepulchre,   And no man saw it e’er; For the angels of God upturned the sod,   And laid the dead man there.

Of which I can only say that it may be glorious for declamation, though of that I cannot presume to judge, but that it is good for nothing else. Unless Mr Pertwee thinks that mere rhyme and an unnatural jigging rhythm have some virtue for the child, there is nothing in the piece which could be of value except as an example of lèse majesté. The third poem is ‘Burglar Bill’, by Mr Anstey, a neat, clever, piece of ri­dicu­lous verse, capable of giving a peculiar satisfaction to a sophisticated mind, but to a child of no interest, except for the story, which could have gone into prose without loss.4 ‘The Forsaken Merman’ of Matthew Arnold follows it. Here the simple rhythm, the frequent rhymes, can delight the youngest ear, and the mind that has dimly apprehended its charm at the age of six will not be ashamed, but happy, at the recollection of that early delight, when, at twenty, it has apprehended all; and the same might fairly be said of all the good poetry, and there is much of it, in these books. But why Mr Alfred Austin’s windy— Where have you been through the long sweet hours That follow the fragrant feet of June?5 [. . .]

A respect for minor poetry is a good thing, and no lover of poetry is without it, but when minor verse has filled its place and earned its shillings in the magazines it has fulfilled its purpose, and is being harshly treated when it is thrust into the company of poetry. That Mr Pertwee thinks differently is 2  Joseph Addison (1672–1719): better known as an essayist than as a poet or playwright. This poem/hymn was set to music by Franz Joseph Haydn: hence its currency. 3  Mrs Cecil Frances Alexander, née Humphreys (1818–95): devout Irish author, best known for her hymns, such as ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, ‘There is a Green Hill Far Away’, ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, and a version of ‘St Patrick’s Breastplate’. 4  Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856–1934): author of comic fiction and verse under the pen-name F. Anstey. Burglar Bill And Other Pieces for the use of the young reciter appeared in 1888. 5  Opening lines of ‘A Country Nosegay’ by Alfred Austin (1835–1913), Poet Laureate since 1896.

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almost certain. For his English History in Verse includes a number of pieces, signed or mysteriously anonymous, which are not poetry and are bad verse.6 One of these, by the way, is called an old ballad, though its first stanza is: Gazing on the iron grating Where the gentle moonbeams fall, Stands a watchful minstrel waiting Near the castle’s prison wall. Strikes the chords with soft emotion, Voice and lute in skill combined, Thus the hope of his devotion, ‘Seek in faith, and thou wilt find.’7

The editor would seem to have gone astray in a belief that poetry is un­nat­ ural, elevated speech, used consciously to exalt its subject. That rhetorical verse has its justification I am ready to believe; that children might take pleasure in it is possible, even to the point of increasing their liking for history; yet it should be excluded from their sight as a bastard artifice, likely to give a fatally false notion of poetry itself. Mr Pertwee has printed many fine things by Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, Marvell, Lovelace, Dryden, the balladists, and others, but a little imagination would have enabled him to do without everything that was not fine. He has taken history too pedantically; and, because Chaucer did not write about the history of his own times, has forgotten him altogether. [. . .] DC: 10 August 

Charles M. Doughty, The Dawn in Britain, Vols III and IV Early in the spring of this year we had the pleasure of reading the first eight books of The Dawn in Britain.1 The two volumes before us contain eight 6 Five years later, ET reviewed Lyra Historica: Poems of British History  A.D.  61–1910 (an anthology seemingly based on Pertwee’s model), edited by M.  E.  Windsor and J.  Turral. His response is slightly more favourable, but still lukewarm: ‘Some of these [poems] are good in themselves. Some relate to great events, and with the help of some historical knowledge may attune the mind of a child heroically or in some other useful way. It is not a book which explains itself, or is sufficient in itself ’ (DC: 4 September 1911). ET’s reaction to all these anthologies may have influenced his own wartime anthology, This England (1915). 7  This unsigned ‘ballad’ (by Pertwee himself?) is ‘The Captivity of Richard, 1194’. 1  See review [183]. On 24 and 27 August, addressing a sceptical GB, ET said of the new volumes: ‘There are some glorious things in III & IV, as fine as anything in the Iliad as it appears

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more books of the same poem. Of these, the ninth takes Joseph of Arimathea to his refuge at Avalon, and Caractacus, son of King Cunobelin, on an embassy to Rome.2 The remaining seven books are filled with British pre­par­ ations for defence against the Romans; the invasion of Aulus Plautius; the campaign down to the battle before Camulodunum;3 and one or two of those blissful interludes which readers must remember with the last four cantos of the Faerie Queene, Book VI. As before, Mr Doughty’s epic combines the grandeur of the ancient epics with the complexity of Sidney’s Arcadia in a manner which is delightful, even though it is lacking in the strong national appeal of A Chinese Honeymoon or The Master Christian.4 There is no sort of falling off in matter or style. Nor is that style any easier, though we must point out that a man who is not a scholar can, after an hour’s reading, follow Mr Doughty as easily as he can Spenser or Burns. It would be easy to show that he writes an English style which never was written or spoken before. It would be still easier to show that Mr Doughty is not a direct successor to Tennyson, and to prove, as was proved of Keats and Wordsworth, that he is therefore no poet. But we shall neglect these paths. Nor, on the other hand, do we propose to prove that he is a poet, but only to say that such is the strong spirit of various life, the fancy, the melody, the brevity, the movement, the comprehensiveness of mind, the instinct for words, in this poem that, producing as it does an effect like that of the Iliad, we feel justified in calling it also an epic poem. And should anyone, which is unlikely, after reading it, object that the style is in a bad sense unnatural and affected, let him read the same author’s noble book of travel, Arabia Deserta, where the same style is to be seen in its simple and harmless youth.5 It is impossible to outline the story here. Essentially, it is that told by the Roman historians of the age. But it is remoulded, enlarged, vivified, created by an extraordinary scholarship, a patriotism which can only be compared with Virgil’s, and an incomparable poetic gift. That it has not a classical sim­pli­city to me not a Greek’; ‘But don’t worry about Doughty. He seems to me now very big but although I did not say so I do hesitate about him & feel that he may turn out a Southey after all. Remember that Edward Garnett gave me a good start towards my admiration for Doughty. And positively Doughty is an antiquarian. Admitting that, perhaps I am not so far from you’ (LGB, 116, 118–19). 2  According to the gospels, St Joseph of Arimathea oversaw the burial of Christ. Medieval legend linked him with Glastonbury and the Holy Grail. Caractacus/Caratacus/Caradoc, chieftain of the Celtic Catuvellauni tribe, resisted the Romans, and thus provoked their invasion of Britain from 43 onwards. 3  Aulus Plautius: Roman senator and general who led the initial invasion, becoming Britain’s first Roman governor. Camulodunum (Colchester): base of the Catuvellauni, taken by the Romans who gave its Celtic name a Latin ending. 4  An ironical allusion to two popular works: A Chinese Honeymoon (1899), musical comedy by George Dance and Howard Talbot; The Master Christian (1900), novel by Marie Corelli. 5  For ET on Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, see [297n.].

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of motive must be conceded, as it was to be expected and even desired. Antique in form and language, it is thoroughly modern and democratic in its immense sympathies and in the sense of multitude and complexity which it gives. And yet, what freshness, what youthful beauty of men and women, what dewy virginity of green country, the poem has! The Canterbury Tales have not more. With what a large, joyous and pitiful heart the poet handles the simple and permanent contrasts of life, the terror of what was foredoomed but not foreseen, the pure careless ardency of youth and love, the foulness and impertinence of death! We will give a few examples of the poet’s qualities, and first a few lines from the story of the young priestess Esla’s love for the Prince Cloten, shipwrecked on her island: O joy, when dimly, at last, beholds each one, The other’s semblant, in this doubtful gloom. Then whispered speech, sweet knitting of true palms, Already knit their hearts. Her mantle, warm, Of wadmel, then she splayed about them both. They creep together, in that fear and cold, In dim sea-­cave. Smiles out, in firmament, The hoary girdled, infinite, night of stars, Above them: like as when, in sweet spring-­time, With wind-­flowers white, some glade is storied seen; Whereas, from part to part, like silver stream, Shine hemlocks, stichworts, sign of former path.

In the following passage, a young British prince lies dead: Is this that helm and front, as Camulus;6 Which Erdilla’s gentle hands, with plumes of erne,7 Dight, and whereon she girt the golden band, Of noble charioteers? the bearded lips Are these, where last farewell of her spouse-­lips, She smiling-­weeping kissed; when, from his hall, She brought forth his cart-­quivers, filled with darts? [. . .]

Here, lastly, is the dawn after battle: Veiléd with grace, and amber her bright weed, Broidered with pearl; (for she, glad-­eyed and mild, 6  Camulus: war-god of the Britons and Gauls; the Celtic name of Camulodunum signifies ‘fort of Camulus’. 7  Erne: sea-eagle.

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Is maiden heavenly pure,) the sacred Dawn. Whilst, forth, her goddess feet do gently trace: Her crystal front, and long, ringed, golden locks, The Graces, like to virgin bride, have crowned; With rosebuds pluckt from garden of the gods.

But by these quotations it is no more possible to show Mr Doughty’s greatness than to show the beauty of a head by a braid of hair, and yet, we hope, not less. DC: 18 August

Hilaire Belloc Nearly ten years ago at Oxford, in the best bookseller’s shop in the world, there used to be a shelf devoted to volumes of classical poetry, so small and so prettily bound that they reached the hearts of many who would otherwise have been too retiring or too much lacking in intellectual pride to read them. There were the Elizabethans, got up so as to look like knick-­knacks. On those walls, craggy and vast and dark with books, they looked like the flower called ‘snow upon the mountains’ climbing over rocks. But whether by some artifice of the booksellers’, or by some prophetic play of chance, there lurked among them one of the least known books in the world—­namely, Verses and Sonnets, by Hilaire Belloc, published by Ward, Lock, and Downey in 1896.1 There was no indication that it had ever been published before; yet it lay in wait for the man or child who insisted on having the right thing. It might, for aught I knew, have been written by a living man. But the contents, to one who had been brought up on famous and dead authors, were against any such supposition. I remember opening one of the classics beside it and then, without any sense of incongruity, reading this sonnet, called ‘July’: 1 For Belloc, see Appendix [694]. Influenced by Belloc’s poem ‘The South Country’, ET regretted that Belloc did not concentrate more on poetry. Writing to Jesse Berridge in September 1902, he said: ‘Yes! Isn’t Belloc prodigious? But he is too unstable & fantastic to be anything more than a literary man. He ought to write more verses than he does’ (LJB, 34). ET’s reviews of Verses (1910), a volume that partly reprints earlier work, are cooler than this article: ‘for the poet in Mr Belloc since the days of the first book we must chiefly look in the essays, where this poet lies hidden but not lost’ (MP: 12 January 1911); ‘The best are so good that we are too impatient of the others . . . Simply as a piece of personality the book has few equals in our time, while as poetry “The South Country” stands alone’ (DC: 18 February 1911).

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 The Kings come riding back from the Crusade,   The purple Kings and all their mounted men; They fill the street with clamorous cavalcade;   The Kings have broken down the Saracen. Singing a great song of the eastern wars,   In crimson ships across the sea they came, With crimson sails and diamonded dark oars,   That made the Mediterranean flash with flame. And reading how, in that far month, the ranks   Formed on the edge of the desert, armoured all, I wish to God that I had been with them   When the first Norman leapt upon the wall, And Godfrey led the foremost of the Franks,   And young Lord Raymond stormed Jerusalem.

Clearly, nobody then in the world, to judge by the faces of old and young in Oxford, the hub of the universe, could have written that. Yet clearly the man who wrote it lived and enjoyed, and I was troubled. I could see that it was better than Below me trees unnumber’d rise, Beautiful in various dyes . . .

and yet John Dyer was thrust upon me by a serious man,2 and this sonnet had never been mentioned. A few days after that, on a May Day, I heard a great voice singing:— S’ils tombent, nos jeunes héros, La France en produit de nouveaux, Contre vous tout prêts à se battre! Aux armes, citoyens!3

A bicycle swept by, down a steep hill, guided, so far as it was guided at all, by the spirit of the Spring, winged by the south wind, crowned by superb white

2  The quotation is from ‘Grongar Hill’: best-known poem of Welsh poet John Dyer (1799– 1857). Dyer had been recommended to ET by his tutor and mentor at Lincoln College, Oxford: the historian (Sir) O[wen] M[organ] Edwards (1858–1920), a Welshman, who arranged for him to write an introduction to The Poems of John Dyer (1903). In December 1902 ET had asked GB: ‘Do you know [Dyer] & his “Grongar Hill” & “Ruins of Rome”? Long ago I found him a pleasant oasis in the midst of the 18th century and its coffee-houses and its rhymes as like one another as Windsor chairs or policemen. But he is little else & it was not easy to avoid showing that I thought so in my introduction’ (LGB, 41–2). 3  Extract from the ‘Marseillaise’.

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clouds, and singing that song in a whirl of golden dust. ‘That was Belloc,’ said my companion, as he lay by the roadside trembling from the shock of that wild career. It was Belloc; and it still is. I bought the book at once. It was by a living man, who could be proved to exist. Even had I never seen that chariot of Spring going down Boar’s Hill at twenty miles an hour I could have proved out of the book alone that the author existed. And that is no easy thing to do. You may be, if you are credulous, convinced of any author’s existence when you hear him speaking after dinner, or when you see his liabilities in a bankruptcy case; but by his books how seldom can you be convinced. Mr Belloc is always proving, about twice a year, that he exists. Incidentally, too, he proves that other things exist, as, for example, Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter (see his Path to Rome), Joy (see his Avril), Love (see his Verses and Sonnets), and Hate (see his Lambkin’s Remains).4 Only a few months ago he proved that Parliament existed by countenancing the report that he had been elected a member for Salford, in Lancashire. That is Mr Belloc’s great gift. He lives, and he proves life, not by assertion, like certain rhetoricians, but by living, like very few other contemporaries of ours. [. . .] And when I speak of Mr Belloc’s vitality, with which he keeps himself and part of his age going, I am not thinking only of The Path to Rome.5 It is the same in his histories. In them, he emphatically asserts the right of a living man to show not only that the dead once lived, but that he himself still lives. Thus, his histories eclipse those by learned men of questionable vitality. They make of time not a long night, but a long day, and their prevalent music is a laughing sonorous voice, and not a wind whirling in skulls and ruined sedge. His writing has something of Hazlitt’s gusto; the writer is, in a sense, the equal of his heroes. So, too, in his criticism. Of criticism, in the tremendously lofty Arnoldian sense, he has nothing; his criticism is simply an in­ter­pret­ ation of enjoyment. He always reveals two things—­namely, that the verse or prose is good, and that he knows it and is happy with it; and at its best, it is

4  Books in different genres by Belloc. ET had reviewed The Path to Rome (see note 5) and Avril: Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance. He calls Avril ‘the work of an emotional intelligence which has been accustomed to deal with men and nature and events, and preserves the same attitude in dealing with books’. As a result: ‘Accurately he may not know [the poets]; for he is not one of those who wear themselves blind in the effort to see clearly; but vividly and personally he knows them well’ (DC: 26 May 1904). 5  ET’s affectionately humorous review of The Path to Rome had given it the character of Rabelais’s Gargantua: ‘It is a book with flashing eyes, loud-laughing and eloquent voice, columnar neck, biceps and triceps perfect, a chest equal to any emotion or exertion, and feet (whether they are more or less than “four hundred and six ells long”) that can not only run and dance, but are sure and swift and joyful, even in the clouds’ (DC: 29 April 1902).

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creative, as the greatest of critics in ‘The Critic as Artist’ said it must be.6 Yet he is no dreamer, at least no ‘dreamer more than dreams are wise’.7 Even when he has to write about what he does not like, Mr Belloc is good, thus corroborating the proofs of his vitality. Sometimes his dislike is expressed by laughter, sometimes by irony; both are good, the laughter perhaps the better; and they are to be found everywhere, but especially in Lambkin’s Remains, Caliban’s Guide, Mr Burden, and the books of beasts.8 Everywhere he preserves his gusto; with it he relieves an irony which would, I think, be monotonous without it. He writes of his travels, of books, of the past, and reveals them and himself at once—­life contemplating life. In the past, many men have done this. But Mr Belloc is our contemporary; he has all our modern characteristics—­our phrase-­making, our descriptiveness, our far-­fetchedness, perhaps even our introspectiveness; he writes for us, he prob­ably would not think it much fun to be ‘with Shakespeare’; and while he lives, some of us must needs think him more important than the dead, ‘the tiny stuffless voices of the dark’:9 let us enjoy him. The Tribune:10 10 September 

Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne, edited by Bertram Dobell; Richard Garnett, De Flagello Myrteo: CCCLX thoughts and fancies on love; Poetical Works of Tennyson, 5 Vols It is little short of marvellous that anybody should read the poetry of our contemporaries today, if only for the reason that reprints of dead poets’ work are so numerous, various, conspicuous and cheap. As soon as one publisher has brought out a charming edition of an old poet in a blue cover, another brings one out in red, which is followed rapidly by editions in green, in parchment, and in pink, and probably another in blue. Phineas Fletcher, 6  For ET and Oscar Wilde, see [301] and Introduction [xlviii]. 7  Last line of Belloc’s sonnet ‘Her Music’. 8 Besides Verses and Sonnets, Avril, and The Path to Rome, between 1896 and 1906 Belloc had published The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts (1896), More Beasts for Worse Children (1897), Lambkin’s Remains (1900), Caliban’s Guide to Letters (1903), and Emmanuel Burden, Merchant (1904). 9  From Belloc’s sonnet ‘Because My Faltering Feet’. 10  Liberal Party newspaper, which refused advertisements on high-minded principles, and only survived for two years: January 1906 to February 1908.

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Cowley, Crashaw, Sedley, Prior, Butler, Crabbe, Drayton, and a great many more who are better known, have appeared during the last year or two.1 Those reprints are so accessible that a young man who reads a great deal of poetry may read for ten years and hardly see one volume of verse by a living writer, except Messrs Swinburne, Meredith, Kipling, and Stephen Phillips.2 If he has had the usual classical education, he will very likely take no notice of the new verse even when he knows that it exists, and if he is unusually open-­minded he will by the time he is forty have little patience with any but the friends of his youth or the widely-­approved. It is a fatal difficulty in the way of many possible readers of modern poetry that there are thousands of verse writers, and that it is an expensive and lengthy task to learn which, if any, are good. Nor do the professedly literary papers do anything worth mentioning to guide the public taste. A week or two back, a weekly paper that devotes five or six pages every week to reviews of books boasted that it was most virtuously considerate of the living poet; yet that paper gives not more than four or five pages a year to notices of verse. It is marvellous, then, that new poetry achieves such success as it does. In the last few weeks we have had three interesting reprints sent to us, and of these two are new editions of work by men who are both practically contemporaries. Three years ago Mr Dobell published a volume of hitherto unknown poems by a seventeenth century clergyman, Thomas Traherne. As it turned out, and as we said at the time, they prove Traherne to be a religious poet of the first order. And now we are glad to see that Mr Dobell has been able to issue a second edition at half the original price.3 Last summer we gave such praise as love inspired us with, and at least a hearty welcome, to an anonymous book, De Flagello Myrteo. It went into a second edition while it was still anonymous. Now it is in a third edition, increased by almost half, with the name of its author, Richard Garnett, on the title page.4 This is 1  ET had reviewed editions of Cowley [167], Butler [137], Crabbe [194], and Drayton [118]; and would soon review editions of Prior [252] and Crashaw [254]. Sir Charles Sedley (1639–1701): poet, dramatist, and politician; Phineas Fletcher (1582–1650): chiefly known as author of The Purple Island; or, The Isle of Man (1633), a poem which brings together science and religion. 2  For Stephen Phillips, see [16n.]. 3  For ET’s original review of Traherne’s Poetical Works, see [58]. The book’s price had dropped from seven shillings and sixpence to three shillings and sixpence. 4  Richard Garnett (1835–1906): man of letters, librarian in British Museum, father of Edward Garnett (see Introduction [xxii]). De Flagello Myrteo [Concerning the Myrtle Whip] contains aphoristic reflections on love, which derive from Garnett’s passion (after his wife’s death) for a young woman: a cause of some upset to his family. ET had previously noted Garnett’s ‘rare and . . . difficult’ method, induced by ‘a love of brevity and a love of fancy that are never common’; and called his sayings ‘not all jewels, perhaps; yet all the work of a jeweller’ (A: 15 July 1905).

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another good sign. Dr Garnett’s book is mainly prose, but it is all poetry. Its blitheness, ingenuity, and loftiness are now, perhaps, more pleasant than ever, when we know that they were the companions of learned old age. Our third reprint is not of Mr Sturge Moore’s poems, nor of Mr Masefield’s ballads, nor of Mr Trevelyan’s Polyphemus, nor of Mr Lysaght’s Unknown Way,5 but of Tennyson’s poems. This does not give us so much satisfaction. It probably means that a few hundreds more who have, or are open to have, a vague belief in the immortality of the soul are going to enjoy In Memoriam; that a few hundreds more, who like plenty of sugar and the politer virtues with their romance, are going to enjoy Idylls of the King; and that we are nearer than ever to a statue of King Arthur in front of Exeter Hall.6 For we may be sure that when a poet becomes popular like Tennyson, he is being admired or accepted for many bad reasons or for no reason at all. But perhaps the heckling of Tennyson is rather louder today than the praise of him. Carlyle said somewhere that Tennyson was a poet chiefly because he had been in the habit of making Latin verses at school. Tennyson’s sweetness and exquisite tact were naturally unnoticeable, or of no value, to Carlyle, who, like Whitman, enjoyed the ‘Ulysses’. And many in our day take a similar view of Tennyson, though their principles and prejudices are as different from Carlyle’s as could be imagined. Some would say that his poetry, like the antimacassar, has had its day. More would reject him as decidedly. He was a lord, a complete Whig, a solemnly egotistical gentleman. He wrote ‘that good man, the clergyman’, which is worse than ‘A Mr Wilkinson, a clergyman’.7 We no longer think it is wonderful that he should have digested a large quantity of science. We do not accept the poems collected under the title of In Memoriam as a whole at all; or, if we do, we think it lacking in significance, and we are not overawed by the family history of those well-­bred Victorians. We prefer the Morte d’Arthur and ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ to the Idylls.8 5  For R. C. Trevelyan, and ET’s review of his Polyphemus, and Other Poems, see [76] and note. ET had written of Sidney Royse Lysaght’s Poems of the Unknown Way: ‘He has an admirable style, and, though his vocabulary is not rich, he has an almost Swinburnian command of metre. Whatever his theme . . . a delicate vapour of words arises, and by means of his skilful writing we faintly see shapes therein. . . . He has nothing to say, and he says it wonderfully’ (DC: 2 July 1901). 6 Exeter Hall: building in the Strand (erected 1829–31), venue for concerts and religious meetings, associated with the Anti-Slavery Society and other progressive causes. In 1907 it would be demolished to make way for the Strand Palace Hotel. 7 ‘[T]hat good man, the clergyman’: phrase from Tennyson’s poem ‘The May Queen’; ‘A Mr Wilkinson, a clergyman’: phrase that sparked a parody of Wordsworth, supposedly written by Tennyson in his youth, although Edward FitzGerald also claimed authorship or co-authorship. 8  The Arthurian works ‘preferred’ to Tennyson are Sir Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century Morte d’Arthur and William Morris’s ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ (1858). Re Tennyson and Morris, see also ET’s review of Alfred Noyes, William Morris [345].

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We compare ‘Maud’ with Modern Love;9 we applaud its lyrical passages moderately, and we wonder at the poetry with which he gilds modern life. We read ‘Edwin Morris’ and marvel that Pater could have said of its author that he ‘treated contemporary life nobly’;10 for to us that tea-­table idyll is not made noble by the last three lines:— While the prime swallow dips his wing, or then While the gold-­lily blows, and overhead The light cloud smoulders on the summer crag—

which is pure decoration. Yet a few years ago a middle-­aged don asked a number of undergraduates whether they read Tennyson, and, assuming that they did not, he recalled the glorious days when people were always reading Tennyson, and seemed to think that no worse fate could have overtaken our generation than to be impervious to his charm. Probably neither fashion—­of praise or ridicule—­ will last. Neither will take away from him his chief glories;—that he wrote ‘Mariana’ and ‘The Lady of Shalott’; his artful felicity of diction which provides thousands of examples of how to write and how not to write; his melody, as in the poems to Virgil and Catullus, and A Dream of Fair Women; the pictorial quality of such passages as the two best in ‘Launcelot and Elaine’; and above all, the singular record which his poetry contains of English lowland scenery. Some day, perhaps, we shall learn not to see in him that rich smoothness which seems the symbol of a too sleek and comfortable spirit, and that love of the decorative, the decorous, the poetical, the respectable, rather than of the true, which gives an unreality and, as it were, a flavour of Parma violets and evening dress to much of his work. But until we reach that blessed state, let us have reprints of living poets, who share the air with us, not with Martin Tupper11 and the Prince Consort. DC: 15 October 

9  For George Meredith’s sequence Modern Love, see Appendix [708]. 10  Pater says this in his essay ‘Style’ (Walter Pater, Appreciations with an Essay on Style [London: Macmillan, 1889], 2). 11  Martin Tupper (1810–89): chiefly known as author of Proverbial Philosophy: A Book of Thoughts and Arguments, a windily moralistic work set out as long lines of verse: ‘Error is a hardy plant; it flourisheth in every soil’. Popular with Victorian readers, Proverbial Philosophy was published in four series and various editions from 1837.

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Walter de la Mare, Poems A few years ago Mr de la Mare published a little volume of poems called Songs of Childhood, and they proved that yet another writer had arisen who could use English as a living tongue.1 Some of his poems were perfectly beautiful; all were unusually interesting, because there clearly was a man who wrote so much from his individual heart and brain that every verse was characteristic and his own, just as every nightingale’s egg is olive, and not yellow or freckled or blotched. Then followed the same author’s Henry Brocken, a loveable, finely-­conceived romance, that failed, in spite of its wonderful sense of beauty, because the world could not comfortably take so many deep gulps of fantasy one after the other.2 And now his new Poems confirm our hopes and set new ones up. For here is the same sincerity, speaking, as sincerity always does, a strange new tongue, because it is unlike our muddy conventional speech; but here, too, is an opaqueness of thought that has come to trouble the almost transparent lyric stream of the first book. There is no ‘Slim Sophia’3 and no ‘Bunches of Grapes’ among the new poems. But though this new element is not always easy to enjoy immediately, the careful reader, for whom alone Mr de la Mare has written, will find himself soon with an additional sense of gratitude to the poet for so passionately putt­ing his spiritual life into his work. There is more sadness here. The cry against passing time comes more than once. The personal note has become commoner. There are more moods. Joy and intensity of life, whether joyful or not, are seen in this volume to be snatched with difficulty from among the flames and swords. Some of the poems are but as sweet lights and songs already threatened and surrounded by tempestuous winds and clouds. Others are frankly dejected, but without weakness, because they have the strange joy of sorrow that is simple and p ­ assionate. 1  In a largely dismissive review of new poetry ET had briefly noticed Songs of Childhood, published by de la Mare under the pen-name Walter Ramal. Despite finding ‘one or two wonderful things’, he complains that the poet has ‘choked them with unsuccessful verses for children’ (DC: 14 August 1902). This review of Poems reflects the change of opinion expressed to GB on 28 July: ‘I regret that I saw nothing in any except the nonsense pieces in 1902, while I now see that it is poetry’ (LGB, 115). 2  ET’s review of Henry Brocken (subtitled ‘His travels and adventures in the rich, strange, scarce-imaginable region of romance’) similarly admits to ‘disappointment’, and ends: ‘The book should have been romance: it is, in fact, romanticism’ (DC: 17 May 1904). 3  De la Mare’s poem ‘Reverie’ begins: ‘When slim Sophia mounts her horse’; ‘Bunches of Grapes’, a favourite poem of ET’s, ends: ‘ “Chariots of gold,” says Timothy; / “Silvery wings,” says Elaine; / “A bumpity ride in a wagon of hay / For me,” says Jane.’

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And yet more than half of the poems come under none of these heads. There are some dedicated to indignation, even to hate, to regret, to laughter, to pure fantasy of imagination. In fact, they have so little of the sameness due to mannerism or self-­imitation that I despair of suggesting the quality of the book by quotation on any possible scale. All are short, most of them less than twenty lines in length. The verse forms are much varied. All are dense with feeling or observation or thought; some, in fact, so dense that I wonder sometimes whether the poet has truly reached the ultimate form for his idea. The writing is that of one who uses a phrase or a word never because it will seem to the careless reader to be musical or poetical, but always because only with its help can he tinge the paper with his soul; and if it has a fault, it is that it creeps along, at times, rather weary with the burden of thought added to thought. One technical fault he has, and that is a trick of printing ‘heav’n’ for ‘heaven’, and so on, though it is elsewhere clear that his ear does not habitually reject an extra syllable in his lines. Briefly, in these poems are to be found the very accent and features of a living man whom the world does not yet know. DC: 9 November 1906

A Book of English Sonnets [no editor given] Everyone has written a sonnet, for it is but fourteen decasyllabic lines curiously interwoven and it must contain not more than one idea. Some, ex­trava­ gant­ly pedantic, have sought an impossible perfection by reducing it to half an idea or none at all. As there is not a moment of any human life which, if rightly apprehended and clearly seen, may not take on an immortal artistic form in words or colours, so some of the most energetic spirits of our time, like Canon Rawnsley and Mr Lloyd Mifflin, have laboured to show that without a sonnet no day and no tea-­table event need pass.1 Some day we are likely 1 The prestige of Canon Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley (1851–1920), as worker for progressive causes, conserver of the Lake District, and a founder of the National Trust (1895), is not equalled by his prestige as a poet. He published several books of sonnets, including Sonnets at the English Lakes (1881) and A Sonnet Chronicle 1900–1906 (1906). ET says of the latter: ‘No one has done more to cheapen the sonnet than he’ (DC: 15 September 1906); and of Rawnsley’s Poems at Home and Abroad (1909): ‘It had become, thanks to Canon Rawnsley’s industry, almost impossible to read a new sonnet without a slight measure of contempt’ (MP: 9 August 1909). For the American poet Lloyd Mifflin, another sonnet-addict, see [82] and [170n.].

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to have a Utopia where men and women and children, subduing guilty passions, commercial aims, religious emotions and intellectual unrest, shall ruffle eternity with nothing wilder than an even flow of sonnets. In the meantime, in an admittedly imperfect life, it is as well to set beautiful dreams aside and to consider the sonnet simply as a verse-­form of romance origin. Perhaps the most noticeable characteristic of the sonnet is the way in which it has towered above all other strict forms of the same order. How trivial the roundel and ballade,2 compared with it! Some royal strain in its origin has marked it during its whole course. It has done nothing common or mean. No great poet has left it quite unsaluted. What is more, where English literature is at its lustiest, there the sonnet is at its height, and in the less brilliant periods of poetry the sonnet is hardly to be found, or found only in the work of the unusually gifted man, like Cowper or Gray. Thus it seems to be bound up with our literature as if it were a mode and not a mere form. In fact it may fairly be said that the sonnet, whether it have the long simple or wavering curve of Shakespeare’s or the two exquisite married curves of the perfect Italian form, is a mode almost as distinct as the drama, the epic, or the lyric, and certainly far more than a mere stanza form. Even minds not the greatest, seeking its help, have sounded astonishing lofty notes. There is more than one man who is in a fair way to some sort of immortality on the wings of one sonnet only. Surprised though we have been by the taste that could include, among much that is superb and much that is excellent though less known, some trumpery in this attractive anthology, we have been yet more surprised by the kinship, which only the sonnet seems to have revealed, between great and renowned names and unquestionably lesser names. It would be a superstition of which none need be ashamed, that the fourteen interwoven lines have such a mysterious and essential relationship to fine minds as the geometric web to the spider, the spiral to the flight of sparks or the growth of a shell.3 2  Roundel: intricate form, invented by Algernon Charles Swinburne, in which three three-line stanzas are rhymed ABA BAB ABA. A refrain, established by the opening words, recurs at the end of the first and third stanzas. Ballade: French form, consisting of three eight-line stanzas, rhymed (always on the same rhyme-sounds) ABABBCBC, followed by an Envoi: BCBC. The last line of the first stanza is repeated at the end of the succeeding stanzas and of the Envoi. 3  In November 1902 ET had advised his friend Jesse Berridge, an aspiring poet: ‘Personally, I have a dread of the sonnet. It must contain 14 lines, & a man must be a tremendous poet or a cold mathematician if he can accommodate his thoughts to such a condition. The result is—­in my opinion—­that many of the best sonnets are rhetoric only’ (LJB, 36). Hostility to the sonnet, as a formal and conceptual straitjacket, is a motif of ET’s criticism: ‘The sonnet had become, in fact, so powerful a thing of itself [in Elizabethan England] that the chances were against a man who set out to use it as a medium of “emotion remembered in tranquillity”. He might as well hope to

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[. . .] And yet it does not need any vast knowledge of, say, Elizabethan sonnets or sonnets written during the last ten years, to produce some qualification of our esteem for the form. It is almost part of the nature of the sonnet to be solemn, pontifical, unbending. It can, therefore, fall easily and welcome into the hands of those who do not distinguish pomposity from solemnity. The man who can write a ballade will but have to be a little more polysyllabic and expansive to write a sonnet as well. Hence a belief that a sonnet must first of all be a good sonnet. It may also be a good poem: it must be a good sonnet. A swelling Malvolio who has but wind enough to last out the fourteen lines without breaking into either a laugh or a tear at his folly, shall write a ‘good sonnet’ with an expenditure only of time. Partly the sonnet itself is re­spon­ sible, by countenancing a notion that she is only fourteen lines, well-­knit, sonorous and well-­rhymed; but of all sonneteers who have helped, probably Rossetti is most conspicuous. By lines like these:— And veriest touch of powers primordial,— His hours elect in choral consonancy,— Sleepless with cold commemorative eyes4

he has begotten as many bad poems as Marlowe’s mighty but windy line has begotten lines like— As she that drew the dreaming keels of Greece After her over the Ionian foam.5

This sonnet is a good example of this false sublimity:— If, on these pale and trembling blooms, full soon The winter of oblivion should descend, Remember, it was in my summer’s noon I gave you the poor posy, gentle friend. be the saviour of mankind in a well-ironed silk hat’ (FIP, 98). Yet he says a few pages later: ‘As the sonata can be true-hearted as the folk-song, so the elaborate sonnet or epithalamium can be no less so than “Whistle and I’ll come to ye, my lad” ’ (104; see [422]). ET’s love-hate relationship with the sonnet entered his poetic practice. He strictly wrote only six sonnets, yet seems constantly in touch with its possible basis in physics and biology: its higher or deeper ‘mathematics’, its DNA ‘spiral’. Some of his longer poems are double or treble sonnets; while his shorter poems often stop just before, or just overshoot, fourteen lines. 4  See ET’s review of The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti [518]. The quoted lines are from Rossetti’s sonnet sequence ‘The House of Life’ (written 1847–81): XXXIV: ‘The Dark Glass’; LV: ‘Stillborn Love’; XCVII: ‘A Superscription’. 5  Quotation from Nero (1906), verse-play by Stephen Phillips: see [16n.].

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Remember, how a fickle gust of praise Ruffled my foliage in that perished time, And by the after-­light of these dead days Read once again my world-­forgotten rhyme. Say: ‘Fame his mistress was; he wooed her long, She toyed with him an hour—­and flung him by: With me alone the memory of his song Reluctant fades, and hesitates to die.’— Then burn the book, that eyes less kind than those Vex not the haunted dusk of its repose.6

But a careful, curious and broad-­minded selection like this should be recommended to all who wish to write sonnets, for it is likely to give them several useful ideas. A sonnet, for example, may be about anything in the world, but to be a good sonnet it must be a good poem first, it must be sincere, terse, melodious. It may be in any style, however simple and lacking in thunders, and it need not end in a crash or in something solemn, unintelligible and insincere. SR: 10 November 

Arthur Symons, The Fool of the World and Other Poems There are some simple books which are made for reviewing, because they either annoy the reviewer and enable him to call them bad, or they soothe and perhaps flatter by agreeing with him and so enable him to call them good. Of those fine books which are not made for reviewing Mr Symons’s Fool of the World is an extreme example.1 His intelligence and fancy are so restless 6  Sonnet by William Watson: ‘To—, with a Volume of Verse’. 1  For ET and Symons, see Introduction [xlix]. On 15 March 1909, ET asked GB: ‘Tell me why you frown on the later Symons? I suppose you detect in his broadening out also a thinning down. But I should have said that, allowing bulk to count, he hardly had a superior living as a critic combining instinct & scholarship. I don’t think he had any originality, but then that is true of his other work too. But I thought a few of the later poems as good as anything he had done before, tho not better than (of their kind) the earliest. I imagine he could never be what I should call quite sincere, that is why he had not style; but in the later attitude all the flimsy avoidable insincerity had gone’ (LGB, 181–2). In his reply (8 April) GB conceded that some of Symons’s later poems ‘do seem to me more really poetry than anything he wrote earlier’; and said: ‘I do grant that much of his criticism of poetry and prose is illuminative . . . yet how constantly his reproduction of Pater’s pet cadences surrounds his carefullest paragraphs with an aroma of stale perfumery and insincerity’ (ETGB, 72). He goes on to dismiss Symons as a critic of painting, and calls Studies in Seven Arts (see next review) an ‘unreliable and second-hand book’ (73).

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and so various in their affections that not more than three or four of the poems can be dealt with in one review. But we must first suggest something of the opulence of the book. There is a brief morality play, ‘The Fool of the World’, in which Man, Death, The Coffin, The Spade, etc., converse, and there is a little Nativity play. There are ten ‘Meditations’. There are twenty poems under the heading—­which will interest all who have followed Mr Symons’s work and his autobiographical chapter in Spiritual Adventures—‘Amends to Nature’.2 There are seventeen further poems, reflections and dramatic monologues. Lastly, there are ten ‘Variations on an Old Tune’, the tune being now Herrick’s and sometimes the Arthur Symons’s of some years ago. These poems have little in common except a well-­wrought style which, with all his love of visible and tangible beauty and luxury, is yet sombre, heavy-­gaited, and tending to produce an impression of intellectual activity rather than physical beauty. This activity almost amounts to a dramatic gift. The dramatic pieces are not particularly good evidence of this, but the shorter poems, taken all together, are, since they show the writer’s exceptional desire and ability to put himself into a mood, a hundred moods, and to extricate himself with ease, just as the dramatist puts himself into a hundred characters without entanglement. In ‘The Fool of the World’ and the Nativity he throws himself dramatically into the mood of a medieval playwright. That in itself would be interesting, but not much more. But though he is a mental traveller who goes unbiased against new lands, yet he takes his character with him, and none but an intensely modern man could have made the speech of Death at the end of the morality. Death is a poor simple one, the fool of the world, who is perplexed and shamed by the mystery cast about her by men, and he says that she truly knows nothing— Have pity, all ye that draw breath, O men, have pity upon Death. The bells that weigh about my brows, And ring all flesh into my house, Are a fool’s witless bells; I lead The dance of fools, a fool indeed; And my hands gather where they find, For I am Death, and I am blind. [. . .] 2 ET’s review of Symons’s Spiritual Adventures (1905), a mix of autobiography and short stories, is not particularly enthusiastic. He thinks that that Symons fails to blend the factual with the spiritual, and says: ‘His work has seemed to us too much compressed, as if he were so afraid of being dull that he has only written down what lent itself to sentences that were separately interesting or agreeable’ (DC: 11 January 1906).

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We must pass over the ‘Prologue for a Modern Painter’ (namely Mr Augustus John) and its dramatic sympathy with an attitude assuredly not Mr Symons’s own; and ‘The Turning Dervish’, a brilliant but not quite persuasive revelation of the Dervish who turns like the stars in heaven, ‘Till, with excessive love, I drown, and am in God’; and the ‘Song of the Sirens’, which is as fine a thing as Claudian’s or William Browne’s.3 And we will take what it is easy to praise, the ‘Amends to Nature’. Here Mr Symons is on new ground, and how good an artist he is the poems show abundantly. Are they dramatic, too? At any rate, they are more than tours de force. They are among the best poems of Nature which have been written in our day. They express deliciously the most characteristic attitude towards Nature today, by letting us enjoy her beauty and variety frankly through the mind of one who is not always with her. They have not the intellectual abandonment of Wordsworth’s, nor the sensuous abandonment of Keats’s; we do not feel ourselves in the presence of Nature as we read them; yet they charm and interest us profoundly. ‘Cornish Wind’ is typical:— There is a wind in Cornwall that I know From any other wind, because it smells Of the warm honey breath of heather-­bells And of the sea’s salt; and these meet and flow With such sweet savour in such sharpness met That the astonished sense in ecstasy Tastes the ripe earth and the unvintaged sea. Wind out of Cornwall, wind, if I forget: Not in the tunnelled streets where scarce men breathe The air they live by, but whenever seas Blossom in foam, wherever merchant bees Volubly traffic upon any heath: If I forget, shame me! or if I find A wind in England like my Cornish wind.

That is good, but it is by no means the best. There are others equally strong in feeling; others with observations like this:— Under the harvest moon, one by one goes The austere procession of trees, that walk as I walk.

3  ‘In Sirenas’ is one of Claudian’s Carmina Minora (L); William Browne (c.1590–1645) wrote ‘The Sirens’ Song’ for his masque about Ulysses and Circe (1614–15).

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And others with a dramatic intensity like this: The gardener in his old brown hands Turns over the brown earth, As if he loves and understands The flowers before their birth, The fragile childish little strands He buries in the earth. Like pious children one by one He sets them head by head, And draws the clothes, when all is done, Closely about each head, And leaves his children to sleep on In the one quiet bed.4

We could quote much more, and yet do the volume no sort of justice: that can only be done by enjoying it. Mr Symons has done nothing better. If he had done nothing else, he would have shown himself to be one of the best spirits of our time who are the medium of verse. And yet, though every poem has the sincerity, the observation, the terseness, the brainwork, of poetry we have often wondered whether there is not lacking that divine impulse which makes poetry something entirely different from prose. For there remains even in the best of them a sign of their building up, an element of prose which enables us without impudence to fancy that they could have been written in several ways equally well. Even so, even if we are right, we are but suggesting that he is not in the company of men who were poets before every­thing, but rather of men like Arnold and Cowley and Gray. DC: 20 November 

Arthur Symons, Studies in Seven Arts1 Mr Symons’s seven arts are ‘painting, sculpture, architecture, music, handicraft, the stage (in which I include drama, acting, pantomime, scenery, costume, 4  This poem is ‘The Gardener’. In his poem ‘Sowing’, ET similarly uses a lullaby-like rhythm to evoke a sense of fulfilment associated with seeds having been ‘safely sown’ (ACP, 69). 1  See note 1 to previous review.

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and lighting), and, separate from these, dancing’, and he deals especially with Rodin, Mr MacColl’s Nineteenth Century Art, Gustave Moreau, Watts, Whistler, some Cathedrals, modern English handicrafts, Beethoven, Wagner, Richard Strauss, Duse, Mr Gordon Craig, and M. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi.2 His dedication and implicitly each of the essays in turn lay so much stress upon two sentences of Pater that we must quote them if we are to give in a short space some understanding of a wonderfully various book: It is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and painting—­all the various products of art—­as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour in painting, of sound in music, of rhythmical words in poetry. In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite principle—­that the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind—­is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism.3

On these sentences we will only remark that the second is illogically constructed and that some of the punctuation is apparently not Pater’s. But the idea is clear, and Mr Symons has followed it faithfully. His fidelity to it is, indeed, the most marked quality of the book, always excepting that strong if not easily definable personal note which distinguishes his work even from that of other followers of Pater. And yet we suspect that without this idea Mr Symons would have done equally well. For he has that docile, chameleon mind, always so valuable to a critic, which enables him to submit in an interesting manner to the ideas of the remarkable men of whom he writes. He submits to them, at first sight it seems quite passively, and then having accepted them he permits his own personality and charming style to turn them into something more or less definitely his own. The result of this 2 The sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), the painters G.  F.  Watts (1817–1904), Gustave Moreau (1826–98), and James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), and the composers Richard Wagner (1813–83) and Richard Strauss (1864–1949) were variously associated with Symbolist modes. Dugald Sutherland MacColl (1859–1948), author of Nineteenth Century Art (1902), was a watercolourist and influential art critic, who championed the French Impressionists, and headed both the Tate Gallery (1906–11) and the Wallace Collection (1911–24). Eleonora Duse (1858–1924): Italian actress with an international reputation. Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966): illegitimate son of the actress Ellen Terry, avant-garde theatre director and designer. Alfred Jarry (1873–1907): French writer, best known for his anarchic play Ubu Roi (1896), which influenced Dada, Surrealism, and the Theatre of the Absurd. 3  Opening of chapter, ‘The School of Giorgione’, in Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873, and subsequent editions). ET is right about Symons’s punctuation of the passage.

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a­ ttitude is naturally to give his criticism a creative character, which in its turn deserves and calls for criticism. What the general verdict on that criticism may be we shall not guess, but Mr Symons seems to us to miss a great achievement because he is only intellectually convinced of the necessity for clear and honest vision, for im­agin­ ation as distinct from invention, on the part of artists, and among them critics must presumably be counted. We have found it almost painful to notice with what emphasis Mr Symons repeats this one infallible canon of criticism. Rodin, in his words, ‘surrenders himself to the direct guidance of life itself ’; and later on, ‘Hardly anyone is able to see what is before him, just as it is in itself . . . he condemns without allowing his instinct the chance of asserting itself.’ Modern painters have, he asserts in his second essay, found ‘the pattern and rhythm of their pictures in nature itself rather than in their own brains and on their own palettes’. He quotes from Mr MacColl about invention ­contravening the logic of beauty and tearing away ‘just the integument in which the choicest visible life abides’; and from Wagner: ‘Art is an inbred craving of the natural, genuine, and uncorrupted man.’ Of Watts he says finely that he is content ‘to wait, disinterested, humble, incurious, sure that the secret, if not the meaning of the secret, will come to him’. In condemning the rhetoricians who ‘produce their effect by an effort external to the thing itself which they are saying or singing or painting’ he is keeping to the same high ‘specular tower’; so, too, in his adverse criticism of Strauss, a very brilliant one, he says that ‘Vital sincerity is what matters, the direct energy of life itself, forcing the music to be its own voice.’ We believe that these ideas are true and invaluable to the present age; that an understanding of them is ne­ces­sary to the rejection of bad work as well as to the enjoyment of good; that without them no security is possible; and that in circulating them in so many different forms, and so justly expressed, Mr Symons is doing a great service. But the reader ends, if he has not begun, by looking for this vital sincerity, this direct energy of life itself, in the criticism; and we must qualify our admiration for a brilliant, versatile, ingenious and very honest book by admitting that we at least have failed to find, amidst this crying out for vision and directness, any large portion of them in the writer himself. He has perhaps over-­strained his perceptions by his wide interests. He is apparently too much entangled in the words of other writers ever to get quite free and to speak out with the cloudy and yet genuine individuality of his own poetry. MP: 17 December 

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William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job With a General Introduction by Laurence Binyon; Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake, edited with an introduction by W. Graham Robertson The last two or three years have seen an unusually large number of appeals to the public on behalf of William Blake. Messrs Maclagan and Russell have edited the text of Jerusalem—­in their opinion ‘the most splendid’ of the prophetic books by this ‘greatest of English mystics’—and have gone so far as to promise an explanation. Mr John Sampson has given us a critical text of the short poems and some lyrical portions of the prophetic books, and Professor Raleigh, if we remember rightly, introduced the lyrical poems with some very confident and cheerful remarks about Blake’s poetry as a whole.1 Mr Swinburne’s essay, the first and apparently the last word on the poet, has been reprinted.2 Mr Edwin Ellis has edited the poems and the prophetic books of the ‘Irishman’, and added notes which reveal but by no means do justice to a long devotion to his mysticism. Mr Russell has arranged Blake’s letters and printed Tatham’s charming brief ‘Life’.3 The better part of the original Gilchrist’s Life of Blake is reprinted with many new reproductions from ­colour prints and engravings belonging to Mr Graham Robertson. Finally, we have the first volume of William Blake, a work of which the scope is not announced, containing an introduction by Mr Laurence Binyon and the twenty-­one illustrations to the Book of Job. We might almost suppose that Blake is popular or that his admirers expect him to be. That he may become popular on account of his poetry, as the ‘Elizabethans’ or Keats and Coleridge have been popular, is possible. That is to say, he may be widely bought, published in divers editions with introductions by journalists and others, and he will remain a mystery or he may get so far as to be misunderstood. From this airing one good will result. It will become worth the while of men with prodigious leisure and patience to read the prophetic books and tell us something about them. But we cannot so much expect that the simplicity and impulse of his finest lyrics will freshly appeal to more than a few—­which is the fortune of no great poet—­as that, by being widely sown, a chance will be given to all those who are fit for this fresh enjoyment, and among them the poets of the future who 1  For ET’s reviews of these editions, see [77], [186]. 2  Swinburne’s influential William Blake. A Critical Essay was published in 1868. 3  ET had also recently reviewed The Letters of William Blake together with a Life by Frederick Tatham, edited by Archibald G. B. Russell, along with Blake’s Poetical Works, edited and annotated by Edwin J. Ellis (MP: 29 October, 1906). Ellis and W. B. Yeats had previously edited The Works of William Blake (1893), making the controversial claim that Blake was of Irish descent—­an idea that greatly appealed to Yeats.

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could have no better tutor in the mysteries than this Centaur upon the mountains.4 It should be admitted also that even among the shorter poems there are not a dozen which have a great simple aim greatly and absolutely achieved: the poet was translating out of silence, and that was even to him a tongue imperfectly understood. Still less can we look forward to the popularity of Blake’s ideas. It may safely be said that no poet, not Whitman or Shelley, or Shakespeare, or Euripides is fuller of ideas that must for very long, if not for ever, remain exceedingly strange, disturbing, and fitted to infest conventionality and the daily round. An intelligent man who has once read a large part of Blake with patience can never again settle down with just the same dusty creases in his mind as before. He drenches the mind with eternity. We become, not necessarily wiser or kinder, or more just, but certainly more like citizens of the universe and less men of the world or gentlemen after reading him. Such ideas, if they became popular, would stop many a mill and let many a furnace die down.5 As an introduction to Blake, we can think of nothing better than Gilchrist’s Life, Mr Swinburne’s essay, and this volume containing Mr Binyon’s essay and the illustrations to Job. Gilchrist’s would have been a notable biography in any age. In 1863 it was astonishing. His sympathy and even his insight are not easily surpassed today, when we think ourselves much finer fellows than the Victorians. Yet he wrote from the outside: not as Crabb Robinson did,6 for he obviously thought it a noble thing to be inside; but as one who sometimes thought an apology necessary. Nor can we always accept his kind of apology. In the ‘Mad or Not Mad?’ chapter, for example, though the reasoning is vigorous and acute, there appears to us to be too much of an apology, if not actually of concession to the usual standards of the world. ‘Not mad, but perverse and wilful’ is a pitiful conclusion, implying a condemnation as severe as if it had been simply ‘mad’. Mr Binyon accepts it literally, but when Blake said that every man could be a visionary—‘work up imagination to the state of vision, and the thing is done’—either he was ironical or he strangely miscalculated the difference between others and himself. For one thing at least we have to be grateful to Nordau, Lombroso,7 and the rest—­for the 4  Several centaurs, including Chiron, associated with Mount Pelion, feature in Blake’s art. 5 In another review of Illustrations of the Book of Job, ET writes: ‘Modern books are a monument of human labour to which only the Pyramids are comparable—­amidst them Blake’s songs are as eagle or dove, joyous and alive, in flight’ (DC: 7 December 1906). 6 The Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867), which records impressions of Blake and other Romantic poets, was published in 1869. 7  The Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) and his Hungarian-Jewish disciple, Max Simon Nordau (1849–1923), physician and author of Degeneration (1892), believed that criminal behaviour and mental illness were genetically determined. Although their ideas have been mostly discredited, they are viewed as pioneers of modern criminology.

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indifference or unmitigated laughter with which we can now hear the charge of insanity against this or that proof of energy. Dowson, as we know, went so far as to write of one in Bedlam: better than love or sleep, The star-­crowned solitude of thine oblivious hours!8

Mr Binyon is a well-­trained and perfectly sensitive modern, whose ap­pre­ci­ ations of the man, the artist, and the poet suggest that if this age wanted a remodelling of Gilchrist he would be the man for the work. We hope that his essay of fifteen thousand words or so will become accessible in a cheap form—­as an introduction to the poems, for example. He gives, first, an ad­mir­able sketch of the poet’s life, a quintessential chapter, with none of the faults of an epitome. Then he writes of Blake, the artist. Within limits that would have been fatal to most men he succeeds in giving easy play to his imagination, his learning, and his critical faculty . . . [. . .] ‘Blake the Poet’ is also very good. Nothing could be more calm and passionate than his exposition and praise of Blake’s enthusiasm and his contempt for the mean. He does justice, and in a fascinating way, to the beauty of Blake’s form and ideas, and incidentally he discovers for the world two more fine passages from the prophetic books. Finally, just before the illustrations themselves, he gives an introduction to them and a series of notes on them one by one, which are wonderful in their insight and poetry. The illustrations are reproduced in a beautiful manner. We can say of them only that, with Stonehenge, they rank among the sublimest monuments of the handiwork of men in England, though they are now, unlike Stonehenge, in the possession of Mr Pierpont Morgan.9 MP: 17 December 8  Ending of ‘To One in Bedlam’; for ET on Ernest Dowson, see [124]. 9  The American financier and banker, John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), was a prominent collector of art, books, and literary papers. He first acquired Blake materials in 1899, laying the foundation for the important Blake collection in The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

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1907 W. B. Yeats, Poems, 1899–1905 This volume contains three plays in verse, The Shadowy Waters, The King’s Threshold, and On Baile’s Strand, and the short poems which were published under the title: In the Seven Woods. It is a pleasant and cheap form in which to have the second period of this poet’s work, though to be complete it should have included The Wind Among the Reeds. But not only does the book once more remind the public of the strange and the strong beauty of these poems, but, as might have been expected, it is interesting on account of the many changes in handling and detail to be found in the plays. No poet has troubled himself (and some of his readers) so much by revision as Mr Yeats. It is not that he outgrows his work, but that he does not outgrow it, and that, since all art is only an approach to perfection, he never loses the patience needed to bring it a little nearer to his desire. And yet we cannot but wish, a little petulantly, that he had thrown all this energy of heart and head into new work. The Shadowy Waters is almost a new play. For the ‘galley’ of the original scene has become ‘an ancient ship’ and, what is more, the sailors have been treated more grossly, so that we get a jumping-­off place to the unknown like that, for example, in Utopia, and this is a real improvement. Thus the second speech of ‘the other sailor’ is no longer:— How many moons have died from the full moon When something that was bearded like a goat Walked on the waters and bid Forgael seek His heart’s desire where the world dwindles out?

It has become:—         And I had thought to make A good round sum upon this cruise, and turn— For I am getting on in life—­to something That has less ups and downs than robbery.

The character of Aibric is blunter, too, so as to contrast clearly with Forgael’s in speeches like:—

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 I have good spirits enough. I’ve nothing to complain of but heartburn, And that is cured by a boiled liquorice root.

There is also a more gradual development of the union between Forgael and Dectora and the failure of her attempt to rouse a meeting is more striking; so, too, is the excitement of the sailors over the treasure in the captive ship. The effect in the end is as if we saw the gods coming and going among real sailors on a salty ship and not among enchanted sailors on an enchanted ship. It is, we think, a gain. The changes in The King’s Threshold—­ which is printed without the prologue—­are of the same kind, although not so marked. The burden of all the changes is a comic realism going along with a translunary quality in that harmony which only Mr Yeats can achieve. The beauty of certain blank verse speeches cannot be overpraised, but it is also hard to pass by. We are now more than ever struck by the beauty of the ordinary speeches which, in their naturalness and real poetry, prove as much as Wordsworth’s preface that the speech of poetry can be that of life. The blank verse of most modern plays is ridiculously antique and professional1 compared with that of Mr Yeats. DC: 1 January

William H. Davies, New Poems1 It is now nearly two years since a book appeared with this title-­page: The Soul’s Destroyer, and Other Poems. By WILLIAM H. DAVIES. Of the Author, Farmhouse, Marshalsea-­road.

1  This adjective seems odd: perhaps a misprint, perhaps for ‘professorial’. 1  Davies dedicated New Poems ‘To Helen and Edward Thomas’, which compounded ET’s problem in reviewing a collection he thought inferior to The Soul’s Destroyer. He confided to GB (9 December 1906): ‘It is (as I knew all along) far below the first book, & yet I find some beautiful things in it. I am troubled to think that the book will be neglected or slighted in reviews and almost certainly not very widely sold—­because I dared not discourage Davies by telling him boldly what I thought’; concluding later (26 December): ‘He will always observe & always feel,

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For some months no notice was taken of the book, which was published by the author without advertisement. Then it was discovered that he was an exceedingly poor man in a common lodging-­house, and had but one leg. He was a nine days wonder. There had been a postman-­poet, a policeman-­poet; why not a one-­legged tramp-­poet?2 Photographs and interviews were plentiful. It turned out that he was a young Welshman who had led a roving life, which did not end when he lost a leg on the way to the Klondyke. For he came to London and roamed about its streets for some years and wrote verses and endured much life; at intervals he walked out into the country and into Wales. These verses were extraordinary. The feeling for the country was profound, and equalled only by the observation. London appeared in them as it has certainly never appeared in any poetry except James Thomson’s, and at his best Mr Davies achieved a simplicity and directness which were beyond the author of The City of Dreadful Night. There were pathetic re­ min­ is­ cences of his early childhood in Monmouthshire, not merely pathetic, but beautiful and strong and clear, and some epigrammatic pictures of lodging-­house characters. There were a few poems which might have belonged to Crashaw’s age. There was no imitation. Altogether the book plainly revealed a surprising genius, which was acknowledged from very different points of view. Mr Davies’s second volume, New Poems, repays our confidence in his capacity for observation and expression. Some of the pieces relate to his London experience: the majority deal either with the country and his life in it or with subjects independent of time and place, such as music and his infancy. They include nothing, perhaps, as concentrated and shapely and powerful as his ‘Lodging House Fire’, but the best of them are noble. ‘The Likeness’, though far from being his best, shows his simplicity and clearness and is short enough to quote: I  think & whether he grows much or not, it seems likely that he will often attain simplicity unawares. I must think out a just & yet genial comment for his private eye. In print I shall praise him mainly because a reviewer has to shout like an actor if he is to be heard by the audience’ (LGB, 127–8, 130). 2  Postman-poet: probably Edward Capern (1819–94), who became well known after he sent his broadside-poem, ‘The Lion Flag of England’, to British troops during the Crimean War. Policeman-poet: ET had written a satirical review of Ballads in Blue by Police-Constable George H. Mitchell (DC: 12 September 1903). Discussing Mitchell’s ‘sparks from the hobnails of his own actual life’, he quotes this stanza: ‘Think not because when in the street, / At evening hour upon my beat, / I love to court the muses, / I fail to keep a keen look-out / For burglars who may be about, / Or aught that law abuses.’ ET comments: ‘Oh, admirable and too rare combination of artist and citizen.’ Mitchell subsequently left the Police for the Church, and in 1912 published More Ballads in Blue as an ‘Ex-Police Constable’.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 When I came forth this morn I saw   Quite twenty cloudlets in the air; And then I saw a flock of sheep,   Which told me how those clouds came there. That flock of sheep, on that green grass,   Well it might lie so still and proud! Its likeness had been drawn in heaven,   On a blue sky, in silvery cloud. I gazed me up, I gazed me down,   And swore, though good the likeness was, ’Twas a long way from justice done   To such white wool, such sparkling grass.3

It is followed by such a drinking song as is not produced once in a gen­er­ ation, a thing full of gusto, of strong, terse thought, and of irony, ending thus: One quart of good old ale, and I   Feel then what life immortal is: The brain is empty of all thought,   The heart is brimming o’er with bliss; Time’s first child, Life, doth live; but Death, The second, hath not yet his breath. Give me a quart of good old ale,   Am I a homeless man on earth? Nay, I want not your roof and quilt,   I’ll lie warm at the moon’s cold hearth; No grumbling ghost to grudge my bed, His grave, ha! ha! holds up my head.4 [. . .]

And there is hardly a poem which is not a thing of entirely new beauty on account of its truth and imagination, and above all the impression it leaves of coming straight from the spirit of a strange, vivid, unlearned, experienced man. It is a pity that he admitted the long poem which fills his last fourteen

3  ET also quotes ‘The Likeness’ in a third review, which again stresses the freshness of New Poems: ‘We notice here the same naïve, original outlook, sudden out-of-the-way observations of beautiful and pathetic things, the images and ideas of one who has gone straight to Nature and Man without books, the style of one who has no care for words and uses them because he must, having been deprived of other means of expressing his vitality’ (B: January). ‘The Likeness’ may have its own likeness in ET’s ‘Adlestrop’ (also in quatrains with a four-beat line): ‘grass, / And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, / No whit less still and lonely fair / Than the high cloudlets in the sky’ (ACP, 51). 4  The poem is ‘Ale’, from which ET’s next review quotes the first stanza.

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pages. His long poems, though they contain good things, invariably fail. They lure him into indefiniteness, incoherence, inconsequence. Perhaps they demand purely intellectual gifts in which he is not rich, and they certainly put a severe strain upon his constructive faculty, which is weak; his poems either sing themselves through like an old air or they break up and fall. MP: 3 January *** [. . .] His New Poems, as might have been expected, contain many strong, beautiful, and pathetic things. They will disappoint only those who had unreasonably hoped that Mr Davies would at once leap to a state of perfect self-­criticism, and give us nothing but concentrated poetry, without the crude, the vague, and the prosy, and the faults of grammar which schoolmasters found leisure to deplore. He has not done this. His longest poem, ‘Hope Abandoned’, is as faulty as any of those in The Soul’s Destroyer; it is not always easy to understand, and it is incoherent even when intelligible, though it is also rich in more than half-­made poetry. As before, we see his syntax very often the victim of his unskilfulness with rhyme and rhythm. In fact, there is nothing to distinguish the later poems from the earlier except, perhaps, a not always admirable fluency, and, certainly, a more ex­uber­ant use of natural subjects and images and a more cheerful spirit. [. . .] There are two drinking poems which I should like to quote entire, because I do not know more than twenty drinking poems in the language fit to rank with them. Their vigour, their truth, their splendid spirit are inestimable, and is not the irony of this equally so, in ‘Ale’? Now do I hear thee weep and groan,   Who hast a comrade sunk at sea? Then quaff thee of my good old ale,   And it will raise him up for thee; Thou’lt think as little of him then As when he moved with living men. [. . .]

In his ‘Autumn’ and other earlier poems Mr Davies showed a deep feeling and an original eye for Nature. In this book there is more observation, the feeling is still deep, and the imagination straight from his own soul and from no man’s book How new is this in ‘The Ox’, for example:— Why should I pause, poor beast, to praise   Thy back so red, thy side so white;

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 And on thy brow the curls in which   Thy mournful eyes take no delight? [. . .]

Again there is a lyric called ‘Parted’, about which nothing can be said that is not unnecessary:— Alack for life! Worn to a stalk since yesterday Is the flower with whom the bee did stay, And he was but one night away. Alack for life, I say. Alack for life! A flower put on her fine array, In hopes a bee would come her way, Who’s dying in his hive this day. Alack for life, I say. Alack for life! If Death like Love would throw his dart And pierce at once a double heart, And not to strike away one part— Alack for life, who’d say?

Until these poems get a little stale in the mind, if that is possible, or a little more familiar, it is hard to criticise them or to say anything but acknowledge their newness and beauty, and do what one can to ensure the future of this fascinating genius.5 DC: 24 January 

J. J. Jusserand, A Literary History of the English People, Vol. II: From the Renaissance to the Civil War, Part 1; A Treasury of English Literature (From the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century), selected and arranged by Kate M. Warren, introduction by Stopford A. Brooke; A Pageant of Elizabethan Poetry, arranged by Arthur Symons; The Pilgrims’ Way: A Little Scrip of Good Counsel for Travellers, chosen by A. T. Quiller-­Couch1 5  This echoes ET’s letter of 26 December 1906: see note 1. 1  Jean Jules Jusserand (1855–1932): scholar and diplomat, French ambassador to the US during and after the First World War. His Histoire littéraire du peuple anglais appeared in three parts,

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The knowledge of many things—­little and great things—­in M. Jusserand’s book is remarkable; the rightness of most of its judgments is remarkable. Yet  there are and have been English critics who are, so far, the equals of M. Jusserand, while there are some who far exceed him in subtlety, and could have praised Spenser, e.g., more adequately. But his great gift of imagination, as applied to such a vast material, and in combination with those other qualities, is not to be found in the same perfection elsewhere. Without this imagination there was no room for a book of this kind. It shows itself in the colour that pervades the whole, in the arrangement that gives to the history the movement of a ‘pomp of waters unwithstood’,2 and in a hundred vivid pictures and images. And it is, on that account alone, the most inspiring and therefore the most useful book of the same scope which has yet been written. The translator has caught admirably the manner of the whole; the number of errors or weaknesses in detail is not considerable. After the ordinary history of literature, this book reaches us with the same tumult of enjoyment as comes, after the ordinary political history, with Carlyle’s French Revolution, or after the ordinary natural history, with a book like Hampshire Days.3 Its enthusiasm and impetus are wonderful. I feel that every history that follows it must have the same or fail. It has actually some of that very vitality of which M.  Jusserand is the chronicler. It is full of a learned, exuberant, and just personality. Above all, it is full of sympathy with

1893–1909. Kate  M.  Warren: lecturer in English Language and Literature, Westfield College, University of London. For Stopford A. Brooke, see [312n.]. (Sir) Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863– 1944), novelist and critic with pen-name ‘Q’, was Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University from 1912. He edited the influential Oxford Book of English Verse (1900; later editions updated). For ET’s interest in how literary canons were being constructed at that time, and his own different approach to English-language traditions, see also his response to the Cambridge History of English Literature [268]. 2 Phrase re the Thames from first part (1595) of Samuel Daniel’s epic poem The Civil Wars (II.vii); quoted in Wordsworth’s poem beginning: ‘It is not to be thought of that the flood / Of British freedom. . .’. 3  Country book (1903) by ET’s friend, the naturalist and novelist W[illiam] H[enry Hudson (1841–1922): see Introduction [xix]. ET had written of Hampshire Days: ‘We know no other county patriotism that has produced anything as good’ (DC: 5 June 1903). In 1907 Hudson and ET became closer friends: see JMW, 155–7. ET admired Hudson, above other contemporary Naturewriters, as ‘the substantial miracle of a naturalist and an imaginative artist in one and in harmony’ (IPS, 245). In a letter to GB (26 February 1908), he said: ‘Except William Morris there is no other man whom I would sometimes like to have been, no other writing man’ (LGB, 158). ET’s coreconcept of being ‘An old inhabitant of earth’ (ACP, 42) has an affinity with a passage which he quotes from Hudson in his laudatory review of A Shepherd’s Life: ‘we are not aliens here, intruders or invaders on the earth, living in it but apart, perhaps hating and spoiling it, but with the other animals are children of Nature’ (MP: 26 September 1910).

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personalities. M.  Jusserand’s Skelton is as alive as his Thomas More. His Surrey and Wyatt are men as well as poets. It is very well to assert that poetry confers immortality. M. Jusserand proves it by showing that for him, a living man, the poets are living men. Mr Stopford Brooke, in his introduction to Miss Warren’s rich Treasury, talks about English literature as ‘a living organism, with a living soul’. But he also generalises in a tedious manner about the addition of ‘logical, historical and analysing powers to the English mind’ through ‘certain Italian influences’, and, perhaps, because he lacks space, he suggests rather that English literature is a nicely-­ordered document, with a beginning and a middle, and so on, than what it really is—­namely the most vital part of a thousand active, passionate, contemplative men who have moved proudly and with enjoyment among their contemporary men and women during a thousand years. The Treasury shows this abundantly. It is a selection from English verse and prose, on the same lines as the very recent Oxford Treasury of English Literature, and beginning with the seventh century and ending with Burns, is designed especially to accompany and illustrate Mr Stopford Brooke’s famous ‘Primer’.4 It gives many samples of what Mr Brooke calls the ‘vital and en-­linked evolution’ which belongs to English more than any other modern literature except the French. But it is possible to dwell too much upon this vaguely scientific aspect of English literature, an aspect that cannot honestly strike us until long after the first flush of pleasure has died away and left us in philosophic calm to arrange the poets like so many tiles along a garden border or bottles in a medicine chest. Mr Stopford Brooke says: In this closeness to life, English literature has painted England as it was from generation to generation. All that England is and has been is written in its prose and poetry. Not half enough has been made of this by historians.

M. Jusserand asserts nothing of the kind. He proves it. For his history is a pageant in which poets and historians and satirists and ballad-­writers ­mingle with captains, sailors, explorers, buccaneers, men from over the sea, courtiers, fair women, princes, princesses, preachers, rakes, vagabonds, statesmen, diplomatists. In his pages they intermingle and meet on equal terms because they have one thing in common, life, and they enjoy and suffer from it intensely because it is the sixteenth century, and their country is England. 4  The first volume of the three-volume Oxford Treasury of English Literature, edited by sister and brother G[race] E[leanor] Hadow and W[illiam] H[enry] Hadow, had appeared in 1906; Brooke’s Primer on English Literature (often reprinted) in 1876.

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There is not a chapter in which we are not joyfully aware that all these forms of life are beautiful and akin; in which we do not see them rising miraculously out of English soil as a myriad different flowers rise and mingle from one deep garden; in which we do not feel proud in our confidence that they will bear brave children as roses follow the rose. He shows us poetry going hand in hand with other life, so that we cannot but remember the words of a living poet:— the King’s money would not buy, Nor the high circle consecrate his head, If poets had never christened gold, and even The moon’s poor daughter, that most whey-­faced metal, Precious; and cry out that none alive Would ride among the arrows with high heart Or scatter with an open hand, had not Our heady craft commended wasteful virtues.5

The one touch of pathos comes with the thought that, of all these captains, sailors, princes, and fair women, nothing will survive except in the winged words which some of them snatch a moment to write. And even that touch of pathos is wiped out continually as we see what life these written words may have. There is hardly one book that gives so vivid a satisfaction in the written words of the Elizabethan English as Mr Arthur Symons’s Pageant. It is one of those few anthologies—­Mr E. V. Lucas’s Open Road 6 and Mr Quiller-­Couch’s Pilgrims’ Way are amongst them—­to which the compiler has given a form corresponding in a special way with his own passion or intelligence or humour. Most anthologies have some impudence in their impersonal desire to select what is good, or even as some have claimed, the best. Mr Symons and Mr Quiller-­Couch have made their anthologies images of their own minds. The Pilgrims’ Way is on the model of The Open Road, with mingled prose and verse; but the road here is the road of life, and the feasting is more stately and the comment more grave. 5  Spoken by Seanchan, the poet on hunger-strike against King Guaire, in W. B. Yeats’s play The King’s Threshold (1903): see [91]. ET had recently revisited the play [131]. 6  E[dward] V[errall] Lucas (1868–1938): prolific man of letters. His anthology The Open Road: A Little Book for Wayfarers (1899) remained popular for many years. ET regretted (9 December 1906) that he would ‘not make £1,500 out of ’ his own Pocket Book of Poems and Songs ‘as Lucas did out of his genial Open Road anthology’ (LGB, 128). He often reviewed works by Lucas, and (perhaps envying his success) was not always complimentary, as when noting to GB (12 October 1909): ‘Another anthology by E. V. Lucas. I get sick of geniality & odd charming characters all extracted from their context as if you should spread jam over toffee & eat it with honey’ (LGB, 195).

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Mr Symons’s Pageant is a joyous stream of lyrical poetry, some of it new to anthologies, all of it so chosen and arrayed as to have a movement and con­ tinu­ity which make it his own book; a pageant opening with the invitation to music and dancing and wine, passing on to the praise of beauty, the love of love, and then love itself, and lastly to meditations, and ‘the dirges and epitaphs of death, and no inconsolable conclusion’. I would rather have it than any other anthology, because, not only are all his poems good, but as I have said before, they have been so handled by Mr Symons that they suggest the life of the age in which they were composed and, more vaguely but still pleasantly, human life itself and the mind of the master of this pageant. DC: 7 January 

Charles M. Doughty, The Dawn in Britain, Vols V and VI These two volumes contain the last eight books of Mr Doughty’s epic.1 In twenty-­four books, or about 30,000 lines of blank verse, with constant passion and infinite richness of workmanship, he has given us a strong, beautiful impression of the ascent of the British people out of prehistoric gloom, through a period of offensive foreign war under Brennus, and the years of vivid but disintegrated life before the Roman invasions, down to the defensive struggle under Caractacus, the introduction of Christianity by Joseph of Arimathea, and the marriage of a Christian Britoness with a Roman knight. He has not attempted to give a narrow and pedantic unity to the vast and numerous and scattered events which he sings, but I venture to think that the more the poem is read, the more of a passionate moral unity in the whole will be revealed. Such are his imagination, his learning, his patience, that even had he written in prose, or had his verse no positive merit, the narrative 1  For ET’s previous reviews of The Dawn in Britain, and his arguments with GB about the poem, see [183], [208]. He had admitted on 27 September 1906: ‘I daresay you are right about [Doughty], but I still think that his war . . . is far & away the finest that ever got into poetry, though I will confess that I compare it (favourably) rather with the great histories than the great poems’ (LGB, 123). But these final volumes led him to write on 27 March 1907: ‘Doughty is great. I see his men & women whenever I see noble beeches, as in Savernake Forest, or tumuli or old encampments, or the line of the Downs like the backs of a train of elephants, or a few firs on a hilltop’ (LGB, 135).

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would have deserved the highest praise as an introduction to the study of Britain, its people, its visible beauty, its personality. It has no competitors. To turn from Livy on Brennus, or Caesar on the state of this island, or Tacitus on Cartimandua, Queen of the Brigantes to Mr  Doughty’s poem is like turning from a list of deaths to ‘Lycidas’ and ‘Adonais’. Even where his material is the same as that of those historians, his superiority is clear. Now, for the first time in written words, Brennus and Caractacus and Boadicea are made alive, beautiful, and strong. Their battles, their feasts, their wooings, their partings, their thoughts under the stars, their deaths, have a clearness and truth and passion which raise their creator to the same class as the famous epic poets—­I do not say to their level, because I do not know; but that his effects and theirs are of the same order is certain. Supposing that he had not done this, then his picture of early Britain, vast, wild, sunlit, coloured, perfumed, full of the songs of birds, with here and there a town and here and there the burial mounds of princes and unknown men—­that picture would alone have made the poem deserve an undying name. It is a little matter, but I had no worthy sense of the rich great age of this home of my race until I found it here; it is not a little matter that (some day) children will grow up with the emotion of this book in their breasts, with such an harmonious view of early history and folklore and ancient monuments and the physical beauty of Britain as we can only grope after. But the book is not only poetry in substance and spirit; it is poetry in form. That is to say, its verse makes it something different from the prose narrative which the same man might have written; different, of loftier beauty, monumental, terse beyond the reach of prose. Except Milton and Spenser, no English writer has wrought out a style as consistent, poetical, and perfectly his own as Mr Doughty’s; and it has this, too, in common with theirs, that, when it fails, it becomes dull, but does not cease to be poetry. And it is simpler than theirs, with as little that can be accused of verbosity as that of Wordsworth, or the early William Morris, or Mr Yeats. It is very modern, for example, in its daring and just use of unimportant syllables, as at the beginning of a line, over and above the usual weight. Enough has perhaps been said about Mr Doughty’s vocabulary and the structure of his phrases in our notices of the first four volumes. The vocabulary is unusual, abounding in words or forms that have become obsolete, or even in those which were probably never in use; it is as eclectic as Milton’s or Keats’s; but with the aid of Mr Doughty’s notes, the glossary, and a little patience, it is easily mastered, and is seen in the end to have a curious fitness and consistency, so that, if it sometimes puzzles, it never jars. The structure owes something to Latin and Greek, but everything, it must be observed, to

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a pursuit of what is logical and most brief. After an hour’s reading it offers no difficulties, and in a short time the poetry may be read aloud with ease and joy, so as to disclose the admirable concentration, the melody, the accents that obey and serve the sense. [. . .] DC: 7 February *** The last two volumes of Mr Doughty’s epic poem take us from the capture of Camulodunum by the Emperor Claudius to the wasting of Mona by Agricola, the burning of Rome and the death of Caractacus in Italy, and Joseph of Arimathea’s vision of the great nation to rise from the mingling of Briton with Saxon. The poem is now complete in twenty-­four books. Into these the poet has gathered all that is known or can be surmised, by means of history, archaeology and folk-­lore, of Britain and its people, from the dim days before Brennus took Rome, down to the introduction of Christianity into this island and the final failure of the islanders to make a nation without help from the continent. His learning is extraordinary, and that alone would make the book as important as, let us say, Stubbs’s Select Charters.2 I can easily imagine that it might be annotated in such a way as to make an in­com­par­ably equipped history. Some day, no doubt, it will be so annotated. For the immense and long-­continued effort of a great, original and strange intellect implied by the mere materials of the book cannot conceivably be allowed to disappear, even supposing that future generations decide against The Dawn in Britain as an epic poem. For my part I know of no history with which the poem can be compared, except Livy’s, in the great tract of time which it covers, in the degrees of light through which it passes out of the twilight into early day, in the diversity of the events which it describes, in the sense of a large, complex, unguided struggle towards a great end by which it delights and awes the mind. Livy has  a great style, but so has Mr Doughty. Livy has a Roman mind, but Mr Doughty’s is not less. Where Livy has at first sight a clear advantage is in the large, ample sweep of his narrative. There is nothing of the kind in Mr Doughty, whose progress compared with the historian’s is as a serpentine pack-­road over difficult country compared with the Roman road out of Winchester northward. As far as its outward shape goes, the poem is more 2  Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional History from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward the First (1870), by William Stubbs (1825–1901), Professor of Modern History at Oxford University: textbook used by ET when a history-student at Oxford. Hard-up after leaving Oxford, he asked a friend, Ned Elsey, to sell his copy of Stubbs to Blackwell’s (letter, 2 March 1902, ETFN 77, 11).

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like the Hebrew Books of Kings or the Shahnama of Firdausi.3 But then Livy was untroubled by all the recondite, never before related, science, with which Mr Doughty has elected to work, and we may venture to think that only a stupid pedantry or a lifeless power of generalisation could have made a poem of this scope as simple as the Odyssey—­and as unreadable as the Henriade.4 For its reception at the present day, Mr Doughty has made a further ­difficulty by by using a vocabulary and constructions of his own. We meet such words as caterf (Lat. Caterva), bavin, crome, pilch, yex.5 We meet such sentences as:— Careless of warfare, which, erewhile, with Romans; How may they only eat, seek dying Britons.

or this beautiful one:— And hearken, a far-­off bray, ah, heavy note, If any feared to die, of Roman clarion!

It is true also that sentences like this (a speech of Caractacus at Rome) abound:— Romans! whilst I viewed, from hence, Your palaces, your gilded temple-­roofs, I marvelled, ye could covet our poor cotes!

and that his style allows of a fine simplicity in touching a simple matter, as here:— Grey deep, how wholesome, to a shipman’s eye! And who is ’scaped, from ape-­faced world, not joys Look forth, o’er thy vast wandering breast, abroad, From some lone cliff, and snuff up thy salt breath? Eternal flood! how thy waves’ sullen sound, Doth seem, as mother’s voice, to wakening child!

But when I add that his blank verse has a hundred surprises for those who have scamped their Shakespeare and Milton and know nothing of Mr Yeats

3  Reviewing the first two volumes of The Dawn in Britain, ET had also compared it to the Persian national epic, Shahnameh (usual transliteration): ‘Book of Kings’, created by Firdausi/ Ferdowsi: see [185] and note. 4  Epic poem (1723) by Voltaire. 5  Except for caterf: crowd (a coinage), all archaic or dialect words, thus glossed by Doughty: bavin: brushwood; crome: a crook [shepherd’s crook]; pilch: coat of skins (Latin: pelliceus); yex: hiccup.

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or Mr Sturge Moore, it will be clear that Mr Doughty is not asking for a ­sixpenny edition within twelve months. The result is that the reader’s first hour with the poem is full of doubt and confusion and pain. Some have probably shut the book for ever after the first half hour. But we are quite sure that because Endymion and much of Browning and ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and Paradise Lost, not to speak of the poems of Donne, do not now appear to be in a foreign tongue, they never did appear so? When the style of a book by a manifestly big man offends us it is worth while to ask some such question. Also, the present reviewer, a hurried man, with little scholarship, has found that in an hour or two the difficulty of the style disappeared, and its wonderful brevity, precision, consistency and power emerged without a cloud. Of course it does remain a subject for specu­la­tion: whether an entirely great man would hamper himself with a vocabulary and an eccentricity of construction so much outside the tradition of English poetry. And yet is it not idle speculation, since the result achieved by this style is prodigious? What that result is I have tried to suggest in reviewing an earlier portion of the poem, of which these last eight books are worthy in every way. Above all things, the book does reincarnate and reinspire the ancient life that was once lived in this land. It is not necessary to be able to say that probably the Britons who fought under Caractacus or Boadicea did thus live: nor is it relevant to say that our knowledge of ancient weapons, burials and so on is inexact and incomplete. The point is that in these pages glorious men and women do live a credible noble life, in a land of which the poet depicts the outward features with a sense of the beautiful and the majestic ‘too deep for tears’. These tall, beautiful young princes charioted behind white horses, these rugged melancholy kings debating the fate of the country before the Roman invaders, these fair, straight women suckling heroes or weeping over their corpses, these ravens croaking and sweet-­voiced skylarks carolling over the still battle-­field in the bloody dawn—­these things move us as nothing but great poetry or a private joy or grief can move a man, and they leave the heart uplifted and the mind glowing with a vision of the dawn such as no other book can give. In short, I cannot understand how a man can read this poem (with the patience which a work of this magnitude demands) and see the author’s strength and vivacity in battle, his pity—­in which no English poet except Shakespeare equals him—­and his lofty and melting tenderness, his equality and sympathy with the heroes whom he paints, his enjoyment of great adventures and, no less, of little household things, his power of rendering the action of men and the sleep of landscapes—­I cannot understand how a man can see these things, as he must if

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he reads every line of the poem, without admitting that only the great poets have produced similar effects. B: March 

John Davidson, The Triumph of Mammon In his Rosary Mr Davidson gave a short conversation between a critic and a playwright. The critic asked the other why he studied philosophy so much, and he replied that he had been seeking ‘the relation of Literature to Philosophy—­that is to say, the relation of the Soul of Man to the Universe’. He continued: It is clear that these two worlds, Literature and Philosophy, are related and divided by a profound antithesis, and yet exist within each other, like the intermixed spirits in the seventh gulf of the Inferno; but without the horror and torture of Hell. I perceive the identity of Spinoza’s God, Hegel’s Absolute, Fichte’s Transcendental Ego, Schopenhauer’s Will to Live, and Nietzsche’s Will to Power. These all-­embracing categories are titles which Man in his madness has conferred on Matter. It is the aim of Philosophy to integrate the appearances of Matter, to know and present them as a Universe or Unity. It is the aim of Literature, which keeps on absorbing and will ultimately include all Science, to know and present Matter as it is disintegrated into individuals, men and women, plants, animals, elements, suns, and systems. I hold by Literature, but the soul cannot live by Literature alone; wherefore I have recourse to the madness of Philosophy.1

It is a good distinction, cleverly made. The pity is that Mr Davidson does not preserve it in his poetry and so make good his boast that he can be ‘master in one world and acolyte in the other’. Literature and philosophy appear in his work, now as partners, philosophy a sleeping one, having talked itself to sleep; and again as civil enemies. These differences seem to be due to the fact that the philosophy is exclusively intellectual, the poetry essentially passionate. We ought to guess the philosophy from the poetry no more than we guess the athlete’s meals from the length of his leap. But Mr Davidson is at the beginning of a new age, or is convinced that he is. He appears to believe himself the first poet to confront this age and 1  John Davidson, A Rosary (London: Grant Richards, 1903), 87: for ET’s review, see [68].

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all its most characteristic activities quite honestly—­like M. Maeterlinck in prose; and the knowledge or belief that this is so has disturbed him as much as might have been expected. It is very well for him to say that critics have been talking about his ‘metaphysical and philosophical poetry’, and to reply with: There can be no metaphysical or philosophical poetry: a poet may employ metaphysic and philosophy as he may employ history and science, but all poetry is poetical. It is not a new metaphysic, a new philosophy or a new theology which I begin: metaphysic, theology and philosophy itself in its esoteric sense, are to me fallacies, as each insists on a dual world of matter and spirit. It is a new poetry I begin, a new cosmogony, a new habitation for the imagination of men.

A poet may be a metaphysician and a great one, but not at the same time, or  if he is we should salute him as we should one who is poet and baker and  composes with dough, currants and icing. It is extraordinary that Mr  Davidson should know this, yet write things like The Testament of a Prime Minister2 and The Triumph of Mammon. Its effect upon his writing alone ought to have told him that he had gone wrong. He must know that there is no reason why he should use blank verse for this—­in a bridal chamber ­conversation: To be a beast?—it is to be a star! Nothing is bestial, nothing mean or base; For all is Universe, an infinite Ethereal way and being of myriad-­minded Matter: substance and soul, all matter, wanton As lightning, chaste as light, diverse as sin.

If this crude and furious pamphlet has any merit it is as an allegory. A dramatic allegory—­from the author of Fleet Street Eclogues and ‘A Runnable Stag’! We assume that Mr Davidson has hoped to do with his one mind what no one mind has done before—­to face contemporary life and invent (out of excellent material) a new cosmogony better suited to its needs, brand-­new and dirt-­cheap. Hence his failure. You cannot make yourself into a giant by bolting two or even three oxen and a complement of ­potatoes. [. . .] It is poor poetry—­setting aside the fact that it is poor blank verse—­so poor that only Mr Davidson’s singular vigour and seriousness keep us awake 2  For ET’s review of The Testament of a Prime Minister, see [102].

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to the end. Except to make the allegory more striking, the dramatic form is irrelevant and unnecessary. He could have said what he wanted to say in a monologue of a quarter the size. The prose of his Epilogue is as full as ever of proofs of his mental activity and divine egotism, but it is also more broken and inconsequent than ever.3 DC: 30 April 

Ralph Hodgson, The Last Blackbird and Other Lines Mr Ralph Hodgson’s book is the second—­Mr Marjoram’s Repose being the other1—volume of verse published this year which has the mark not merely of a class or a school, but of an individual, singular, unique, whom we cannot mistake for someone else. A few phrases from the first poem2 will show this, such as: I dumbly guess Why on a wintry window-­pane   Late Edens effloresce—

and— What tears are those in evening bells   A harvest field away—

3  ET wrote on 22 April: ‘One of my saddest jobs lately has been reviewing John Davidson’s drama: Triumph of Mammon, with an epilogue. I think his brain must be giving way. There is a lot of energy, as usual; but an unusual incoherence and much less beauty in detail. Of course I couldn’t praise it yet I did not like having to say anything against this sad serious, very “clever egoist” ’ (LGB, 137). 1  ET’s review of Repose and Other Verses by J. Marjoram calls him ‘a very clever and sincere writer unknown to us’, whose poems contain ‘not a line that is merely fluent or sweet’ (DC: 24 June 1907). On 27 March he had sent the book to GB, saying: ‘He seems to me to think and compose verse sincerely, independently, & usually with subtle effects’ (LGB, 135). ET was less impressed by Marjoram’s second collection, New Poems, despite concluding: ‘if he can go on producing these delicate individual pieces of emotion and observation he will be very welcome’ (DC: 28 August 1909). In fact, he may have talent-spotted a novelist rather than a poet. ‘J. Marjoram’ was a pseudonym of Ralph Hale Mottram (1883–1971), author of the Spanish Farm trilogy (1924–6): highly regarded novels based on his war-experience. 2  This poem is ‘The Treasure-Box’.

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and— What gladness fills the yellow wren   When June is in the thorn.

These illustrate a characteristic power of his, that of producing the emotional picturesque, and there are few living poets who can equal him in this. At its best it is magical in its effect, and when it is not it is admirable, terse, and vivid, as here: . . . the spume that quilts an idle tide Behind the trough where meeting waters mix.

He is apparently one of the few who have come under Coleridge’s influence—­in his case the influence has been the good one of ‘Christabel’, in the poems in ballad form. One whole poem, called ‘St. Athelstan’, is a beautiful specimen of this style, though it contains one terribly disorganised sentence. Only now and then does his simplicity go obviously wrong, as in: The thrush sang with amazing skill.

‘The Hammers’ is the short poem which best shows Mr Hodgson’s force: Noise of hammers once I heard, Many hammers, busy hammers, Beating, shaping, night and day, Shaping, beating dust and clay To a palace; saw it reared; Saw the hammers laid away. And I listened, and I heard Hammers beating, night and day, In the palace newly reared, Beating it to dust and clay: Other hammers, muffled hammers, Silent hammers of decay.

But, though Mr Hodgson is going to advance a long way further, it is already beyond us to do justice to his thought, his emotion (the two nearly always working together), and his fine use of words. DC: 30 May 

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J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World Mr Synge’s play has already excited intense admiration and annoyance on the stage, where alone perhaps its wholeness and its extraordinary vitality at every point may be completely enjoyed.1 The characters are Michael James Flaherty, an innkeeper, and his daughter, Pegeen; her lover, Shawn; some village girls and farmers; and Christy Mahon and Old Mahon, his father: the scene, the coast of Mayo. Christy comes after nightfall, a lean and timid youth, to the inn, and makes a hit by saying that he has killed his father. ‘You should have had good reason for doing the like of that’, says Michael, with great respect, and all are in awe of such a bold fellow, especially as the police are against him. He is made potboy and left to look after pretty Pegeen while the rest go to a wake. ‘Now, by the grace of God, herself will be safe this night, with a man killed his father holding danger from the door’. Pegeen falls quite out of love with her old lover, a timid, law-­abiding man, and in love with Christy for his daring and his beautiful speeches. Christy rises to his reputation, swaggers more and more—­making the blow that killed his father split him to the gullet, and finally to the waist—­wins a fearful widow as a second lover, and actually triumphs in the local sports on the shore. Meantime old Mahon, not at all dead, is close on his track, and is at the inn when Christy is coming back shoulder-­high from the races—‘It’s Christy! by the stars of God!’ cries Old Mahon, ‘I’d know his way of spitting and he astride the moon.’ His recognition, the astonishment and gradual disillusioning of the spectators, is fine. The old man thrashes his son and leads him off amid the cheers of the mob, Pegeen boxing Shawn’s ears and wildly lamenting: ‘Oh, my grief, I’ve lost him surely. I’ve lost the only Playboy of the Western World.’2 The fresh beauty of the speech appears with greater clearness in the book than on the stage. Mr Synge has used only one or two words which he has not heard ‘among the country people of Ireland, or spoken in his own nursery before he could read the newspapers’. That might seem a needless handicap; but then he uses their arrangement of these words—­their idiom, their directness, 1  In June 1909, telling GB that he and Helen were taking ET’s mother to see The Playboy on stage, ET says: ‘Synge’s Riders to the Sea is wonderful & equal to the Greeks, isn’t it?’ (LGB, 187). In a review of published plays, he had called In the Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea ‘the most dramatic and accomplished of all those before us now’ (DC: 19 July 1905). See review of Synge’s Poems and Translations [378]. 2  ET’s summary truncates the ending of The Playboy: it’s after Christy has turned the tables and become ‘master of all fights’ that Pegeen Mike laments her loss. A line in ET’s poem ‘Home’ may echo her Hiberno-English idiom here: ‘This is my grief. That land, / My home, I have never seen’ (ACP, 64).

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their fancy that seems to be partly a quality of the words themselves. Since Lyrical Ballads there has hardly been such a notable purification of the diction of English verse (and prose, too) as has come in the past generation, chiefly from Irishmen like Messrs Yeats and Synge. The best of the old b ­ allads are not more direct. The quite unbookish phrases are like the speech of very young children of high courage, and yet have in them at times great subtlety and fitness to the moods of modern men. Mr Synge’s play is a mine of those phrases. His characters being simple country people and not considerably moved, we need not expect a wide range or much subtlety. Yet when his innkeeper says: Where would I get a pot-­boy? Would you have me send the bell-­man screaming in the streets of Castlebar?—

When Christy says: It’s well you know it’s a lonesome thing to be passing small towns with the lights shining sideways when the night is down, or going in strange places with a dog noising before you and a dog noising behind, or drawn to the cities where you’d hear a voice kissing and talking deep love in every shadow of the ditch, and you passing on with an empty, hungry stomach failing from your heart—

or: If the mitred bishops seen you that time, they’d be the like of the holy prophets, I’m thinking, do be straining the bars of Paradise to lay eyes upon the Lady Helen of Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in her golden shawl—

when the Widow Quin speaks of looking out on the schooners, hookers, trawlers is sailing the sea, and I thinking on the gallant hairy fellows are drifting beyond, and myself long years living alone—

we relish speech as a really thirsty man does water. Not many writers can hope to mend their writing by listening to Irish peasant girls through a thin floor, but a comparison of Mr Synge’s prose with the leading article or literary criticism of today will perhaps knock some young men off their stilts before it is too late. By nature or by art, we must achieve a speech something like this which corresponds with the thought almost onomata-­poetically, or fail. B: August ***

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This play caused a disturbance at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, one paper saying it was a ‘gross and wanton insult to the Irish people’; and it turns out to be a very good play. [. . .] If the unworldly and un-­English spirit of the play, with its obverse of superstition and childishness, is not Irish, we are much mistaken, and it is certainly as pleasing as if it were. Mr Synge has used ‘one or two words only that I have not heard among the country people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery before I could read the newspapers’. He speaks, justly, of the striking and beautiful phrases ready to his hand as in the happy ages of literature they must have been; and he continues: in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words, and at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form.

A very true and new thought, and especially true of drama; and we know few plays of our day except his own and a few such as The Pot of Broth3 where the talk has at once the character that seems almost to have caught an accent or brogue in it, and a poetry that has nothing to do with invention, but falls naturally out of the life of the speakers, as apples fall in a still night. The talk, all of it, is like poetry in its richness, its simplicity, its remoteness from the spoken print of towns. There is probably not a speech that might not have fallen from a peasant’s lips, and yet Mr Synge has so arranged the talk that a hundred pages reveal more than a lifetime of evenings in a tap-­room would reveal to most of us. [. . .] To Englishmen it ought to be as great a relief as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. To all who care about life it will be a joy. Whether the life is Irish or straight out of Mr Synge’s head, as his enemies will have us believe, does not matter; for it is life, and even without an actor there is human breath clinging to every word of it as it clings to a worn book or an old walking-­stick. At each fragment of the dialogue, we exclaim that it must have been overheard; at the end of all4 we are equally confident that it is pure art. DC: 13 September

3  One-act play (1903) by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. 4  ET alludes to Christy saying: ‘you’ve turned me a likely gaffer in the end of all’.

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Gordon Bottomley, Chambers of Imagery; etc. All poetry is difficult, inasmuch as it demands passion from the reader who will understand. It is wrought up by passion so that every word has a cloud of glory about it beyond its wont. Mr Bottomley’s newest verses are difficult, we think, because they are not always wrought up to the condition of poetry, but seem to have been left in a raw state that can appeal to the intelligence only, except in a few places. He has always been an artist faithfully and curiously endeavouring to follow and capture his private intuitions about life, and several poems reveal his unique personality through beautiful forms. Every man lives ‘in the dark, in the chambers of his imagery’,1 and only the artist and the lover can share his with other men; they alone are aware of these possessions. But Mr Bottomley loves their remotest corners, where the spider and the bat and the mouse have long been in sole occupation, and in this book we see him—­on his knees or on a rippling lofty ladder—­peering into the darkness and bringing back what he can. And so he has produced, in his Hymns of Touch and Form, something more like prolegomena than poetry. They seem to us to be in their present stage short of poetry, to demand the amplification of prose, and not the sensuous and elliptical forms of verse. [. . .] DC: 5 August

The Writings of Matthew Prior, Vols I and II, edited by A. R. Waller (Cambridge University Press)1 This edition of Matthew Prior’s verse and prose has been one of the most remarkable adventures of our time, one of the proofs that English courage 1  GB had taken the title of his collection from Ezekiel VIII.12: ‘Son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the chambers of his imagery?’ On 10 August ET wrote to him: ‘I am glad you did not mind my review’ (LGB, 145). 1  Matthew Prior (1664–1721): poet and diplomat; for A. R. Waller, see [137n.]. Vol. I of Waller’s edition of Prior (Poems on Several Occasions) was published in 1905; Vol. II (Dialogues of the Dead and Other Works in Prose and Verse) in 1907. ET’s attitude here contrasts with his praise below of Waller’s edition of Richard Crashaw. In another largely negative account of Prior’s Writings, ET remarks: ‘too many [poems] consist of words arranged to produce effects in which human beings have long ceased to be able to take a pretended interest’ (SR: 28 September 1907). He cites Prior’s poem ‘God is Love’.

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and endurance are not extinct. In an age like this, it equals the adventures of Cortez and Drake; it surpasses them, for when our heroes have reached their peak in Darien they must see clearly that beneath them is a dirty duck-­pond. That an editor, compositors, printers, paper-­makers, binders, and capitalists should be found to help in the labour of giving all Prior’s printed and manuscript works to the world makes us feel, as Wordsworth says, that ‘we are greater than we know’.2 And there are other grounds for a sense of profound satisfaction with these two volumes of nearly 800 pages. For example, we are led to conceive great hopes for an age so devoted to poetry that it can print, with its preliminary quotations from Euripides, Cicero and Bacon, a poem in three books called ‘Solomon on the Vanity of the World’, beginning:— Ye Sons of Men, with just Regard attend, Observe the Preacher, and believe the Friend, Whose serious Muse inspires Him to explain, That all we Act, and all we Think is Vain.

But to this hope there is the counter-­regret that this very age is taking no notice of a dozen men greater than Prior who have the supreme advantage of being alive. There is, however, another and unexceptionable ground for satisfaction. Prior’s works are now all printed. There is no longer a shadow of romance about the unpublished MSS. at Longleat. They are printed here, and they confirm the belief that has long been seriously entertained, that Prior is dead. Prior is dead. We have done our unctuous and shallow duty to his bones. And now there is nothing to do but with joy and relief to put him up among the spiders and the dust for a thousand years. Prior was a clever man in his day. His wit can still amuse those who do not know how to use their leisure. He had, says Mr Waller, ‘an abiding influence on the form of English verse’—an allusion probably to the nimbler and less pompous rhythms and unaffected language of some shorter pieces that may have helped the return to Nature in our poetry. And he said one thing excellently about Conscience— Your Conscience, like a fiery Horse, Shou’d never know his Native force: Ride him but with a Moderate Rein, And stroke him down with Worldly gain; Bring him, by management and Art, 2  The last line of Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘After-thought’, which ends his ‘series of sonnets’ on ‘The River Duddon’, is: ‘We feel that we are greater than we know’.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 To every thing that made him start; And strive by just degrees to settle His Native warmth and height of Mettle . . . [. . .]

DC: 15 August 

Richard Crashaw, Steps to the Temple, Delights of the Muses and Other Poems, edited by A. R. Waller (Cambridge University Press)1 The excellent editor of this volume tells us that it contains all Crashaw’s poems, English and Latin and Greek, ‘now for the first time collected in one volume’. Everything is here that the general reader wants of Crashaw, and everything authentic that was in Dr Grosart’s edition. [. . .] We said that everything that the general reader wants of Crashaw is here. But the general reader has little to do with Crashaw, and the poet returns the neglect. He is not a great poet, one who has been discussed and explained until his difficult things are on everyone’s lips and his finest things a little stale. And not only is he not a great poet, but he is off the line upon which English poetry has advanced. Crashaw comes between Milton and Dryden in date, but his relationship, though small, is with Cowley and Herbert and Donne.2 By virtue of his matter and style, he stands aloof. One might even suppose that he had a sense of loneliness in his poetical life, which drove him in upon himself with such fascinating results. For though, as we think, certainly a lesser man, from the narrowness of his range, he stands out as clearly among poets as the greatest, and more clearly than any other man of his rank, except perhaps William Morris—­William Morris, the author of ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ and ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’. With this loneliness we connect his concentration, and so also his defects, viz., a style evidently not formed in the full air of the action and thought of his own times, and encumbered as the style of a man must be who converses 1  Richard Crashaw (?1613–49), a Catholic convert, went into exile on the continent in 1644. Despite being helped by another Civil War exile, Abraham Cowley (see [167]), he endured poverty and other difficulties before receiving a post from the Pope and dying in Italy. Alexander Balloch Grosart (1827–99), Scottish Presbyterian minister and editor of early modern literature, had published a two-volume edition of Crashaw’s works (1872–3). For A. R. Waller, see [137n.]. 2  For ET on Herbert, see [83].

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little with the world and much with himself; and his inadequate intelligence or incomplete use of his intelligence, as of a man who indulged overmuch in reverie and the long, long thoughts that end in nothing or in the stars. Those very defects became the qualities which people who care for Crashaw admire. His passion, his concentration, his absolute power of seeing things afresh, are sometimes manifested in verse of the most strangely-­moving kind. Thus, e.g., it was given to him to write of religious things, of the incidents in the lives of holy persons, with dignity, as if he had discovered them for himself and had seen the Holy Family, dim and strange in some golden dawn, by an English byre. Sometimes, indeed, the plain reader cannot but connect the oddity of style and fantastic thought with some not quite healthy asceticism, with that moderation of diet, ‘almost Lessian temperance’,3 of which his encomiast speaks. One remembers having seen such strained visions during the pangs of hunger or weariness or pain. There is an unstable pomp about them. One fears that they are without foundation and flesh, and may vanish without a vestige. One may go to him at times, when the blood is noisy in the breast and the brain is warm, and sicken as at the scent of drugs. Again, there are places where he seems to have become conscious of his oddity, and to have played with it not quite seriously. Thus, he writes, in ‘Mary Magdalene, or the Weeper’:   Hail, sister springs!   Parents of sylver-­footed rills!   Ever bubling things!   Thawing crystall! Snowy hills, Still spending, never spent! I mean Thy fair eyes, sweet Magdalene! . . .   When sorrow would be seen   In her brightest majesty   (For she is a Queen),   Then is she drest by none but thee. Then, & only then, she weares Her proudest pearles; I mean, thy Teares.

His oddity even seems to become ingenuity in the two poems on the frontispiece to Isaacson’s Chronologie.4 One of his most noted poems, ‘Musicks Duell’, is never wholly satisfying, because the undoubted rapture is matched 3 Leonardus Lessius (1554–1623): Flemish Jesuit who advocated sobriety and dietary selfcontrol. Crashaw wrote a poem ‘In Praise of Lessius, his Rule of Health’. 4 Henry Isaacson (1581–1654): theologian and historian, associate and amanuensis of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes. Isaacson’s Chronologie (1633) spans secular and religious history on a global scale.

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by the apparent trickery. His Latin poems have a similar ingenuity, but also a neatness which his classical training at Cambridge protected from his nat­ ural wildness. But we have only to turn to the famous hymn to St Teresa, to be reassured by the opening phrase:— Love, thou art Absolute sole lord Of Life & Death. To prove the word, Wee’l now appeal to none of all Those thy old Souldiers, Great & tall. Ripe Men of Martyrdom, that could reach down With strong armes, their triumphant crown; Such as could with lusty breath Speak lowd into the face of death Their Great Lord’s glorious name, to none Of those whose spatious Bosomes spread a throne For love at larg to fill, spare blood & sweat; And see him take a private seat, Making his mansion in the mild And milky soul of a soft child.

That is not great poetry, but it is an almost equally powerful thing. Stuffed with his vices and virtues, the poem reminds us of a leading characteristic of his best work. We mean his passionate lack of egotism. So taken is he by his subjects, that he is rapt out of himself and becomes one with them. We do not see him pondering and controlling his subjects, but immersed in them. He is possessed, hypnotised by them. Each of his poems, therefore, represents an adventure of his soul. He says himself in one of his poems to St Teresa:— Let me so read thy life, that I Unto all life of mine may dy.5

And he succeeded. George Herbert loved holy things with a calm sense of possession, as of wedded love, and rising only at intervals to ecstasy. But Crashaw loves them as an inaccessible mistress,6 and always with the same brightness. He was 5  Quotation from ‘The Flaming Heart upon the Book and Picture of the Seraphicall Saint Teresa’. 6  Here ET alludes to Crashaw’s most celebrated poem, ‘Wishes to his (supposed) Mistresse’. His own poem, ‘The Unknown’, will rewrite Crashaw’s vision of ‘That not impossible she’. ‘The Unknown’ ends: ‘She may be seeking / Me and no other: she / May not exist’ (ACP, 112).

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evidently a man full of the daintiest and most splendid imaginations, which he scorned to bestow upon earthly things—­women and pageantry, and gardens and palaces. He preferred to lay them on a little corner of an altar to invisible things. Not for him the false homage of the rhetorician or the dull repeated compliment of the ordinary worshipper. So strong was his love of dainty and splendid things that he cannot refrain from mentioning them in the description of a religious house which is conspicuously without them. Thus:— No roofes of gold o’re riotous tables shining Whole dayes & suns devour’d with endlesse dining; No sailes of tyrian sylk proud pavements sweeping; Nor ivory couches costlyer slumbers keeping; . . . But Walkes & unshorn woods; and soules, just so Unforc’t & genuine; but not shady tho.7

In fact, there was a kind of sensuousness in his abstinence, not unlike the delight of children who tread on poppies and scatter rose petals and watch carelessly where they fall on the shining grass. Even Death’s scythe is ‘amorous’. He himself would have said that he did but burn a little incense in the infinite cathedral. And so, as we read in the preface to his Steps to the Temple, ‘maist thou take a Poem hence, and tune thy soule by it, into a heavenly pitch; and thus refined and borne up upon the winges of meditation, in these Poems thou maist talke freely of God, and of that other state’. DC: 20 August

The Poems of Thomas Lovell Beddoes,1 edited with an introduction by Ramsay Colles In his introduction to this edition of Beddoes’ poems, Mr Ramsay Colles quotes from Pater’s essay on Botticelli: ‘there is a certain number of artists who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to us a peculiar 7  The beginning of ‘Description of a Religious House’. 1  In recent years, Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–49) has somewhat emerged from the shadows. Judith Higgens and Michael Bradshaw edited his Selected Poetry (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1976/1999); Bradshaw, his dark drama Death’s Jest-Book (Carcanet, 2003). In 1989 John Ashbery, an admirer, devoted one of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures to Beddoes and his obsession with death. In 2002 Reginald Hill based a crime-novel on Death’s Jest-Book, giving it Beddoes’s title.

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quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere; and these too have their place in general culture, and must be interpreted to it by those who have felt their charm strongly, and are often the object of a special diligence and a consideration wholly affectionate, just because there is not about them the stress of a great name and authority.’ These words are felicitously applied to Beddoes, who never was, and never can be, popular, though he may fall upon a passing fashion. The ‘distinct faculty’ and the ‘peculiar quality of pleasure’ are strong in all his work, though perhaps we cannot feel precisely an affection for a writer so impersonal. The few known and important facts of his life fit in with the nature of his poetry and his reputation. He published his first book in 1821, when he was an Oxford undergraduate, eighteen years old, and afterwards did his best to suppress it. He wrote plays and fragments of plays, sometimes in a ferment of imagination, sometimes languidly and at long intervals; thus, he began Death’s Jest-­Book in 1825, and was at work on it as late as 1837, though it was, he said, ‘a horrible waste of time’. In 1825 he left England and lived chiefly at Göttingen, Würzburg, Zurich, Giessen, and Frankfurt, studying and practising medicine, translating Grainger’s Spinal Cord into German, writing German lyrics and epigrams, becoming a complete German, forgetting his English, until his suicide in 1849. After The Brides’ Tragedy (1822), his second book, none of his work was published during his lifetime. In the letter found on his corpse were the words: ‘I ought to have been, among a var­ iety of other things, a good poet.’ Landor2 said of the Jest-­Book that nearly two centuries had elapsed since a work of the same wealth of genius had been given to the world. Beddoes had fire and he had energies, but no ambition, no hold of life. While he lived he cared little about his writing, yet he left nothing else behind, and is now only a voice out of an uncertain gloom. That voice, never­ the­less, is one as truly poetic as the voice of Coleridge or Keats, and as remote from prose. Only a man whose vision of life and the world was singular and his own could have written as he did, and this singularity is the more striking because it is expressed with the thinnest appearance of autobiography and chiefly through a dramatic medium. He was a passive, not an active, poet; not one who forced his thought and passion upon the world, but one who took the world into his heart as a deep shadowy water will do, and reflected it most magically. His phrases, and not his best only, are from a mint closed before and since his time. His Elizabethanisms and his extravagances are as 2  Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864): prolific author of poems, plays, and prose.

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genuinely his own, those of one who ‘with half his heart inhabits other worlds’.3 Thus: Let heaven unscabbard each star-­hilted lightning . . .

and (a mad mother speaks to her dead child): Ah! thou pretty silence,

and (of a comet): Let the unshaven Nazarite of stars Unbind his wondrous locks . . .4

‘This Araby of words’5 is a phrase of his that may be applied to his own rich, immobile work. But rich as he is in words, he is so not less in his fancy, as in that speech of Valeria to her attendant maiden: I should not say How thou art like the daisy in Noah’s meadow, On which the foremost drop of rain fell warm And soft at evening: so the little flower Wrapped up its leaves, and shut the treacherous water Close to the golden welcome of its breast, Delighting in the touch of that which led The shower of oceans, in whose billowy drops Tritons and lions of the sea were warring, etc.

Or this: Knights shut in steel, Whose shields, like water, glassed the soul-­eyed maidens, That softly did attend their armed tread, Flower-­cinctured on the temples, whence gushed down A full libation of star-­numbered tresses, Hallowing the neck unto love’s silent kiss, Veiling its innocent white . . .

or that picture of a woman: when she moves, you see, Like water from a crystal overfilled, 3 In one of his last poems, ‘Lines Written in Switzerland’, Beddoes represents his targetaudience (rare and rarefied) as those who ‘With half their hearts inhabit other worlds’. 4  Quotations from The Second Brother (II.ii), The Brides’ Tragedy (V.ii), The Second Brother (III.i). 5  From Beddoes’s drama Torrismond (I.ii).

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 Fresh beauty tremble out of her and lave Her fair sides to the ground.6

The two work together in Death’s Jest-­Book and The Brides’ Tragedy to make a frieze illustrating the glories of ‘Death the bony, Death the great’. The phrases like ‘To make the grave and the flowers’ roots amends’ and ‘The green and milky sun-­deceived grass’, the beauty of Sibylla and Amala and Floribel, the passions of Melveric and Isbrand and Athulf and Hesperus, the ‘earthy mouth’ that ‘moves its nettle-­bearded lips together’, the delusion of Lenora in the presence of dead Floribel, do not perhaps make great plays, but they make great poems, where in scene after scene Death contends with Love, as Greek with Amazon in the frieze.7 The shorter poems are better known, and they include few that are in the same class as the ‘Dream-­Pedlary’ and ‘Love-­ in-­Idleness’, which are in many collections. SR: 14 September

W. B. Yeats, Deirdre: Plays for an Irish Theatre, Vol. V; etc. Mr Yeats’s hero and heroine are two of the most famous lovers in Irish story, Deirdre and Naisi.1 The beautiful Deirdre was a foundling child:— and there’s nobody can say If she were human, or of those begot By an invisible king of the air in a storm On a king’s daughter, or anything at all Of who she was or why she was hidden there But that she’d too much beauty for good luck.

6 From The Second Brother (II.i), Death’s Jest-Book (II.ii twice). 7  ET quotes from Death’s Jest-Book (V.iv; I.ii; IV.ii; III.iii) and refers to characters in it and The Brides’ Tragedy. 1  Writing to GB on 2 November and 26 December, ET said: ‘Deirdre is perhaps the most perfect thing Yeats has done, but I don’t like it most, perhaps because I resent more & more his giving drugs to all the Irish heroes in turn’; ‘if he does it again I shall administer an emetic for the laudanum with which he is always drugging big hearty people. But it was so perfect in its kind I couldn’t throw stones, though glass houses are really meant for stones’ (LGB, 151–2). ET develops this last image in his poem ‘I built myself a house of glass’ (ACP, 91).

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The king Conchubar was to have married her, but the young Naisi carried her off and they wandered together until the king sent word that they might return in safety. This part of their history is most happily woven into the talk by some wandering minstrels who are at Conchubar’s guest house just before the lovers arrive. When these women hear that Deirdre and Naisi are coming back they are astonished, and they recall certain ominous things which they have seen, and as the lovers enter they sing:—   Love would be a thing of naught Had not all his limbs a stir   Born out of immoderate thought.

Deirdre sees an ill omen in the absence of the king; Naisi, in the dry flagon, the mouldy bread, and the old chessboard where two lovers played before they died. He goes out to look up the road towards Conchubar’s house, while Deirdre talks with the musicians and has her fears confirmed. She would try to escape, but gives way before the old man, who tells her the court will welcome her to safety and peace:— Safety and peace! I had them when a child, but never since.

Naisi is going out to drag the truth from Conchubar, when a dark-­faced messenger comes to say that supper waits for all but Naisi:— It is enough that the king pardon her, And call her to his table and his bed. [. . .]

She is kissing Naisi as Conchubar comes to the door, and the musician says: ‘Children, beware!’ Naisi, rushing out to fight, is caught in a net, and Deirdre has but just risen from the feet of the king when she sees an executioner with a bloody sword. She cries to be allowed to go to Naisi, and then, after a pause, speaking calmly and perhaps with a smile, seems to be giving way to the king, only asking leave to go to lay out the dead, which he grants when she has offered to allow a slave to search her for a knife. She goes behind the curtain. The musicians sing: ‘Eagles have gone into their cloudy bed’. A rescue arrives. Conchubar asks for the curtain to be opened to disclose his triumph, and cannot believe that Deirdre is dead. The rescuers shout: ‘Death to Conchubar!’ ‘Where is Naisi?’ The dark-­skinned men gather round the king, who motions them away:— Howl, if you will; but I, being king, did right In choosing her most fitting to be queen, And letting no boy lover take the sway.

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In drama which is full of character, quite without the qualities of the mere ‘poetical’ play, and yet has for its highest effect a lyrical and pictorial grouping of men and women in a far-­off time, this must have a high place, if not the highest. There is not a speech that does not help the story, and at the same time reveal character. The writing could not be more simple or more relevant, nor the story more briefly told. And yet most men would have needed the help of some other music than the human voice, of the painter’s art also, to enrich this simple situation, as Mr Yeats does, so that the half-­dozen figures stand out in such a noble, tragic, lovely group, clear and near as figures seen in the darkness outside our lighted windows, and also as awful and aloof, dipped in Mr Yeats’s elfish poetry as those are dipped in old night. DC: 28 September *** [. . .] Mr Yeats has done nothing so shapely and severe, so rich at once in character and in his own singular poetry. The piece moves, without change of scene, as naturally as any talk, without the intrusion of anything merely poetical, yet with that rich simplicity in which this poet is unequalled. Austerely organic, the play has melody also; it mingles the qualities of drama and of ballad. Most of the speeches are like lyrics; yet at the end the reader acknowledges that the march, as of a Greek tragedy, has not been interrupted. If there is any poem to rank it with, it is Baile’s Strand, or Mr Swinburne’s Rosamond.2 As a play, it stands alone in its magic realism. B: October

Arthur Symons, William Blake Inspired, as he tells us, by Mr John Sampson’s excellent edition of Blake’s Poems, Mr Symons has written a book which gives a ‘narrative, containing, as briefly as possible, every fact of importance, with my own interpretation of what I took to be Blake’s achievements’, together with a reprint of every personal account of Blake printed during his life and up to the publication of 2  On Baile’s Strand (1903): play by Yeats (see [91]); Rosamond (1860): play by Swinburne.

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Gilchrist’s Life, and also all the references in Crabb Robinson’s manuscripts. A year ago we had Tatham’s ‘Life’ and Blake’s own Letters in Mr A. G. B. Russell’s edition; so that the most important material for a study of Blake is now easily accessible. Mr Symons has made use of it in his own way. We did not expect from him the divine energy and insight of Mr Swinburne; but we did expect scholarship, research, grace and order, and we have them here in a book which we cannot do without.1 [. . .] Among his most interesting discoveries is one which shows that the div­ ision of the prophetic books into lines was not always made with metrical intention. He quotes: Such is the Forgiveness of the Gods, the Moral Virtues of the

and he comments: That is one line, and the next adds ‘Heathen’. There may seem to be small reason for such an arrangement of the lines if we read Jerusalem in the useful printed text of Mr Russell and Mr Maclagan;2 but the reason will be seen if we turn to the original engraved page, where we shall see that Blake had set down in the margin a lovely little bird with outstretched wings, and that the tip of the bird’s wing almost touches the last letter of the ‘the’ and leaves no room for another word.

He points out, too, that read as prose and according to the sense only, the best of the Jerusalem ‘has generally a fine biblical roll and swing in it, a rhythm of fine oratory’. Until Messrs Russell and Maclagan produce their promised ‘attempt at a complete exposition with justificatory references’ of the prophetic books, Mr Symons will have no rival as their interpreter. In dealing with them he is seen at his best: for it is a field that has been touched (if we may exclude the special appeal of Mr Ellis) only by Mr Swinburne, a little impatiently, and by Mr Binyon, freshly, it is true, but briefly of necessity, in his edition of the illustrations to ‘Job’. He begins to prepare for his exposition of these difficult pieces by suggesting that when Blake spoke of writing the Jerusalem from ‘immediate dictation’, it is his description rather than the thing described which is astonishing. Imagination is the clear seeing of things in the brain, whether those things exist (and have been seen) in nature, or, so far as we know, only in the brain. 1  For the references here and subsequently to editions, biographies, and discussions of Blake, and for ET’s acquaintance with Blake scholarship, see his reviews of Sampson’s edition [186] and Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job, introduced by Laurence Binyon [228]. For ET on Symons as critic, see [222n.] and Introduction [xlix]. 2  See review of the Jerusalem text [77].

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In Blake this power was apparently such that nothing interfered with it, neither the mental playfulness of mere fancy, nor the everyday records of the retina; but in kind it did not differ from the imagination of other poets. Yet Mr Symons goes perhaps too far when he says that he cannot imagine Blake ‘searching out words that would make the best effects in his lyrics’, for do not the corrections and re-­corrections recorded by Mr Sampson, in pieces like ‘Earth’s Answer’, ‘The Fly’, ‘The Lilly’, ‘To My Mirtle’, prove that some of the lyrics were handled after the first heat by a process like that of other poets? And there are places where we might suspect that the necessity of rhyme and not obedience to a vision caused a line. And such emendations might justify us in hesitating to accept Mr Symons’s comment on Blake as a pictorial artist: that he ‘was too humble towards vision to allow himself to compose or arrange what he saw, and he saw in detail, with an unparalleled fixity and clearness’. But as to the prophetic books, he is almost certainly right. They are translations out of silence, and of a silence which perhaps no man had disturbed before, but they are translated into another kind of silence. ‘It is’, says Mr Symons, ‘a miscalculation of means, a contempt for possibilities; not, as people were once hasty enough to assume, the irres­ ponsible rapture of madness.’ [. . .] SR: 19 October

George Saintsbury,1 The Later Nineteenth Century We cannot believe that the literatures of Europe during fifty prolific years could have been more completely handled than in these 450 pages. We admire the proportions of the book at all times, the details often. Nothing escapes Professor Saintsbury, and there are places where his marvellous brevity seems to have been dearly bought and to be more ingenious than profitable. But there is nothing to complain of, unless it be that he allows himself the liberty of some dark sayings not at all friendly to writing so recent that it does not come within his province. His grumbling at Tolstoy could leave us with little doubt that Professor Saintsbury prefers to look backward rather than forward.

1  For Saintsbury, see Introduction [xlv, xlvii].

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In several places he speaks of modern poetry’s ‘appeal to visual sensation’, the ‘appeal of this poetry to the mind’s eye’, and he finds in the ‘appeal to visual and audible effect’ in nineteenth century poetry one of the matters in which it differs, perhaps essentially, from its ancestors, immediate or remote. He is thinking of Keats, Tennyson, and Rossetti.2 The development of the power and the wish to make pictures in other men’s minds would be the subject of a fascinating history if a scholar of imagination could be found to write it, from ‘Thou crownest the year with thy goodness; and thy paths drop fatness’, to some modern pictures of Autumn; from ‘This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes’ to ‘Lovelocks’ or to the dead Amazon under the pines in The Rout of the Amazons.3 In some ways the changes have been progressive; that is to say, that just as Homer appealed to the eyes of his contemporaries in a way that satisfied them, so Keats to the eyes of the different men in his day. The world has itself grown richer in its appeal to the eye, through the works of war, of religion, of industry, of thought, of time, and we make more of it, not perhaps because we love it more, but because, as men of greater leisure and curiosity, we know it more. This knowledge, or, at least, the curiosity which aims at knowledge, the creator and the child of the scientific spirit, inevitably fails time after time, because it trusts less to the imagination. But many distrust imagination, chiefly because they do not possess it, partly because the most imposing energies and achievements of the day seem to owe nothing to it. Artists are confidently advised to go to Nature. Yet if you look at Nature for a lifetime with intellectual eyes, at one face, at one landscape, you will not exhaust her, and you will not have a picture or a poem; whereas the image in the brain that comes of love has but to be copied with such skill as has been given to you. Richard Jefferies sometimes appears to have thought that, given a pier­ cing eye and a notebook,4 beauty will follow transcription; and he failed a 2  For another discussion of verbal-visual relations, see ET’s review of The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti [113]. 3  Quotations from the Bible: Psalms LXV.11, Song of Solomon VII.7; ‘Lovelocks’: poem by Walter de la Mare, beginning: ‘I watched the Lady Caroline / Bind up her dark and beauteous hair’; The Rout of the Amazons (London: Duckworth, 1903): poem by T. Sturge Moore (see [100]). 4  ET always kept notebooks as a basis for his ‘country books’, but feared that this habit might stifle creative invention. He complained to GB (26 February 1908): ‘I go about the world with a worried heart & a note book’ (LGB, 158); although he later maintained (12 October 1909): ‘I now use the notebooks more and more exclusively for the details of things conceived independently’ (ETGB, 107). In IPS he depicts his alter ego, ‘the Other Man’, as ‘abus[ing] notebooks violently’, because ‘they blinded him to nearly everything that would not go into the form of notes’ (220). In a letter of May 1915, ET writes of poetry as having liberated him from notebooks along with

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hundred times, and succeeded unawares. Blake, on the other hand, knew that imagination is not ‘a daughter of memory’, had no notebooks, and created beautiful things continually; and in his poetry, it is odd to notice, appealed to any part of the mind rather than to the mind’s eye. Life and Nature are perhaps increasingly diversified, and they are now watched by minds so much more variously alive and curious, that a writer has enough to do if he does not go beyond the confines of one county, or class, or of himself. He must specialise, he must be particular, he must give his own proper vision. To take an example of this specialisation—­or call it this inability to bring things sub specie aeternitatis—­of which Professor Saintsbury complains; in early times, if a poet had to speak of a chieftain’s tent it was enough for him to say that the furniture was that of a chieftain; but today his words would have little meaning if he were to speak of the furniture of a bank clerk or a marquis. And hence arises the manifold appeals to the mind’s eye in modern literature. Yet it is worth noticing how rich and various they already are. The simplest means of describing visible things is to appeal to common knowledge and experience. It was enough for Homer to say that the ships of Ajax were ‘dark’, the ships of Ulysses ‘red-­sided’; for the author of Beowulf to say that Hrothgar’s hall was ‘lofty and horn-­gabled’. There is still abundant suggestiveness in a ‘green field’ or a ‘blue sky’; yet modern authors are rarely content to leave the rest—­some will leave nothing—­to the experience of their readers. But the attempt of literature has been more and more to delight us with things which we have not seen, and this is done commonly in early times by a mention of the things and by a comparison. Thus in Solomon’s Song, the eyes of a beautiful woman are like ‘the fishpools in Heshbon’. The audience might not have seen those eyes, but they had seen the clear shining of fishpools and perhaps of those at Heshbon. To this day we evade many difficulties by such means, as when we say that a child is ‘good as gold’. Almost, perhaps quite as early, and far more difficult and more beautiful in its result, is the description of things by their effects. The beauty of Helen could not have been more powerfully suggested than by saying that Priam and the prudent old men, too old for war, sitting at the gates of Troy, saw her and compared her with the immortal goddesses. Some of the most delicate passages in all poetry are of the same kind; as when Hector’s plumed helmet makes Astyanax hide his eyes in the nurse’s bosom; as when Nicolette’s prose: ‘I had got past poetical prose and my new feeling is that here I can use my experience and what I am and what I know with less hindrance than in prose, less gross notebook stuff and mere description and explanation’ (SL, 111). Nonetheless, his notebooks contain the seeds of poems.

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beauty caused the peasants to mistake her for a fairy;5 as when Hamlet clothes again the skull of Yorick by recalling those lips that made men laugh. Akin to these are the emotional descriptions which appeal indirectly to the eyes, like Chapman’s ‘As when the moon hath comforted the night’.6 Deliberate attempts to produce pictorial effects without any of these means, but by many selected details expressed with a finely wrought brevity, come later. There are, of course, very early pictures of a most moving power—­ the Myrmidons playing at quoits and javelins, while their horses stood by the chariots eating ‘lotus and lake-­fed parsley’, and the thousand fires on the plains of Troy, and the mother of Sisera looking from the lattice;7 but those owe half of their force to their context. The curious description is already at its height in the messenger’s account of the Bacchanals whom he saw as he drove his calves to the hills, in the Bacchae of Euripides. Applied to costume, it was used with exquisite skill in the great ages of costume, by medieval Welsh poets, by Elizabethan dramatists. In the sixty-­fourth poem of Catullus there is actually a description of the embroidery on a bridal coverlet setting forth the deeds of the heroes; and this is one of the supreme descriptions, because not only is the eye delighted, but dramatic emotion has entered in.8 But Virgil, in praising the box trees of Cytorus and the Locrian firs, is content to leave us to think of the trees themselves, according to our love, himself adding only that it was the lack of all human sign that gave the scene its peculiar power.9 In modern poetry there are no other methods than these. Observation is more and more minutely used, and its success or failure depends upon the weight and variety of emotional value that can be attached to it; and more and more this emotion is indicated by the poet, not left to the reader to divine. Yet, definite, detailed as the pictures, and particular as the emotions at the same time, become, the human mind, pressing on to its unknown goal, keeps pace, and in a short time absorbs what was lately the experience of a

5 Allusion to Aucassin et Nicolette: French chantefable (mixture of song and narrative), probably dating from early thirteenth century. 6  Line from Part I, Act iii of The Conspiracy, and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron (1608) by George Chapman (?1559–1634). 7  Sisera, commander of the Canaanite army, was defeated and killed by the Israelites. In Judges V.28–31 his mother anxiously watches for his chariot’s return. 8 Catullus, Carmina, LXIV, an epyllion/epithalamium on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, is known as Catullus’s ‘bedspread poem’ because its main focus is the story of Theseus and Ariadne, embroidered on the marriage-bed’s cover. 9  Allusion to Virgil, Georgics, II.437–9.

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singular spirit, lives with it, and impatiently awaits the new and beautiful which it cannot foresee. DC: 29 October

The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. I: From the Beginnings to the Cycles of Romance, edited by A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller1 (Cambridge University Press) The Cambridge History of English Literature has evidently a great future before it.2 Its aim is to give a connected account of the movements of English literature, with adequate treatment of secondary writers and of the inter­ action with foreign literatures, and each chapter is to have a bibliography. The first volume shows the thoroughness which we should naturally expect, along with an uncertainty of style which will at once be forgiven by everybody of importance. This awkwardness is to be noticed particularly when a writer seems to have been keenly aware of the weight of his material and to have set about decking it with bunting for the purpose of concealment. If anything, there is too little history interwoven, considering that the chron­ icles in prose and rhyme form so large a part of the literature in this period; and it would hardly have been beyond the reach of such a work to have given now and then a clear indication of the state of the people, of the court, of town and country, especially where the books under discussion could be used. The work would have gained in humanity without vastly adding to its stature. The parsimony in quotation is remarkable. This, coupled with the curb which has been put upon generalisation, may make its appeal more exclusive than was designed. But as a record of the best results of scholarship applied to a most difficult period of language and literature it is invaluable, and modern scholarship is so cautious that it is not easily superseded, though it is yearly augmented. Perhaps only in one matter can we feel confident that it will be superseded, and that is in prosody, which remains the abyss it 1  For Ward and Waller, see [194n.] and [137n.]. 2 The Cambridge History appeared in fourteen volumes until 1916; four volumes on American literature had been added by 1921. ET would review seven more volumes: for his judgement of the whole enterprise, see Introduction [xlvi]. His reading of histories and anthologies of English literature may have conditioned the alternative, mythic literary history in his poem ‘Lob’ (ACP, 76).

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always has been, where gnomes gibber in their own tongue and delve for their own ends, but bring up nothing of any human significance.3 Taken together with a few texts or a volume of selections like Miss Kate M. Warren’s,4 the work gives a large picture of life as it is revealed in literature, and the reader has a sense of profound progress which is a great delight, the progress from Beowulf to Chaucer, from the barely credible Saxon chiefs to Richard II. And along with this sense we have the perhaps even deeper satisfaction of recognising how truly literature is a commonwealth, and what perfect citizens, working for the good of the commonwealth, the prose writers and poets are, for there is not one who does not send the mind happily backward and forward among the writers before him and those of our own day. No ordinary history reveals the darkness of the early age and the sweetness of the dawn as this does. The early poets show the crudity, the energy, the violence of life. They are countrymen all, men of Northumbria, of Lancashire, of Gloucester, of Kent, and even the King, when he wished to show how one man should be taught in one way and one in another, says: ‘Even as with soft whistling one quieteth a horse, so also with the same whistling one may rouse a hound.’5 Their work is full of monsters and hard deaths, and harder lives, ‘heavy-­hearted, winter-­ sad, over the mingled waves.’6 Necessity, says one, is harsh, yet it is good and healing for men, if they consider it in time. Woman at first hardly appears, and when she does it is to praise the courage of her lover and to fear that it may be his death; to hold up the severed head of an enemy before the army of her friends; to lament that, while others lie in their beds, she is alone in a cave under the oak tree.7 At first the joys of life are such as that of the dying Beowulf when he bade his companions raise a barrow on a high place, when they had burnt his corpse, so that sailors might see it out of the misty sea and call it ‘Beowulf ’s Barrow’. Or there is the joy of the seafarer whose heart ‘is not for the harp, nor receiving of rings, nor delight of a wife, nor the joy of the world, nor 3  For ET’s opinion of scholarly approaches to prosody, see his reviews of Mark H. Liddell, An Introduction to the Scientific Study of English Poetry [37]. 4  For ET’s review of Kate M. Warren’s A Treasury of English Literature (London: Archibald Constable, 1906) see [236]. No doubt owing to the ‘parsimony in quotation’ of the Cambridge History, all his subsequent references here are to works anthologized (with translations, where appropriate) by Warren. 5  From King Alfred’s Preface to Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care, which he translated (c.890) into (Old) English (Treasury, 81). 6  From ‘The Wanderer’, dated by Warren as eighth century (Treasury, 38). 7  Allusions to three poems dated as eighth century: Waldere (fragments of a lost epic poem), Judith, ‘The Wife’s Complaint’ (Treasury, 5, 31, 43).

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about aught else but the rolling of the waves’. Only in the fancy of the poet of the ‘Phoenix’ is there a land of flowers, without steep hills, or anything rude, without hail, fire or frost, and his picture of the ‘sinless land’ implies a more vivid one of the wild land in which he actually wrote.8 It is two centuries later—­in the tenth probably—­that a poet sees May come gliding into the town, beautiful, and bringing gifts to all.9 Would that it had been possible with some certainty for folk lore to illustrate the attitude towards life of the very poor and unlearned! Two centuries later still men have leisure to write an ode on a wasted life,10 slow to do good, bold to do ill; they begin to tell tales that are a relief from the life around them, though that is itself a more and more easy life. The feeling of security grows, and chron­ ic­ ler and rhymer spend their days in the earthly Arthurian Paradise; as early as 1113 a French monk raised a tumult in Cornwall by denying that Arthur was yet alive; in the end of the thirteenth century the poet who showed Tristram and Ysolde drinking the love-­ potion together let the good hound Hodain lick out the cup; and in Gawain and the Green Knight the poet’s eyes are so much in love with beautiful dress that he paints it for our eyes as if he forgot that it was the dress of his hero’s supernatural enemy. It is the voice of a brother to us of this century that sings: Blow, northern wind, Send thou me my sweeting!   Blow northern wind,   Blow! blow! blow!

So, too, the voice singing of the sweetness of Alysoun, of spring coming ‘with love to town’.11 With Chaucer, at last, it is a good, joyous, not too difficult world, an endless pleasure to watch, a world with which a wise man might well be content. But Chaucer is left for the second volume. Those that follow will doubtless supply some of the defects we have mentioned . . . [. . .] As the matter becomes less obscure, if not less difficult, these historians will take a greater and greater number of readers who are not scholars along

8  Allusions to two poems dated as eighth century: ‘The Seafarer’ and ‘Phoenix’ (Treasury, 41, 68). 9  ‘The Month of May’ (Treasury, 71). 10  Allusion to ‘The Author’s Lament for his Wasted Life’ (Treasury, 113). 11  ‘Blow, Northern Wind’, ‘Alysoun’, ‘A Song of Spring’: anonymous poems/songs, grouped by Warren as fourteenth-century ‘Lyrics’ (Treasury, 174–9).

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with them, and if their achievements equal their intentions they are well enough equipped to make their work one of national importance. DC: 16 December

Francis B. Gummere, The Popular Ballad; Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk-­ Song: Some Conclusions1 Mr Gummere’s2 Popular Ballad is a definition of folk song, a statement and discussion of the theories about its origin and growth, an examination and classification of most of the ballads in Child’s collection, a consideration of the sources of those that have survived, and finally an estimate of their importance. Collections of ballads are multiplying fast; no anthology excludes them. The work of Mr Cecil Sharp3 and others in recovering melodies 1  These reviews prefigure the conceptual and structural importance of folksong to ET’s poetry. In ‘Edward Thomas and the Folk Tradition’ Jonathan Barker particularly notes ‘the influence of the ballad tradition’ on how ET ‘adapts the four line . . . stanza pattern’ (Barker [ed.], The Art of Edward Thomas [Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1987], 139). Two of ET’s first poems incorporate folksongs, and have the title ‘An Old Song’ (ACP, 46–7). Also prophetic in 1906–7 was his work on The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air (discussed by Barker), published in July 1907. The anthology gives melodies for some songs, and the ‘Note by the Compiler’ thanks ‘Mr Cecil Sharp and Rev. C. L. Marson for songs from their Folk Songs from Somerset; and Mr Sharp for one melody to “Spanish Ladies” ’ (PBPS, x). ET thought that research like Sharp’s might have consequences for poetry: ‘I cannot help wondering whether the great work done in the last century and a half towards the recovery of old ballads in their integrity will have any effect beyond the entertainment of a few scientific men and lovers of what is ancient, now that the first effects upon Wordsworth and his contemporaries have died away. Can it possibly give a vigorous impulse to a new school of poetry that shall treat the life of our time and what in past times has most meaning for us as freshly as those ballads did the life of their time?’ (SC, 241) See, too, ET’s review of English and Scottish Popular Ballads from the Francis James Child Collection [162]. 2  Francis Barton Gummere (1855–1919), who studied with Child at Harvard, was an American scholar of folksong, Old English and the Scandinavian languages. He translated Beowulf (1910), and in Democracy and Poetry (1911) explored modern relations between poetry and community. 3 Cecil James Sharp (1859–1924), musician and musicologist, largely inspired the folksong revival of the early twentieth century. He began by collecting folksongs in England and the southern Appalachians: he is honoured in the Country Music Hall of Fame, Nashville, Tennessee. In the 1970s, Sharp and his cohorts came under attack for allegedly appropriating and misrepresenting working-class culture: see Dave Harker, Fakesong: The Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’ 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985). But Steve Roud argues: ‘While an investigation into the motives and methods of the early collectors was long overdue, and could have been a useful corrective to the previous uncritical acceptance of their

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as well as words from those who still sing them traditionally is giving them another and a fairer appeal to the public. It is, therefore, necessary that someone should put the whole matter in a way which will appeal to those who are not specialists in ballads and folk music. It is a complicated question, and it has not been finally answered; but some kind of certitude has been attained, and Mr Gummere leads up to this and expresses it in a learned manner, yet without concealing his love of the subject and his enjoyment in doing it this service. Mr Sharp’s introduction to his book is, by the way, taken largely from an earlier handling of the subject by Mr Gummere; but no one interested should fail to see Folk-­Song: Some Conclusions, because Mr Sharp knows more about the men and women who sing these songs than anyone else, and his personal experience is very useful in following the theory of Mr Gummere. Moreover, Mr Sharp deals with ballads in connection with their melodies, and it is through this ancient union that the perfect beauty is achieved. This matter Mr Gummere does not touch, but he endeavours to suggest the long slow process—­of which Mr Sharp shows us a step or two—­by which the ballad grew out of the corroboree or some other primitive com­bin­ation of communal dance and song. He excludes, first, the compositions of the minstrels, which were of a different order and probably did not take hold of the common people; second, the ‘journalistic’ ballad made all hot for an occasion by a more or less educated man, the kind of thing which abounds in the Shirburn Ballads.4 The ballad, as we know it, is a poem which can be attributed not to one man, nor to one contemporary group, but to successions of groups varying indefinitely in number. He quotes several ancient and modern instances role, the polemic that was produced has seriously warped the debate ever since, and it is time that it be relegated to a brief historiographical footnote concerned with the follies of the era, and replaced by a more balanced, accurate and nuanced perspective’ (Roud and Julia Bishop [eds], The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs [London: Penguin Classics, 2012], xviii). ET himself, as in his review of Vincent Jackson’s selection of a hundred English Melodies (1910), could be tough on ‘the taste for old songs . . . founded largely upon the languid fashionable curiosity as to the past and dissatisfaction with the present’, and manifested by ‘the benevolent, self-conscious, half-artistic members of the middle-class’ (MP: 30 December 1910). This may be self-criticism too. 4  ET had recently written two reviews of Andrew Clark (ed.), The Shirburn Ballads 1585–1616: a collection of ‘Broadsides’ or ‘Black-letter ballads’. While carefully distinguishing such ballads from folksong, he finds them ‘extraordinarily interesting’ because: ‘They show us what the largest reading public of that day liked to read, what was the level of taste and intelligence and poetic power among those who provided for this public. If they prove that the crowd does not change very much they prove also that it does not change entirely for the better’ (MP: ?July 1907). ‘The style of most of them is good—­simple, idiomatic, running neatly, if no more, in the bonds of verse, and often handling the matter in a way which suggests that the writer’s mind was in it; and that this is the only kind of poetry that was ever popular, and in a real sense contains more food for thought than can be digested in haste’ (DC: 26 July 1907).

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of groups of men actually making a song and singing it; the Faroe islanders in our own time; the Scottish Borderers of the Sixteenth Century, of whom Bishop Leslie says that they themselves made songs about their raids and stratagems, ipsi confingunt; the common people of the Twelfth Century, as implied by the chronicler who gives the story of the song made by Cnut and his knights when they heard the monks of Ely.5 All poetry, it is supposed, grew out of tribal ceremonious dances, with music and gradually complicated words. But the ballad is the one kind which remained in this social state. One man, it may be, gave the impetus to a song, as in a game of ‘Consequences’, but his work was swallowed up by his collaborators at the time, and, if the thing lasted, at later times. This does not exclude the man of exceptional talent; for a generation, perhaps for ever in some degree, he might impress his personality upon the song. The form grew out of the conditions of the choral dance—­of which the incremental repetitions are a reminder—­and the content was what came in course of time to please the mass. It might be defined as a poem meant for singing, quite impersonal in manner, narrative in material, probably connected in its origins with the communal dance, but submitted to a process of oral tradition among people who are free from literary influences and fairly homogeneous in character.

Making allowance for difference between us and those compact communities where a man could not even think himself separate and independent, composition today is not very different: only the author’s coadjutors, his chor­uses, are invisible and his intercourse with them incalculable. The distribution of ballads, the resemblance between those of remote countries, is harder to explain than their origin and growth. Mr Gummere inclines to Mr Lang’s6 suggestion that there was ‘spontaneous and independent production of similar narratives’ in different lands, with mutual borrowing understood: Speaking in a general way . . . we may regard all particularly epic material, when not based on a historical or local and legendary event, as mainly borrowed or derived in our English and Scottish ballads, while the dramatic material, the ‘action’ of the choral throng, the situation which appealed to 5  ET is citing Gummere, The Popular Ballad (London: Constable, 1907), 57, 249. Bishop Leslie: John Leslie (1527–96), Catholic Bishop of Ross, wrote a history of Scotland (1578) in Latin, subsequently translated into Scots. 6 Andrew Lang (1844–1912): prolific Scottish novelist, poet, critic, anthologist, and anthropologist. A collector of folklore and fairy tales, Lang wrote popular ‘fairy books’ for children.

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those improvising singers, and even that complication of kinship or of social relations which gives motive to so many of the old ballads, must be left in good part to the original side of the account.

Mr Gummere goes into the question of the common stock of phrases and incidents and descriptions without taking us much farther. In his estimate of the value of the ballad he is a little niggardly, considering that of the finest half dozen short poems in our language one ballad would probably be found. Mr Sharp is entirely enthusiastic. He sees some contribution towards a better education of all classes of children, towards better conditions in village life, and a truer patriotism in the resuscitation of the beautiful melodies which he and others have revealed; and he sees the possibility that their musical influence may be akin to the poetic influence of the Percy Reliques a century ago in the foundation of an English school of music.7 It is to be hoped that they have not been revealed too late, and that they may become yet again really national, since only in that event could we look for a healthy growth of national music out of them. MP: 23 December *** Professor Gummere is to be congratulated on a happy task and a happy accomplishment of it. There could be no more genial and bracing exercise than that of hewing some kind of footpath back to the origins of popular poetry. The roughest work seems to have been done, but there was room for a book that would show in a lively way what results have been reached, and how. This Professor Gummere does in his long chapters on the definition, origin and distribution of ballads, and in another chapter he examines practically all of our ballads and classifies them. Mr Sharp also gives a ­summary of the same matter, derived chiefly from Professor Gummere, but he is able to throw some light from his own experience among people who still remember and sing the old ballads in Somerset. Mr Sharp, it may still be necessary to point out, is one of the editors of three volumes of Folk Songs from Somerset, which contains words and tunes taken from peasants’ lips, with accompaniments, often of exquisite sweetness, of his own ­composition. [. . .] 7  Thomas Percy (1729–1811), Bishop of Dromore, published his influential Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765. Among the composers who responded to Sharp’s stimulus were Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), George Butterworth (1885–1916), and Gustav Holst (1874–1934).

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Mr Sharp quotes the words of a modern Greek folk-­singer: ‘As I do not know how to read, I have made this story into a song so as not to forget it’; and he tells a corresponding tale of an Australian native chanting a song in monotone about the chase of a horse that had escaped that day. Neither of these songs was yet a folk-­song, though if it were afterwards approved by the companions of the singer it might become so, with addition, simplification, and an unconscious polishing down to a kinship with already accepted songs. In the Faroe Islands they still dance the old dances ‘to the tune of a traditional ballad which all must sing’, and ‘on occasion every member of a festive throng must still improvise his stanza’. They could not only sing old songs about Sigurd,8 but compose new ones about unusual incidents of the day, and ‘if the song wins general favour . . . it is remembered and sung from year to year’. In some cases the stamp of an individual upon a song thus used by a community would probably be so strong that no amount of repetition and change during centuries of dances could efface it; others might change their nature as often as Taliesin did, now frog, now wolf, now stag; and it might be said of some that they were in Canaan when Absalom was slain, and that their ori­ gin­al country was ‘the region of the summer stars’.9 In the course of time some might receive a fresh stamp from some supreme man; one line may commemorate the perhaps momentary genius of a forgotten smith or herdsman. Ancient literature is not quite silent about the ballads which we shall now never know; as, for example, in the I Samuel: And the women answered one another as they played, and said, Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands.

That social composition without any individual’s work to start on was ­common under conditions where all men’s lives were social is clear; and Mr Sharp is apparently not justified in saying that the beginning ‘must have been the work of an individual’. But it may be urged that there is no proof that those ballads which have survived were made in this way; that none of them is more than three or four centuries old, for certain. In answer to this, 8  Hero in Norse mythology: warrior, king, and a descendant of Odin (German: Siegfried). 9 Taliesin: half-mythic sixth-century bard, to whom are attached works collected in the fourteenth-century Welsh Book of Taliesin. ET may be quoting from translations in Lady Charlotte Guest’s Mabinogion (see [64n.]): ‘I have fled as a frog . . . / I have fled as a wolf in the wilderness . . . / I have fled as a stag’s antler’; ‘I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain’; ‘my original country is the region of the summer stars’. See Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams (trans), The Book of Taliesin: Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain (London: Penguin Classics, 2019).

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I should like to point out that there are practically no poems in the ballad form by known authors earlier than the eighteenth century in England; and that ballads have so many characteristics in common that if we are to at­tri­ bute them to individuals at all we might well attribute them all to one man; they bear the mark of one genius, but it is, surely, the genius of the multitude. Mr Sharp has met unlettered singers who distinctly add to the evidence as to the origin and growth of the ballad. One man at Haselbury-­Plucknett sang a song that can almost be proved to have lived in oral tradition alone for over 200 years. There are many examples of the variations, essential and unessential, which several singers introduce into the same song; and, beautiful as these melodies are, there are at least two untrained singers known to Mr Sharp who have shown the gifts which have given them their beauty in the course of years. Mr Sharp, by the way, mentions half a dozen causes of variation in the melodies, such as the adaptation to new words and the substitution of corrupt and unmetrical lines, herein revealing a weakness in Professor Gummere’s statement that ‘rhythm in actual ballads, as they were sung, is always exact to a fault, however the record may distort it’. There is more than an echo of the origin in choral dances when we find men and women unable to sing these folk-­songs except at some occupation, as breaking stones or kneading dough; when lines are repeated as they would be by a singing company. Most vividly Mr Sharp compares the growth of a tune by social and individual efforts with the flight of a host of starlings where at first there seems unanimity, until we notice the rough and changing edges: The erratic movements of the birds on the margin are so many invitations to the flock to change the direction of its flight. Ordinarily, these invitations are ignored . . . When, however, one of these suggestions happens to coincide at the moment with the will of the majority, the invitation is accepted; the flock changes its course and a new evolution is initiated.

Professor Gummere does not allow sufficiently for the influence of the individual. Yet I think it is one of the subtle pleasures which they bestow to notice the possible touches of a genius in lines like— For a’ the bluid that’s shed on earth Rins through the springs of that countrie,

(which may be a glimpse of the old Scandinavian ‘water bell’), and: And speak up, my bonny brown sword, that winna lie,

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and in whole verses of ballads like ‘Sir Patrick Spens’.10 It is not true to say that there are no vivid lines and memorable words, nothing to provoke the imagination. The minds of all manner of men take flight at some of the verses, as they do at the sunset, as bees To their known island-­homes in Himera.11

For they, and their melodies no less, imbed the history of men as abundantly as language itself, and more vividly. They are full of sunlit and windy air; of the dancing of silent feet and the singing of bodiless voices; of the anxious, energetic life of warriors and knitters in the sun; of wanderers who perhaps brought home with them some of those universal things which, found in the ballads of widely-­separated lands, have puzzled science to explain. And if the words are often trite, if the recurrence of certain phrases seems conventional and to us insignificant, yet melody lifts them on her wings away, away—­ those melodies which Mr Sharp with just fervour recommends to children and teachers for their sweet influences and their affinity to the heart of the nation and of the child; to the musician, as the foundation of a truly English school of music that may equal those other schools which have grown up where folk-­song is not only indigenous but alive, beloved and national. DC: 23 January 1908 10  Quotations from the ballads ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ (in which Thomas is abducted by the Queen of Elfland) and ‘Gil Brenton’ (also called ‘Cospatrick’ or ‘Bothwell’). Scandinavian ‘water bell’: possibly an allusion to the legend of water-spirits, such as Fossegrim, who lure women and children to drown by playing enchanted music on the violin. ET continued to maintain that ‘the mind of a poet’ is to be found in ballads such as ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ (SC, 243–4). See also excerpt from FIP [406ff.]. 11 Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, III.iii.43; Shelley’s line begins: ‘At their’. Himera: ancient Greek city in Sicily.

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1908 Fiona Macleod [William Sharp], From the Hills of Dream: Threnodies, Songs and Later Poems Anyone who knows a little of the old Celtic literatures is pretty sure to turn to them again after reading the poetry of William Sharp. He will turn to the cry of Deirdre, when she has lost her lover: Thou that diggest the tomb, And that puttest my darling from me, Make not the grave too narrow; I shall be beside the noble ones.

Or to the Welsh lament: At Aber Cuawg the cuckoos sing . . . There are that hear them that will not hear them again.1

And it will then be hard for him to believe that the most fascinating of Sharp’s poems are much more than variations upon old themes. Sometimes they are terse and simple enough to be beyond cavil, as for example: I have seen all things pass and all men go Under the shadow of the drifting leaf;   Green leaf, red leaf, brown leaf,    Grey leaf blown to and fro,      Blown to and fro.2

Sometimes, as in ‘The Lament of Darthool’, he transports the ancient cries straight into his own verse. And in places it is evident that, however much he owed to the old poetry, he did not find everything there; in some he has certainly allowed a little of the modern lover to mingle with the lover of Ossian’s day. But, old or new, the spirit of them does not vary much. It may be the spirit

1  Quotations from translations in Magnus Maclean, The Literature of the Celts, reviewed by ET [63]. See also his review of J. S. Smart, James Macpherson: An Episode in Literature: a study of the begetter of ‘Ossian’ and Celticism [151]. 2  From ‘Leaves, Shadows, and Dreams’.

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of Ossian, or of Llywarch Hên, or it may be the spirit of Sharp, troubled by the loves of the dead men whose blood lived on in his veins; it is hard to say. If the poems were all good it would matter little what they owed to the old bards; and that some are good enough to give him a place among the poets of the ‘Celtic revival’ no one will deny. But, on the other hand, a number seem to have been made after a recipe—­not consciously, of course: conscious affectations are rare enough to go into a glass bottle on a museum shelf. In a poem like ‘Oona of the Dark Eyes and the Crying of Wind’ we seem to see the recipe all astray, the ingredients carelessly spread in disorder: those ingredients are the words ‘dim’, ‘sorrow’, ‘grief ’, ‘old tears’, ‘the brown leaf ’, ‘the old, salt, bitter tears’, ‘the crying of wind’, ‘the crying that is in my heart’, ‘long years’, ‘the old familiar grief ’. Then there are the words ‘magic’ and ‘mystical’, scarcely more significant than ‘awful’ or ‘rattling’ in common talk. [. . .] Often it has been enough for the alchemist to mingle love, sorrow, and ‘the old, old, far-­off days’.3 We are not denying that these mixtures are charming. In them all there is an element, true to Sharp’s own nature, call it Celtic or not, which does not cease to be fascinating in its steadfast unreality, all the more noticeable because it is not found at all in the majority of our poets, great or small. But when Sharp does without these mixtures, when he does not suggest the old poetry, he is merely florid, as in: Behind the Legions of the Sun, the Star Battalions of the night, The reddening of the West I see, from morn till dusk, from dusk till light. A day must surely come at last, and that day soon, When the Hidden People shall march out beneath the Crimson Moon—

(where we can only admire the craft in the third line). Or he is true but hopelessly long-­winded, as in ‘We who love are those who suffer’, or trite and pretty, as in ‘The Bells of Youth’.4 His weakness, then, is that he does not give us enough over and above what he got from the old poetry, or, to put it another way, what he has in common with that poetry. What he does add is an often beautiful sense of rhythm, but that, again, is to be found more ex­quis­ite­ly used in other poets of his school. DC: 1 January *** Fiona Macleod’s is purely antiquarian verse, antiquarian in its vocabulary, in much of its matter, and—­what is most important—­too often in its spirit. One 3  Phrase from Sharp’s poem ‘The Song of Ahèz the Pale’. 4  ET has quoted from ‘The Crimson Moon’, and referred to ‘The Sorrow of Women’ by its first line.

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would not like to say that it is fundamentally insincere, but we are rarely able to detect a heart as well as a supple, imitative brain behind it. If it succeeded in its aims it would make us feel the stirring of the blood of ancient men in a modern breast; but in fact we are conscious of ancient books and modern tricks, and charming as stanzas like this are: Green wind from the green-­gold branches, what is the song you bring? What are all songs for me, now, who no more care to sing? Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still, But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.5

they fail to enter our life more intimately than mantelpiece decorations, and Mr Yeats has spoilt us for anything beneath him. MP: 30 January6

The Book of Living Poets, edited by Walter Jerrold; The Poets and the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century: Christina G. Rossetti to Katharine Tynan, edited by Alfred H. Miles1 Mr Jerrold’s anthology ‘does not pretend to be a completely representative selection’. We notice at a glance the absence of any poems by Messrs Meredith, Edward Carpenter, Yeats, de la Mare, Doughty, Davidson, Phillips, Morley Roberts, Legge, Trevelyan, W.  H.  Davies, Lysaght, Hodgson, Bottomley, Guthrie, A. E. Housman, and Colum, Miss Sweetman, Father Tabb, and the author of Borgia.2 Some of these, no doubt, were excluded unwillingly, and through no fault of the compiler; if inadvertently, then inexcusably.

5  From this poem, ‘The Lonely Hunter’, Carson McCullers took the title of her novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940). 6  ET’s second review of From the Hills of Dream followed his MP review of Alfred Noyes’s Forty Singing Seamen in a round-up of poetry collections [284]. 1  Walter Jerrold (1865–1929): biographer, writer of country books, editor; Alfred H[enry] Miles (1848–1929): prolific author across various genres, who edited nineteenth-century poetry in ten volumes. ET gave a further brief notice, similarly pitched, to Jerrold’s anthology (MP: 30 January). 2 For poets not named below, see Appendix. For Edward Carpenter, Stephen Phillips, R. C. Trevelyan, and James Guthrie, see notes [190], [16], [76], [177]. Morley Roberts (1857–1942): author of Songs of Energy (1891) but mainly a fiction-writer, whose autobiographical prose-work, The Wingless Psyche, ET had reviewed rather unfavourably: ‘He seems to have set out to talk about himself, and to have felt that only those matters which were fit to be decorated by metaphor

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And there can be little doubt that about half a dozen of those represented might have been omitted; some because they are unworthy or because they do not differ essentially from the rest; Mr Swinburne, because his work is known to every person who will handle this book. But it was a good thing to fill nearly four hundred pages with verses by fifty living men and twelve living women,3 and it could not have been much better done. In bulk, numbers, and variety the poems are sufficient to make a few converts to Mr Jerrold’s belief that we now ‘have a wonderful body of poetry of a peculiar richness’. No one who possesses this book, and a few dozens more, including that which gives specimens of work by the woman poets from Christina Rossetti to Katharine Tynan, can doubt that, at the lowest estimation, the poets of today—­excluding Mr Swinburne and Mr Meredith—­make up a body of poetry equal to the complete work of any of our poets, except the greatest, and far more than equal to that of Tennyson, for example. We believe also that their poetry, whatever its enduring merits, has in it elements deserving as wide a popularity as poetry can ever have among contemporaries. For our poets are seriously absorbed in the life, social, political, philosophic, and artistic, of our day, and they have abundant gifts of expression, of melody, of enthusiasm which ought to domesticate their work in our hearts. But we recognise also that there are immense and, so far, insuperable difficulties in the way of any such popularity and of the influence which is their due. Reprints of old, well tested, or well guaranteed poetry abound and catch

and rhetoric should be put down’ (DC: 8 December 1903). Arthur E. J. Legge (1863–1934): ET had recently praised Legge’s largely narrative poem, The Pilgrim Jester, for its ‘Byronic mingling of the humorous and sublime’, but noted that he ‘has still a good deal to learn in the matter of writing’ (MP: 9 January 1908). Sidney Royse Lysaght (1856–1941): ET had found in Lysaght’s Poems of the Unknown Way ‘an almost Swinburnian command of metre’ and ‘a delicate vapour of words’: ‘He has nothing to say, and he says it wonderfully’ (DC: 2 July 1901). Padraic Colum (1881–1972): poet and playwright associated with the Irish Literary Revival, whose work ET saw as resisting ‘Celtic’ tropes. Reviewing Colum’s Wild Earth, he calls him ‘a really living descendant of Walt Whitman and of the ballad writers’, and says: ‘His style is, wonderful to relate, his own, and free even from the best influences of his contemporaries in Ireland’ (MP: 13 April 1908). Elinor Sweetman (c.1861–1922): Irish poet, of whose collection The Wild Orchard ET wrote later: ‘Her outdoor feeling is wonderfully fresh and untainted by her language’ (DC: 9 April 1912). John B[anister] Tabb (1845–1909): American poet and Catholic priest, known as ‘Father Tabb’. Borgia: A Period Play (1905), published anonymously by Michael Field (see Appendix [701]), had been praised by ET for scenes that ‘are full of character, of dramatic conflict, or exquisite rhetoric, and, above all, of a kind of dramatic lyric in blank verse’ (DC: 19 July 1905). Among poets included by Jerrold are Hilaire Belloc, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, T.  Sturge Moore, Alfred Noyes, and Arthur Symons. In advocating contemporary poetry here, ET stresses quantity as much as quality; hence his unusual indulgence to ‘minor poets’: see note 5 below. 3  Among Jerrold’s ‘living women’ are Michael Field, Alice Meynell, and Katharine Tynan.

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the attention of the most timid and unobservant; and not only poetry, but such prose as satisfies similar needs, as for example Religio Medici and the Opium-­Eater,4 which were probably never before so much bought. The prose of our own time is also rich in poetic qualities, and it finds its way into the confidence of the numerous half-­educated people who are, we fancy, afraid of the form of verse and perhaps distrustful of poets as eccentrics, dreamers, etc., while, even among the educated, writers like Stevenson, Mr Conrad, and Mr W. H. Hudson must also turn aside some who would in another age have read more poetry. Foreign literatures and translations add still further defences which new poetry has to scale. Then the multiplication of authors, and of writers in verse in particular, makes choice very difficult. An imbecile with ten pounds in his pocket can easily add one to the number of the volumes from which the lover of poetry has to choose. Finally, in a centrifugal age, in which principles and aims are numerous, vague, uncertain, confused, and in conflict, the lack of good criti­ cism, or even of moderately good criticism that has any authority, defrauds many noble and beautiful voices of the ears which expect them. [. . .] These poets are writing the autobiography and the criticism of our age as sincerely, as delicately, as their predecessors whom we all applaud. They sound notes which were never heard before, notes which, if our ears refuse to hear them, will never to the end of time bear quite their true meaning again. Their multitudinousness, their subtlety, their variety, their fineness, their enthusiasm and aspiration, their sadness, their introspection, their love of what is old and what is very new, make clear large claims upon almost all of us. Even where curiosity, working inward and more inward, becomes sad and opaque for lack of the north-­west wind of real publicity and criticism and applause, there is often a charm which expresses some of our own secret and never before expressed thoughts and emotions.5 [. . .] Too often, it must be admitted, what is called a poem is but a good piece of observation, a fine allegory or moral or conceit in mere verse. But with all their faults, these poets reflect their age with a subtlety unequalled by any surviving body of poetry. Time will choose much to take along with it. It is 4  When discussing ‘poetic’ prose, ET usually mentions Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822) and Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1643): books that ‘seem to belong to my own experience’, as he told GB in November 1902 (LGB, 40). 5  ET proceeds to celebrate a roll-call of contemporary poets (obscure figures alongside Hardy, Yeats, Doughty, Kipling, Housman, Masefield, and de la Mare) for creating ‘ballads . . . appropriate to the heart of this age’; for expressing ‘the imaginative mind troubled by science and machinery’; for uttering ‘our love of the country’; for spear-heading a response ‘to old legends and mythologies, to the call of early races in our blood’.

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for us to accept or refuse those hundred other things of exquisite beauty which Time may destroy, not because they are weak or foolish, but because they are ours and ours alone. DC: 13 January

Alfred Noyes, Forty Singing Seamen And Other Poems; etc. Few recent books of verse have given one so much satisfaction as Forty Singing Seamen, for not only is it full of interesting and often admirable work, but it largely fulfils the suspended promise of Mr Noyes’s first book, The Loom of Years. His Flower of Old Japan and Forest of Wild Thyme were charming enough, inventive, high-­spirited, having something of the quality of improvisation along with a pretty finish.1 Poems, though ambitious and more striking than The Loom of Years, was unsuccessful. The ‘Sherwood’2 hit the fashion of the hour, and perhaps something more, but most of the pieces were just experiments. Drake,3 again, could be loved, but not often admired, and the love it attracted was not quite legitimate, being rather for the aim and the temper of the effort than for the result. But this new book is very good. In his failures he fails nobly. In his successes he promises higher things. A good many of his pieces belong to the school of Shelley, Swinburne, and O’Shaughnessy4 in the nature of their melody, of which the chief characteristics are exuberance and movement, as in: Then, like a torrent, a tempest of splendour, a hurricane rapture of wrath and derision   Down they galloped, a great white thunder of glory, down the terrible sky; Till earth with her rivers and seas and meadows broadened and filled up the field of their vision,   And mountains leapt from the plains to meet them, and all the forests and fields drew nigh.5 1  For ET’s review of The Loom of Years, see [51]. He had written of The Forest of Wild Thyme (and The Flower of Old Japan): ‘This book has all the gaiety and movement, the sudden brilliancy and invariable high spirits, of its predecessor’ (DC: 25 January 1906). ET had initially thought Noyes promising, but saw warning signs. 2  Noyes’s then-popular poem ‘Sherwood’ (1904) begins: ‘Sherwood in the twilight, is Robin Hood awake?’ He later wrote a play: Sherwood or Robin Hood and the Three Kings (published 1911). 3  For ET’s reviews of Drake: An English Epic, see [198], [204]. 4  Arthur O’Shaughnessy (1844–81): best known for ‘Ode’, which begins: ‘We are the music makers / And we are the dreamers of dreams’. 5  Quotation from ‘The Ride of Phaëthon’.

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We have chosen at random, and it is not a flawless piece, but nobody living excels Mr Noyes in this kind. Such verse is, however, seldom able to carry much weight of thought or much variety of emotion with it; it is of the kind which should be used in writing beautifully of a broomstick. Nor does Mr  Noyes confine himself to it. His ‘Slumber-­ Songs of the Madonna’, ‘Remembrance’, and ‘The Venus of Milo’, for example, begin and end in loftier regions, where words have more like their true opulence—­of melody, but of thought, and of spirit also. At his best, he seems to have listened to the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, and, without being more than an independent disciple, to have been moved by it to see beauty as twofold, body and spirit, inseparable. And we are often conscious that here is a mind that promises to have more points of fresh and honest contact with our age than the majority of our poets. MP: 30 January *** [. . .] [Mr Noyes] had always gaiety, ardour, exuberance and enthusiasm, both in his ideas and in his forms, and he has them still. But those qualities are being turned to finer and loftier uses, and are worthy of them. There are moments when he reminds us, and by no mere echo, of the devotion to high things in Coleridge, in Shelley, and in Mr Swinburne. His sense of melody and movement is by itself enough to make a reputation. His long measures soar and curve and plunge until the mind is giddy with pleasure and with half-­fearful expectation . . . [. . .] But there is a danger lying in the leaping rhythms that Mr Noyes uses so well. Even Mr Swinburne has often found it impossible to use them in such a way that words shall have a profound truth, as well as a melodic value. To balance and fill out these melodies a great many adjectives are used, and we are by no means sure that their sound always justifies their lack of perfect truth. Too seldom are the words transmuted into the very things that they describe. We find ‘beautiful’, ‘miraculous’, ‘enchanted’, ‘strange’, ‘triumphant’, ‘perilous’, ‘immortal’, etc., outworn insignificant words, with a kind of hardness and dullness, with no gleam, no opalescence, no shot colours at all. [. . .] B: January

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Mary E. Coleridge, Poems, edited by Henry Newbolt This small book contains two hundred and thirty-­seven poems, of which the late Miss Coleridge published one-­ third in Fancy’s Following, Fancy’s Guerdon, and The Garland, and several newspapers.1 Except to her friends, the author was ‘Anodos’,2 for she would not put the name of Coleridge to her poems, though, if only for their scrupulousness, she need not have been ashamed to do so. They are a most precious autobiography, the expression in fine English of a personality interesting for its emotion and its reticence, and still more for its combination of the two. They suggest, I know not how truly, a cultivated and experienced woman who might for long appear to be pure intellect and will, but has in her often-­sounded, but infinite, depths of spiritual life. She fights a losing battle without being hardened or alarmed, finding unexpected consolations and always looking at things in her own way, so that even the defeats enhance the value, because they add to the profundity, of life. There is hardly a rich, sensuous line in the whole book, and hardly any love simply of beautiful objects (with the doubtful exception of ‘Street Lanterns’). Conventionally beautiful or not, she esteems things according to their spiritual significance, and this esteem is reflected in her language and rhythms, though these last abound in originality, and are never mere lengths of so many syllables. A resolute delicacy, an ardent quietness, a frank reserve, are among her characteristics; and since their medium is verse, which—­only because it is the work of an utterly careful artist—­might be compared with that of Mr Bridges, the book is yet another proof of the poetic abundance of our day; and only through this abundance could her work have remained as obscure as it is. Some little excuse there is, too, in the very fineness of her work, for this neglect. She is so true to a hairbreadth to herself: and that gives many of her pieces a singularity, though not a strident one, and a special appeal, which can have their plenitude of force with but a few. I think this is true, for example, of ‘Two’: No nearer to thy presence let me stand! Fate set me in a strange and distant land! There let my life run out its tranquil course, 1  The poems in these three publications overlap to some extent: the last named being an anthology in which Coleridge’s publisher and supporter, Elkin Mathews, included twelve of her poems. Newbolt’s edition, reprinted eight times by 1927, boosted Coleridge’s reputation, but her work fell out of literary fashion until rescued by Feminist criticism. 2  Coleridge’s Greek pen-name, signifying ‘on no road’ or ‘wanderer’ (see Appendix), which she used for her poetry. As the great-grand-niece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, she feared, to quote Newbolt, ‘tarnishing the name which an ancestor had made illustrious in English poetry’.

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Unchecked, as now, with every painful breath, To feel between us a dividing force More strong than Death! And say not thou, ‘This is Love’s waning hour.’ By Love’s own God, I never felt his power, The all-­commanding terror of his bliss, Never in passion’s noontide loved thee more. When I compare my former state with this, I never loved before.

Many readers will be inclined to salute its sincerity and complain that it touches them too little, either because it is so exceptional or because its exceptional quality has found a delicate but not a universal form. That is more true of the poems that make no appeal to the senses, or the mind through the senses, than of those that do: yet ‘A Mother to a Baby’ is not alone in making, through a subtle and special emotion, a universal appeal. In many poems she describes with just as much fidelity to her vision moods and the objects of moods of a far from obvious kind, and they go deep with their brief truth, yet suffused with lights from we know not where. Others, again, have no such light about them, but are simple statements, lucid and bare as a chemical analysis, like ‘Burial’: How, was it I—­I that unmoved   Stood tearless in the funeral train, When it was you, you that I loved,   Whose earth was given to earth again? The highest heavens are holy ground,   The song of birds—­the dawn—­the gloom. In every perfect sight and sound   I bow, fair love, before thy tomb.

Of the same spareness is ‘Awake’. She is equally good at a kind of unforced allegory—­as in ‘The Witch’ and ‘The King’. And there are many spiritual epigrammatic pieces which are to be classed with hardly anything except Father Tabb’s work.3 Nearest to a song is ‘Renaissance Gentlemen’, and her self-­criticism was, as usual, right in allowing it to her. In ‘Affection’ the language is so colourless and yet effective that it calls to the mind the grey ashes that still just crumble and flutter with the heat that has left them pale but not yet cold. Her sonnets are among the few 3  Also mentioned in ET’s review of Jerrold’s Book of Living Poets: see [281] and note.

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written lately which persuade the form to accept the thought without modification, instead of forcing the thought or part of it or something like it to accept the form. Such a one is: Deep are thy waters, Love, in every heart. Who is there that hath ever sounded these? Lightly we sail the still, unfathomed seas, Without a compass and without a chart. Yet are there two that have essayed this art— The mother with her firstborn on her knees, The son whose cordial spirits shrink and freeze To see the life from whence he lived, depart. These who have learnt that all their strength is weak, These who have striven in vain and vainly found Their resolution but an idle freak And all their spoken faith an empty sound, These have let down the plummet; could they speak, They would but say, ‘It never touched the ground.’4

The poems of affection are probably the finest of all, but they are so many and various that it might harm them to quote one. If there are any poems today which have more poignantly expressed the happy, the doubtful, and the unhappy searchings of heart of one who loves in solitude, I have not met them. They remind one a little of De Flagello Myrteo,5 and they are, besides, in perfect verse. Many ought to be grateful to Mr Newbolt for this collection, and he makes us feel quite sure that he can have omitted nothing that was worthy of the poet. B: February *** [. . .] The selection makes an interesting book, many sided, but of almost even merit. Every year of a period of twenty-­five has contributed something to the book, yet there are scarcely half-­a-­dozen flaws, if we accept the poet’s aims. For she was a scrupulous writer; she wrote little, and all that she wrote was clearly related to her own spiritual life; and emotion and intellect are always on good terms in her work. No poems, even in this age, have been fuller of 4  Coleridge has given this sonnet a heading from Psalms XLII.7: ‘Deep Calleth Unto Deep’. 5  Book of succinct sayings by Richard Garnett, subtitled ‘Thoughts and Fancies on Love’: see [214].

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personal revelation than these. Altogether, they make a portrait, complex, shadowy, baffling, intimate. The writer would seem to have used verse largely as the most exact means of bringing her own experience before her mind’s eye; to have committed to it, as to the most intimate of journals, what meant most to her in her real and imaginative life, of thoughts, fears, recollections, in moments of happiness or doubt. Hers was a grave and curious mind; the quality of expression most valued by her was austerity. Hence she has no common glibness or sweetness; nothing that even appears to be decorative; she is seldom or never fanciful; she uses few adjectives, and hardly any of them purely sensuous; her music is intellectual only. Of beautiful visible things she writes only once or twice; she dwells habitually in a fine uncommon world in which personification is not out of place. Thus, to the unsympathetic reader, the reader who is not grave and curious as she is, her austerity is nine-­tenths sterility. Could she have been less precisely true to herself she might have made a quicker, a wider, and a more transient appeal. But she was resolutely herself, even when contradictory, uncertain or vague. The portrait is therefore unique. She paints herself not as one of a class or school, in which others can claim fellowship, but as an individual perfectly alone. [‘Two’, see above, is quoted.] A few of her poems are perhaps inaccessible except to friends; there has been a shade of meaning which all her care could not infuse into the words. Few will fail to find something of themselves in the book, if only in a single piece; but the whole—­in fact, almost any half-­dozen pieces—­belongs to Miss Coleridge alone. She is bold to set down weakness, or bitterness, or sudden pain, and at the same time reticent in her method of doing so.6 The heart cry is thinned and veiled almost as it would have been in the society of her equals, and more than one poem touches upon this restraint, as for example one headed ‘ “To thine own self be true” ’: True to myself am I, and false to all.   Fear, sorrow, love, constrain us till we die.   But when the lips betray the spirit’s cry, 6  Here ET anticipates the judgement of Simon Avery that ‘refusal to explain is a common strategy in Coleridge’s poems as the reader’s entry into meaning and interpretation is repeatedly and purposely blocked’ (Avery [ed.], Selected Poems of Mary Coleridge [Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2010], 17). This review is headed: ‘The Incommunicable Soul’. ET would later make a similar point in his review of Gathered Leaves: a collection of prose-writings by Coleridge, together with memoirs of her. He advises her true readers not to be ‘deterred by occasional notices which affect to announce “Private”. What they really say is “No thoroughfare”, which, as everybody ought to know, is very different from “Private”, and does not by any means signify “No footpath” ’ (DC: 21 June 1910).

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 The will, that should be sovereign, is a thrall. Therefore let terror slay me, ere I call   For aid of men. Let grief begrudge a sigh.   ‘Are you afraid?—‘unhappy?’ ‘No!’ The lie About the shrinking truth stands like a wall. ‘And have you loved?’ ‘No, never!’ All the while,   The heart within my flesh is turned to stone. Yea, none the less that I account it vile,   The heart within my heart makes speechless moan,   And when they see one face, one face alone, The stern eyes of the soul are moved to smile.

Another, very different piece, unlike any other in the book, may be given as complementary in its revelation of this austerely passionate Englishwoman: O let me be in loving nice, Dainty, fine, and o’er precise, That I may charm my charmèd dear As tho’ I felt a secret fear To lose what never can be lost, Her faith who still delights me most! So shall I be more than true, Ever in my ageing new. So dull habit shall not be Wrongly called Fidelity.

And the last poem of all, singularly befitting its place, takes us if not nearer an understanding, at least deeper into the mystery, of her personality: Some in a child would live, some in a book;   When I am dead let there remain of me Less than a word—­a little passing look, Some sign the soul had once, ere she forsook   The form of life to live eternally.

The book is full of such indelible passing looks. As the exquisite portrait of a woman of this age the book must rouse many to friendship. The beauty, courage, cheerfulness and honesty that float always above its pains and perplexities give it a moral charm in harmony with its artistic accomplishment and its intellectual severity. SR: 16 May

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Minor Poems of Michael Drayton,1 chosen and edited by Cyril Brett (Oxford: Clarendon Press) There are several Drayton problems, but the whole psychological problem of relating every different kind of his work together and to his character is the most difficult. There is more need here for a bold and sensitive psychologist than for the critic with his usual equipment and the historic spirit. In the sonnets we meet a difficulty common to all of the Elizabethan sonnets. The majority seem to be exercises with no more spirit of truth in them than there is in a set of Latin verses, and less originality. A plain man of some ex­peri­ ence in life and letters would naturally condemn almost every one as insincere. There is, of course, the famous ‘Since there’s no hope’,2 and there is the third ‘Amour’ beginning: My thoughts bred up with Eagle-­birds of Jove, And, for their virtues I desired to know, Upon the nest I set them forth, to prove If they were of the Eagle’s kind or no . . .

Are we to suppose that Drayton hit upon his good sonnets by the practice gained in writing not merely bad ones but frank arrangements of words after the fashion of the day? Or is it not better to suppose that exuberant enjoyment of words and the sonnet form, in the brain of a young poet, amidst a young and thronging world, outstripped the perfectly sincere emotions which they were summoned to express? For this is the poet who wrote: Let Art and Nature go One with the other; Yet so, that Art may show Nature her Mother . . .3

Psychologist, resolve us. Then there are the elegant, self-­confessed, playful rhymes, in which he had no peer and hardly a rival, things like:   But Ile not mourne,   But stay my Turne, The Wind may come about, Sir, 1  See ET’s review of Drayton’s Poems [118]. In a briefer notice of Minor Poems he had already said: ‘No poet except Chaucer is so full of the sweetness of England when it was a land of fields and fair small towns. The golden age of his Dowsabell and Daffodill is an immortal one’ (DC: 6 January). 2  Quoted in full [118–19].    3  From ‘The Sacrifice to Apollo’.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916   And once againe   May bringe me in, And help to beare you out, Sir.4

And in this playful kind he strays into genuine emotion, as in ‘The Cryer’, after a fashion only surpassed by Lodge’s finest lyric5 in its happy mingling of passion and play. The ‘Hymne To His Ladies Birth-­Place’, Coventry, is one of the earliest of those poems to places in which Jonson, Carew, and Marvell have excelled; and that is indisputably true to the heart, with its Deare Citie, travelling by thee, When thy rising Spyres I see . . .

Among the ‘Elegies’ that to Henry Reynolds must always rank high in its small class, with the ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’6 and the rest, for its criticism of the English poets, and among them Marlowe, who ‘Had in him those brave translunary things’.7 But it has also that tender honest passage about his own childhood: how, when he was a little page, he clasped his arms about his master’s thigh and O my deare master! cannot you (quoth I) Make me a Poet, doe it if you can, And you shall see, Ile quickly bee a man, Who me thus answered smiling, boy quoth he, If you’le not play the wag, but I may see You ply your learning, I will shortly read Some Poets to you; Phoebus be my speed, Too’t hard went I, when shortly he began, And first read to me honest Mantuan, Then Virgils Eglogues . . .

The sonnets of such a one can hardly have been mere exercises. There remain his finest things, close and elaborate in workmanship; in the martial strain of ‘Agincourt’, simple as a ballad, yet in its movement beyond any ballad; in others, with a richness of words and rhythm together, as in With Roses damask, white, and red, and fairest flower delice, With Cowslips of Jerusalem, and cloves of Paradice,8 4  From ‘To His Rivall’. 5  Probably the poem beginning ‘Love is a sickness full of woes’, by Thomas Lodge (c.1557–1625). 6 For Drayton’s elegiac epistle to Reynolds, with its representation of friendship between poets, see [119] and note; ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’: poem by Shelley. 7  See longer quotation [119].    8  From Drayton’s Third Eclogue.

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for which we must come to the nineteenth century to find the best parallels. These make us marvel that Mr Brett should speak of Drayton’s ‘English stubbornness and doggedness’ as if they alone could achieve such ends. Drayton’s glories do not come to an end with the pastoral, another class represented in this selection. There is not an English poet who has equalled him in the pastoral, not used for alien purposes, but pure and simple. In his ‘Dowsabell’, in ‘The Shepherd’s Sirena’, in the Ninth Eclogue (where are the lines There was the widow’s daughter of the glen, Dear Rosalind, that scarcely brook’d compare, The moorland maiden, so admir’d of men, Bright Goldilocks, and Phillida the fair . . .)9

in Gorbo’s three verses on Daffadill, in the Fourth Eclogue with its ‘Oh Elphin, Elphin’, and in some of the Nymphalls too, he combines the honied sweetness of the courtiers with a real Cotswold earthiness, in a manner that is among the most fascinating minor triumphs of poetry. [. . .] SR: 8 February

Lascelles Abercrombie, Interludes and Poems Any half-­dozen lines in his book would prove Mr Abercrombie a poet. Almost any half-­dozen would prove him a new poet; not a mere melodious gentle spirit who has loved Tennyson or Shelley, and been unable to think or feel or write away from them, but one who twenty years ago would have seemed to speak a foreign and grating tongue, because he is so much ours of this day, one who has drunken the same new air as Mr Sturge Moore, Mr Yeats or Mr Davidson. He is clearly a man of a big, eager imaginative life, who has seen Men and Nature for himself. He is a curious and successful student of words.1 9  Also quoted in ET’s earlier review of Drayton’s Poems. 1  ET had written to GB on 26 February, saying of Abercrombie: ‘He is good there is no doubt. He reminded me a little of you. If he can get finer without losing his energy he will pass Sturge Moore. But he is already fine, has his own vocabulary & a wonderful variety in his blank verse, has certainly his own vision of things, is perhaps too metaphysical.—But though I have written a review of the book I have not made up my mind about it except that it is the sincere work of an artist’ (LGB, 157–8).

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Most of the book is in blank verse, and there is hardly a conventional line, a mere ten-­syllable length among hundreds. His rhythms are bounded solely by his needs. Mr Yeats’s are as much modulated and with far greater sweetness, but they are modulated as often by a rich ear for the physical love­ liness of curving words as by the power of rhythm to help the sense—­ Mr Abercrombie’s are dramatic; there is only one English dramatist who has gone beyond this poet in making blank verse, the march or leap or stagger or crawl or hesitation of the syllables correspond to varying emotions with thrilling delicacy. There are few of his unconventional lines which could not be shown to be justified by the sense, and what is more, to be legitimate variations such as every artist is bound to make. It is this dramatic quality as of speech itself which will help to make these interludes, or dialogues of a few hundred lines between two or three people, hard to put upon the stage. For the speeches are, as a rule, very long; some are monologues, and the dialogues are between the speaker and something within him as much as with the person addressed. All the persons speak in a musing, deeply moved, truly poetic speech, in the manner of men and women who have thought and talked with solitude; their words fill the air with a cloudy chorus, with gods, with devils, with the past and the future; and what actors will call such spirits up? They are worthy of a voice of widest range and giddiest heights and depths of significance. [. . .] It is impossible in this or twice this space to do more than assert and re­iter­ate that in these poems a whole man, imaginative, intuitive, reflective, observant, passionate in his relations with life, is to be seen burning with original language, in towering and sweeping flames, in jewels of glowing, in awful and splendid smoke, as in a garment. For his vocabulary he has gone far and wide, but nearly always back to his own heart; rarely he is rash as well as adventurous. He uses ‘furfur’ for scurf, ‘delf ’ for dell or dale, anxious even in words to get back to primitive things. For he has that most modern of modern qualities, the feeling for what is primitive and radical. He has, for example, rendered the emotions of a blind boy on touching beautiful hair, on feeling the night come down; has described love and fire; has seen man sep­ ar­ate from the rest of the beasts in a manner which Jefferies (who also in a trance ‘was exalted above surety And out of time did fall’)2 would have envied; he has seen the One and the Many, and the longing of created things to be unmade again; he has expressed M. Maeterlinck’s belief in the soul:

2  Quotation from ‘The Trance’: ET was then working on RJ, in which (167) he makes the same comparison with Jefferies’s trances in The Story of My Heart.

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The mind is to interpret to the heart: Only the heart can answer to the world; Mind knows the speech, but the heart the meaning.3

He has captured the rude sweet beauty of Nature; and in his magnificent ‘Indignation: an Ode’ he calls for the ‘indignation of the Lord’, for a ‘righteous sword’, for the ‘anger among men In the old days’, to come and to sweep away the nastiness of our life. If he makes any error which can decently be pointed out here, it is in too often making his men metaphysicians. Never were metaphysics so steeped in character, yet two of his men die of metaphysics. Poetry does not refuse hospitality to metaphysics, but they are in any case likely to give small return for it in the drama, and as Mr Abercrombie comes near to repeating himself it is particularly true of these brief plays. A man with a noble and exquisite sense of words and rhythms, with a fine pictorial power kept in its due place in a large attitude towards all life, bold, energetic, nervous, having an artist’s harmony of sensual and spiritual life, Mr Abercrombie must move to things beyond the grandeur and subtlety of this book. DC: 29 February

Michael Field, Wild Honey from Various Thyme The late Mary Coleridge, ‘Michael Field’, and Mrs Meynell1 are in themselves enough to refute the charge of poetic barrenness against this age. Yet all have its hesitation, its subtlety, its quiet delicacy, its lack of energy, movement, and principle. Michael Field has (or have) these qualities and deficiencies, but she has also a rich sensuousness of words and images which the others seldom have. More than the others, too, she has a style which is something more than scholarly, terse and refined, and often she gives her words those effects which are incalculable beforehand and inexplicable afterwards, the effects of genius arranging language not merely by rules of grammar and custom—­as in this which is otherwise not one of her best:

3  From ‘The Fool’s Adventure’. 1  See Appendix for all these poets; ‘Michael Field’: pen-name of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 I love him . . . fountains of sweet marge, ’Tis as when night-­stocks blow! Follow me not, ye stars, for I must go As one that fares alone, and in the large Soft darkness scent my woe!

In all her writing, in fact, she not only shows that she has character which is something, but that she is fortunate enough to call up words to express its visions, and they come. Poems like her ‘Feeding of Apollo’ and ‘Feeding of Bacchus’ are so utterly new and with all their refinement so naïve that we are reminded of the early Italian painters who drew their Olympians out of small Latin and less Greek. It is the same power that gives her dealings with nature a mythopoeic strangeness and vitality; she borders on personification without any of the hardness and mere artifice of personification as a pis aller.2 In reading her ‘Silence’, for example, we seem to assist at the birth of one of the early goddesses or dryads at least. Then, in translating her own special ex­peri­ences beauty comes to the help of her sincerity and makes us able to admire things in which we have not shared: as in ‘Mood’: As God creating did not yet create, But, quickened in His spirit, moving stood. And felt the light, and saw that it was good Before the lesser lights, before the great Were fashioned, not impatient to relate The open, clear befalling of His mood, So dwell I in the Muses’ neighbourhood, And in the infinite soft chaos wait. [. . .]

‘Raindrops’ is an example of her plainest method: Days the rain drips deep Till it touches those that sleep   That they moan, Sorrowing ’gainst their walls of stone . . .

Her work has often a mere ‘aesthetic’ beauty that goes with taste in wall paper and other delights of the southward-­facing cloister, but then her sonnets are with those of Mary Coleridge among the finest of a generation, packed with thought, experience, and passion, and perfectly austere,

2  A last resort.

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­ ithout the verbosity and blatancy with which the imitation of Rossetti has w led a multitude. MP: 5 March *** Perhaps the authors known as Michael Field write for posterity. I hope so, for I might thus be excused for not being able to make anything of many verses in their book. And yet there are places where it seems possible that they have achieved obscurity by that most fertile of methods—­the search of the proper word for something imperfectly apprehended. In this search, first comes a vague common word with a moment’s value; then flocks of uncommon words, of which a hundred might excusably be harboured for a while; through these the writer toils towards the one. [. . .] There are very few writers with Michael Field’s sense of style, with their beauty and fineness of words and rhythms. For a score of these poems are perfect accomplishments of their ends. But their ends, it must be said, have often a fatal triviality, a mere indoor cloistered grace, with an atmosphere of incense and exquisite wall-­paper; and when this is not true of their ends, it is true of their treatment, so that I cannot read one of the sonnets and hardly one of the other poems without disturbing thoughts and beautiful objects in place of a sense of beauty and energy and joy.3 B: June

Charles M. Doughty, Adam Cast Forth1 Mr Charles  M.  Doughty’s Dawn in Britain and Wanderings in Arabia have already shown us his unique power in creating bold and simple men, and making them act and speak amidst unblemished landscapes.2 This he does out of his 3  When he reviewed Michael Field’s final collection, Mystic Trees (1913), ET had become more impatient with the women’s style, and also regretted their latterday ‘extravagances of piety’ (DC: ?May 1913). He describes the book as ‘written in a religious state, or in imitation of one’, a ‘mixture of the naïve and the recondite and of what results from the difficulties of rhyme’ (B: August 1913). 1  Evidently trying to promote Doughty, ET wrote two other laudatory reviews of Adam Cast Forth (MP: 23 April; B: June). All the reviews are anonymous. 2  For ET’s reviews of The Dawn in Britain, see [183], [208], [240]. Earlier in 1908 he had reviewed Wanderings in Arabia, an abridgement (by Edward Garnett) of Doughty’s monumental

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own large humanity and personal force, out of an imagination singularly aided by his synthetic, closely-­knit, archaic, but in effect simple, English. His new subject is the meeting of Adam and Eve after their hundred years’ wandering from Paradise; their healing from the wounds of that wandering; their five days’ journey over mountains of bitterness to the Earth which they are to possess; their learning the primitive arts of life; Eve’s first child-­bearing; and their security from winter rain and wind in a cave, their first house. Between the first meeting and the end about a year must elapse, and there are no unities of time and place in the five ‘songs’ or acts of the drama. Adam and Eve talk as they rest, or journey, or toil; a chorus completes the narrative and the scene by frequent interventions. Sammael, or Satan, opens the drama with a speech scornful of man and defiant of God, whom he accuses of punishing man with a hasty curse for a fault that was really the imperfection of His work. The Angel Ezriel is God’s vicar throughout the book, and he instructs and admonishes the two exiles. The original legend is a Judaeo-­Arabian one. Mr Doughty is a Christian of so simple a type that it is hard to describe him unless by comparing him with, say, Izaak Walton. The effect of his book is in the largest sense religious, though to the Christian it may be sufficient to say that it is Christian. It is pious towards God and man, in the sense that The Dawn in Britain was pious. But it is no attempt to justify the ways of God to man. Adam says with a sigh to Eve in one place: We may not question with the Lord, nor ask, Why dost Thou thus? nor gainsay, in our hearts, The thing which pleaseth Him, that the Father doth.

Among other unconventionalities we notice Adam’s saluting Eve as his equal when she has given birth to a man. Throughout the book these two suffer, as we understand, by a Divine edict, but they suffer from the conditions of life on this earth, because the sun is hot and their feet are tender, and they enjoy in the same way, just as we do in our time. Their joy in meeting, their brief rest and refreshment, their rude travel, their achievement of the fields where they are to live, their perils, faintings and hopes, their happy converse, full of memories, and their final comfort and confidence, are things which we watch unless we are very learned men, with more intimate and homely satisfaction than the twelve books of Milton. Milton could create Satan, and Heaven, and Hell; but he could not create Adam and Eve, though he could describe them, and invest them with pompous and bookish dignity; and Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888): ‘he is more than a mere observer; he is an actor in the book, and the give and take of Asiatic and European, of rustic and urbane, brings out more character in both than would otherwise have been possible’ (MP: 6 February).

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they remain gigantic statues, whose movements and speeches are incredible except to a theologian. But Mr Doughty’s man and woman are the true ancestors of those British princes who are buried under the barrows on our downs, of the Arabs whom he has drawn in their hungry wayfaring, in their playful leisure, and going out to battle with shivering lances on their tall camels. Adam and Eve, in this sacred drama, are human figures of common stature, made heroic by their sorrow and their love, and by the splendour and magnitude of the amphitheatre in a corner of which they stoop, leaning on their walking staves; or take a path worn first by the beasts; or pluck dates and remember Eden; or taste the bitter sea water, and are astonished; or gather fuel and food against the winter. Every speech is so direct, essential and significant that we may choose at random one that will show the manner of Mr Doughty’s verse. Let it be this one, where Adam (or Adamu) lies near death towards the end of the five days’ journey over the mountains, and Eve, reviving, speaks: Tart is this cold and cutting as the flint! Out of steep Night, the Stars of God hang forth, Like fruits from Summer boughs, in the dim groves. We Father see Thy Stars! Seest not Thou us? (Touching him.) Is cold (his sighing ceased!) the father’s flesh: Here laid in frost; and hardly he draws now breath. To cover him, Adamu shall have my long locks. I will me lay up to him, in the cold. Aye me, hath us led forth, an heavenly Voice, That God might slay us, in dread wilderness coast?

Only a great and only a modern poet could have brought into this small space a widespread matter, and have added to the main beauty of a perfectly original unity the felicity of pathos and delight in the thoughts and emotions, and of description which, by a few relevant touches here and there, brings around this human pair and before our eyes the terrible and the lovely in Nature. If it lacks of necessity the exuberance and variety of beauty in The Dawn in Britain, this unity almost atones for it. DC: 9 April *** [. . .] Only a great artist could depict such scenes in a manner likely to move men today. Even Milton’s magniloquent treatment has hardly composed more

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than a frigid group of sculpture out of the earlier part of this tale. There is no magniloquence in Mr Doughty. He creates two human figures, of more heroic stature than ours, but otherwise purely human in their suffering, their frailty and their affections. They might be a fisherman and his wife, or any simple pair of brave, beautiful people, ennobled by immediate contact with Nature and a religious poet’s imagination. Their first wretched greetings, their growing happiness together and mutual service, their almost overwhelming agonies in the five mountain days, their recollections of Eden and the casting forth, their musings on the world, and finally their entry into possession of the earth and into hopes and cheerful toil, are the occasion of dialogues of indescribable tenderness and nobility. As in The Dawn in Britain, Mr. Doughty creates natural luxuriance and beauty on the one hand, sublimity and terror on the other, with equal mastery. There is nothing to equal the clearness and largeness of the impression of elemental cruelty which he gives through the dialogue of Adam and Eve and the chorus during the mountain journey, unless it is such a contrasting passage as that when Adam recalls to Eve how they lived in Eden: And when we waked, white morn was in the Eden; Where fowls’ sweet early voice had raised us up. Then whilst I lifted to the Lord, my face; Like gentle bird on spray, ’midst the sheen leaves, Thou hither thither leap’dst, on thy winged feet, To pluck thee of all fair flowers; wherewith thou filledst, That lilies likewise seemed, thine happy hands. [. . .]

The whole book brings before the mind, by means of precision of detail and a suffusion of romance, entirely new scenes of human joy and pathos, of beauty and sublimity in earth and sky and water. The naturalness, the realism, is lovely in itself, yet is so used that it subsides to its true place in the rich imaginative whole effect, after a manner for which few precedents will be found outside Spenser. The order of beauty is so rare in kind and so intense that the poem will overcome those superficial disadvantages of style which it is easy to exaggerate. Mr Doughty is a scholar and a man of experience. Out of his learning and the needs of his own mind he has wrought a style which looks more remote from common English than Milton’s. Like Donne’s, Milton’s, Coleridge’s, Browning’s, his style will astonish at first. It is troublesome because it does not avoid words like ‘uneath’;3 it is punctuated to show the breathing pauses rather than the sense; its constructions are often 3  ‘With difficulty’: archaic word used by Spenser and Coleridge.

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­ orrowed, for their brevity or synthetic value, from the classical languages; b and it is not without tricks and misprints. We are content to believe that this style, common to Mr Doughty’s prose and verse, learned, personal, honest, the vehicle of great beauty and nobility in pictures and ideas, is therefore right. The first half-­hour with it is infuriating. But if the reader suspend his judgment for an hour, while he is getting used to the punctuation and construction, he need never again have any difficulty, and can pass on to enjoy the high severity of Mr Doughty’s language, its order, propriety, brevity and ­colour, and the sweetness of strength. There are passages to which we shall turn again and again as examples of those ‘best words in the best order’ which make fine poetry; and to many others for sheer beauty of style, such as we go for to Spenser or Sidney, as for example: Earth’s fruit hangs ruddy on the weary bough; In all the fallow field, the bearded herb, Stands sere, and ripeneth seed: fall russet leaves, Cumbering clear brooks, which bitter flow thereof.

We therefore contend that the thrilling delicacy and awe of the scenes and actions described are matched by the language and structure of a master, and that they make a splendid whole. SR: 23 May

Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, edited by Robert Ross This uniform edition of the prose and verse of Oscar Wilde is attractive in many ways. It is well printed on good paper; it is edited by Mr Robert Ross;1 and it is altogether suited to the work it enshrines, though we miss the illustrations to A House of Pomegranates. One of the volumes, already reviewed here, contains The Duchess of Padua, practically a new work by Wilde.2 Another contains De Profundis, with not only a score of pages omitted from the other English editions, but four letters from Wilde in Reading prison to

1 Robert Baldwin [‘Robbie’] Ross (1869–1918): Canadian journalist, critic, and art-dealer, prominent in London artistic circles, who became Wilde’s lover and literary executor. Ross later befriended Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. 2  ET had written a mainly narrative review of this early play (1883) by Wilde (DC: 13 February).

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Mr Ross, and the two memorable letters on prison life printed in The Daily Chronicle in 1897 and 1898. In the further ten volumes before us the work is of an extraordinary variety. There are poems and prose poems; the four modern plays in prose, full of plot, epigram, and stagecraft, than which no one has written anything better fitted to make a perfect theatrical entertainment—­altogether a catalogue of opulent or witty writings. No writer of such reputation has in recent times equalled Wilde’s versatility. But to connect one class of work with another there is little except the epigrams which he was so fond of repeating from book to book, instead of leaving them all in Dorian Gray. It can hardly be said that they contain a body of ideas, a philosophy gradually completing itself. The books have the appearance of being too deliberate—­done to satisfy a belief that he could do this or that exceedingly well. That is not how they came to be written: to think so would be to accuse the writer of affectation, and who dares to bring that charge against any man who is not an imbecile? That they all sprang from the heart and brain of this man there is no doubt, and there is no more difficult or fascinating character study still left untouched than Wilde’s. But it can with fairness be said that his works are works of fancy—­fancy which has no divine call, but is free to choose between several paths—­not of ­imagination, which is for ever engaged in continuing the work of the ­creation;3 works of wit, not of humour, certainly not of the comic spirit. His writings are clothes that reveal the man only in the dubious manner possible in an age when it is scarcely possible to be well dressed, but only to be usually or unusually dressed. ‘Sleep, like all wholesome things, is a habit’: so he wrote when discussing the prison life after he had shared it. Before that, he might have said a hundred things about habit, but this one was impossible. He decorated. He never created but one thing in his life, Salomé, and that was in French, perhaps by way of tribute to Flaubert and M. Maeterlinck.4 ‘The Critic as Artist’ is equal to almost anything that has been written about criticism by anyone since Coleridge;5 but then the writer’s decorative instinct 3  ET, who would soon be writing about Biographia Literaria [310], is applying Coleridge’s proposition, in chapters 4 and 13, that Imagination and Fancy are ‘two distinct and widely different faculties’; that Imagination is ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite “I am” ’, whereas Fancy is ‘a mode of memory [which] must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association’. 4  Salomé: written in 1891–2, translated into English (not very well) by Lord Alfred Douglas in 1894. Ross oversaw the publication of two superior translations (1906, 1912). 5 ET greatly admired ‘The Critic as Artist’, published in Wilde’s Intentions (1891): see Introduction [xlviii]. He later singled out Wilde’s criticism when reviewing Miscellanies and Reviews, the final volumes of Ross’s fourteen-volume edition, saying of the reviews and lectures: ‘They show how alert he was to ideas that were in the air, and how much he did to foster them

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has actually made a sea of words to hide the pearls. Except Salomé and ‘The Critic as Artist’, his writings raise him, indeed, to the position of the greatest rhetorician since De Quincey. But it was a sad fate for one who thought so much of art and the artist that he should have been a signal example of the man who describes beautiful things, talks about beautiful things, as if that were the same as creating them. He used beautiful words about beautiful objects, and thought it art. It was a fitting punishment of one who could address Beauty as if she were a light woman:            there are a few Who for thy sake would give their manlihood   And consecrate their being, I at least Have done so, made thy lips my daily food,   And in thy temples found a goodlier feast Than this starved age can give me, spite of all Its new-­found creeds so sceptical and so dogmatical.6

But with these limitations, how admirable he is; what exquisite patterns are his prose plays; how heavy and gorgeous and costly is Dorian Gray, The House of Pomegranates, and even the poems with all their wordiness, and their echoes of Arnold and Keats; what grace and abundance everywhere, what wit and dalliance! His writing can be like a dress wholly of jewels and fine gold, every part of it equally rich, but weighing the wearer to the ground and crushing her. Or it can be swift, sharp, and hard, logic and paradox, clad in complete steel. In either case it is on parade. It calls attention to itself. The words have a separate value from the things which they are meant to express. On paper, he seems often not affected, but incapable of sincerity. Thus, literature is made a craft rather than an art, related to wallpaper and carpets more than to life. It is a literature of the idle classes, for the idle, by the idle. Life flows past it, while it languidly watches the waves; only now and then there is a cry, and a watcher has fallen in and gone down; and still life flows past, regardless of the voice repeating ‘Experience, the name we give to our mistakes’, or ‘I am dying beyond my means’, or ‘Merely to look at the world will always be lovely’. DC: 13 April

and advance them in the world. With all his weakness he appears quite clearly as a writer who took a large view of life in its relation to art and art in its relation to life, and must be considered with Ruskin and Tolstoy by the historian’ (DC: 1 February 1909). 6  Quotation, invoking ‘Spirit of Beauty’, from Wilde’s poem ‘The Garden of Eros’.

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Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, The Web of Life; etc. The ‘Samurai Press’1 has produced a number of good-­looking books but has been unfortunate in the matter of them. The Web of Life is the second, or, perhaps, the third by Mr W. W. Gibson, who long ago swamped his small delightful gift by his abundance. He is essentially the minor poet in the bad sense, for he is continually treating subjects poetically, writing about things instead of creating them. In ‘Ferhad and Shirine’ he has such a poetical subject, and all he does is to put into not very competent blank verse the things which everyone who reads poor poetry expects. It is treated ‘poetically’, and yet it is every bit as tedious, commonplace, void of poetry as Blackamore or Mallet,2 in passages like this: He paused; and Ferhad waited, wonder-­mute, But lifted not his eyes; though Shirine’s form Quivered within her lucent draperies. Then, at a sign from Kesra, she drew back With trembling hands the veil from her bright brows, Even unto where the night-­black hair upsprang from the broad temple.

The third line is enough to damn any poet except Mr Phillips,3 and there are hundreds no better. It is utterly cheap senseless rhythm, and lack of value in words no artist would pass by. The man capable of writing about hair just as he would write about a letter-­box is capable of anything. Mr Gibson does not even distinguish between blank verse and heroics. These, e.g., are merely heroics without rhyme: Fresh as the morn, and eager for the sea, The brown-­armed mariners with easy force Bent to the oars, with swift and certain stroke Cleaving the waters with cool-­plashing blades Into bright foam; and, full of sudden life, Her mooring-­chains unloosed, the quivering ship Strained for the ocean . . . [. . .]

1  For the Samurai Press, see Appendix entry on Harold Monro [709]. In 1907 Gibson had published two collections of verse-plays/dramatic poems with the Press: On the Threshold and The Stonefolds. ET writes of the latter: ‘He has a romantic vocabulary, a sweetness, an energy also, and a genuine rustic breath from the north country, pasturised, so to speak. But he grows more austere, and his Stonefolds . . . shows that he gains nothing by this austerity’ (DC: 1907/8). 2 Richard Blackamore (1654–1729), David Mallet (1705–65): versifiers famed for their mediocrity. 3  For Stephen Phillips, see note [16].

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How forced and lifeless, heavier than the poorest prose! Nothing said and ill said! [. . .] DC: 18 April

Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature Mr Arthur Symons has three uncommon qualifications as a critic.1 He is a scholar; he is an eager adventurer, ever looking out for new beauty; he has a ‘wise passiveness’2 in dealing with books, by which he becomes penetrated with their secrets, allowing them one by one to colour, as so many new windows to his soul, the light that comes to him. And, on the whole, none of his books shows all these qualities quite so well as his Symbolist Movement in Literature, i.e., in French literature. Few, if any, Englishmen could have done it at all. For these eight men—­Gérard de Nerval, Villiers de l’Isle-­Adam, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Laforgue, Mallarmé, Huysmans, and M. Maeterlinck—­ all of them writing in French, have a certain detachment from the life of the householder which, even in the artist, we are in the habit of resenting when it goes beyond an inexpensive personal oddity or two. Matthew Arnold’s ‘What a Set!’3 is at the top of the notepaper of nearly all our critics. But Mr Symons, as well as being an exact and sober man, has all the sympathy which Walt Whitman desired to have. He approaches books as an artist approaches life, and he interprets and so criticises. It is necessary to understand at least so much in case we should accuse him of lacking a sense of proportion when he deals with these men, all of them, except Verlaine and M. Maeterlinck, not of the first or of the second order. Perhaps for the purpose of reaching an 1  For ET’s high opinion of Symons as a literary critic, see Introduction [xlix] and [222n.]. First published in 1899, The Symbolist Movement influenced Anglophone poets like T. S. Eliot, and especially Symons’s friend, W.  B.  Yeats, to whom he dedicated the book as being ‘the chief representative of that movement in our country’. In Maurice Maeterlinck (1911) ET would develop his own thinking about Symbolism, and pursue the partial disagreement with Symons implied here: see extract [468], in which he also discusses Yeats. For other writings on French poetry (Baudelaire, Verlaine), see [170], [350]. 2  Phrase from Wordsworth’s poem ‘Expostulation and Reply’ (1798). 3  In his review of Edward Dowden’s Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1886), Arnold writes: ‘What a set! what a world! is the exclamation that breaks from us as we come to an end of this history of “the occurrences of Shelley’s private life” ’ (Essays in Criticism: Second Series [London: Macmillan, 1888], 237).

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English audience, or more likely from a hatred of school-­masterly comparisons, he avoids showing the Symbolist writers in their relation to their predecessors and contemporaries. Some day he will do this and make it clear that they are not so exceptional or so new as they appear in his pages, or, rather, that their finest achievements, as distinct from the theories of Mallarmé,4 for example, are neither in a backwater nor at a fountain head. He never wearies us by taking a standard line from Dante or Shakespeare and comparing Verlaine or Mallarmé with it. He is dogmatic only when he seems to accept Poe’s quibble that not merely is ‘the age of epics past, but that no long poem was ever written; the finest long poem in the world being but a series of short poems linked together by prose’.5 His business is to prove that these writers live, not that this or that is their probable haunt upon Parnassus. This he does admirably, beginning with this large claim for the movement as a whole: in this revolt against exteriority, against rhetoric, against a materialistic tradition; in this endeavour to disengage the ultimate essence, the soul, of whatever exists and can be realised by the consciousness; in this dutiful waiting upon every symbol by which the soul of things can be made visible, literature, bowed down by so many burdens, may at last attain liberty, and its authentic speech. In attaining this liberty, it accepts a heavier burden; for in speaking to us so intimately, so solemnly, as only religion had hitherto spoken to us, it becomes itself a kind of religion, with all the duties and responsibilities of the sacred ritual.

He puts this more clearly and satisfactorily in the essay on Gérard de Nerval when he says that he had divined that poetry should be ‘not a hymn to beauty, nor the description of beauty, nor beauty’s mirror, but beauty itself; the colour, fragrance, and form of the imagined flower, as it blossoms again out of the page’. In essay after essay he reveals these men as they have not, except to the few, revealed themselves, in the same way as an artist reveals a landscape which has been for centuries but so many acres and cubic feet of land, air, water, and vegetation. The ‘Mallarmé’, the ‘Verlaine’, and the 4  Symons, too, had reservations about ‘the theories of Mallarmé’. His chapter on Mallarmé begins: ‘Stéphane Mallarmé was one of those who love literature too much to write it except by fragments; in whom the desire of perfection brings its own defeat. With either more or less ambition he would have done more to achieve himself; he was always divided between an absolute aim at the absolute, that is, the unattainable, and a too logical disdain for the compromise by which, after all, literature is literature’ (The Symbolist Movement in Literature [London: William Heinemann, 1899], 117). 5  This quotation, from the same chapter (137), paraphrases the opinion of Edward Allan Poe (1809–49) in his essay ‘The Poetic Principle’ (1848). For ET on Poe, see [451].

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‘Maeterlinck as a Mystic’ are especially fine portraits, and not only because the first two were known to him personally. They speak through him, and the reader has to know them well in order to understand how much of Mr Symons there is in these essays in discipleship, to see the study and the craft behind what might appear to be only supreme self-­abasement. [. . .] MP: 14 May

W. H. Davies, The Autobiography of a Super-­Tramp. With a Preface by Bernard Shaw Mr W. H. Davies’s two books of verse have not only contained some of the purest poetry of our day, but have suggested an unusual life behind that poetry.1 Evidently he had suffered from poverty, had known the East End lodging-­house, and had rioted to the best of a poor man’s ability. Through it all he preserved the innocence of an animal, frank, happy, and bold, breaking many laws and rules with no shame and no remorse. Blake did not go beyond Mr Davies in radical purity and simplicity. And now Mr Davies gives us an instalment of the truth about him in his extraordinary Autobiography of a Super-­Tramp, with an introduction from Mr Bernard Shaw. It is in every way extraordinary. Its style, in spite of a few lapses from what is taught at school, is a simpler, clearer, and more perfectly-­mastered instrument than that of almost any living man. There is no unusual word, hardly an epithet, in the whole book. Mr Davies does not know what it is to try to put a thing well. But profoundly genuine personal experiences, thoughts, emotions, conversations 1 Until the 1920s, Davies continued to publish poetry as William  H.  Davies; prose, as W. H. Davies—­which became his sole literary name. In another review of Autobiography ET calls Davies ‘a prose writer more closely related to Borrow and Defoe than any other of our time’, and (drawing a self-ironical contrast with writers ‘bound to write for a living’) praises ‘the ease and sincerity and inevitableness’ of Davies’s English (DC: 23 April). He also reviewed Davies’s further autobiographical works positively, stressing a ‘doubleness’ created by the play of conscious and unconscious impulses. He says of Beggars (1909): ‘Mr Davies’s powers are doubled in their effectiveness because he is unaware of them, and consequently never puts a strain upon them’; although his ‘powers of reflection and criticism have increased’, making the book ‘more subtle and various’ than Autobiography, while they also ‘imply growth and promise other books’ (MP: 21 October 1909). ET’s review of The True Traveller (1912) ends: ‘The double revelation in this book is remarkable—­the conscious revelation of out-of-the-way or hushed-up things, and the unconscious revelation of a temperament having that simplicity which is so far from morality and yet is apparently superior in the same field’ (B: May 1912).

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are set down so that we feel sure there is no veil between the author and ourselves—­no veil of vulgarity, laboriousness, haste, or, indeed, of complexity. It is an even surer instrument than his verse, and expresses in a more even manner the writer’s spirit, though it does not go so deep or rise so high. Then the book is extraordinary in its matter. Apprenticed to a picture-­frame maker, Mr Davies disliked his work, and went off to the United States while still a youth. There he spent the greater part of nine or ten years beating his way either on foot or on railway trains without a ticket, with a companion or two. Now and then he did a little work at fruit picking, or spent the winter in prison, or crossed the Atlantic in a cattle boat; but as a rule he begged, and lived well and indolently. In these years he met a variety of men, in the open fields and woods, in saloons, in prisons, and on deck. His sketches of these men, their history, their speech, their habits, their persons are vivid and effortless. They evidently remain clear as life in the author’s lucid brain, and he writes as if at the dictation of these memories with never a word too much. We would gladly read twice as much of this kind of work. [. . .] And then the man himself is extraordinary, for he is so simple. He is just a small, dark Welshman, shy and yet unreserved, of perfect physique and great courage, with a preference of starvation to regular work. He is not adventurous, but, being fearless, pleasure-­loving, and fond of the company of men and of seeing Nature and cities, he has drifted across the world, drinking, sleeping rough, begging, living without any care except to get fresh air, and preserving or acquiring a wonderful tact and love and knowledge of men. As a child—­he was born in a public-­house—­he was a truant and lawbreaker, incorrigible by pious guardians. He had some love of literature, and read Byron with a young companion who rediscovered Byronism and would bite his lips and frown at the merrymaking of his bright-­eyed contemporaries, leaning his figure, ‘not so tall as he would like it’, against a pillar for effect. Occasionally in his travels he says that he wished for books. The wish must have been frail and transient. However, in London he began to frequent the free libraries, and read everything just for the pleasure of stories and characters and imaginations. Books have been as meat and drink to him, but rather less important, and certainly mentioned less. He never quotes. He has absorbed books, and with their help, but much more with the force of an original vitality that will have its way though he perish for it, he has acquired a unique mastery of prose and of some simple forms of verse. [. . .] MP: 14 May

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W. B. Yeats, Discoveries; A Volume of Essays Mr Yeats writes the most beautiful prose of our time. It is very likely not the greatest prose, but it provides greater pleasure for its readers than any other. There are writers more heavily adorned, more witty, more stately, more elaborate. Mr Yeats has got beyond adornment and stateliness into simple power. His style is serious, imaginative, flexible, and most sweet. It has not an astonishing word in it. We have, in fact, re-­read many of the essays several times out of pure self-­indulgence, to revel in this shadowy crystal element that is lovelier than anything coloured. The book is so singular a pleading and a confession that little would be gained in discussing it except by a competent critic who had the whole of this page to use. Only to a few will it come as a surprise, though it is a slap in the face to those who persist in admiring his other work. The revision of The Shadowy Waters and of the stories of Red Hanrahan prepared us for it.1 In his first essay he is annoyed by a play that is ‘full of sedentary refinement and the spirituality of cities’. In the next he is asking: How can I make my work mean something to vigorous and simple men whose attention is not given to art but to a shop, or teaching in a National School, or dispensing medicine?

Speaking of musicians, he says: ‘We may remind them that the housemaid does not respect the piano-­tuner as she does the plumber’. He praises old wives’ tales and ends by recalling that he once thought Tolstoy’s War and Peace the greatest story he had ever read: and yet it has gone from me; even Launcelot, ever a shadow, is more visible in my memory than all its substance.

He likes the Iliad, the Odyssey, and ‘the swift and natural observation of a man as he is shaped by life’. It is beautifully and truly said of two pictures: Neither painting could move us at all, if our thought did not rush out to the edges of our flesh, and it is so with all good art . . . Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world . . .

And yet, again, when he has said that ‘all symbolic art should arise out of a real belief ’, he points to a real weakness in modern poetry in that its matter ‘has not entered into men’s prayers nor lighted any through the sacred dark

1  See reviews [231], [133].

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of religious contemplation’.2 The individual is everything in it: society has not been considered. But then society is not alive, it is a lump that exists. Reform society, not the artist. Though Mr Yeats loves old wives’ tales, he is at the head of the living men who lead us away from them. His style is the reverse of the old wives’ tale. That says little and suggests much: into Mr Yeats’s you must plunge deep and plunge again before getting all that is in it, but it suggests nothing. He is really not for the plumber. When he depicts heroic men, the equals of the Agamemnonian phalanx, there is a languor about them; he has wreathed poppies in their parsley crowns, and there is nothing of the dawn in their eyes.3 But, then, only a man in the forefront of this age could worry about what moves ‘natural men’. He is so new that he must to his opposite and would take Sycorax for a beauty. He praises a girl playing a banjo—‘her movements call up into the mind, so erect and natural she is, whatever is most beautiful in her daily life’—but the common people prefer the musician in evening dress at the shiny piano. Who are the common people, by the way? There are educated and there are half-­educated people; but there is no peasantry, or anything like it. Perhaps it is different in Ireland. Mr Yeats can enjoy the pianist, too, can enjoy the ‘merely scholarly or exceptional’. He is aware of all periods, and this book expresses with fascinating subtlety his doubt and pain as he ranges among them, saved from self-­ consciousness and death by his mysticism, by the rapt flight that has melted even into the heavenly blue. Our only fear is that these discoveries and hesitations may add yet another check to the productiveness of an artist like Mr Yeats. DC: 18 May

S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, edited with his Aesthetical Essays by J. Shawcross, 2 Vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press) It is astonishing that Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria has never been edited until now, nor indeed was the mere text to be had easily in a pleasant form. 2  ET writes similarly about symbolism and modernity in HE, saying of the expanding London suburbs: ‘these streets are the strangest thing in the world. They have never been discovered. They cannot be classified. There is no tradition about them. Poets have not shown how we are to regard them’ (ETPW II, 157–8). 3  For ET’s view that fin-de-siècle ‘languor’ enervates Yeats’s depiction of Irish legendary heroes, as contrasted with their vigorous Homeric counterparts, see his response to Deirdre [260n.].

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This new edition is worthy in its appearance of the Press from which it comes, and in its equipment worthy of Coleridge. Mr Shawcross gives many valuable notes, biographical and literary, at the end of each volume, and his introduction is a fine sympathetic tracking of Coleridge’s ideas, chiefly those on imagination, to their sources in his own meditations and in his reading of Kant and Schelling.1 This last he has done with very great labour by the use of Coleridge’s poems, prose-­writings, and letters. He begins with this significant passage on Coleridge’s childhood, which, even if mistaken, propounds questions which cannot be too often attempted: A fretful, sensitive, and passionate child, Coleridge at all times shunned the companionship of his playmates, and substituted for their pastimes a world of his own creation. To this world, fashioned largely from the Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe, and other works of wonder and fantasy, he attached a livelier faith than to the actual world of his senses. And when his father discoursed to him of the stars, dwelling upon their magnitude and their wondrous motions, he heard the tale ‘with a profound delight and admiration’, but without the least impulse to question its veracity. ‘My mind had been habituated to the vast, and I never regarded my senses as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions, not by my sight, even at that age.’ [. . .]

The introduction, in fact, stimulates the reader almost as much as a chapter of the Biographia itself, and it boldly gives an unusual amount of credit to Coleridge for originality. The Biographia will be read for its stimulation, even after it has lost the importance due to its bearing upon Lyrical Ballads, unless criticism develops more rapidly than it has lately done. The book is confused and confusing. ‘Dark with excessive bright’,2 it has no sort of unity, it has no order, balance or steady aim; but it contains, nevertheless, the most profound literary criti­ cism which has so far been written in English. Matthew Arnold is a journalist, Pater a dilettante, by comparison with Coleridge. Ruskin alone is with him. And chiefly on two matters is Coleridge to be heard, on poetic diction and on imagination. His scattered pages on poetic diction, due to his dis­ agree­ment with Wordsworth’s theory, are all that can at present form the basis of any true criticism of Poetry, while these words on the imagination deserve to have a temple of Imagination and Romance built in order that they might adorn its entrances: 1  Coleridge’s thought was indebted to the idealist metaphysics of the German philosophers Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), although Shawcross is innovative in also stressing his ‘originality’. 2  Milton on God: ‘Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear’, Paradise Lost, III.380.

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The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite ‘I am’.3

Incidentally, too, the unusual range of Coleridge’s reading makes his least original pages incomparable paddocks in which the young mind may skip about and sniff immortal airs. Such is that page on the mystics who ‘contributed to keep alive the heart in the head; gave me an indistinct yet stirring and working presentiment, that all the products of the mere reflective faculty partook of Death, and were as the rattling twigs and sprays in winter, into which a sap was yet to be propelled from some root to which I had not penetrated, if they were to afford my soul either food or shelter’.4 DC: 8 June

Stopford A. Brooke,1 A Study of Clough, Arnold, Rossetti and Morris, With an Introduction on the Course of Poetry from 1822 to 1852 Most critics are dull without learning; but not even learning can make dull Mr Stopford Brooke. He never writes without sympathy, without first having tasted deeply of pure joy from the work of the men of whom he writes. There is even at times such a glow and rapture about his criticism that we regret his inability to use verse instead of this imperfect medium of prose. Nor does Time quiet his enthusiasm and his expression of it. Few young men could write of Shelley nowadays with the confidence and high spirits which pervaded an essay on that poet published less than a year ago.2 And in the volume before us he handles the poetry of Clough, Arnold, Rossetti, and Morris with his old sureness and humanity. For him poetry is inseparable from character, and his criticisms of these men are all character studies. No poets lend themselves so well to this treatment, for no poets are less exclusively poets than these four. In all but Rossetti the man exceeded the poet, and in 3  Biographia Literaria, chapter 13.   4  Ibid., chapter 9. 1  Stopford A[ugustus] Brooke (1832–1916): critic, scholar, theologian, and Anglican clergyman (later, an independent preacher) from a distinguished Irish literary family. In 1890–1 Brooke led the campaign to purchase and preserve Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage. 2 Brooke’s Studies in Poetry (London: Duckworth, 1907) had included his ‘Inaugural Address to the Shelley Society’ (1886).

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him the painter and the man will live at least as long as the poet. It is possible to care very much for Arnold, and to survive an interest in his poetry, except of the kind we take in Clough’s, namely, a personal one, because it is ne­ces­ sary to know it in order to know a remarkable man. We are especially attracted by Mr Brooke’s chapter on William Morris, the richest human being of the four, and not the poorest poet. He compares Morris with Keats for his sensuousness, his early seclusion from con­tem­por­ ary life or death, and his medievalism: The love of the earth (he goes on) and all her doings and growings, and of the business, moods and fancies of the heavens which belonged to the earth as the great mother’s husband, was deep in Keats; but it was deeper in Morris. No tongue can tell how Morris loved the earth; she was his delight, his joy, his refuge, his home; the companion of his uncompanionable thoughts; his mother from whose breasts he drank life, energy, food for his work, joy for his imagination, and incessant beauty. No one has praised her better; and his poetry of Nature reveals how close, how passionate he was in his worship.

That is very true, and it has not been too often said. There is a nobility, a humanity of this world, in Morris’s feeling for Nature, with which not even Wordsworth’s can be compared. Wordsworth’s may be finer and rarer, but it is not more universal or more enduring. Except in the greatest unaccomplished things in Walt Whitman, there is no earth-­feeling in the literature of the English tongue so majestic and yet so tender as in ‘The Message of the March Wind’.3 As a man, that poem, and it is not quite alone, puts Morris on a level with Homer and Chaucer and Whitman. After ‘The Defence of Guenevere’, he wrote much that was imperfectly achieved, albeit beautiful and of lofty aim, but he wrote nothing which did not help to build up a portrait of a most goodly man. Looking back over English poetry, we can see many great poets who are not eminently goodly men. Chaucer is a goodly man; no one would trouble to say that Spenser or Milton or Coleridge is; but Dryden is, and so is Ben Jonson, and Sidney, and Samuel Johnson, and Drayton, and Browning. Others have sent up their branches higher among the stars than they have plunged their roots deep among the rocks and springs. But these have obviously much plain humanity in their composition. They have a brawn and friendliness not necessarily connected with poetry. Shelley and Byron are great men, but not exactly in this way. We use some ceremony in our converse with them. We use none with Morris when we read: 3  ET usually mentions this poem when writing about Morris, and usually quotes the quatrain quoted here, of which there are slightly different versions: see [489]. The poem (whose ‘message’ was intended by Morris to be socialist) influenced his own poem ‘March’ (ACP, 35).

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The days have slain the days, and the seasons have gone by And brought me the summer again; and here on the grass I lie. As erst I lay and was glad ere I meddled with right and with wrong.4

Or the end of ‘Thunder in the Garden’: Then we turned from the blossoms, and cold were they grown: In the trees the wind westering moved; Till over the threshold back fluttered her gown, And in the dark house was I loved.

Or in ‘The Message of the March Wind’: Come back to the inn, love, and the lights and the fire, And the fiddler’s old tune and the shuffling of feet; For there in a while shall be rest and desire, And there shall the morrow’s uprising be sweet.

With Morris poetry was not, as it has tended more and more to be in recent times, a matter as exclusive as caste. He was never half-­angel or half-­bird, but in all that he did a man on close terms with life and toil, the actual, troublous life of every day and toil of the hands and brain together; in short, a many-­ sided citizen. Mr Brooke is to be thanked for the attention he has given to Morris’s later poetry, even though it has cost him an imperfect appreciation of the earlier, which, simply as creative art, was his best. DC: 7 July

John Davidson, Mammon and his Message This is the second part of Mr Davidson’s trilogy of plays, God and Mammon.1 Mammon, heir to the throne of Thule, is disinherited by his father for Atheism. After ‘mewing his mighty youth’ in exile,2 he returns, snatches his 4  Quotation from ‘The Half of Life Gone’. 1  See ET’s review of The Triumph of Mammon [245]. Davidson died (by suicide) in 1909 before he could write a third Mammon play. 2  In his Areopagitica (1644) John Milton envisions England ‘as an eagle mewing her mighty youth’.

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brother’s bride from the bride-­chamber, murders brother and father, proclaims himself king, and delivers his message in such words as these:                  Men Belov’d, women adored, my people, come, Devise with me a world worth living in— Not for our children and our children’s children, But for our own renown, our own delight! All lofty minds, all pride, all arrogance, All passion, all excess, all craft, all power, All measureless imagination come! I am your King; come, make the world with me!

So ends the first part. In the second now before us, King Mammon does and says things of this kind all through. The monstrosity of his character and the bombast of the style remind us of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. Mr Davidson never could write blank verse; it turns his natural exuberance into verbosity, pure and simple, a laborious and dull verbosity, with no melody and little else. A trilogy seems unlikely to be long enough for the chronicling of King Mammon’s performances. In the present play he does only half-­a-­dozen notable things, and those within a space of twelve hours. He throttles the Papal legate because he will not say, ‘Get thee behind me, God; I follow Mammon.’ He stretches the Abbot of his capital city on a rack. He violates his nearest friend’s betrothed. He gives the strange women of the city twenty pounds apiece to leave the country. He sets fire to the Abbey, a building of national renown. He seizes the Bank of Thule. And once more he delivers his message:           The fanes are ruined; spent The adoration that was only fond Expedient, frantic makeshift for delayed Self-­consciousness in men; the truest creed Dies like a mollusc when you crack the shell. Instead of temples I bring the universe; Instead of creeds I offer you yourselves, The greatness of the universe become Self-­conscious . . . In flames and crimson seas we shall advance Against the ancient immaterial reign Of spirit, and our watchword shall be still, ‘Get thee behind me, God; I follow Mammon.’

Unfortunately, it is not only Mammon who talks like this, after discovering the superiority of the will to the reason. His mistress rants in the same way:

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 We are the whole great universe itself Become intelligent and capable.

The girl in the poke-­bonnet who cries, ‘Oh, let us be joyful’, at the street corner is as intelligent and more sound. This mistress, Guendolen, is playing the parrot to Mammon. But Mammon is only a parrot with the divine gift of repetition and of watering down superadded. Nietzsche has written:  Mankind en masse sacrificed in order to ensure the growth of a single stronger species of man—­that would be progress.   It characterises the philosopher that he avoids these showy and noisy things—­glory, princes, and women; whereby it is not meant to be said, however, that they should not come to him.   Life is a constant struggle against that which wants to die; cruelty and implacableness against the tendencies of decay.   Not your sin, your moderation, crieth unto heaven.3

So spoke the philosopher and poet to a palsied generation, and the palsied are listening. King Mammon does but make a showy cento of such phrases, with melodramatic modifications and amplifications; as, for example: I’ll leave no impotence alive in Thule, Nor any woman past conception! Cult Of age is Christian: only youth should be, Should have, should do, should rule.

The only satisfactory meaning that we can give to the piece until we see the third part is a strained one, and that is, that it is a satirical presentation of a

3  ET quotes from three works by Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), II.12 and III.8; The Gay Science (1882/1887), I.26; Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–5), Prologue: 3. He had been reading Nietzsche as part of research for his biography of Richard Jefferies (1909), exclaiming to GB on 26 December 1907: ‘Isn’t Nietzsche magnificent? & so necessary these days? Yet he damns me to deeper perdition than I had yet bestowed myself ’ (LGB, 152). By 15 January 1908, he had modified this view: ‘The Genealogy of Morals is a very great book. But I kick at his too completely aristocratic view’ (LGB, 154). Comparing Jefferies’s vision with Nietzsche’s, he writes: ‘Jefferies would not have made the mistake of so admiring the unfettered great man’s prowess as not to see the beauty of the conquered and all the other forms of life which the powerful would destroy if they might’ (RJ, 189). Later, discussing a study of Nietzsche and some new translations, ET both questioned the facile domestication of his ‘wicked’ ideas, and presciently speculated about their future currency: ‘Let us keep the eagle in our palace court and watch his imperial ways, though the supreme beauty of flight cannot be granted to him. . . . Unless we of the middle classes take him into our tender bosoms and charming parlours and stifle him there, it will perhaps be not with the aristocracy so-called which is dead or dying, but with the brutal unspoilt multitude that his hope of life or resurrection will lie’ (B: June 1909). ET’s poem ‘Health’ implicates these Nietzschean ironies (ACP, 82).

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modern tyrant who has determined to live up to the few scraps of Nietzsche that he has read in the newspapers. But even as such the play is absurd, for this mighty King Mammon actually omits to notice, until the mob is breaking his windows, that he has no treasury, except his mistress’s jewels. The prose Epilogue does not help us. It abuses Feudalism, Christendom, and Socialism; and substitutes the phrase, ‘I would have all men come out of Christendom into the Universe’, which is so much like a phrase out of Mammon’s mouth that we have an unpleasant feeling that, after all, Mr Davidson wishes his play to be taken literally and seriously. But that we are not inclined to do, as the writing shows unusually little of Mr Davidson’s characteristic powers, instead of that abundance of them which alone could make it acceptable. DC: 8 July *** Mr John Davidson’s Mammon and his Message is the second part of a trilogy of which The Triumph of Mammon was the first. They are in the form of blank verse plays, but are more epic than dramatic in character. For there is no psychology, no interaction of motives, but just the triumphal progress of King Mammon over the bodies of priests, princes, and women. [. . .] The first part left us in doubt as to whether Mammon was a real hero of Mr Davidson’s, or a crude personification of Capitalism gone mad over the New Theology.4 We cannot interpret the whole, but probably both conjectures were right. The poet really sees salvation through some such bloody welter as that caused by the kingship of Mammon. We shall watch his progress with more uncertainty than interest. In the second part he murders an enemy, the Papal Legate, and tortures another, spends his money recklessly, and at the end of the play finds himself penniless with a mob at his gates. All that he has to support him against the mob and his other opponents, the Church, and the ‘Inceptors of the Teutonic Religion’, Neo-­Pagans, etc., is his vigorous constitution and his doctrine that might is right, variously expressed in such rhetoric as this: 4  ‘The New Theology’: body of ideas promoted by R[eginald] J[ohn] Campbell (1867–1956), a charismatic nonconformist preacher, author of The New Theology (London: Chapman & Hall, 1907). Those ideas involved ‘a restatement of the essential truth of the Christian religion in terms of the modern mind’ (New Theology, 3): i.e. an effort to reconcile Christianity with science, socialism, and an evolutionary concept of human development. Campbell would later repudiate his book, becoming a conservative Anglican clergyman.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916              I in myself Will show mankind how dead are all the lies The other-­worldlings forged and foisted in Amidst the immaculate material truth Like false decretals in the canon law. Men may do what they list without a thought: Matter of brain and blood, good food, good drink, Employment of the muscles, of the nerves, With high imaginings, superb designs, Superb exploits, sound sleep and pleasant dreams.

Hundreds of men without the will to live or even the will to die are going about saying such things today, while the man who believes them digs in his garden. Poetry may be better than digging in the garden, but rhetoric is not, and the most unpleasant thing about this book is the havoc that these ideas have made with Mr Davidson’s poetry. [. . .] Here and there a phrase betrays the poet, and the rhetoric itself has a frenzied inventiveness and magniloquence which sometimes calls for admiration as well as astonishment. But more and more Mr Davidson is a prey to the sesquipedalian word and the mighty senseless line— The everlasting durability Of the immeasurable universe.

The prose epilogue is viewy and vigorous, but it is not to be compared with the epilogue to Holiday,5 for example. [. . .] ‘A Runnable Stag’ outdares these philosophies. We hope Mr Davidson will recover the real energy with which he wrote that, to replace the fever of this play. MP: 8 July6

Selected Poems of Francis Thompson Francis Thompson’s work is small in bulk and of such excellence in its own kind that no selection can be satisfactory except to those who have not time 5  See review of Davidson’s Holiday and Other Poems [200], in which ET praises ‘A Runnable Stag’. 6  ET’s two reviews of Mammon and his Message appeared on the same day: the DC review signed with his initials; the MP review unsigned.

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for more—­and they will be wise not to trouble about poetry, especially about Thompson’s.1 For no man’s verse, even in this age of recluse poetry, is so obviously and vauntingly remote from yesterday and today and tomorrow. His very style keeps the crowd at arm’s length and must ever do as Donne’s and Crashaw’s have done. This was a necessity of his spirit, and his clearly autobiographical poems paint a man more familiar with Eternity than Time. A few children, a woman like De Quincey’s Ann,2 and another, were all that stood between him and the Hound of Heaven which, in his most imaginative poem, pursues him through the world. As for man and woman, he has known The hold that falls not when the town is got,   The heart’s heart, whose immurèd plot    Hath keys yourself keep not!3

In ‘The Hound of Heaven’ he gives a terrible reality to the idea of the flight of a hunted spirit like Cowper’s stricken deer.4 There is more reality in the spiritual world of that poem than there is in the sun, the flowers, the women’s faces, of his other poems. Whether or not ‘Daisy’ is as early as Mr Meynell seems to imply, it is nearly the only poem where he has presented things very much as they are seen by the eyes in the light of the sun, and, exquisite as the feeling of that poem is, he is never quite at ease with the ballad measure. It opens in a manner little different from that of many other men. The child Daisy is a young hearty girl, very visible and alive, when the vision of her is spoiled by the comparison: Her skin was like a grape, whose veins   Run snow instead of wine.

1  Francis Thompson had died in 1907. This selection includes a ‘Biographical Note’ by Wilfrid Meynell. For Thompson’s personal and literary relationship with Wilfrid and Alice Meynell, see Appendix. In a third review of Selected Poems, ET calls Thompson ‘a solitude within a solitude’; says: ‘No poet is less a discoverer than he, and he saw and we see the world through the stained glass window of himself ’; and contrasts the few poems, like ‘The Hound of Heaven’, in which ‘language is the very flesh of an idea’ with those in which ‘it is a robe of ceremony’ (DC: 6 October). 2  Thomas De Quincey, when a young drug-addict in London, was helped by the prostitute ‘Ann of Oxford Street’. Thompson, who had read De Quincey and followed in his dangerous footsteps to the London streets, found a similar saviour. Meynell’s Note cites the parallel, and quotes Thompson’s poem ‘A Child’s Kiss’, which mentions this woman. 3  Quotation from ‘A Fallen Yew’. 4  In ‘The Garden’, Vol. III of The Task (1785), William Cowper (see [180]) represents himself as ‘a stricken deer that left the herd’.

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Those lines at once lift her into that curious enchanted chamber where Thompson converted the so-­called real into the unreal, and the so-­called unreal into the real. The life of the girl is lost in this image; just as, by the reverse process, an idea receives a life and a spirit in ‘The Hound of Heaven’. When he said, in the beautiful ‘Her Portrait’, How should I gauge what beauty is her dole, Who cannot see her countenance for her soul, As birds see not the casement for the sky?

he was speaking no more than the truth. Like Crashaw and Shelley he clothed things invisible with a visible glory. Only a spiritual man who was imperfectly or fantastically or not at all prompted by the physical could have written             His [Man’s] heart is builded For pride, for potency, infinity, All heights, all deeps, and all immensities, Arrased with purple like the house of kings,— To stall the grey-­rat, and the carrion-­worm Statelily lodge.5

That he should have remembered the look of the bare heart in the dissecting-­ room and yet been able to compose that delicate variation upon a commonplace is extraordinary, or would be in any other man. As a rule it may fairly be said of him that he wrote like one who had closed his eyes upon the visible and passing world and had taken it into his own heart and there practised upon it strange alchemy. It is an angel, a spectator from a distant star, rather than a man thinking himself a citizen of no mean planet—­it is one, as he says, ‘Unsharing in the liberal laugh of earth’—that writes of the sun as a golden bee stinging the West to angry red, as a lion leaping at the throat of the dusk, and makes the earth a sort of dragon filling its mouth ‘with nations’, or calls it a ‘Tellurian galleon’ Riding at anchor off the orient sun.6

Only in the ‘Corymbus for Autumn’ can he give the earth a real majesty by putting it into the hands of ‘the solemn thurifer’,    The mighty Spirit unknown, That swingeth the slow earth before the embannered Throne. 5  From ‘An Anthem of Earth’. 6  ET has quoted from or cited ‘Ode after Easter’, ‘Ode to the Setting Sun’ (twice), ‘An Anthem of Earth’, ‘To my Godchild’.

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How far these curiosities of vision were defects of language is perhaps impossible to decide. That he was a self-­ conscious workman in words, like Chatterton or Keats, there can be no doubt, and sometimes when he seems only to be toying with words as in a simile he is led into profound truth by what looks like divine good fortune. The end of ‘The Poppy’ is the best ex­ample of this, and it is worth quoting entire: The sleep-­flower sways in the wheat its head, Heavy with dreams, as that with bread: The goodly grain and the sun-­flushed sleeper The reaper reaps, and Time the reaper. I hang ’mid men my needless head, And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread: The goodly men and the sun-­hazed sleeper Time shall reap; but after the reaper The world shall glean of me, me the sleeper! Love, love! your flower of withered dream In leavèd rhyme lies safe, I deem, Sheltered and shut in a nook of rhyme, From the reaper man, and his reaper Time. Love! I fall into the claws of Time: But lasts within a leavèd rhyme All that the world of me esteems— My withered dreams, my withered dreams.

At its extreme, Thompson’s language is the most luxuriant that has been used by a poet of note, and we have to be grateful to him for a great delight. But it is an encrusted luxuriance, applied from the outside and not flesh of its flesh and bone of its bone with the idea or the image. There are passages where the reader inevitably translates them into other words expressive of the same idea before he is perfectly sure what they mean. The language of such a verse as this— I will not perturbate Thy Paradisal state    With praise   Of thy dead days—

is a dead language where Thompson’s seclusion among words and dreams is not justified. This is the domain of rhetoric, and there Thompson can be superb, perhaps supreme. It is by rhetoric, derived as it is from the true im­agin­ation of Blake, that he expresses the essence of his own view in the hitherto unpublished poem where he speaks of

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    . . . the traffic of Jacob’s ladder Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.7

For him such traffic was continuous, and the fact made one great truth with that other fact that ‘all the springs are flash-­lights of one Spring’.8 Not all his verses bear witness to this truth, but where they do they are of a delicate beauty that is to be found in no other poet’s work. SR: 26 September *** [. . .] Because Francis Thompson’s style was about as remote as it could be from spoken English of today, it is assumed—­it may be true, but it is only an assumption—­that he did conscious violence to words. Some even go so far as to accuse him of insincerity; that also may be true, but the only source of evidence for the accusation is in the grave. And on the face of it Thompson’s work bears the stamp of an absolute sincerity. Only sincerity could have prod­uced such a large consistency of character in spite of lesser inconsistencies. Insincerity would have been more artful, would not have permitted the poet not only to speak of    The mighty Spirit unknown, That swingeth the slow earth before the embannered Throne, . . .

but also in at least two other places to show his means of approach to that magnificent image; and to speak at least twice of the Earth as dancing like David before the Ark. No, in Thompson artificiality of style was due to his extraordinary love of his medium. Language, in fact, appears to have been more than a medium to him. It was a realm of experience of equal beauty and strangeness to the other realms in which he travelled. The same, it will be said, is true of all artists in words, only they are wiser than to say of earth: Who scarfed her with the morning? And who set Upon her brow the day-­fall’s carcanet?   Who queened her front with the enrondured moon? [. . .]

But it is truer of Thompson than of most others because he never seems to have got on terms, as it were, of married familiarity with words, so that they remain 7  ET has quoted from ‘To the Dead Cardinal of Westminster’ and ‘ “In no Strange Land” ’. 8  From ‘Ode after Easter’.

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in his verse as a permanent memorial of this nympholepsy.9 No doubt in conversation he used a vocabulary not unlike other people’s. But in the written word the artist has to make up for all those advantages of tone and look and gesture and other unspoken speech, of which he is deprived, in solitude. There are as many ways as there are artists of doing this. Rhythm, of course, and especially recurring rhythm, which hardly exists in conversation and is never noticed, along with a choice vocabulary and an uncolloquial use of metaphor and simile, are the most obvious means. There is no great joy of rhythm in Thompson. Metaphor is his supreme method. And here again it is surely understood that we are not speaking of a perfectly conscious method. Conscious effort of intellect through endless time will not produce ‘Absent thee from ­felicity awhile’. And so Thompson’s style also could not have been achieved by merely taking thought. It is the implicit heresy in Pater’s criticism—­exemplified to the point of absurdity in his own style—­that the mot propre can be reached by thought, and ‘the infinite capacity for taking pains’. We defy anyone to write verse like the dedication to Coventry Patmore by malice aforethought: Lo, my book thinks to look Time’s leaguer down, Under the banner of your spread renown! Or if these levies of impuissant rhyme Fall to the overthrow of assaulting Time, Yet this one page shall fend oblivious shame, Armed with your crested and prevailing Name.

There, at the beginning of his New Poems, is his one article of faith. The word is the thing and the thing is the word. The only indictment of it must come from the schoolmaster who has set his boys to paraphrase these verses and has been content with the result. Of course it must be granted that there are places where words have advanced from their position of equality with things to one of superiority, because Thompson thought words greatly beautiful; and that for most of us this is a faulty balance of power. [. . .] But the important fact is that even so did a human spirit feel and see in his way through life. Every one of his poems has this in common with great art that it lifts objects and ideas out of the dullness and weariness of blank acceptance in which we chiefly dwell into just that sumptuous visibility which they had for him. His forty-­seven years of life were devoted to the seeing and making seen of the beauty of the body and spirit of things. In his work they are one. His words are ‘the gold, the incenses and myrrhs’10 with 9  ET has quoted from ‘A Corymbus for Autumn’ and ‘Ode to the Setting Sun’. Nympholepsy: obsession with young women, from ancient Greek belief that nymphs bewitch men. 10  ‘Haste with my gold, my incenses and myrrhs’ is a line from Thompson’s ‘Orient Ode’.

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which he decks them for their praise. If we are not mistaken, rich and heavy as is the dress, it is after all only an image that it clothes, and through the image we are helped to see, behind no veil at all, the unconcealable spirit. In a narrower sense the words are the garment of his personality, and no one can deny that this does not emerge from the book before us very gorgeously in its deep sorrow and deeper joy. MP: 12 November

Alfred Noyes, Drake: An English Epic, Books IV–­XII1 Mr Alfred Noyes has written some of the liveliest and prettiest fanciful verse of our time; he has written a few lyrics of no real originality but of a light-­ heartedness which we are very glad of today; and, following Mr Swinburne, he has made some enchanting arabesques of adjectives for a summer’s day, and they also have no originality in their cadence, their colour, or in their ideas. He has now published half a dozen, or nearly half a dozen, books of verse, but not one of them, nor all together, can be said to suggest any latent profound power. Exuberance of colour and simile and sound are to be found on every hand; he does not outclass the others who have them. What is most nearly his own, and only his, is his improbable improvising fancy, as in The Forest of Wild Thyme,2 for example. And it is this writer who has made an epic in twelve books and some five hundred pages about Francis Drake—­ Drake: An English Epic. Perhaps no great poetry, certainly no great epic poetry, can be built except upon the most massive foundations of experience, of wisdom, of religion. Only a great people can produce an epic, and not they except through the medium of a gigantic intellect and character. Each great epic is a system of philosophy embodied. It is large, massive, clear, of manifold simplicity. It is scarcely credible that one should be born out of even the finest intellect and spirit except at its full maturity. But Mr Noyes is exceptionally, delightfully crude. Some evil spirit has persuaded him to call his twelve books an epic: they are really only happy triflings like The Forest of Wild Thyme. They are 1  For ET’s review of Books I–­III, see [198]. 2 Reviewing The Forest of Wild Thyme, ET had called Noyes a poet whose ‘essential gift is a happy, impetuous swiftness of movement’ (DC: 25 January 1906). See his reviews of Noyes’s Forty Singing Seamen [284].

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pure fancy, and they can only serve to pass away the time. So far are they from embodying a system, they do not imply one, even an imperfect recent one; they actually could not have been written by a man capable of understanding a system. They are utterly irresponsible foam upon the surface of the present moment, with the fatal weakness that they are intolerably bulky. They contain a hundred pretty notions, scraps of narrative, oceans of description which are sometimes charming in themselves. But the thought that he was making an epic swelled Mr Noyes’s style beyond its usual condition of tumidity, with the result that as a whole it is not pretty nor charming, but pitiful or ridiculous, according to the reader’s mood. Nobody with any self-­control and judgment could get beyond the first book except to look for the nice bits. The commonplace blank verse, naturally very monotonous, but broken up self-­consciously and ineffectively at times by a variation, could not possibly be the medium of an epic poet;3 these intruded lines will deceive nobody, lines such as              The heart of him Who dares turn backward now must be so hardy That God might make a thousand millstones of it . . .

and This judgment just against the winds of the world . . .

and Ephemeral conflict of contemptible tongues. [. . .]

The living men who can write like that are to be counted by scores; those who know better than to write long poems like that are fortunately almost as numerous. Of course pleasant things one achieves by the process, pleasant irrelevant things, mainly descriptions. But there is nothing to knit them together except the notion that it must have been jolly to be a buccaneer in the spacious days. Time after time we are aware of Mr Noyes applauding Drake and his sailors as if he were at a cricket match. It is a most amiable sight, but it is not epic. [. . .] For the most part even the description is, in the nature of metrical prose, rich, redundant, often lacking in real visual effect, and full of vague fancies better suited to adorn a column of prose in a journal than epic verse. For example:         Marvellous The pomp of dawn and sunset on those heights, 3 Six years later (20 May 1914), ET would cite Noyes as epitomizing hostility to RF’s revitalization of blank verse: ‘His getting back to pure speech rhythms is going to do good & to provoke the Noyeses among bards & critics’ (LGB, 234).

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 And like a strange new sacrilege the advance Of prows that ploughed that time-­forgotten tide.

These lines will also serve as well as a thousand others to show what we mean when we insist upon Mr Noyes’s lack of a firm philosophic basis for his work and his substitution of a hundred random modern dreams, only half sincere and entirely ineffectual. Homer is the equal of Achilles, Milton of Satan, but between Mr Noyes and Drake there is a constant and conspicuous discrepancy which reaches the absurd at such a point as where the poet describes in his most poetical manner a beautiful shore and then points out that the mari­ners ‘like a troop of boys let loose from school’ merely laughed and sang as they passed by. Its model is The Idylls of the King. Its real prototype is ‘The Gardener’s Daughter’.4 MP: 5 October

William H. Davies, Nature Poems And Others It was impossible for Mr W. H. Davies or any man living to improve upon the best work in The Soul’s Destroyer and New Poems.1 But these Nature Poems And Others show that, without losing any of his incomparable freshness, he is becoming more critical. This is his finest book, because it is all, or very nearly all, excellent of its kind. Mr Davies is not a discoverer. There is no new order of beauty in any of his work. He has found no new fields, no new music. But he has found himself, and has been divinely gifted with a power of expression equal to that of any other man of our day. Divine gifts are perilous things, and we have always been a little anxious, before looking at new poems by this man, lest the gift should have been withdrawn. But it has not been withdrawn, and we now feel that Mr Davies is master of his fate, and will go on securely in his work. The poems express a simple, hearty nature, loving joy and physical freedom, loving women, children, animals, the country, hating misery, tyranny, 4  ‘The Gardener’s Daughter’: sentimental early poem by Tennyson, as contrasted with his Arthurian epic. 1  See reviews [159], [232]. ET later (13 February 1909) enthused to GB about this collection: ‘O yes isn’t Davies fine now? I was terribly excited over the new book. It was almost incredibly good. Yeats wants him to “cultivate his instrument” more. But Davies wouldn’t know what the phrase meant’ (LGB, 179).

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and the town. In English poetry so lucid and simple a nature has seldom appeared. The Scottish lyrists before Burns, could they have been transported to this age and dipped in the life of cities, would have sung thus. Blake and John Clare and Chalkhill2 sounded the same notes, and so did Herrick when he thought of flowers and of maids like flowers. But has any of these men written more perfectly than the author of this—­not by any means his best, and of a Horatian lucidity that touches only half his nature, but still exquisite? It is ‘The Muse’: I have no ale,   No wine I want; No ornaments,   My meat is scant. No maid is near,   I have no wife; But here’s my pipe,   And, on my life: With it to smoke,   And woo the Muse, To be a king   I would not choose. But I crave all,   When she does fail— Wife, ornaments,   Meat, wine and ale.

In the poems which follow, the simple lucid expression of beauty and joy is a thing to wonder at continually. Although there is nothing exalted in the subjects, nothing majestic in the thought, yet the air they breathe is of such astonishing purity that I could scarcely endure the stale sight of half the things that met my eyes in the street after reading the book. This man is so right that the dull, the ugly, the unnecessary things, the advertisements at the railway station, and so on, disgusted me as so many obstacles to the life which these verses seem to propose to us. Izaak Walton is not more sweet than this man, whom all things love:

2  John Chalkhill (c.1595–1642): less known for his elaborate pastoral poem, Thealma and Clearchus, than for two songs included by Izaak Walton in The Compleat Angler. One is ‘Oh, the gallant fisher’s life’; the other, ‘Coridon’s Song’, begins in Davies-like style: ‘Oh the sweet contentment / The country-man doth find!’

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The Horse can tell,   Straight from my lip, My hand could not   Hold any whip.3 [. . .]

The poems on a still-­born child, on children coming out of school, on a child known long ago, on ‘A Merry Hour’: You heard the Cuckoo first, ’twas he; The second time—­Ha, ha! ’twas Me.

on love’s birth, on the laughers, on a swallow that flew into the room, on ‘Beauty’s Danger’, express old things as if they were but now just born. And how absolute the style is, from the mere brevity of this:   Content, though sober, sleeps on stone, But Care can’t sleep with down and ale . . .

up to                 Now we Lived in a city dark, where Poverty, More hard than rocks, and crueller than foam, Keeps many a great Ulysses far from home.4 [. . .]

But these things, though they prove his power, cannot hint at his abundance, at his hundred felicities in suggesting the visible world which he loves so well, at his hundred touches of childlike sincerity and truth that would make us love him without any other gifts. Here are no trappings whatever, neither robes of ceremony nor grave clothes, but the word that is the life. DC: 4 November *** Mr William H. Davies, author of The Autobiography of a Super-­Tramp, is one of the few living poets of whom it could safely be said that his work would have been as readable three centuries ago, and will be, if it survives, three centuries hence. It varies down to doggerel, but when it counts at all it has the limpidity of Wordsworth. There is a truth and freshness in the writing that is a pledge of the author’s absolute sincerity. This achievement in words which it is impossible to explain and impossible to describe 3  Quotation from ‘Nature’s Friend’. 4  From ‘A Beggar’s Life’ and ‘A Familiar Voice’.

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except in the old-­fashioned way as inspiration, may be seen in such an opening as this: Now I can see what Helen was: Men cannot see this woman pass And be not stirred . . .

or this: Ah, what is Beauty but vain show—   If nothing in the heart is sweet . . .5

There are whole poems which, like ‘The Muse’ could not have been improved by Herrick, or, like ‘The Wind’, could not have been touched by Wordsworth, and others that are at one with Blake. For example, take such phrases as this of the wind:         When he’s on mischief bent, He breeds more ill than the strange Parliament Held by the witches, in the Hebrides.

Mr Davies’s simplicity is natural, though it may owe something to his love of Wordsworth. It is also invariably consistent, and not to be mistaken for any other man’s. And yet it is not quite so novel as it is natural. The book as a whole is novel, because it reveals a character of singular joyousness, tenderness, and uncorrupted frankness, and a love of animals and children and nature and poor men, that are not to be found in the same combination elsewhere. Certain poems, too, like ‘A Maiden and her Hair’, could only have been written at the present day; but these are few. The one weakness of the book is that it makes no advance, no change for better or worse, from the past. It opens no new worlds, nor makes the attempt. Half the poems are fit for an anthology, and we could almost believe that they came from one. It is a nice question whether poems which would have been excellent a hundred years ago can thus late take the place which their beauty seems to claim. But it must not be supposed that they are echoes. They would be more fitly described as poems which Herrick, Wordsworth, and Blake left unwritten. MP: 31 December

5  From ‘A Lovely Woman’ and ‘Vain Beauty’.

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Laurence Binyon, London Visions,1 Collected and Augmented; etc. We miss in Mr Binyon [. . .] just that spiritual glow and ecstasy which is felt though unexpressed in Mrs Cunninghame Graham’s verse.2 He has emotion, intelligence, fancy, skill, but not that which gathers them all up and knits them into poetry and sets them beyond the reach of grammar and an infinite capacity for taking pains. It is this alone that can make mere logic unne­ces­ sary and, indeed, absurd in poetry, and that does away with explanations. It is the business of prose to explain and gradually to persuade. Poetry shows results rather than processes, never explains; and, instead of persuading, compels. Not often is the danger of ignoring this shown so conspicuously as in Mr Binyon’s work. It is rare and scrupulous work. He is a critical artist who never makes an avoidable mistake, and he is always interesting, often—­as in ‘The Belfry’, in his ‘Death of Adam’, or ‘The Statues’ in the present volume—­ fascinating. But in this early work particularly he attempts the impossible task of converting his observation and his thought into poetry by means of remembered emotion and a careful use of words. The result is much beauty or brilliance in detail, but no transfigured whole. If it were not more terse than the prose that is written by the best living writers, we should say that there is no reason why verse should be used. We still think that the same effects could be produced by prose, and that prose is the more natural medium for the impassioned and reflective description which occupies the greater part of the book. Of course there are passages where something more than brainwork has produced an unassailable quality in the verse, as, for example, in She that had come past her last hope, and found Nothing beyond, and had shed no more tears . . .

—unassailable except in sound; and there are phrases such as: A hunted sky flies over the housetops. 1  Binyon had originally published two collections under this title (1895, 1898). On the day his review appeared, ET commented to GB: ‘Fancy Binyon troubling to republish London Visions (which are better than my prose but very like it in observation, feeling & lack of unifying impulse & of style)’ (LGB, 175). ET reviewed London Visions twice more: in MP (7 January 1909) and belatedly in DC (4 September 1909). His MP review also questions Binyon’s formal powers, but highlights his empathy with London’s ‘dim, neglected multitudes’ and is more positive about his ‘vision’ in general: ‘We do not always feel that there is anything inevitable in the form in which he has cast them. . . . But of the deep feeling, keen observation, and exquisite metaphor in these poems there can be no doubt.’ For ET’s third review, coupled with a review of Lionel Johnson, see [382]. 2  ET’s previous review is of Gabriela Cunninghame Graham, Rhymes from a World Unknown. He credits her with a ‘large and delicate soul’, but not with any skill in verse.

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But far more frequently we pause over lines like Often, in spirits wrought, despair, Not less than joy the end of care, A lightness feigns . . . ,3

which is a compressed piece of truth, but not beyond the reach of prose [. . .]. SR: 14 November

The Testament of John Davidson Some of Mr Davidson’s finest verses have been written in a spirit that owes no more to modern science than does ‘Puss in Boots’. In his ‘Runnable Stag’ he makes a stag at bay see himself ‘in a vision of peaceful sleep’, lying ‘in a jewelled bed, Under the sheltering ocean dead’. Few other poets today would have dared to be so little naturalistic in a poem which begins with the ac­cur­acy and detail of Richard Jefferies’s Red Deer.1 Yet the poem is a success. For Mr Davidson was presumably following his own natural bent. But before and since the date of that poem he has published verses written under the powerful obsession of modern scientific knowledge and theory. That those verses have never risen beyond a heavy exuberance of rhetoric is sufficient proof that his scientific knowledge is no real part of him, not even so real and effectual a part of him as Tennyson’s was. If all the poetry which has been seriously influenced by the discoveries of Newton and Galileo were destroyed, we should not miss it. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at that Mr Davidson should do himself less than justice in his attempt, single-­handed, and of set purpose, to digest still more recent discoveries, which have so far shown no sign of being incorporated in the really vital knowledge of European minds. Love, natural beauty, a myriad things can in a moment turn us into men of Chaucer’s, of Job’s age. Mr Davidson stands out against his own nature and the spirit of the race, and produces volume after volume of interesting, of splendid failure and rhetoric.The poem before us states the story of a man’s victory over the gods, over Apollo, Thor, 3  ET has quoted from ‘Trafalgar Square’, ‘Mother of Exiles’, ‘Martha’. 1  A work of natural history by Jefferies (1883).

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Aidoneus, and lastly Artemis.2 The most impressive part is the victory over Apollo. He describes it to Artemis before he conquers her by ravishment. First he tells how Marsyas, the Satyr, contended with Apollo in music and overcame him, but was slain by the god in insolent resentment. There he had a beautiful, ancient tale as his material, a tale which was long deep-­seated in human belief, and grew out of something more than a merely intellectual study of the universe, and he tells it in an attractive way, not unworthy to be compared with ‘Music’s Duel’.3 But when he comes to relate how a mortal overcame Apollo in music it is in words like these:            I sang the brain, A double sponge soaked in the ether, fruit Hesperian in the garth of space, the goal Unconscious lightning aimed at when it led The onset of eternity towards man: Receiver and recorder, carder, sieve, Alembic, loom and lyre, and every arm, Machine and implement for art, war, use, To put in act the thoughts the body thinks. [. . .]

The passage is a very brilliant one, and though it is not poetry we doubt if any but a poet could have written it. It is certainly a great advance upon Erasmus Darwin.4 But it is quite arbitrary to make Apollo shrink and die under any rhetoric, and had Marsyas been the judge he would have differed from Mr Davidson. Another passage of equal sublimity describes the part which Jehovah unwittingly played in the destruction of the theocracy, by giving his son a human form. These things make the book a very notable one. Here and there also there are passages such as the following which owe very little, if anything, to the science which the poem celebrates:               Utmost heights, Immortal in romance, with forests fledged And battlefields beneath, keen-­crested hung 2 Davidson’s Testament continues in the Nietzschean, anti-theocratic vein of Mammon and his Message: see [314]. A lengthy prose ‘Dedication’, addressed to the House of Lords, also rants against Irish nationalism, suffragettes, and trade unions. Aidoneus: another name for Hades or Pluto. 3  Poem by Richard Crashaw (see [254]), which represents a competition between a lute-player and a nightingale, and which ends with the nightingale’s defeat and death. 4 Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802): physician, natural scientist, philosopher, and poet. The grandfather of Charles Darwin, he anticipated some of his grandson’s evolutionary ideas in poetic works such as The Loves of the Plants (1789), reprinted, together with The Economy of Vegetation, as The Botanic Garden (1793).

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In air; then loomed uncharactered as dusk To darkness turned; and sank into the ground When in the wakeful bosom of the night The slumbering land lay hushed. The monthly star, Whose silver sorcery fills the tidal wave, Ascendant with the sun, in hidden courts Her interlunar festival observed; And through the swarthy battlements no glance Sidereal from any loophole fell.

How many words in this would have to be changed if it were to pass the censorship of the singer who outsang Apollo. No! for the poetry of science we prefer M. Maeterlinck. DC: 26 November

Select Poems of William Barnes,1 chosen and edited with a Preface and Glossarial Notes by Thomas Hardy Mr Thomas Hardy is probably the one man living who has a full right to introduce the poetry of William Barnes; and, as a matter of fact, the introduction to this volume shows that it was almost as much a duty as a right. It is only ten pages long, but it is a close and knotty piece of writing, that raises and treats adequately the questions which arise from a consideration of these poems in the Dorset dialect. All but four of the pieces are in that dialect, and it is significant that in three out of the four there is a touch of Dorset. It is, of course, a dying speech, and perhaps not even the use of it by Barnes and 1  William Barnes (1800–86): multi-faceted autodidact, who became a poet, school-teacher, philologist, and Church of England rector. He and his friend Hardy had a shared interest in Dorsetshire and in language. In the preface (‘Fore-say’) to one of his works, An Outline of English Speech-Craft (London: C.  Kegan Paul, 1878), Barnes stresses the Anglo-Saxon origins of the English language, and calls it ‘shapen by the breath-sounds of speakers, for the ears of hearers, and not from speech-tokens (letters) in books, for men’s eyes’ (iii). On foot of this review, GB suggested that ET might write a book on Barnes, but he replied (13 February 1909) that Barnes ‘would hardly bear turning into the big book Methuen want’ (LGB, 179). On 20 July 1907, however, ET had written to Charles Cazenove, his literary agent: ‘Can you find a publisher to let me edit in one volume the poems of William Barnes of Dorset which were published before 1858 & so out of copyright?’ He calls the poems ‘well worth’ reprinting and proposes to write an introduction (ABL, 353). A warm account of Barnes’s poetry—­his sense of place and community, his ‘Dorset homeliness and humbleness’—appears in IPS (186–92).

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Mr Hardy himself can save it for very long, except for the benefit of philologists. English synonyms for and paraphrases of the Dorset words and phrases are given at the foot of the page, but Mr Hardy points out that— they are but a sorry substitute for the full significance the original words bear to those who read them without translation, and know their delicate ability to express the doings, joys and jests, troubles, sorrows, needs and sicknesses of life in the rural world as elsewhere. The Dorset dialect being—­or having been—­a tongue, and not a corruption, it is the old question over again, that of the translation of poetry; which, to the full, is admittedly impossible. And further; gesture and facial expression figure so largely in the speech of husbandmen as to be speech itself; hence in the mind’s eye of those who know it in its original setting each word of theirs is accompanied by the qualifying face-­play which no construing can express.

It is, therefore, all the more remarkable that half a century after their publication a selection from verses in this dialect should be offered to a literary world that is less capable than ever of understanding them to the full. And we feel little doubt but that the selection will be read. Both the native and the cultivated merit of Barnes’s work break through the mist of half-­ comprehended words, and many will detect the force of his feeling and description and the genuine charm of his rhythm. We would, in fact, rather the pleasure that comes after groping into the vernacular than what is readily given up by a common English verse. Such as this: ’Twas when the op’ning dawn was still, I took my lonely road, up-­hill, Towards the eastern sky, in gloom, Or touch’d with palest primrose bloom; And there the moon, at morning break, Though yet unset, was gleaming weak, And fresh’ning air began to pass, All voiceless, over darksome grass,   Before the sun   Had yet begun To dazzle down the morning moon. By Maycreech hillock lay the cows, Below the ash-­trees’ nodding boughs, And water fell, from block to block Of mossy stone down Burncleeve rock, By poplar-­trees that stood as slim ’S a feather, by the stream’s green brim; And down about the mill, that stood

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Half darken’d off below the wood,   The rambling brook,   From nook to nook, Flow’d on below the morning moon . . .2

The poem leaves a clear and beautiful picture, washed with emotion; but Barnes’s gift was dramatic as well as lyric, and it so happens that his deepest effects come from an effort to describe not his own, but a peasant’s view of things. Whether it is accurately a peasant’s view is not easily to be decided, but the outsider seems to detect in it the emotion and philosophy of a race and a class rather than of an individual—­William Barnes or another, but with a difference. Not that there is anything artless or rustic in the expression. That would have been an affectation, indeed. As Mr Hardy says: Barnes . . . belonged to the literary school of such poets as Tennyson, Gray, and Collins, rather than to that of the old unpremeditating singers in dialect. Primarily spontaneous, he was academic closely after; and we find him warbling his native wood-­notes with a watchful eye on the predetermined score, a far remove from the popular impression of him as the naif and rude bard who sings only because he must, and who submits the uncouth lines of his page to us without knowing how they come there. Goethe never knew better of his; nor Milton; nor, in their rhymes, Poe; nor, in their whimsical alliterations here and there, Langland and the versifiers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

And, inevitably, just as there is the skill of an educated man in the versification, so there is a touch of Arcadianism in the attitude, an Arcadianism as of Theocritus in his most rustic hour. The age forbade that it should be other­wise. Or if we can suppose a man in the fifties of last century looking at country life without some of the glamour of remoteness and of earlier literature, assuredly we can suppose that he would not have written in the Dorset dialect. We do not know how Barnes composed, but it is pretty nearly certain that he must at times have translated out of English into Dorset. There is his one serious weakness. He had no ­tradition behind him, as Burns had. He could not by himself achieve a quite authentic diction. Very seldom is he quite unalterable; he is apt, but not inevitable, and perhaps never rises to that phrasing by which a great spirit delights us with the sight of honours given and received at once by the mother tongue. 2  First two stanzas of ‘The Morning Moon’.

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‘The Gre’t Woak Tree that’s in the Dell’ is a lovely thing.3 We will reduce the first verse to its lowest terms by paraphrasing it, and thereby spoiling even the rhymes: The great oak tree that’s in the dell! There’s no tree I do love so well; For times and times when I was young I there’ve a-­climbed and there’ve a-­swung, And picked the eacorns green, a-­shed In wrestling storms from his broad head, And down below’s the cloty brook Where I did fish with line and hook, And beat, in playsome dips and swims, The foamy stream, with white-­skinned limbs. And there my mother nimbly shot Her knitting needles, as she sat At evening down below the wide Oak’s head, with father at her side. And I’ve a-­played with many a boy That’s now a man and gone away;   So I do like no tree so well   ’S the great oak tree that’s in the dell.

‘Cloty’ equals ‘water-­lilied’, and also surpasses it, as, for sweetness of sound, the original surpasses this paraphrase; but is it not evident that, for example, the separation of ‘wide’ in the thirteenth line from its noun in the fourteenth is a weakness in dialect? That kind of weakness, due to borrowing cultured forms as they stood for use with the vernacular speech, is likely to deny Barnes very high honours. And yet, after all, there are few poets we can really love as we love him. DC: 28 November

The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, 8 Vols These handsome volumes of The Collected Works of William Butler Yeats are worthy of the prose and verse which they contain. Some, attracted by the 3  ET had chosen this poem (not a ‘paraphrase’ or ‘translation’) for PBPS. He would include another tree-poem by Barnes, ‘The Lilac’, in TE.

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opportunity of possessing all his work and in so respectable a form will doubtless now read the whole or very large parts of it for the first time, and we should be very glad to know the effect of this singular work, so concentrated and so much of a piece, upon an intelligent mind chiefly familiar with the poetry of past generations. There can be no doubt that it will produce an effect without any parallel in the past. If this effect is strong and favourable it will most likely be due largely to the ‘natural magic’ of the poetry.1 ‘Natural magic’ is usually a very uncertain and fleeting quality. It seldom pervades a whole poem. The same poet may at different times be conspicuous for his possession or for his lack of the gift. But Mr Yeats has it always, at least in such poems as it could possibly enter. Often enough he has nothing else. He can plunge us, as few other poets writing in English can, into a world where all the values are changed and the parochialism of humanity is forgotten, or rather it is inconceivable that it should ever have existed. Such is that poem which ends: Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill: For there the mystical brotherhood Of sun and moon and hollow and wood And river and stream work out their will; And God stands winding His lonely horn, And time and the world are ever in flight; And love is less kind than the gray twilight, And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.2

After Matthew Arnold no one is so well worth hearing on the subject of this magic and of the Celtic element in literature,3 and everyone who has read Arnold should make a point of reading Mr Yeats’s essay in Ideas of Good and Evil. Many must have suspected that Arnold was too definite and simple on this difficult matter to be quite accurate, and many must have refused to see a Celtic origin for the magic in non-­Celtic writings. Mr Yeats’s essay is short, and it is therefore not as rich in illustration and argument as it might have been, but the central sentence of it seems to us absolutely true: When Matthew Arnold wrote it was not easy to know as much as we know now of folk song and folk belief, and I do not think he understood that our ‘natural magic’ is but the ancient religion of the world, the ancient worship of 1  For ‘natural magic’ and Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), see ET’s review of The Complete Poetical Works of Shelley [108] and notes. 2  From ‘Into the Twilight’ (?1893). See ET’s reviews of Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight [30]. 3  ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ is the title of Yeats’s essay (1897).

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nature and that troubled ecstasy before her, that certainty of all beautiful places being haunted, which it brought into men’s minds.

He holds that the element of natural magic is due to a survival of these old religious values that were set upon trees and springs and caves and the like, while the ‘Greek way’ is simply the more modern way, the townsman’s sheltered way, of looking at Nature, ‘the way of people who are poetical, but are more interested in one another than in a nature which has faded to be but friendly and pleasant, the way of people who have forgotten the ancient religion’. To read Hesiod4 is to see that at one time the Greeks came near to having this ‘Celtic’ element. As Mr Yeats points out, this ancient religious feeling is perhaps more Celtic than anything else because ‘of all the fountains of the passions and beliefs of ancient times in Europe . . . the Celtic alone has been for centuries close to the main river of European literature’. Mr Yeats’s ‘nat­ ural magic’ is peculiarly his own because it is far less sensuous than any other man’s. It is full of ‘the essences of things’ and not of the things themselves. In this way he is typical of the modern revolt against ‘that picturesque and declamatory way of writing . . . which a time of scientific and political thought has brought into literature’.5 But had he been a less curious critic he had perhaps made fewer mistakes in his poetry. At his best his poetry is fine because its symbols are natural, ancient, instinctive, not invented, but his discovery that it was a survival of a religious attitude that made natural magic possible has apparently led him into the error of using old mythological terms as if in themselves they had some effect besides their quaintness—­which they have not, we believe. But it is out of place to disparage a poet of this magnitude who is as yet so little known though universally heard of. Nor would we leave the impression that he is only a poet of Nature, though we believe that his nature is so deeply moved by the unseen and the old things that they are never entirely to be separated from any of his work. [. . .] MP: 17 December *** Apparently, all of Mr Yeats’s work in verse and prose, except his letters to the Press, has been included in these eight volumes, together with an excellent bibliography; but there is nothing ill-­considered, nothing that does not 4  Hesiod (fl. c.700 bce): Greek poet, chiefly known for his long poem Works and Days. 5  ET has twice quoted from Yeats’s essay ‘The Autumn of the Body’ (1898). The parallels with Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), recently discussed by ET [305], support ET’s point, in his second review of Collected Works, about the potential contradiction between Yeats’s valuation of ‘the peasant’ and his belief in art.

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deserve the handsome binding and clear print. The grey cloth and parchment and gold are impressive, and we regret only that here at length is a sort of knighthood conferred on a man who seemed far too busy in a hundred ways to have time for such things. Yet if he were to do nothing more, the body and spirit of his work are large enough to make a very notable achievement. Seeing his work altogether, as we now easily can, his position seems not only assured, but pre-­eminent among the distinguished poets still in their prime.6 We are particularly glad to see here the critical articles from Samhain7 and elsewhere, which a good many of Mr Yeats’s readers must have missed. They are full of admirable doctrine and of judgment and practical sense. His prose is always beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful of our time, certainly the most enchanting. These articles as a whole make a body of critical ideas which it would be impossible to equal in England today. New also to many will be the two early stories, ‘Dhoya’ and ‘John Sherman’, delicate and already individual in their workmanship. There are two virtually new things in the book, though both have been performed on the Irish stage—­The Golden Helmet, a little piece introductory to On Baile’s Strand, and The Unicorn from the Stars. The latter is a prose play which Mr Yeats has written to take the place of Where There is Nothing. That play, he tells us, was written in a fortnight, to save the idea from a plagiarist. He considers Paul Ruttledge too arid and dominating, and it is true that the play was a slightly unreal tract. The substituted play has the strange merit of being very reasonable throughout. Mr Yeats is seldom happy when he alters—­as he did The Shadowy Waters and The King’s Threshold8—for the sake of realism; nor is he here. Paul Ruttledge was a tremendously vivid sketch, if he was half the embodiment of an idea.9 6  A. Norman Jeffares considers that, in this review, ‘Edward Thomas probably took the largest view of the Collected Works’ (Introduction, W. B. Yeats: The Critical Heritage [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977], 23). The publisher, complimented by ET in both reviews, was A. H. Bullen together with Chapman & Hall. 7  Samhain: Irish theatrical journal which appeared intermittently from 1901 to 1908. The journal’s title invokes a Celtic festival (Christianized as All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day), which took place in early November, and signified the beginning of Winter. 8  For ET on Yeats’s revision of his plays, see [231]. 9  ET had always liked Where There is Nothing (see [130]): in fact, as he may have unconsciously recognized, Lady Gregory, a more ‘realistic’ dramatist, did most of the rewriting. Thanking GB (8 January 1903) for sending him the original play, ET says: ‘Yeats can do nothing bad, and the play had some thing excellent about it. . . . As a play (I am not a playgoer, & have only been to a theatre six times) I should think it was good’ (LGB, 46). He uses a speech by Paul Ruttledge as epigraph to SC: ‘As I can’t leap from cloud to cloud, I want to wander from road to road. That little path there by the clipped hedge goes up to the high road. I want to go up that path and to walk along

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Of Martin Hearne we can say, by comparison, little, save that he may very well have existed.10 The well-­known poems and plays and essays are for the most part printed here in the same form as in the later editions. But there are some additions—­ for example, the acting version of The Shadowy Waters, and some changes in Deirdre, indicated in an appendix. In making changes in his prose and verse, Mr Yeats is moved by two distinct motives. Sometimes, as in revising the stories of Red Hanrahan,11 he rubs out the too physical highly-­coloured beauty of his prose; while, in revising The Shadowy Waters, he tries to bring his scenes a little nearer to life as the majority know it by touches of common speech or thought. But these changes, especially of the second class, make no serious difference to work already so profoundly impressed by the feeling and cadence characteristic of the poet. If we object to them, it is only because we regret that he should have given to ineffective labour time which might have otherwise been given to something new. These two ways of changing his work correspond to the two apparently distinct ideas which have almost from the beginning been curiously harmonised in his poems and in his criticism. On the one hand he longs for ideals of literature and life belonging to times before ‘the newspapers, all kinds of second-­rate books, the preoccupation of men with all kinds of practical changes’, drove ‘the living imagination out of the world’. He sees the vestiges of these ideals among the peasantry today, and he asks: ‘Will not our next art be rather of the country, of great open spaces, of the soul rejoicing in itself?’ And yet he knows that he is of this age when ‘he who does not strive to be a perfect craftsman achieves nothing’.12 He is little like the peasant when he says that ‘those who care for the arts have few near friendships among those that do not’. Why, even so far back as Shakespeare he sees this separation of the artist from the common man, ‘when solitary great men were gathering to themselves the fire that had once flowed hither and thither among all men’.13 the high road, and so on and on and on, and to know all kinds of people. Did you ever think that the roads are the only things that are endless; that one can walk on and on and on, and never be stopped by a gate or a wall? They are the serpent of eternity. I wonder they have never been worshipped. What are the stars beside them? They never meet one another. The roads are the only things that are infinite. They are all endless.’ This passage influenced ET’s conception of roads in his prose, especially in The Icknield Way (1913), and in poems such as ‘Roads’ (ACP, 106). In his poem ‘The Mountain Chapel’ the wind says: ‘Till there is nothing I shall be’ (ACP, 44). 10  Martin Hearne: character in The Unicorn from the Stars.   11  See review [133]. 12  Quotations from two essays in Samhain 4 (December 1904): ‘First Principles’ and ‘The Play, the Player, and the Scene’; and from ‘Modern Irish Poetry’: Yeats’s introduction to his anthology A Book of Irish Verse Selected from Modern Writers (1895; revised 1900). 13  Two quotations from ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’ (1901).

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Mr Yeats works out for himself not a way to an older world, but a position that looks detached from any life that numbers of men together have ever known. In truth, he is gazing as much forward as backward when he writes that ‘we must . . . admit that invisible beings, far wandering influences, shapes that may have floated from a hermit of the wilderness, brood over council-­ chambers and studies and battle-­fields’, or again, that ‘The arts are . . . about to take upon their shoulders the burdens that have fallen from the shoulders of priests, and to lead us back upon our journey by filling our thoughts with the essences of things, and not with things.’14 Thus his own work combines the beautiful simplicity of language, the rich tales, and sometimes the ballad form of the people with a subtlety of feeling for which there is no parallel in another age. Through all of it runs that cry for the essences of things, for the spirit against the body. He seems to have got beyond our critical interest in old things, folk-­lore, spiritualism, etc., as much as Wordsworth got beyond Percy.15 The heavy, voluptuous splendour of much of his work has yet a ghostliness as of the palace made magically of leaves.16 Even his heroes and beautiful women are aware of this, as when Naisi ‘is calm, like a man who has passed beyond life’, and are careless of ‘heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass’ and in love with music ‘that but cries “Sleep, sleep,” Till joy and sorrow and hope and terror are gone’.17 He never leaves us, any more than Crashaw, content with the glory alone. It calls our attention to a spirit behind and beyond, heaping high lovely, invisible things only that it may show the greater beauty that can survive their crumbling into dust. In this way his glorious work, related at first sight only to the clouds that pass and the flowers under our feet, plays and must play a great part in the movement of this age towards a finer and deeper spirit, and will enrich literature by revealing new riches in life. DC: 5 March 1909

14  From ‘Magic’ (1901) and ‘The Autumn of the Body’. 15  ET often alludes to the influence on Romantic poetry of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), compiled by Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromore. 16  This motif recurs in ET’s prose: in Celtic Stories (1911) ‘The Palace of the Mountain Ash Trees’ (the supposedly magical trees also called ‘rowans’) recounts the Irish legend of a castle like ‘a delusion of clouds’, surrounded by such trees, and used to entrap the Fianna (Celtic Stories, 63); Chapter XIV of The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans (1913) is called ‘The Castle of Leaves and the Beggar with the Long White Beard’ (ETPW I, 121–6). ET’s poem ‘Wind and Mist’ refers to a hilltop house, in which he had lived unhappily, as a ‘cloud castle’ (ACP, 74). 17  Quotations from Deirdre; from Yeats’s poem ‘To the Rose upon the Rood of Time’ (1893); and from The Countess Cathleen: a play much revised between 1892 and 1911.

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Poems by John Clare, edited, with an introduction, by Arthur Symons The introduction to his selection from John Clare’s poems would alone suffice to prove Mr Arthur Symons the first of our literary critics.1 It is a precise, compressed piece of writing, and the book is worth having for the sake of its criticism and narrative, almost as much as for the thoroughly representative examples of Clare’s work, and it is so fine and so moving that no one who reads it will fail to go on to the poems, many of them here printed for the first time. Altogether, there are nearly 200 pages of Clare’s verses here. Half the number would have been as effective, except that, in the case of an observer like Clare, who very often was merely an observer, quantity tells, as for different reasons it tells in the cases of Byron and of Whittier.2 For example, Mr Symons has printed poems entitled ‘February’, ‘April’, ‘July’, ‘November’, ‘Autumn’, and ‘Summer Images’,3 all of the same kind, and, as was Clare’s way, all too long. He saw and felt intensely; he had a natural and what was not always the same thing, an acquired, gift of writing; but rarely indeed were his vision and his power of writing such that the result was more than a delightful flower, taken obviously—­taken alive, it is true—­from Nature’s abundance. But his vision was fresh, and, at its best, his words did it no injury, and hundreds of his lines of this kind are well worth reprinting and reading. The fact that the writer was a Northamptonshire peasant, and one of the un­happi­est of unhappy poets, will long continue to give them rather more than their face value; while it makes the pathos and simplicity of some of the Asylum poems, for example, almost intolerable. Their narrow personal quality, the fact that one man, and he a peasant, a hundred years ago, noted this and that, will endear them to this age far more than to his own, and possibly to any other. The poems of greater men become our own, we dream ourselves with them, and actually by doing so increase our spiritual stature. But it is not so in reading all but a very few of Clare’s. How can we think of anyone but the poet himself in reading those ‘Remembrances’ which are among the poems which Mr Symons prints from the manuscript, with verses such as these?— Summer’s pleasures they are gone, like to visions every one, And the cloudy days of autumn and of winter cometh on. 1  For ET on Symons as critic, see [222n.], [225], [305], and Introduction [xlix]. 2 John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–92): American poet from New England, a Quaker and campaigner for the abolition of slavery; associated with the so-called ‘Schoolroom Poets’ or ‘Fireside Poets’, such as Longfellow, and best known for Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl (1866). 3  ET would himself write poems called ‘February Afternoon’, ‘March’, ‘April’, ‘May 23’, ‘July’, ‘October’, and ‘November’. Appreciative as this review is, he may not entirely recognize either all Clare’s qualities or his own affinities with Clare. For ET on Clare: see also [418], [624].

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I tried to call them back, but unbidden they are gone Far away from heart and eye and forever far away. Dear heart, and can it be that such raptures meet [?must] decay? I thought them all eternal when by Langley Bush I lay, I thought them joys eternal when I used to shout and play On its bank at clink and bandy chock and taw and ducking stone, Where silence sitteth now on the wild heath as her own Like a ruin of the past all alone. . . . O words are poor receipts for what time hath stole away, The ancient pulpit trees and the play. . . . Enclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain, It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill And hung the moles for traitors, though the brook is running still It runs a naked stream cold and chill.

They have the same quality, but in a far less perfect form, as Richard Jefferies’s ‘My Old Village’.4 They are always imperfectly transmuted, and the poet passes from mere description and explanation to living words without knowing it. In becoming more or less articulate, he lost much of his peasanthood. The great disappointment which will always be felt by those who read his work for the first time arises from this. We expect the impossible, we expect that he is going to reveal the peasant mind pure and simple, in words appropriate to that end, and we find, instead, that he is a peasant in his defects far more than in his qualities. ‘The Cross Roads’ is a touching country tale, but it might have been written by a man of almost any tradition or class. Every verse in ‘February’, from the first— The snow has left the cottage top;   The thatch-­moss grows in brighter green; And eaves in quick succession drop,   Where grinning icicles have been, Pit-­patting with a pleasant noise   In tubs set by the cottage-­door; While ducks and geese, with happy joys,   Plunge in the yard-­pond brimming o’er—

—every verse from the first to the last is charming, and, as a matter of history, only this peasant wrote in that way in his day, but we feel, and I think justly, that in taking advantage of the methods of expression which he gained 4  ‘My Old Village’ is a nostalgic memoir in which Jefferies values the countryside around Coate more than he does the villagers.

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from his reading of lettered poets he took also their attitude; he turned round and saw his own life and that of his coevals from the outside. His rusticity is incomplete culture as a rule, and later poets and prose writers of the writing class have done far more than he to reveal the peasant. Nevertheless, as Mr Symons points out, with many good examples, Clare did remarkable things with this foreign tongue of literary English. He matched his curious eye with curious felicity of words. He expresses his narrow, personal sorrow of regret and despair and helplessness with the intensity of genius. He goes farther than any man of his time, except Crabbe, in detail, and at his best excels Crabbe in the use of that detail.5 And, above all, here, through and also in spite of his skill, is a man and boy of singular character, with ardour and pathos and youth. DC: 19 December 5  For ET on George Crabbe, see [194].

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1909 Alfred Noyes, William Morris By ransacking Mr Mackail’s book on William Morris1 it ought to have been possible to make an interesting little volume for the ‘English Men of Letters’ series. Mr Noyes has not done this. He has given us a slight and incomplete outline of Morris’s life, and filled it in with critical remarks in an awkward and flighty prose, and the book has no merit even of a pedestrian kind. But he drags his admiration of Tennyson2 several times into this small book, and thus raises afresh a question which no one wishes to leave for posterity to settle. In his chapter on ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ he speaks of that poem as ‘in some ways one of the sweetest flowers of Morris’s work’ and continues: Had it been welcomed enthusiastically on its first appearance it could only have been on false grounds. The atmosphere had not yet been created in which it could live and breathe naturally. There was, however, during the inevitable reaction against the overpowering weight and splendour of Tennyson’s work, a kind of artistic snobbery abroad which would vaguely proclaim Morris’s first little book to be a mysterious revelation of some one true Church of Arthurianism unknown to the greater poet’s more mundane mind. . . .

But as elsewhere in the book, when a difficulty arises Mr Noyes is unable, being in a hurry and imperfectly skilled in English prose, to say what he means. This is particularly regrettable in the case of the comparison between Morris and Tennyson in their treatment of the Arthurian tales because it is a matter which has been discussed acrimoniously but never in a precise and sufficient manner. Mr Noyes asks us to compare ‘Two Red Roses across the Moon’ with ‘So all day long the noise of battle roll’d’3—which is not criticism 1  J. W. Mackail, a friend of Morris, had published his two-volume The Life of William Morris in 1899. For Mackail, see [352n.] and Introduction [xlvii]. 2  For ET on Tennyson, see also [45], [54]. GB, who shared ET’s regard for Morris, congratulated him on ‘the delicate and just way in which you have settled that old Tennyson-Morris contention’. His letter (8 April) also suggests that they agree about Noyes’s ‘whole relation to literature’: that he abuses words by seeing them ‘as a means of producing pungent or sugary effects’ (ETGB, 69–70). 3  ‘Two Red Roses’ is from Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems (1858); ‘So all day long’ etc. is the opening line of Tennyson’s ‘Morte d’Arthur’.

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but partisanship of the least serious kind. He also says later that Morris’s medievalism ‘does not actually come nearer to the real life of the Middle Ages than does the unaffectedly modern speech of Tennyson’s Idylls. Women’s necks in the Middle Ages were not really longer or their feet thinner than they are today . . .’ It is hard to take seriously a writer who talks of Tennyson’s ‘unaffectedly modern speech’, but we seem to see at the back of his mind a point which he might reasonably have attempted to make. He might have claimed that Tennyson, ‘with his great lovable simplicity and real kingliness of soul’, came and, himself a man of his age and representing it, gave to these old tales a new life especially suited to that age, and that Morris fell short of this. But we think that Tennyson made two grave and indeed fatal mistakes. First he must have undervalued Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Malory may not have been a great writer, but his book is a great book, one of the half-­dozen or so great books in English Prose of the class of The Bible, The Anatomy of Melancholy, The History of the Rebellion, Tom Jones, Boswell’s Johnson, books of great size and inexhaustible suggestiveness.4 Had Tennyson perceived its true value he could never have ventured to pilfer from it with such rapacity, taking not only the groundwork of whole tales, the striking incidents, speeches, pictures, but the very phrases and words, to such an extent that we can scarcely believe it possible for a man to enjoy Le Morte d’Arthur without discarding The Idylls of the King as a whole. The second mistake is implicit in the first. Tennyson over-­estimated the content of the tales. He thought them capable of expanding to his epic needs, and of gaining a new modern significance while retaining the old charm. Perhaps they were capable of even greater expansion, but his method seems to us to have burst them. For he did not re-­create, but versified and poetised them instead, translated them into the melodious Tennysonian tongue. We do not dispute his marvellous virtuosity, and that learned skill in which he appears to rank with Milton. In line after line, and in the whole of ‘The Passing of Arthur’, this is conspicuous. In Tennyson’s day Malory was far less known than now and there is little doubt that the Idylls created his vogue. But the fact is now that once we have read Malory we read Tennyson chiefly to see what he has done with his material, and what he has done is to decorate and obscure the quaint, the romantic, the ineffably simple, with a vaguely solemn morality, much dignity and much melody of words. And if it is true of all or nearly all the twelve books that 4  For ET on Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, see [177]. Edward Hyde, First Earl of Clarendon (1609–74), wrote (from a Royalist perspective) The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, published posthumously in various editions from 1702. ET, who may have encountered Clarendon’s History when studying history at Oxford, includes an extract in TE.

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they challenge with so little success a comparison with their originals, that they are elaborated and elevated to a point beyond what they will bear, it is far more true of the whole if taken as an epic. Guenevere’s father in Le Morte d’Arthur is a ghost with a pleasant name, but in Tennyson’s ‘Leodegran the King of Cameliard’ is a mannequin d’osier5 whose presence at the opening of the first book is only too significant of this attempt to turn a manor-­house into a palace by enlarging it. The inconsequent, rambling, confused, imperfect tales of the old book refuse to live in this ‘unaffectedly modern speech’ and consciously invented golden age. The poet tries to naturalise the shadowy Arthur but succeeds only in making of him and his Court an uncertain allegory—­that is, in destroying them. He allegorises where Malory makes unconscious symbols of great power, and in nothing is the laureate’s inferiority so clear. ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ and the other Arthurian pieces in the same volume may be the work of a lesser man. We contend that they are the work of a man who avoided the two mistakes of Tennyson. As Mr Noyes justly says, he is not more truly medieval than Tennyson, nor did he try to be. But while Tennyson places his knights and ladies in a No Man’s Land of his own invention, modernised by the approximation of Arthur to Albert the Good, although his historical knowledge seems to dispose him to connect it with Britain at the period of the Saxon invasion, Morris on the other hand attempts no consistency, uses the Wiltshire Downs as a scene, makes Guenevere speak simply as a passionate woman, and allows us to see all the time that he is dreaming short dreams inspired by his master Malory. He enlarges upon a suggestion from Le Morte d’Arthur, he invents, he mixes his knowledge of the Middle Ages, of painting, of chivalry, of devotion, in a manner which by its confusion of several ages reminds us of Malory himself and yet never competes with him. It is a narrow but an intensely realised dream-­world, this of Morris’s, which immediately engulfs the reader, holds him secure for a little while and then sets him free. Morris had not such a big box of paints as Tennyson but he used them at least in these poems with more magic, with the magic of a vivid personal experience in the imaginative world such as appears to have been denied to Tennyson. The Celts, we are always being told, can do nothing big and prolonged, and apparently their legends trip up even a poet like Tennyson, who is not a Celt, when he attempts 5  The ‘faceless’ mannequin, used to display fashion, became a cultural trope in the 1890s. Anatole France’s novel, Le Mannequin d’osier/The Wicker-Work Woman, which appeared in 1897, involves a jealous husband who destroys his wife’s dress-making mannequin as a proxy for attacking her.

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something big with them.6 Celt or not, Morris had a surer taste. He made no attempt to naturalise Arthur, to lift him out of the ruinous dreams of Le Morte d’Arthur or the Mabinogion. Still less did he make an allegory. Not once, we believe, in reading these poems can you become conscious, as continually in reading The Idylls of the King, that they are a re-­handling of old matters, certainly not that they are a mere poetisation. They are not medi­ eval, nor modern, but the work of a thoroughly modern man deeply and intelligently concerned with medieval things and things of no age, and he gives them a vivid dream-­life. Tennyson also was a modern man of culture, but in his Idylls of the King he undertook to produce by an intellectual process of reconstruction what only imagination could have succeeded in. His knights and ladies have therefore no life at all except what they retain from Malory’s page. Morris creates a world or a fragment of one which we cannot and do not feel compelled to try to locate. Tennyson makes one which it is fatally disappointing not to be able to locate. On some such grounds as these we are disposed to rank ourselves with the snobs whom Mr Noyes contemns for placing Morris’s Arthurian poems above Tennyson’s. ER: April

Francis Thompson, Shelley, With an Introduction by the Right Honourable George Wyndham There are many ways of writing the first sentences of a book. One is like the imperceptible approach as by footpaths, another like the opening of a wicket-­ gate into a garden girdling the house of mystery, and there are many others; and one is like the swinging open of great brazen gates on wrathful hinges, and such is the beginning of The Stones of Venice,1 such the beginning of Francis Thompson’s Shelley: The Church, which was once the mother of poets no less than of saints, during the last two centuries has relinquished to aliens the chief glories of poetry, if the chief glories of holiness she has preserved for her own. The palm and the 6  For the ‘Celticist’ source of such ideas, see [68n.]. 1  The first sentence of John Ruskin’s three-volume The Stones of Venice (1851–3) is: ‘Since the first dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England.’

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laurel, Dominic and Dante, sanctity and song, grew together in her soil; she has retained the palm, but forgone the laurel.

It is worthy of whatever admiration this age has left for prose delighting in its own loveliness, and the gates open with a scene to which their stateliness is a fitting introduction. This generation has been rich in several modes of the beauty of prose: Lionel Johnson’s, Mr Hudson’s, Mr Conrad’s, Mr Yeats’s, Mr Doughty’s, to mention a few who are each unlike all the rest. Francis Thompson’s Health and Holiness,2 and his more celebrated Shelley, undoubtedly place him with these. Evidently some of those who read the essay in the Dublin Review would give it a much higher place. And this is natural. It is dazzling. Nobody could fail to see that it is wonderful prose, such as no other has written, or perhaps could write. Some of the images, in fact scores of them, are worthy of Thompson’s own poetry, and yet it never loses the fundamental character of prose, and in its most ­unnoticeable parts it never falls down. Mr Wyndham calls it a poem, presumably because it is poetical.3 But if it is a poem, then Religio Medici and A Cypress Grove4 are poems, and the description is not a sufficient and inevitable one. We are inclined ourselves to say that the intellectual and the fanciful or imaginative qualities of the essay are too unevenly matched to justify the title of poem. There are great poems which are not intellectually great, but where the intellect plays an important part, it must be of a great calibre if the poem is to be great. Intellectually this essay is not great. There are passage where this is not a fatal fault, and hardly the greatest of writers could read them without an admiration transcending, after first entertaining, envy. But these passages cannot support the burden of the whole. No man has yet built a cathedral of stained-­glass alone, yet to succeed entirely that is what Thompson should have done. He should have kept exclusively to this mood: The universe is his box of toys. He dabbles his fingers in the day-­fall. He is gold-­dusty with tumbling amidst the stars. He makes bright mischief with the 2  ET had reviewed Thompson’s Health and Holiness (1905), subtitled ‘A Study of the Relations between Brother Ass, the Body, and his Rider, the Soul’: ‘the value of the argument lies in its implicit autobiography’, that ‘of a Catholic and a poet’ (S: 23 December 1905). 3  George Wyndham (1863–1913), Conservative politician (respected for settling the issue of land ownership in Ireland) and man of letters, says in his brief introduction to Shelley: ‘Thompson’s article, though an Essay in prose criticism, is pure Poetry’. 4  Discussing an edition of A Cypress Grove by William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585– 1649), ET calls the book ‘a deliberately poetical meditation in prose on the subject of death’. Comparing Drummond’s prose unfavourably with that of Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici (a work he greatly valued: see [2n.]), he says that its rhythms ‘suggest rather the unheard melodies of the recluse philosopher’s mind than the activity and aspiration and exultation of the curious physician’ (B: June 1907).

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moon. The meteors nuzzle their noses in his hand. He teases into growling the kennelled thunder, and laughs at the shaking of its fiery chain. He dances in and out of the gates of heaven: its floor is littered with his broken fancies. He runs wild over the fields of ether. He chases the rolling world. He gets between the feet of the horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of patient Nature, and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred wilful fashions, to see how she will look nicest in his song.

We will not argue that the word ‘nicest’ betrays Thompson’s limitations, but the limitations are plain. For its ultimate effect the essay depends upon its value as a criticism of Shelley, and as criticism it is not new, and will not bear comparison with Mr Yeats’s essay,5 for example. There is something more than a spangled dress and an old idea, it is true, but very little. As for the criticism of Shelley as a man, it falls little short of triviality where it is not sectarian, for we take it a man may be sectarian even though he writes as a Catholic, and undertakes to whip Master Shelley because he was not a Catholic. It was not for a writer like Thompson to make capital out of that there are ‘gleams . . . of more than mock solace’ in ‘Adonais’, but ‘obtained by implicitly assuming the personal immortality which the poem explicitly denies’. For did not Thompson take at least an equal license when he wrote of ‘that sacred bridal-­gloom of death where he holds his nuptials with eternity’, and (still more) of ‘Beauty, music, sweetness, tears—­the mouth of the worm has fed of them all’? There are no such weaknesses in Thompson’s finest poems in metre. The essay falls short of them, and it is likely to have the comparatively narrow fame of a poet’s prose, and that, too, chiefly among those who are curious collectors of the bric-­à-­brac of language, prose fanciers. And Shelley himself towers above it, a mighty, heaven-­scaling tree, on which a child has tied a fairy offering. DC: 5 April

Edmond Lepelletier, Paul Verlaine: His Life—­His Work, translated by E. M. Lang Paul Verlaine has a particular fascination for English readers. As he was a poet and a Frenchman doubtless our curiosity is purely artistic. But it is not 5  ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’, 1900.

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only because he was more or less—­and chiefly less—­a modern Villon that he is read a little and much talked about here. His poetry includes some of the finest, or nearly the finest, flowers of that later French poetry which is more suited to English taste than any since the Pléiade.1 The Romantic movement brought English and French poetry nearer together than they had been for two hundred years, but Hugo was clearly and vitally French throughout. With Verlaine and some others of his class we feel at moments that he might have got the same effects in English—­and that he could not have got them more exquisitely: which we feel of few other French poets. Verlaine, the poet and the man, has been written about by at least two of the most distinguished English critics of belles lettres, by Mr Gosse in his French Profiles, and Mr  Arthur Symons in his Symbolist Movement.2 Mr Gosse produced a delightful impression chiefly by the not wholly conscious contrast between himself and the strange wildfowl—­it was an owl he most resembled—­that he went forth to see. But Mr Symons was profoundly sympathetic: indeed, no other critic has his power of sympathy, and if it were more exactly balanced by other powers he would be without an equal. He explains, perhaps, the appeal of this poet to English readers when he says that ‘That “setting free” of verse, which is one of the achievements of Verlaine, was itself mainly an attempt to be more and more sincere, a way of turning poetic artifice to new account, by getting back to nature itself, hidden away under the eloquent rhetoric of Hugo, Baudelaire, and the Parnassians.’3 We do not find much criticism in M.  Edmond Lepelletier’s book now translated into English by Mr Lang. M. Pelletier was a friend of the poet from the beginning, was himself a Parnassian, but became a newspaper editor, a novelist, and figures in a full-­dress photograph in this book as Député de Paris. There is a good deal of M. Pelletier in the book beside the photograph,

1 La Pléiade: poets of the French Renaissance, led by Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85) and Joachim du Bellay (1522–60), who sought to give the French language the same literary status as Greek and Latin. ET was well-read in French poetry: see also his review of Baudelaire’s prose poems [170]. 2  For ET on Edmund Gosse, see Introduction [xlv]. ET’s review of French Profiles questions Gosse’s concern with poets to whom he is clearly unsympathetic. He asks why Gosse should ‘write of Mallarmé merely to show that that eccentric means nothing to him’; and remarks that his ‘account of a random visit to Verlaine . . . is a masterpiece of decorum making itself uncomfortable for the benefit of an indecorous public’ (W: 7 February 1905). For ET on Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature, see [305]. 3  Parnassians: French anti-Romantic poetic movement of the later nineteenth century, headed by Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle (1818–94). This group of poets, which included Théophile Gautier (1811–72), advocate of ‘art for art’s sake’, had influenced the young Verlaine. The Parnassian aesthetic encompassed objectivity, precise observation, and technical skill.

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but it need not disturb us. It is exaggerated and flamboyant, but it has also the better side of these qualities: it is spirited and generous; and if we sometimes sighed for a more close-­knit style and more sense of proportion we consoled ourselves by turning to Verlaine’s own autobiographical books, Mes Prisons and Mes Hôpitaux and his poetry. The biographer is chiefly occupied in describing Verlaine’s way of life with a certain benevolent regret. He is also an apologist, endeavouring, chiefly by means of assertions, to clear Verlaine of the two chief shadows on his memory, the extreme immorality and the alleged attack on his mother with a knife. Sometimes the apology is amusing, as when he says that Verlaine ‘became an outcast, a vagabond, a pariah, but never a cosmopolitan, a renegade, nor a bad patriot’. Neither Verlaine’s vices nor his virtues, especially now that he is dead, bear the eloquence of the Courts. [. . .] MP: 12 April

J. W. Mackail,1 The Springs of Helicon: A Study in the Progress of English Poetry from Chaucer to Milton It might have been foreseen that a book by Professor Mackail on Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton would be very charming, full of knowledge and of feeling. And so it is. It is plain at once how genuinely Professor Mackail enjoys the poets; and we are glad to be reassured of this after his extraordinary experiment in translating the Odyssey.2 Every reader of these three poets will see that Professor Mackail has read them for himself, with diligence and affection. In his ‘Introduction’, some passages led us to expect even more. After speaking of the importance of the cycle of progress between Chaucer 1  J[ohn] W[illiam] Mackail (1859–1945), editor, critic, classicist, translator of the classics, high official in the Board of Education, was Professor of Poetry at Oxford 1906–11. The lectures collected in The Springs of Helicon were given in 1906–8. See Introduction [xlvii]. 2 Mackail had translated the Odyssey into the Persian quatrain adopted by Edward FitzGerald for his version of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Reviewing Mackail’s translation of Books I–­VIII, ET is ‘sorry to see a handsome scheme of verse debased’; but assumes that he ‘hoped to give his close, unvarnished version something of poetic magic, which has so constantly eluded the translator in couplets or blank verse’. While allowing that ‘In a considerable measure he has succeeded’, ET finds a lack of inspiration, and says: ‘It reads like the scholarly effort of a prose-writer, with a fine perception of the value of verse, yet wanting not only in the ardour and inevitableness of true poetry, but in the ingenuities of clever verse’ (DC: 14 May 1903).

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and Milton, he tells us that there are three principal ways of studying it. The historian of poetry will deal with it in detail, and give ‘a systematic account of the whole poetic production’. The philosophical investigator will deal mainly with the ideas embodied in this poetry. ‘But’, says Professor Mackail: to that more inclusive view which the progress of criticism is always striving to attain, both the accumulation of material and the refinement of analysis are but means, not ends. The life in poetry, the appreciation of poetry in its vital quality, is the object of study. The record or classification of actual works of art, the determination of the ideas or impulses which art expresses, are alike subordinate to the appreciation of art itself as a vital energy. The office of criticism, thus regarded, is to interpret art in something of the same way as art interprets life.

That seems to strike a new, albeit an uncertain note, coming from a professor of poetry at Oxford. We cannot imagine his predecessor, Warton, writing like that, or even Matthew Arnold.3 Still less can we imagine them speaking of ‘the miraculousness of human life as it receives expression from Sophocles in the Antigone’, a phrase which suggests that Professor Mackail has been broadening his horizon by reading Mr Chesterton. We confess we were also a little disconcerted by the attribution of great critical value to Gray’s ode, ‘The Progress of Poesy’. Nevertheless the total effect of the introduction was to prepare us for something not usually expected of a professor. The book is unexpected. It is almost entirely lacking in the clearness, the facility, the conventionality which we connect with professors. Professor Mackail has not been content to invent a new way of saying old things in a sort of prose ballade or triolet. What is more, it is perfectly evident that he could not have done so had he tried. He has realised that the old method is dead. He has discovered for himself the tremendous truth that there comes a time when actually you cannot go on talking about the poets, with a spice of history, a spice of generalisation, a few quotations from them and from earl­ ier critics, a graceful simile, a peroration, and then a condemning silence. He has tried to look at these poets as they are, without leaning on others, to tell us what they mean to him, to prove that they are as much alive as he. In some ways he has succeeded. The very spectacle of the partial bewilderment of a professor of poetry in the presence of poets is a beneficial one. It 3 Both Thomas Warton the elder (c.1688–1745) and his son Thomas Warton the younger (1728–90) became Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1718–28, 1757–66); the latter (also Poet Laureate from 1795), to whom ET probably refers, being better qualified for the post. Matthew Arnold, Professor from 1857 to 1866, was the first to give lectures in English rather than Latin.

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does away with an old hypocrisy. Then, too, especially in the matter of The Faerie Queene, he attacks, partly in unconsciousness, old values. He does not think of saying that it is not nearly so great a poem as everyone conspires to assert it is. But he does show the great fluctuations in its own qualities, and he raises, with too great timidity it is true, the question of the difference between imagination and imagery, and decides that Spenser possesses the greater gift, ‘intermittently, capriciously, and imperfectly’. What he fails to show is why the poem is a great one, and why it has had so great a reputation, in spite of the ‘want of touch between art and life’ in it. In fact, in the whole book it is not clear what are the relations between art and life in great poetry, nor what the professor thinks they ought to be. And in this very defect there is an element of good, since it makes clear, almost with naïveté, how backward our criticism still is, and by so doing makes it possible to set about improving it. Professor Mackail is very interesting in many points of detail, in the matter of Milton’s style, for example, but what we feel chiefly grateful for is the frank way in which he exposes his limitations, which are the limitations of most critics. [. . .] His book is a farewell to the old school. Some day it may be [?read] as a welcome to the new, and that will be its only chance of life. DC: 16 April

Basil de Selincourt,1 William Blake If there was any danger that it would become a custom to write books on Blake that were mere exercises in eulogy Mr Basil de Selincourt’s William Blake is to be welcomed in the capacity of monitor. He evidently thinks there was such a danger and is not backward in trying to oppose it. In fact, he has too much confined himself to the part dictated by a consciousness of an­tag­on­ism. It is a mistake to be a partisan even of truth, since one does but raise the devil by 1  Basil de Selincourt/Sélincourt (1877–1966): journalist and literary critic, brother of Ernest de Sélincourt: see [122n.]. Writing to GB on 1 May, ET had asked: ‘About Blake, I wonder have you seen a book on him by a not very sympathetic but also not at all fashionable outsider named Basil de Selincourt? He is a clever man of the “no nonsense” kind & while I don’t think he has got very far, he has so challenged the supporters of Blake that they will have to think what they are at before answering. Since Swinburne nobody except Ellis & Yeats has really faced the difficulties & Ellis & Yeats have not explained them by seeming to overcome them’ (LGB, 184). For ET on approaches to Blake, see [186], [228].

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partisanship on every hand and truth has to hide during the conflict. Mr de Selincourt is not really and at heart a partisan. He is a great admirer of Blake as poet and painter. Only he allows himself to give more attention than he need to what Blake is not, because the enemy has done the same under an opposite belief. For example, at the outset he calls Blake ‘an active Nonconformist to the end’, and tells us that it is a mistake to want to know more of the circumstances of his life. ‘They were banal’, he informs us. Mr de Selincourt, in fact, is too high-­souled to take an interest in the picture of a mystic going, for example, to fetch his own pint of porter, and he uses the contemptuous word ‘Nonconformist’, not, doubtless in the vulgar sense, but well knowing how it will annoy. And we seem to detect on many a page a grating sound, even in the praise of a man whom we feel sure Mr de Selincourt would not have liked to meet; in these words, for example, otherwise so just and expressing the main point of difference between him and some other critics: Yet the central word about Blake can never be a word of depreciation. It can never cease to be true of him that he embodied and proclaimed at its purest the impulse of which all art is the issue, and raising art, as all the greatest artists do, to a level with the greatest achievements of the human spirit, showed that in its essence the artistic principle is the very principle of life itself; and that all religion, all conduct, are barren and profitless except in so far as they express it. He is, of course, greatest both as a man and an artist when circumstances allow him to exemplify rather than to uphold this truth; and it was his life’s misfortune that circumstances enabled him to exemplify it so seldom and forced him to waste so much of his energy in upholding it.

In supporting this very sensible view he goes so far as to say that Blake’s ‘powers of spiritual conquest’ were too often the subject of his reflection and so lost spontaneity. That ‘he was conceited about them’, which is an expression that owes its carelessness apparently to that spirit of opposition by which Mr de Selincourt too often asserts himself and his claim to originality. If he had digested and arranged his opinions this offence would have been removed and their persuasiveness and real value would have been much increased. For in their present condition they are always presented in company with the opinions which they oppose instead of being worked into a coherent study of every side of Blake’s performance and character, inconsistencies and all. The chapter on ‘Blake’s Madness’ gives him many op­por­tun­ ities. Thus he takes the poet’s answer to a question as to the source of his spiritual second-­sight, ‘You have only to work up imagination to the state of vision, and the thing is done’—obviously an imperfect, and possibly a less than half serious statement—­and uses it to pooh-­pooh work of which this can scarcely be an adequate explanation.

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What he does succeed in showing is that in his prophetic books Blake consciously or unconsciously used as models those parts of the Hebrew Prophets which were ‘far more unintelligible in Blake’s day than they are now’. He finds a degree of self-­deception in Blake’s systematisation, or ‘mental obsession’, so great that he carries us with him to his conclusion that ‘It was a kind of madness’, though that phrase will hardly stand. And so, too, in dealing with Blake’s theory of the imagination he points to a fatal flaw due to using the word in two completely different senses without knowing it, a flaw which led to ‘The inability to distinguish between an invention and a dream’. Mr de Selincourt does a valuable service in this chapter and in that called ‘The Ratio of the Five Senses’. He would have done a still greater service if he had made a more continuous effort to get to the back of the mind which deceived itself by these errors and yet showed from time to time powers that seem incompatible with such deception. Another admirable chapter is that on ‘Symbolism’. It asserts that the principles underlying art and symbolism are directly antagonistic,2 and our only complaint is that it does so too much in the tone of a debating society and leaves us with the certainty that his pulverised opponents will write an equally brilliant chapter in reply. But to this complaint there is the consolation that it will have to be something better than has yet been written on the subject. And not only symbolism, but the whole subject of Blake, can and must be discussed now in an atmosphere purified as by a thunderstorm [. . .] MP: 13 May

Katharine Tynan, Experiences; etc. Mrs Katharine Tynan Hinkson is able to express herself with some freedom and power in verse. She thinks, and we are interested; she feels, and we feel with her. Her language is simple, and her attitude sometimes has a perhaps 2  This is because: ‘The artist is no system-maker. It is not his aim to invent tags or labels to be attached to known impressions, and so re-summon them to the mind. His aim is rather to detach himself from those in use already, so as more freely to approach the reality that underlies them, and to create a new and living impression of it’ (Basil de Selincourt, William Blake [London: Duckworth, 1909], 151). ET may have recalled de Selincourt’s distinction when writing Maurice Maeterlinck, which he was then conceiving. See his chapter on Symbolism and Maeterlinck’s poetry, included here [468].

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exaggerated simplicity. And then she has the fascinating, characteristically Irish rhythm, swaying and reluctant, though we are not sure that it is not sometimes used rather mechanically, and not strictly according to the needs of the subject and mood, and there are whole poems in which there is no sign of it.1 This is the rhythm: In the March twilight, the wonderful March twilight,   Blackbirds, thrushes, sing so wild on every tree, Sing their wildest, best, in the grey, the shy light,   Break the heart with grief, with hope, with ecstasy.

But there is none of it in ‘Introit: An Echo’: I look and see the world is fair,   And marvel much at what can move The Lord of Earth, the Lord of Air,   To such extremity of love. Seeing we have so short a space   To abide on this side of the tomb, We could have borne a barer place,   An unadorned, but cleanly room. Pilgrim am I and wayfarer,   Sojourner one night at an inn; What matters if the room is bare,   So that the bed and sheets be clean? But ah, dear Lord, this would not suit   Thy love for me, impure, unkind; Thou settest the daisies at my feet,   Mak’st me the sky, mak’st me the wind . . .

The writer goes on to express a sad wonder that God should make the inn so fair ‘That there are some who here will live, As though Thy lovely earth were 1  ET says of Tynan’s next collection, Lauds: ‘she never seems to us to succeed either in saying anything directly or in creating’ (DC: 29 December 1909); but has become more positive about Tynan’s ‘Irish’ attributes in his reviews of her Irish Poems (1913): ‘The Irish quality—­I suppose it to be Irish since it is not English—­is strong in every poem, so strong that even if it were the only quality it would be enough to recommend the book. It is made up of the simplest words, in singing, pausing rhythms. . . . There is something diminutive, bird-like, child-like, constantly present. It is full of the love of God, men and Nature, with a tone as if they made quite a small family altogether and liked it; and as if the rest of the world were a province of Ireland . . .’ (B: January 1914). ‘The Irish fidelity to their national music has made Irish rhythm a continuous delight and recently a cause of renewal of youth in modern verse’ (Saturday Westminster Gazette: 21 March 1914).

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all’. The point of view sets our credulity an impossible task, but it is charmingly expressed. Best of all, perhaps, is ‘The New Boy’: He never knew before how heavenly the places,   Light-­loved but yesterday, the fields of his home; Gleam to his sick eyes the lost beloved faces,   A mirage, a water-­well, where he may not come.

The feeling is simple and true, and so is the expression, almost invariably. But it is good, we think, by accident, since the rest of the poems, however good, are obvious translations, into a not entirely necessary verse form, of thoughts and emotions which are unfit or unripe for that form. DC: 25 May

Personae of Ezra Pound; Maurice Hewlett, Artemision: Idylls and Songs1 It is easier to enjoy than to praise Mr Pound, easier to find fault with him, easiest to ridicule. His Personae, probably a first book, is strewn with signs of two battles not yet over, the battle with the world of a fresh soul who feels 1  This review is headed ‘Two Poets’. ET’s correspondence with GB, April–­June 1909, records his reaction to Pound’s début, including (before his third review of Personae appeared) a volteface: (undated) ‘I shall send you soon a very interesting book of verse called Personae of Ezra Pound’; (1 May) ‘here is Ezra Pound & I think he has very great things in him & the love poems & the “Famam librosque”—in fact nearly all—­are extraordinary achievements’ (LGB, 182–5). GB responded (8 June): ‘I agree with you about Ezra Pound; there is something quite considerable about him’; although he questioned the poetic durability of Pound’s ‘passion for the odd and outré’ (ETGB, 86–7). But ET then wrote (12 June): ‘Oh I do humble myself over Ezra Pound. He is not & cannot ever be very good. Certainly he is not what I mesmerised myself—­out of pure love of praising the new poetry!—into saying he was & I am very much ashamed & only hope I shall never meet the man. My greatest humiliation is due to regret for cheapening praise & using the same words about such a man as about, say, Sturge Moore, though of course I did indicate the chaos of the work’ (LGB, 187). On 8 June he had written in similar vein to Walter de la Mare: ‘I feel unusually foolish in writing about poetry today as I have just made the most horrible mistakes in saying—­in the Chronicle yesterday & also in the English Review—­that Ezra Pound is a poet. He is not & how I came to mesmerise myself into praising him I can’t think. I began by thinking his work rot but so contemptuously that I seem to have set about altering my view out of pure perversity & desire to be amiable’ (PTP, 65). ET reviewed two further works by Maurice Hewlett. He condemns The Agonists: ‘The style of these three plays is so nerveless and powerless that the effect of them is that of a translation out of a dead language into another’; while noting more positively that ‘Mr Hewlett’s lyric poems were not very remarkable, but they were his own, soaked with the same fluid as his prose’ (DC: 4 May 1911). Reviewing Helen Redeemed and Other

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­ imself strong but alone, and the battle with words, the beautiful, the soiled, h the rare, the antique words. It is not wonderful then that one coming up from the outside should be tempted for a moment to turn away from the battlefield with a promise to come back and see who and what is left. And yet such tumults are fascinating for themselves, especially if we know that sometimes when they are over, nothing, from the spectator’s point of view, is left. In Mr Pound’s case we feel sure there will be a great soul left. Also, in the meantime, the book is well worth having for itself and regardless of its vague large promise. Let us straightway acknowledge the faults; the signs of conflict; the old and foreign words and old spellings that stand doubtless for much that the ordinary reader is not privileged to detect; the tricky use of inverted commas; the rhythms at one time so free as not to be distinguishable at first from prose, at another time so stiff that ‘evanescent’ becomes ‘evan’-scent’; the gobbets of Browningesque; and one piece of construction at the foot of p. 39 which we cannot unravel2 and are inclined to put down as not the only case of imperfect correction of proofs. To say what this poet has not is not difficult; it will help to define him. He has no obvious grace, no sweetness, hardly any of the superficial good qual­ ities of modern versifiers; not the smooth regularity of the Tennysonian trad­ ition, nor the wavering, uncertain languor of the new, though there is more in his rhythms than is apparent at first through his carelessness of ordinary effects. He has not the current melancholy or resignation or unwillingness to live; nor the kind of feeling for nature that runs to minute description and decorative metaphor. He cannot be usefully compared with any living writers, though he has read Mr Yeats. Browning and Whitman he respects, and he could easily burlesque Browning if he liked. He knows medieval poetry in the popular tongues, and Villon, and Ossian. He is equally fond of strict stanzas of many rhymes, of blank verse with many unfinished lines, of rhymeless or almost rhymeless lyrics, of Pindarics3 with or without rhyme. But these forms are not striking in themselves, since all are subdued to his spirit; in each he is true in his strength and weakness to himself, full of personality and with such power to express it that from the first to the last lines of most of his poems he holds us steadily in his own pure, grave, passionate world. Poems more favourably, in the same review as D. H. Lawrence’s Love Poems and Others, he writes: ‘Mr Lawrence’s form has been groped for: it is as near as possible natural poetry. Mr Hewlett’s has been assumed: it is a fascinating, not wholly deceptive mask’ (B: April 1913). Like ET, Hewlett was interested in ‘Englishness’: see Appendix [704] for his possible influence on ET’s poem ‘Lob’. 2  The problem here is partly caused by a confused sequence of tenses. 3 Loose form of ode, popularized by Abraham Cowley (see [167]); theoretically, but inaccurately, based on the Greek odes of Pindar (c.518–438 bce).

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It will appear paradoxical to say after this that the chief part of his power is directness and simplicity. A characteristic opening is this, put in the mouth of an Italian poet4—‘Italian Campagna 1309, the open road’: Bah! I have sung women in three cities, But it is all the same; And I will sing of the sun . . .

or this, from ‘A Villonaud: Ballad of the Gibbet Or the song of the sixth companion’ of Villon: Drink ye a skoal for the gallows tree! François and Margot, and thee and me, Drink we the comrades merrily That said us, ‘Till then’ for the gallows tree!

In the poem ‘In Tempore Senectutis’ the old man says to his old love: ‘Red spears bore the warrior dawn        Of old. Strange! Love, hast thou forgotten   The red spears of the dawn,   The pennants of the morning?’

The finest of his pieces are the love-­poems. In ‘Scriptor Ignotus: Ferrara 1715’, he astonishes us by using again the poet’s claim, Ronsard’s and Shakespeare’s, to give immortality to a mistress by words, by ‘A new thing As hath not heretofore been writ’. But it is not a playing upon an old theme as, e.g., Locker-­ Lampson played on it.5 It is a piece of strong tender passion that happens to lean upon the old theme and to honour it. ‘Praise of Ysolt’ is equally beautiful in an entirely different way, showing that the writer does not depend upon a single mood or experience. The beauty of it is the beauty of passion, sincerity and intensity, not of beautiful words and images and suggestions; on the contrary, the expression is as austere as Biblical prose. The thought dominates the words and is greater than they are. It opens:

4  The poem’s title is ‘Cino’: i.e. the Italian poet known as Cino da Pistoia (1270–1336/7). 5  ET had called London Lyrics, a posthumous edition of poems by Frederick Locker-Lampson (1821–95), first published in 1857, ‘a volume of light-hearted magazine verses’. But he notes LockerLampson’s attempt to imitate ‘Ronsard, and a hundred others’ in a more serious poem, ‘To My Mistress’, which asserts: ‘For ages hence the great and good / Will judge you as I choose they should’ (DC: 7 February 1905). ET himself would adopt/adapt this trope in his love poem ‘The clouds that are so light’ (ACP, 105).

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In vain have I striven     to teach my heart to bow; In vain have I said to him ‘There be many singers greater than thou.’ But his answer cometh, as winds and as lutany, As a vague crying upon the night That leaveth me no rest, saying ever,         ‘Song, a song.’

In the ‘Idyl for Glaucus’ a woman hovers by the sea in search of Glaucus, who has tasted ‘the grass that made him sea-­fellow with the other gods’. Here the effect is full of human passion and natural magic, without any of the phrases which a reader of modern verse would expect in the treatment of such a subject. In ‘From Syria’ and ‘From the Saddle’ the thought is not new but it is made his own by genuineness, weakened only by allowing such a line as So if my line disclose distress.

‘And Thus in Nineveh’ we venture to quote in its entirety, not as the best but as the shortest of these love-­poems, with this warning that, like the two last, it does not reveal Mr Pound neat, though we are confident that it will give conviction to our praise of his style: Aye! I am a poet and upon my tomb Shall maidens scatter rose leaves And men myrtles, ere the night Slays day with her dark sword. Lo! this thing is not mine Nor thine to hinder, For the custom is full old, And here in Nineveh have I beheld Many a singer pass and take his place In those dim halls where no man troubleth His sleep or song. And many a one hath sung his songs More craftily, more subtle-­souled than I; And many a one now doth surpass My wave-­worn beauty with his wind of flowers, Yet am I poet, and upon my tomb Shall all men scatter rose leaves Ere the night slay light With her blue sword.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 It is not, Raama, that my song rings highest Or more sweet in tone than any, but that I Am here a Poet, that doth drink of life As lesser men drink wine.

And on the same page is this wonderful little thing6 that builds itself so abruptly, swiftly, clearly into the air: I ha’ seen them mid the clouds on the heather. Lo! they pause not for love nor for sorrow, Yet their eyes are as the eyes of a maid to her lover, When the white hart breaks his cover And the white wind breaks the morn.   ‘’Tis the white stag, Fame, we’re a-­hunting,   Bid the world’s hounds come to horn!’

In taking leave of this admirable poet we should like to mention other poems we have particularly enjoyed, ‘La Fraisne’, ‘Famam Librosque Cano’ (a prophetic sketch of the kind of reader he will one day have), ‘Ballad for Gloom’, ‘For E. Mc C’ (these two last very brilliant and noble), ‘Occidit’, and ‘Revolt: Against the crepuscular spirit in modern poetry’; and to apologise to him for our own shortcomings and to any other readers for that insecurity of modern criticism of which we feel ourselves at once a victim and a humble cause. There is no conflict, no uncertainty, in Mr Maurice Hewlett’s Artemision; there is achievement but no promise. Most of us he will astonish by appearing suddenly as a full-­fledged poet with a thoroughly developed style and choice of subject, though some will remember the Songs and Verses of 1896, from which some of these poems are reprinted. The largest and the most interesting part of the book consists of three ‘Idylls of the Huntress’, Artemis: the first, ‘Leto’s Child’, describing her childhood with Leto and her early godhood; the second ‘The Niobids’, the revenge taken by her brother Apollo and herself for Niobe’s insult; the third, ‘Latmos’, her friendship with Endymion. The first is in octosyllabic couplets, the second in heroics, the third in a stanza of six decasyllabic lines of which the second, fourth and sixth rhyme with the first, and the fifth with the third. There are few living narrative poets we can read with equal pleasure. The writing is close and rich in colour of words and images, the rhythm never monotonous, the verses, on the contrary, tending to have no real movement at all, as modern poetry, so predominantly descriptive, seldom has. The essential thing is always just the 6  ‘The White Stag’, also quoted in ET’s next review.

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verse we are at, not the end, nor yet the whole. One verse is as good as another and we can leave off or begin anywhere as with a piece of lace. The style is a curious, far-­sought one, giving an unmistakable quality to the work, and well maintained, though here and there his eclecticism is imperfectly mastered and leads to a line at which we hesitate as on the fifth line of Orion, that great hunter! Chios knows His end: no strength avail’d to meet such foes As Hymnia wing’d upon him; but he past, And still in Hell pursues with empty blows Shadowy game in shadowy antres vast, And still exults to watch their shadowy throes.7

Artemis is the chief figure in all, and the effect is gained by emphasising her beauty, her chastity and the allied qualities of coldness and ferocity, and her connection with the open hills and the dim woods and their wildness and purity. [. . .] With all the archaism of decoration the spirit is modern, and such a passage as the following could only belong to our age:              Her way Is with the creatures wild and shy Darkling in coverts, where they lie Till thickest night come, and the hour, That all men charmeth and men’s power, Leaves earth the fee of beast and bird.8

Then probably the finest and certainly the most moving and real passage in the book is where Artemis becomes close friends with one of her nymphs who strays from her maiden path, who bears a child to Pan and, robbed of the child, returns to the goddess only to be repulsed and turned into a bear; and this is handled with a human veracity that comes near to clashing with the tone of the whole. In all three poems the human tenderness and frailty of the nymph, of Niobe and of Endymion, are brought into strong contrast with that conventional character of Artemis, as a chaste, fierce goddess, which comes as something of a shock because it is concealed for a time under Mr Hewlett’s partly naturalistic treatment of her as a slim, beautiful huntress of human nature. The essential weakness of the poems lies in their remoteness from ancient myth on the one hand and entire credibility on the other, which makes Artemis a goddess only for dramatic effect in such a situation as the ghastly butchery of the Niobids. This weakness is perhaps inseparable from 7  Quotation from ‘Latmos’.    8  From ‘Leto’s Child’.

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the nature of the poems, old tales told from a decorative instinct, with c­ olours superinduced from without, and not from any deep conviction such as underlies Mr Sturge Moore’s use of classic themes. But they are choicely wrought, with equal richness and delicacy, and they undeniably create their own world. They only fall short of the great poems of the past which will occur to every one, and of Mr Sturge Moore’s in the present. ER: June

Personae of Ezra Pound Carelessness of sweet sound and of all the old tricks makes Mr Pound’s book rather prickly to handle at first. It was practically nothing but this prickliness that incited us to read his book through a second time. We read it a third time—­it is less than sixty pages long—­because it was good the second, and, nevertheless, still held back other good things. But we know from experience that it is impossible to show in a bit of a column that a new writer is good and in a new way. Nor will we trust him in the form of extracts to anyone’s tender mercies, but give simply the one poem short enough for quotation. It is called ‘The White Stag’: I ha’ seen them mid the clouds on the heather. Lo! they pause not for love nor for sorrow, Yet their eyes are as the eyes of a maid to her lover, When the white hart breaks his cover And the white wind breaks the morn.   ‘’Tis the white stag, Fame, we’re a-­hunting,   Bid the world’s hounds come to horn!’

That will at least give you some idea of the way Mr Pound’s work bursts upon the mind. All his poems are like this, from beginning to end, and in every way, his own, and in a world of his own. For brusque intensity of effect we can hardly compare them with any other work. Of course, this is due partly to his faults and to his pride in revolt, to his lack of all mere amiability, to his austerity, to his abruptness as of a swift beetle that suddenly strikes your cheek and falls stunned with its own force, to his use of a number of archaisms in the midst of a chaste and simple vocabulary. But these faults have the same origin as his virtues, and are doubtless at  present inseparable from them. He is so possessed by his own strong

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c­ onceptions, that he not only cannot think of wrapping them up in a conventional form, but he must ever show his disdain for it a little; one of his poems is, in so many words, a revolt against the crepuscular spirit in modern poetry. But the disdain is the other side of a powerful love for something else, and it is usually either only implicit or entirely concealed. Yet, when we consider it, there is singularly little crudity, and practically no extravagance. It is mostly hard, naked, and grim. Well, and what is this new thing? somebody is asking. It is only the very old, felt and said anew; the love of a man for the wild wood, for women, for his own songs, for his friend, for life. And in half at least the poet chooses to let men long dead utter his words—­a troubadour of the Middle Ages, a companion of Villon’s, an ‘unknown writer’ of the eighteenth century, a Saxon of the eighth, a Crusader, a poet in Nineveh! Yet as we read we forget that it has been done before; we share something of the spirit of love that has entered him, and see all things anew. And, setting aside the archaisms, which do not count one way or the other, the method is so simple. No remarkable melody; no golden words shot with meaning; a temperate use of images, and none far-­fetched; no flattering of modern fashions, in descriptions of Nature, for example; no apostrophe, no rhetoric, nothing ‘Celtic’. It is the old miracle that cannot be defined, nothing more than a subtle entanglement of words, so that they rise out of their graves and sing. And part of our pleasure in reading the book has been the belief, in which we are confident, that the writer is only just getting under sail, that he will reach we know not where; nor does he, but somewhere far away in the unexplored. DC: 7 June *** No one who has any feeling for what is poetry can read through Personae without realising that Mr Ezra Pound has the root of the matter in him. Faults his book has in plenty, but they are all the faults of youth, faults of an eager, adventurous spirit who will not keep tamely to the beaten track, and seeking ways of his own, must needs go often astray before he finds them. He disdains the fetters of regular rhyme; his metrical harmonies are frequently unfamiliar, and at times seem crude and harsh, perhaps because our ears are unused to them; he conjures largely with assonance and alliteration. Again and again his verse strikes you as too artificial, too tricky; the frequent use of old words and eccentricities of phrasing give it an air of affectation; yet again and again, also, you come upon some lyric that is beautifully simple in form

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and utterance, that orbs itself easily and naturally, as thus, with ‘In Tempore Senectutis’:      For we are old      And the earth passion dieth; We have watched him die a thousand times,   When he wanes an old wind crieth,      For we are old And passion hath died for us a thousand times      But we grew never weary . . . The moth-­hour of our day is upon us     Holding the dawn; There is strange Night-­wonder in our eyes Because the Moth-­Hour leadeth the dawn As a maiden, holding her fingers, The rosy, slender fingers of the dawn.

Or turn to ‘In Durance’ and you have Mr Pound almost at his best and almost at his worst: I am homesick after mine own kind, Oh I know that there are folk about me, friendly faces, But I am homesick after mine own kind . . . Aye, I am wistful for my kin of the spirit And have none about me save in the shadows When come they, surging of power, ‘DAEMON,’ ‘Quasi KALOUN’ S.T. says, Beauty is most that a ‘calling to the soul.’1 Well then, so call they; the swirlers out of the mist of my soul, They that come mewards bearing old magic . . . And yet my soul sings ‘Up!’ and we are one. Yea thou, and Thou, and THOU, and all my kin To whom my breast and arms are ever warm, For that I love ye as the wind the trees That holds their blossoms and their leaves in cure And calls the utmost singing from the boughs That ’thout him, save the aspen, were as dumb Still shade, and bade no whisper speak the birds of how ‘Beyond, beyond, beyond, there lies . . .’ 1  Pound is quoting from the third essay ‘On the Principles of Genial Criticism’ (1814) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (S. T.), in which Coleridge makes a doubtful etymological connection between the ancient Greek words kalon (a beautiful object) and kaloun (to call).

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No eccentricities go to the making of great poetry: when Browning rose to his highest he was neither eccentric nor obscure. There is real imaginative power and a breath of originality about such things as ‘An Idyl for Glaucus’, the ‘Ballad for Gloom’, ‘And Thus in Nineveh’, ‘Praise of Ysolt’, and certain other of his poems, which give you confidence that Mr Pound will outgrow the influence of Browning’s perversities and conquer his own; in the meantime, Personae is a profoundly interesting achievement; no new book of poems for years past has had such a freshness of inspiration, such a strongly individual note, or been more alive with undoubtable promise. B: July

A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry1 Dr A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy was one of the newest and most weighty books that have come from an Oxford professorial Chair for a generation. His Oxford Lectures on Poetry, now for the first time collected, were also delivered from the Chair of Poetry at Oxford, and they are of the same quality, of good substance closely woven. They will gain few readers from among the indolent. For though they have grace, they are utterly without graces. There is a true intellectual passion in them, but no charm. Their structure is often admirable, but it is never displayed by artifice. A para­dox­ ical critic might go so far as to say that Dr Bradley cannot write, so un­attract­ ive are his sentences, so inelegant and struggling his phrases. All the more remarkable then is the power which he gradually gains over us. It is a power somewhat unusual in these days. We live in a time of special pleaders, of preachers; we expect personality before everything from a writer, or it would be truer to say that we expect the trappings of personality, eccentricities of vocabulary, construction, gesture, and are easily put off with them; we demand that a man should always take a side, should express himself very positively even to the point of extravagance, and should never hint at doubt. Now Dr Bradley has not taken sides. He would make the worst of debaters. He is only troubled about what is true. Nor is he bent on making converts, least of all to a belief in his own infallibility. He is not afraid to show perplexity 1  For A. C. Bradley and ET’s review of Poetry for Poetry’s Sake, Bradley’s first lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, see [35] and Introduction [xlvii].

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or to formulate a half truth as such. When, for example, he writes of the sublime he says that he ‘proposes to make some remarks on this quality, and even to attempt some sort of answer to the question what sublimity is’; and when he speaks of beauty he is neither pedantic enough to assume that every­body knows what he means, nor journalistic enough to give a brilliant definition straightway. He laboriously hews out a path through his subject, turning neither to the right nor to the left when to do so would be merely to show his agility. In the end he has given us no memorable phrases, but he has given us the very deep and unusual pleasure of watching his thought facing its subject honestly, and of accompanying him through the whole process in a manner so intimate that the reader might be excused who believed that it was he himself who had come to these conclusions and that Dr Bradley had been looking on. What they are in this chapter on ‘the sublime’ we will indicate by one quotation: it seems that we may say that all sublimity, and not only that in which the idea of infinite greatness or of the Infinite emerges, is an image of infinity; for in all, through a certain check or limitation and the overcoming of it, we reach the perception or the imaginative idea of something which, on the one hand, has a positive nature, and, on the other, is either not determined as finite or is determined as infinite . . . ‘Beauty’, then, we may perhaps say, is the image of the total presence of the Infinite within any limits it may choose to assume; sublimity the image of its boundlessness, and of its rejection of any pretension to independence or absoluteness on the part of its finite forms; the one the image of its immanence, the other of its transcendence.

Dr Bradley’s lecture may some day be forgotten, and Burke’s and Ruskin’s writing on the same subject may yet survive,2 but we venture to say that by showing the reader rather how to think than what to think on it he will do actual readers of poetry today a greater service than either of them. In other lectures he deals with Wordsworth, with Shelley’s view of poetry, with the long poem in the age of Wordsworth, with the letters of Keats, with Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and three other Shakespearean subjects, with poetry for poetry’s sake, and with ‘Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy’. Here again he avoids the easy thing. He does not take a well-­worn point of view and colour it afresh, nor does he picturesquely amplify a single point to display his rhetorical power, nor does he treat us to a hotch-­potch of various 2  Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was published in 1757. John Ruskin discusses the Sublime, initially with reference to the paintings of J. M. W. Turner, in his multi-volume Modern Painters (1843–60).

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opinions and biographical extracts. In the lecture on Wordsworth he redeems that poet from the charge of narrowness and mere Puritanism, and gets decidedly nearer to a clear statement of the peculiar ‘visionary power’ of his mind than anyone else has done. Keats, again, he proves from the letters to have been something very different from the aesthete who once fought a butcher boy of the ordinary legend, to have been a man of just such various qualities of mind as we usually expect from a great poet. In the essay on Shelley’s view of poetry as shown in his prose and poetry he expresses in a concise form his opinion on a very important matter, the relation of poetry to ideas: the specific way of imagination is not to clothe in imagery consciously held ideas; it is to produce half-­consciously a matter from which, when produced, the reader may, if he chooses, extract ideas. Poetry (I must exaggerate to be clear), psychologically considered, is not the expression of ideas or of a view of life; it is their discovery or creation, or rather both discovery and creation in one. The interpretation contained in Hamlet or King Lear was not brought ready-­made to the old stories. What was brought to them was the huge substance of Shakespeare’s imagination, in which all his experience and thought was latent; and this, dwelling and working on the stories with nothing but a dramatic purpose, and kindling into heat and motion, gradually discovered or created in them a meaning and a mass of truth about life, which was brought to birth by the process of composition, but never preceded it in the shape of ideas, and probably never, even after it, took that shape to the poet’s mind.

This too short passage further illustrates the quality of Dr Bradley’s mind. It is suggestive, not creative. He is feeling, and helping us to feel, a way to a truer attitude towards poetry, and doubtless his ideas are destined to find fuller and more notable expression, but for the honesty and freshness of his contribution we cannot be too grateful. Here and in the brilliant lecture on the long poem in Wordsworth’s age he seems by his patient method to have opened channels by which truths of first-­rate significance can now more easily flow into the mind of our time, with which indeed he is more tremblingly in sympathy than any other writer, not a poet, whom we can call to mind. MP: 10 June

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John Davidson, Fleet Street and Other Poems Mr John Davidson had done the best of his verse many years before he disappeared.1 The last volume that contained characteristic work perfect in its kind was A Holiday and Other Poems; it included not only several spirited eclogues, but the in many ways admirable ‘Runnable Stag’. But even in that volume the prose epilogue was disconcerting to those who did not believe that Mr Davidson was destined to regenerate the world, and the ‘testaments’ of even earlier date showed much of a fatal tendency simply to translate his thoughts and opinions into verse.2 This became a well-­established disease in the Mammon dramatic trilogy, in which all that could be admired was the ponderous energy of the verse itself and an occasional page where a fine fancy was elaborated with every aid from his powerful rhetoric.3 The man was strong still, but his strength was dissipated. To succeed he had always at his best had to concentrate himself upon some confined subject, and even then his ‘distance’ was short. This last volume of his verse, Fleet Street and Other Poems, is crammed with his far-­sought faults. Much of it is in blank verse and in couplets which are rhymed blank verse with intruded rhymes. They remind us of John Dyer’s Fleece4 in their ungainly attempt to clothe in verse a matter existing in the writer’s mind on the plane of prose. Take this example from ‘The Crystal Palace’:                  No Idea of its purpose, and no word Can make your glass and iron beautiful. Colossal ugliness may fascinate If something be expressed; and time adopts Ungainliest stone and brick and ruins them To beauty; but a building lacking life, A house that must not mellow or decay?— ’Tis nature’s outcast. Moss and lichen? Stains Or weather? From the first Nature said ‘No! Shine there unblessed, a witness of my scorn! I love the ashlar and the well-­baked clay; 1  In March 1909 Davidson, who lived in Penzance, had drowned himself; but his body would not be discovered until September. 2  See ET’s reviews of Holiday [200], The Testament of a Prime Minister, and The Testament of John Davidson [102], [331]. 3  See reviews [245], [314]. 4  The Fleece: A Poem in Four Books, an epic poem about sheep and the wool-trade, was published in 1757. ET had edited a selection from Dyer, The Poems of John Dyer (1903), but did not care for his work (see [212n.]).

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My seasons can adorn them sumptuously: But you shall stand rebuked till men ashamed, Abhor you, and destroy you and repent!’

This is a favourable specimen. But what is there in it which could not have been as forcibly expressed in the prose of A Random Itinerary?5 The whole attitude of mind in it is incapable of true poetic expression. The poet is reason­ing, and the medium of reasoning is prose: it cannot be converted into poetry by being made elliptical. A good deal of the verse in this book is, indeed, easily convertible into prose. The following lines have only to be printed as prose and they are a plain statement of a plain matter: The terrier laid the trophy at my feet: And neither dog protested when I took The wedge: the overture of their marine Diversion had been played out once for all.

In other places it is necessary to do more than this. For example, the poet sets out to write about London Bridge in verse—­we deliberately say ‘write about’—and begins thus: Much tolerance and genial strength of mind Unbiased witnesses who wish to find The railway-­station possible at all Must cheerfully expend.

Here the first line has only to be put last to make the sentence appear what it really is, a piece of pedestrian journalistic prose. And most of our remarks apply even to the complicated stanzas of the book. The phrases are those of prose crushed into the iron moulds of verse. The writer’s taste was faulty in the extreme. We are far from denying the possibility of making mere description and argument forcible in verse, but it must be in verse specially designed for those purposes, as was the heroic couplet of Dryden or Johnson. Mr Davidson’s is a parody of poetry itself as much as is ‘The Splendid Shilling’,6 and not without a resemblance to that piece. As to the matter itself, easily divisible from the form, there is less than usual to attract attention. There are some descriptions of Nature, but the words thrust upon the writer by the fact that he is using verse are as a rule too much for the charming fancy and observation, as in the descriptions of Epping Forest and of atmospheric 5  Published in 1894. 6  ‘The Splendid Shilling’ (1701/5): Miltonic burlesque by John Phillips (1676–1709), in which a debtor, who writes ‘mournful Verse’, bombastically laments his penury.

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effects in London. ‘Cain’—the dying speech of Cain to his descendants—­ opens with some promise, and the distinction drawn between Abel and himself has a slight interest, but the motive for the murder is as absurd as it is unexpected, and leaves the poem with scant merit as an extravagance. By far the best of all is ‘Two Dogs’—a scene on Bournemouth beach, where the poet throws a stick time after time into the sea and watches the different ways of a mongrel and a pure terrier in retrieving it. It is charming, and full of the characters of the poet and of the dogs, and yet even here we feel at every point that metre has been needlessly superimposed upon the subject in hand. MP: 17 June

Fiona Macleod [William Sharp], The Dominion of Dreams1 It would be unfair to judge William Sharp by the tales in this new volume, The Dominion of Dreams. For certainly he did much better or more imposing work. And yet we believe it would not be unfair to say that the faults so conspicuous in this book were essential to the man and are at the bottom of the disillusion which must sooner or later follow the reading of his other books. Sharp was a clever man and we are not going to be so bold as to pronounce that he was fundamentally insincere. Each reader’s conscience must decide that for itself. But we are of opinion that he was fundamentally insincere, though whether or not he was of the type that is unconscious of itself we are not sure; probably he was. What he did apparently was to concentrate himself upon the making of a jargon of thoughts and words founded on his own knowledge of Celtic life and legend and on other men’s interpretation of it. He was no discoverer, though that need not have prevented him from being sincere, any more than it compelled him to make a recipe by which Celtic studies might be cooked ad infinitum.2 But that is what he did. By reading and with the help of an undoubtedly receptive and sensitive mind he learnt 1  Posthumous reprint of a collection of tales (1899), which includes some verse. On its first appearance, W. B. Yeats had reviewed The Dominion of Dreams in similarly negative terms: ‘Her search for dim resemblances sometimes brings her beyond the borders of coherence’ (B: July 1899). See ET on Macleod’s From the Hills of Dream [279]. 2  For ET on ‘Celticism’, see [68n.].

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something of the cadence, something of the vocabulary, which goes to ­prod­uce the peculiar effect of work which is vaguely but by almost universal consent labelled as Celtic. Often the writing is a not very intelligent cento of Celtic phrases and suggestions, as in the following verse quoted from an imaginary poet in this book: Beware of the White Hound whose baying no man hears,   Though it is the wind that shakes the unsteady stars:   It is the Hound seen of men in old forlorn wars: It is the Hound that hunts the stricken years.   Pale souls in the ultimate shadows see it gleam   Like a long lance o’ the moon, and as a moon-­white beam It comes, and the soul is as blown dust within the wood Wherein the White Hound moves where timeless shadows brood.

We doubt whether a clever man could have convinced himself that he was expressing something he really felt in lines like these, but it may be so. There may be room for doubt concerning a man who says: ‘it was difficult for me to believe that darkness could be fallen, without break, upon the eyes of Alasdair Achanna’, when he meant that it was hard to believe the man had become blind—­who says, when he means that a man was dead, he ‘was no longer among those who dwell visibly on earth’—who says, ‘a brief while’ for ‘a short time’ in order to show that he is a student of style, and ‘smiling momently at times’ out of the simplicity of his heart. But a man guilty a hundred times of such faults and worse needs some excuse and we see none. A man who has some experience of good literature is not content with such a phrase as ‘It was a little eddy of evil bitter music, swift and biting and poisonous as an adder’s tongue’, and to leave it alone as an indication of his villain’s playing. Nor does he tell us that the villain ‘looked as a startled fox does, when, intent, its muscles quiver before flight’, because the sentence is bad and the image bad, and probably invented by a man who never saw a fox, let alone its muscles. Carelessness is probably the explanation of these faults, and it not only often prevents him from finding the good but from making the best of it when it is found. But it is akin to incapacity. The least of his sentences—­take, e.g., ‘the coracle swerved, and the four men were wet with the heavy spray’—betrays the man who has neither known nor imagined what he essays to write down. The very consistency of the atmosphere is an indication of insincerity, sincerity being unaware of itself and open to many surprises. That this atmosphere is a peculiar and powerful one we do not deny. It is full of symbols ignorantly used which can charm the reader even while he condemns the lack of a purpose behind them. Such is the fault of

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the journalist from Macpherson3 down to William Sharp, the fault of the journalist pretending to be something else, using other men’s ideas, which is his right, but with an assumed ardour, which is his condemnation. MP: 24 June

Charles M. Doughty, The Cliffs By magic of words and force of religious and national emotion, Mr Doughty created an ancient Britain which will survive all the archaeologists and historians. That was in The Dawn in Britain.1 Now, in The Cliffs, he creates a modern England of extraordinary clearness and simplicity. It is small wonder that he is a patriot when he sees England like this. Certainly, were England like this, or if it appeared so to Englishmen, and if there were many men with Mr Doughty’s pure and deeply and widely-­rooted love for it, there would be no need to talk about Dreadnoughts.2 If there is any broad criti­ cism to be made on the new poem, it is that the scene of its action is supposed to be this country today, but that in reality it is an England at least as far back as Nelson, if not as Raleigh. It is impossible to say how Mr Doughty produces this effect. It is not by the one or two archaisms, as when he speaks of ‘hatted wives’ of Wales; and besides, he introduces a boy from Smith and Son’s, selling the ‘piper’. No, it is by the quality of his mind, and by the fact, as seems to me, that a man must go back a long way to find an England which is more than an abstraction. England as she is today is difficult to see, and impossible to Mr Doughty. For him, all are degenerate except the workers with their hands and the womanly women. He detests our vulgar writing and speech. But we have only to hurry to arms at a rumour of invasion and to embrace the flag, and he can see that there is some good in us. He is, however, though the completest of patriots, as far from the modern Tory as from the Liberal. I say it regretfully, because I had at first hoped that the subject of the poem would introduce it to the 3  For ET’s review of J. S. Smart, James Macpherson: An Episode in Literature, see [151]. 1  See reviews [183], [208], [240]. It may have boosted Doughty’s reputation that ET’s DC and MP reviews of The Cliffs appeared on the same day: the former signed, the latter, not. 2  HMS Dreadnought was an innovative battleship, launched by the British navy in 1906; the name of this first ship becoming the term for the whole class. Dreadnoughts triggered a new naval arms race between the UK and Germany. ‘Super-dreadnoughts’ came later.

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otherwise impervious breasts of readers of poetry who read nothing later than Tennyson except Mr Kipling and Mr Stephen Phillips.3 Nevertheless, to give his book a chance of thus stealing into the enemy’s camp, I will point out that Mr Doughty believes in large numbers of Dreadnoughts, and strongly disapproves, if he has ever heard of it, of women’s suffrage. The subject of the book is the invasion of England. An old shepherd who fought in the Crimea is keeping his sheep on the Suffolk coast, when a German airship arrives. The aeronauts talk of war while he lies concealed. Stepping out, he is murdered before they take flight. In the next part Britannia’s Temple is seen in ruin. The cause says Truth, is covetousness, malice and ignominy of self-­love. Truth orders the Elves to bring English souls to be weighed. They prove light, but the talk of the Elves is full of humour, as well as of indignation, at ‘the cockney malice of mad Parliaments’, and the like. In part three the body of the shepherd is found, and there is other evidence of an intended invasion. England is warned and awakes to arms, in spite of the fact that it is a Sunday, and the telegraph service bad, and everyone away for the week-­end. The villagers arm themselves with axes, pitchforks, shovels, scythes, and bills, when they have not guns. So great is the breath of patriotism that the Temple of the second part is built anew (part four); the Elves play together, and finally witness, with Truth, a vision of the British heroes, beginning with Caractacus;4 and one of the Heavenly Spirits reports the new activity of Britain and her Colonies at the news of invasion, while another announces that the enemy’s navy is recalled. In the fifth part all is peace, and a patriotic song is sung, while the vicar of the shepherd’s parish embraces the flag. I can imagine that even patriots will say at once that this is a subject unsuited to poetry. The reply is that a poet has chosen it. He has made a beautiful poem, partly by a genuine response to the occasion, still more by subduing the matter to his own vision and need. He has perhaps been compelled to admit some things which do not allow of his method of treatment; but that is not certain, and in any case such things are few and of small account. What he does achieve is to bring before us a country which could be no other than England, so that we see its greatness, its trouble, its physical beauty, its citizens moved to its defence. It is a little sea-­girt England; its men and women, its past, its shores, its fields and villages, its flowers, are what we know. But it is a spiritual country, too. It is full of the poet’s own soul-­stuff, of 3  Stephen Phillips: inexplicably popular poet, see [16n.]. 4  Celtic chieftain of the first century, who resisted the Roman invasion of Britain: a prominent figure in Doughty’s Dawn in Britain.

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the soul-­stuff of past ages. It has a life of its own. It is a genuine creation of the imagination, just as is the country in Cymbeline. The critic who could praise it justly would need something of Mr Doughty’s learning, historic sense, and religion. Without them, I cannot feel sure that I grasp the poem as a whole. We have grown unfamiliar with poetry on this scale. We prefer short poems, and in long poems we seek for the minor excellences, and they are here in plenty. The whole portrait and episode of the old shepherd on the cliffs is indubitably fine, broad, simple, and individual. Then both the long scenes where the Elves appear are wonderfully delicate and natural. They are as lively as the fairy scenes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and, strange as it may seem, they are less theatrical and more natural; men, elves, flowers, all are touched to life by Mr Doughty’s poetry, by the truth of his feeling, the fitness of his language, the perfection of his metrical style. Then, again, the character of the sexton who is to bury the old shepherd is another vivid piece of life. There is, in fact, enough in the detail of the poem to content us of today, to content the connoisseur as well as the simple lover of the older authentic English poetry. It is to be noted also that the modern subject and dramatic form have brought out qualities not exhibited in The Dawn in Britain and Adam Cast Forth.5 The criticism of modern England and Germany in the aeronauts’ talk is wonderfully vigorous and pungent and full of satiric power. There is also more verbal felicity of phrase than in the statelier poems. Above all, the poem confirms our opinion that Mr Doughty’s poetry is not skin-­deep, is no mere accomplishment, but a noble exercise of the man’s whole nature. Such poetry is not to be found elsewhere in England today, nor has often been since the death of Wordsworth. DC: 22 July *** Mr Charles M. Doughty is now fairly well known because he has lately been honoured by Oxford University and because an abridgment of his Arabia Deserta, known as Travels in Arabia, has been praised on every hand,6 and is, in fact, for richness of matter and beauty of treatment unequalled by any book of travel in the English language. But his poems are still all but unknown, though they have received the praise and the neglect which seem to mark them as exceptional work. The Dawn in Britain was a blank verse epic of Early Britain, in which were combined elements from Geoffrey of 5  For ET’s reviews of Adam Cast Forth, see [297]. 6  That includes ET’s own review: see [297n.].

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Monmouth, the Roman historians, legend, and archaeology, so as to make a poem full of a massive national dignity and an exquisite human and natural beauty. Adam Cast Forth was a narrative, in dramatic form, describing the meeting of Adam and Eve after they were cast forth from Eden, their atonement, their earliest home on the wintry earth, and the birth of their children. For an English parallel to the effect of this poem we should have to search among the best of Blake’s illustrations to the Book of Job. All Mr Doughty’s work gives us a feeling of a foundation of learning, tradition, and temperament of quite extraordinary solidity and steadfastness, such that even had he no poetic gift his utterances would be respectable, we had almost said venerable. But the poetic gift is undeniable. On the surface, indeed, he has little charm, no prettiness of diction, no obvious sweetness of rhythm, no mere graciousness of manner or theme. He is, indeed, every bit as austere as Milton, whom he further resembles in his studied style. It is this style which is, and for a generation may remain, the chief obstacle to lovers of poetry outside the learned, the curious, and those of a robust and generous taste. For it includes a hundred or so unusual words, chiefly archaic, and its structure is more classical and synthetic than English, or at least more ancient than modern. Here is an example from his new poem, The Cliffs; it is Truth speaking: I will, High Ruler of a thousand spheres, Aye rolling forth, to never-­ending years, Take thought for this.

Naturally the ordinary reader is put off by this, and is not consoled by learning that this is no occasional trick, but a system from which there is no departure. Mr Doughty’s English is as unconventional as Spenser’s, Donne’s, Milton’s, Thomson’s,7 and it is being received as Wordsworth’s was in his day. It is a new language. Yet it is exceedingly easy to learn to read. Once it is learned it is clear how genuine and in a real sense natural to Mr Doughty this language is, and how it arose to satisfy the need of a new order of beauty. The test of a style is its expressiveness and its whole effect. Mr Doughty’s expresses a beauty of thought, of human life, and of Nature which is his own, but is also wide, simple, and entirely without show, mannerism, or morbidity. It is as English as Chaucer, and the ballads, English avowedly, and English down to the roots. One of the supreme proofs of a good style is that every word is dignified and enriched by it, and the writer may use a common phrase and be sure of avoiding any of its common effect or lack of effect simply because all the words around it give it a meaning in accordance with his intention. 7  James Thomson (1700–48): Scottish poet, author of The Seasons (1726–30).

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Mr W. H. Hudson, for example, uses the words ‘rosy maiden’ in his Afoot in England without any commonplace association of sentiment; but so as to convey a full and lovely impression where a follower of Walter Pater might have used a dozen choice and beautiful words and left us with the taste of words only.8 Mr Doughty is a master of language in this way. He gets the utmost value out of every word. This is why he has to do little more than name a few common English flowers to give us a sense of the ancientness of the earth and the fresh beauty of its children. The Cliffs is in some ways the most remarkable triumph of his style. [. . .] MP: 22 July

John M. Synge, Poems and Translations J. M. Synge gave what is probably its finest comedy to the modern stage, and though he wrote in prose, it was of that rich poetic texture which was so common in Elizabethan drama, and has been so rare ever since. It was, therefore, with some surprise that we learnt he had written verses that he wished to publish.1 But altogether they fill only twenty or thirty pages, or not that, for some of the pieces are translations from French and Italian poetry into prose. And as they are small and few, so they are spare in character; they are poetry of the most unquestionable kind, but poetry shrunk almost to its bones. There is nothing here with the exuberance and charm that is found in some of the speeches of Pegeen and the Playboy himself. Synge did not express over again in verse what he had put in prose into the mouths of Nora Burke or the Douls, though ‘Beg-­Innish’ is a song they might have sung, and

8  ET was then also reviewing W.  H.  Hudson’s Afoot in England. Praising Hudson’s—­very different—­style, he uses the adjectives ‘clear’, ‘natural’, and ‘unnoticeable’: ‘his style bears on the face of it no sign of the magic which it possesses’ (DC: 26 July). 1  In 1907 ET had enthusiastically reviewed the text of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World: see [249]. In June 1909 he attended a performance of the play, asking GB (16 July): ‘But The Playboy? Have you read and seen it? I daresay it is the greatest play of modern times. . . . I felt it to be utterly new & altogether fine.’ On 1 September he asked: ‘Have you seen Synge’s poems? They are raw poetry & something more—­wonderfully lean & bare & yet compelling us to clothe them in the warm & radiant life which they disdain’ (LGB, 189, 190–1).

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‘Patch-­Shaneen’ a ballad they would easily have understood.2 The man himself, as Mr Yeats tells us, was ‘a solitary, undemonstrative man, never asking pity, nor complaining, nor seeking sympathy but in this book’s momentary cries’. Momentary cries they are, indeed. They betray nothing, or the little they reveal makes us aware how much is left out. They beget admiration, love, and also awe as at the darkness that follows upon a flash. The constant quality is simplicity, and it is often saturnine, as in the two verses written ‘After looking at one of A. E.’s pictures’, and entitled ‘The Passing of the Shee’: Adieu, sweet Angus, Maeve, and Fand, Ye plumed yet skinny Shee, That poets played with hand in hand To learn their ecstasy. We’ll stretch in Red Dan Sally’s ditch, And drink in Tubber fair, Or poach with Red Dan Philly’s bitch The badger and the hare.

And it can be quaint, as in: Thrush, linnet, stare and wren, Brown lark beside the sun, Take thought of kestrel, sparrow-­hawk, Birdlime, and roving gun. You great-­great-­grand-­children Of birds I’ve listened to, I think I robbed your ancestors When I was young as you.3

It is individual chiefly by its very impersonality of manner. The pieces were written during a period of nearly twenty years—­about one a year. They are the work of a man who knew his art, whether or not they are all he wrote. They are exact and lucid as Greek epigrams, and most of them seem to have been written without remembering any poetry. They overstate nothing, which is more than can be said of most very good verse. They are notes such as a man sitting alone might scratch on a window at an inn, or on the dust of a road, or in a letter that was never posted. They add, if that be possible, to our sense of the truth and sincerity of the plays. The 2  Nora Burke: main character in Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen (1903); Martin and Mary Doul: blind beggars, characters in The Well of the Saints (1905). 3  The poem is ‘In Glencullen’.

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translations into prose are chiefly from Petrarch, and the Irish-­English is a pleasure to read, giving them a genuineness that a verse translation is unlikely to have. But the effort is a tour-­de-­force for which Petrarch was hardly the proper occasion. Villon, however, it suits perfectly, and ‘An Old Woman’s Lamentations’ from that poet is—­almost as good as some of the speeches of Mary and Martin Doul; we cannot say more. The book is the richer for several introductory pages by Mr Yeats which tell us something about Synge. Like all Mr Yeats’s prose, they are music. DC: 26 July

A Treasury of South African Poetry and Verse, edited by Edward Heath Crouch A Treasury of South African Poetry and Verse is a title which awakes no peculiar expectations. Critics and public must long ago have given up the idea that a new country’s literature will have anything new about it.1 Except in local colour it differs not at all from that in an old country. The best Australian poets are those who come nearest to being second-­rate English poets. They are echoes in form and vocabulary and even in feeling. Of the energy and freshness of youth they have nothing. The brawny pioneer himself does not write, while the sensitive man who does probably finds more cause for dejection in a new than an old land. Such folk-­song as they develop or carry on, if we may judge from the collection of Bush song published a few years ago,2 degenerates into something cockney and smacking of cheap spirits. If ever a beautiful poem expresses the feeling of the pioneer, either in its wistfulness or in its exuberant carelessness, it is by a man who was left behind. In Mr  Edward Heath Crouch’s South African anthology there is nothing to belie these foregone conclusions. There is plenty of local colour; and yet even this is very often a matter rather of new words than of emotions coloured by new things. We have a feeling that the writers have listened to some such advice as Mr Crouch gives in his introduction: 1  Cf. ET on Australian poetry in review of Rio Grande’s Last Race by A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson [79]. 2  Paterson edited The Old Bush Songs (1905): an anthology not very positively reviewed by ET, who found ‘little to enjoy in them without their appropriate melodies’: see [79n.].

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Certain it is that no country should oftener pause in its ardent materialistic pursuits to find in poetry that relief and support in its strenuous life, than South Africa. We cannot be too often reminded of Matthew Arnold’s assurance, that ‘more and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us’.3

Yet we doubt very much the value of such advice. The art produced in a ‘pause’ in ‘ardent materialistic pursuits’ is not likely to be anything but trivial. The individual writers represented here are no doubt perfectly sincere, though it does not follow that their words also are. But their style reflects, if not their own, then their compatriots’ ardent pursuits in other directions. Their verses do not spring out of South African life and its peculiar conditions, but out of discontent with it or a desire to gild it and make it other than it is; or, if there is an occasional attempt at facing the facts, it is in the nature of a journalistic chose vue.4 One of the few poems which seemed to us to express a distinctly South African or at least Colonial emotion is not included here. It is Mr Perceval Gibbon’s picture of a man singing a music-­hall song in the silence of the veld at night.5 It is not a great poem, but it is one which could not well have been written by an English verse-­writer of the second order who had never left his own country. Many, perhaps most, of the poems in this book could have been so written; the colour could have been got from books, so unessential is it. In the whole book there is nothing more effective than Thomas Pringle’s ‘Afar in the Desert’. Pringle, who was born in 1789 and died in 1834, was ‘the father of South African poetry’. He was ‘sick of the Present’ and ‘clung to the Past’, so ‘flew to the desert, afar from man’, and there ‘a lone exile remembered of none, My high aims abandoned, my good acts undone, Aweary of all that is under the sun’, he tells us: Afar in the desert I love to ride, With the silent Bush-­boy alone by my side: 3  Crouch quotes from Arnold’s essay ‘The Study of Poetry’, first published as introduction to Thomas Humphry Ward’s four-volume anthology The English Poets (1880); reprinted in Essays in Criticism: Second Series (1888). 4  Thing (too deliberately) seen. 5  Perceval Gibbon (1879–1926): mainly a short-story writer, also a literary journalist and warcorrespondent. Gibbon (whom ET knew) was born in Wales, and travelled extensively in several countries, including South Africa where he worked for the Rand Daily Mail. The poem mentioned here is ‘Koodoo Outspan’, which ET had singled out when reviewing Gibbon’s collection African Items (1903). The poem begins: ‘We were camped at Koodoo Outspan’, and the campers are reminded of home when ‘Kaffir Jack’ sings ‘Some forgotten gutter-song’, thus becoming an ‘uncouth evangel / Of the London music-hall’. ET notes that ‘Several other pieces contain just and moving sentiment, of which a better artist could have made really admirable poems’ (DC: 27 February 1904). Six poems by Gibbon appear in the Treasury.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 O’er the brown Karoo, where the bleating cry Of the springbok’s fawn sounds plaintively; And the timorous quagga’s whistling neigh Is heard by the fountain at twilight grey; When the zebra wantonly tosses his mane, With wild hoof scouring the desolate plain; And the fleet-­footed ostrich over the waste Speeds like a horseman who travels in haste, Hieing away to the home of her rest, Where she and her mate have scooped their nest, Far hid from the pitiless plunderer’s view In the pathless depths of the parched Karoo.

He is artless enough, but he shows a truer feeling for the country, and, what is more surprising, a deeper sympathy with the native than the succeeding writers. He has no individual style, and yet an attractive personality somehow gets itself expressed. But the scores of later men do little but challenge comparison with English minor poets, and usually unsuccessfully. [. . .] MP: 30 August

Laurence Binyon, London Visions, Collected and Augmented; Selections from the Poems of Lionel Johnson; etc. There is some very good work in Mr Laurence Binyon’s London Visions,1 and it is a pleasant sign that they should be reprinted now, after ten years’ life in their original paper covers. In some ways this poet’s work ought to be more readily welcomed than that of his contemporaries, or of most of them. For it is intellectual, and it is to be understood by the intelligence in the first place. It does make a deeper appeal at times, but only after it has sunk in through the intelligence. It is consciously built up, word by word, by a man to whom nothing is given without asking many times. Hence its merit and its fault. It is full of the observation, of the emotional reflection, of a serious and tender mind, looking fairly at modern things, and sometimes it reaches a great depth of pity and a great height of severity in the expression, as in ‘The Statues’. The statues are really the miserable ones whom we pass in the street: 1  This review is kinder in tone than ET’s response to London Visions in November 1908 (see [330]), but similar in spirit.

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Behold them, stricken, silent, weak, The maimed, the mute, the halt, the blind, Condemned amid defeat to seek The thing which they shall never find. They haunt the shadows of your ways In masks of perishable mould: Their souls a changing flesh arrays But they are changeless from of old. Their lips repeat an empty call, But silence wraps their thoughts around. On them, like snow, the ages fall; Time muffles all this transient sound. [. . .]

The poem ranks with several of Matthew Arnold’s, such as that on a gypsy child. But in it Mr Binyon has risen out of the particular into the universal, and his classical manner is suited to this mode. In too many of the others he has not succeeded in doing this, and for line after line the writing man at least can see his effort far too plainly to enjoy. His words are well chosen, but they are obviously chosen, and they have not in perfection either the natural or the elaborate beauty of verse. Needless to say, therefore, they have seldom any movement that is pleasing in itself. In both these matters, in choice of words and in movement, Mr Binyon’s work does not equal that of Lionel Johnson. We are very glad to see some of his verses reprinted here, and could have wished for an illuminating preface. We are not told who made the selection, but it is only sixty pages long and omits some of the best known and also some of the best. For example, ‘Oxford Nights’,2 one of the few memorable bookish poems, is not here. Some of the pieces look rather unlike themselves, when we recall their effect of ten years ago. They have not worn very well. Johnson’s gifts were slender and few, but they were used at times with an intensity which many a robuster nature might have envied. ‘The Church of a Dream’, ‘The Age of a Dream’, ‘Hawker of Morwenstow’, for example, all in this volume, preserve the very sound of a human voice, a thing which words are not easily persuaded to do. As a lover of old, of stately, of natural, of sorrowful things, Johnson has few equals in the verse of reverie. He was neither a thinker nor an observer, nor yet with all his melancholy exactly a sufferer, but rather an Aeolian harp 2  ‘Oxford Nights’ evokes Johnson’s late-night reading in his Oxford college-room, a scenario with which ET could identify: ‘Beside my chair the great ghosts throng, / Each tells his story, sings his song’.

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s­ ensitive to the least movements of the thoughts and sufferings of the world, or a mirror hung high above the road to Camelot. But as most of us are also harps and mirrors of a vastly inferior make we are grateful for these, for ‘The Age of a Dream’: Imageries of dreams reveal a gracious age: Black armour, falling lace, and altar lights at morn. The courtesy of Saints, their gentleness and scorn, Lights on an earth more fair than shone from Plato’s page: The courtesy of knights, fair calm and sacred rage: The courtesy of love, sorrow for love’s sake borne. Vanished, those high conceits! Desolate and forlorn, We hunger against hope for that lost heritage. [. . .]

DC: 4 September

Arthur Symons, The Romantic Movement in English Poetry Mr Symons’s book deals with practically every poet and reputed poet who happened to be born before the year 1800 and to die after it. It is a quaint rule to make, but doubtless he had reasons for it; and we should not have alluded to the matter if he had not so slavishly obeyed this rule as to exclude Chatterton. He excludes Chatterton and includes the two Beatties, John Wolcot, William Hayley, Egerton Brydges, Barry Cornwall and a score of others who do not concern him, since they call only for neglect or scorn.1 And all are treated in strictly chronological order, according to the dates of their birth. 1  Thomas Chatterton (1752–70), who faked poems by an imaginary fifteenth-century poet (‘Thomas Rowley’), and committed suicide, was an iconic figure for the Romantic poets: e.g., Keats dedicated Endymion to his memory; in ‘Resolution and Independence’ Wordsworth mourns ‘the marvellous Boy’. James Beattie (1735–1803), George Beattie (1786–1823): Scottish poets (unrelated); John Wolcot (1738–1819): author of satirical poems under the name ‘Peter Pindar’; William Hayley (1745–1820): friend of Blake and Cowper, well-known poet in his day; (Sir) Samuel Egerton Brydges (1762–1837): mainly known as a bibliographer; Barry Cornwall: pen-name of Bryan Waller Procter (1787–1874), who was a Commissioner in Lunacy. Symons generally gives little space and short shift to these obscure figures: e.g., he says: ‘No one has the right to bore the world . . . with as little excuse as Hayley. He was a rich man, and, in the days of patrons, the prodigal patron of his own ineptitudes’ (Symons, Romantic Movement [London: Archibald Constable, 1909], 33).

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But it is a wonderful book. No living critic has in equal measure Mr Symons’s three gifts of taste, of knowledge, and of writing. This book is by very much his best. It is the very marrow of his thought. There is no superfluity. If anything, it is at times too concentrated, and the part is apt to be greater than the whole. It is a peculiarity of his that he thinks the poetry of the Romantic Movement not only a new kind but actually more poetical. He says in his introduction that— Poetry at the beginning of the nineteenth century wastes surprisingly little of its substance, and one main reason of this is that it realises, as its main concern, what to most of the poets of the past had been, though their existence depended upon it, but lightly regarded,—that imaginative atmosphere which is the very breath of poetry, and adds strangeness to beauty.

‘Lightly regarded’, he says, as if an eye which came to regard it consciously and seriously were likely to have more of it. And the final words of this introduction are: It was realised that the end of poetry was to be poetry; and that no story-­ telling or virtue or learning, or any fine purpose, could make amends for the lack of that one necessity. Thus it may be affirmed that in studying this period we are able to study whatever is essential in English poetry; that is, whatever is essential in poetry.

Yet in the whole book it is hard to learn what poetry is except that it must have a poetical substance—­which prose also may have—­and that it must have regularly recurring rhythms which distinguish it from prose. What makes the book so good is not this definition, but Mr Symons’s own taste, which he is not articulate enough to explain, but which he applies in a very nearly faultless manner to half a dozen great poets and a score of lesser ones. His pages are often subtle and brilliant. Lurking behind them and giving its unique quality to the book is this unexpressed personality and taste which, we feel, is far finer than anything he can say. If only he could have expressed it! He is in possession of a secret which would be more valuable than all the criticism even Coleridge has left to us, if it could be published. It cannot be. Even so its mundane and visible workings in this book are fascinating enough, so much so that it was only at the end that we really perceived that though many fine things had been said about poetry and about individual poets, the secret remains hid. It is a tantalising thought, and we wonder if Mr Symons also is aware of it. Was he aware of it when he said that Blake was ‘the only poet who is a poet in essence’? For if so would he not have stopped short at Blake, have burnt the preceding pages on Wolcot, Hannah More and

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the rest, and have concentrated his attention upon Blake until the ‘poet in essence’ stood revealed? Or, again, when he came to Coleridge and dis­ covered that ‘Kubla Khan’ may be used as a touchstone, that ‘it will determine the poetic value of any lyric poem which you place beside it’, did he entirely know what he was saying? Was it not as much as to say that anyone who—­like himself—­knew why ‘Kubla Khan’ was pure poetry, could recognise the same qualities in other poems, and therefore had no need of ‘Kubla Khan’ or any other poem as a touchstone? For it is certain that many men and women whom that poem has enchanted have made hundreds of mistakes in judging lyric poems, needless to say, by living poets, but also by the dead. If pure poetry is so unmistakable thing, if it is independent of its age, as Mr Symons believes, if it can be tested by touchstones, there is no need of error any more, and we could wish that he might be persuaded to come down among us and award the palm without the dust to the living. [. . .] DC: 7 October *** Mr Arthur Symons has for a long time been one of the most interesting of ­writers, not merely for his fastidious accomplishment, but for his long-­continued development and promise. He had reached one kind of perfection a good many years ago in The Symbolist Movement and in London Nights, and another kind again in the more recent poems of The Fool of the World, and the prose of his introduction to John Clare’s poetry.2 He has grown more austere, more himself, or at any rate less conspicuously of a certain school. And now The Romantic Movement in English Poetry is seldom recognisable as his, except that no other critic of poetry has so fine a taste to serve so considerable a scholarship. The introduction to Clare’s poetry stood alone among Mr Symons’s writings when it appeared, but by far the greater part of this new book is of the same class, as closely knit and as pure of mannerism. The book is not the variation upon a well-­known air, which is usually offered as criticism of the Romantic Movement of the Nineteenth Century. The movement is not treated as a movement at all. Each writer is taken separately, and for the most part Mr Symons leaves it to his readers to flounder in generalisations if they will, for he gives them few. He takes it for granted that genius is always above its age, and that every genius is essentially independent of every other. His object has been to face each of the poets—­good and bad, an extraordinary multitude of them, in fact everyone 2  See ET’s reviews of The Symbolist Movement in Literature [305], The Fool of the World [222], Poems by John Clare [342]. Symons’s London Nights, a collection of poems, was published in 1895.

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who was born before and died after 1800—to face them afresh and define their qualities as they appear by contact with their sensitive critic’s mind. To distinguish poetry . . . where it exists (he writes), to consider it in its essence, apart from the accidents of the age in which it came into being, to define its qualities in itself; that is the business of the true critic or student. And in order to do this he must cast aside all theories of evolution or the natural growth of genius, and remember that genius is always an exception, always something which would be a disease if it were not a divine gift. He must clear his mind of all limiting formulas, whether of milieu, Weltschmerz, or mode. He must disregard all schools or movements as other than convenient and inter­ changeable labels. He must seek, in short, only poetry, and he must seek poetry in the poet, and nowhere else.

It must be said at once that whether or not this is a possible creed, [it?] is one of very many remarkable passages, full of close thinking and genuine feeling, while the writing is the purest and most exact that Mr Symons has ever achieved. He is excellent on Blake, on Coleridge, on Byron, and he says really new things based perhaps on a more complete comprehension than that of any predecessor. And yet we have been struck almost as much by the doubtful philosophy which Mr Symons holds, if he does not always obey, as by the brilliance of what he does with or in spite of it. We are of opinion that this philosophy is not only doubtful but radically wrong and likely to mislead. It first appears in the Introduction, where Mr Symons tells us that ‘No one has ever written more lucidly or more tenderly than Chaucer, more nobly or more musically than Spenser; but to Chaucer poetry was exclusively the telling of a story, and to Spenser it was partly picture-­making and partly allegory.’ And, again, while he admits that ‘there is not so much poetry to be found anywhere in the world’ as in the Elizabethan; ‘it is more often than not in scattered splend­ours and fragments severally alive’. It is in the Nineteenth Century that he finds poetry more pure and simple than in any earlier age. Poetry then he thinks ‘wastes surprisingly little of its substance’ because it ‘realises, as its main concern, what to most poets of the past had been, though their existence depended on it, but lightly regarded,—that imaginative atmosphere which is the very breath of poetry, and adds strangeness to beauty’. It is not only poetry of a new kind but is more thoroughly poetry: ‘It was realised that the end of poetry was to be poetry’. This looks very much like a revival and extension of Poe’s opinion that there could be no such thing as a long poem.3 And so we find 3  This issue recurs in ET’s quarrel with Symons as an Aesthetic critic (see Introduction [xlix]). His review of The Symbolist Movement had similarly attacked Symons for endorsing Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘opinion’, expressed in ‘The Poetic Principle’ (1848). For ET on Poe, see [451].

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him criticising a poem like ‘Tintern Abbey’ and telling us that ‘we have to unravel the splendours, and, if we can, forget the rest’. Apparently his advice to poets in general would have been Keats’s advice to Shelley—­to ‘load every rift with ore’, as if poetry were a precious substance to be procured at great cost, or by a great adventure like pearls or ivory.4 In one place he actually says: ‘Opium might have helped to make Southey a poet’, as if a man might procure poetry at the cost of ruining his stomach and moral fibre.5 The same heresy lurks in what he says of Keats: ‘passion was not less a disease to him than the disease of which he died, or than the act of writing verse’. Now, we should have been prepared to grant Mr Symons, for the time being, some of these extraordinary assumptions if he had not written his essay on Keats. That poet, in whom there is no personal utterance but only ‘an enchantment which seems to have invented itself ’, so that ‘we think of him as of a flattering mirror, in which the face of beauty becomes more beautiful; not as of the creator of beauty’—that poet is the most perfect example so far of the writer who has taken his own or Mr  Symons’s advice. And never­the­less, in finding ‘numberless faults’ in Keats, he has to admit that ‘however closely we may look, and however many faults we may find, we shall end, as we began, by realising that they do not essentially matter’. It is a fatal admission. It is one which can easily be so extended as to prove that the critic was on a wrong track, had accepted an imperfectly tested preference of his own, when he found only ‘scattered splendours and fragments severally alive’ in the Elizabethans, when he believed that he thought some of ‘Tintern Abbey’ unnecessary, when he allowed himself to except from certain poems a stanza, and even from certain stanzas a line which was not ore. The fact seems to be that in this critic’s composition the literary aesthete is too predominant still, as at one time it was supreme.

4  In a letter to Shelley (16 August 1820) Keats says: ‘You I am sure will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and “load every rift” of your subject with ore . . . And is this not extraordinary talk for the writer of Endymion? whose mind was like a pack of scattered cards.’ 5  ET knows whereof he speaks: in his early twenties, drawn to fin-de-siècle concepts (which Symons clearly retains) of the artistic personality, he had himself become quasi-addicted to opium. Hence, in part, his love for Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. In a letter written (November 1903) during a period of physical and mental ill-health, he says: ‘I wonder if my indiscretions and intemperance in alcohol, opium and tobacco, have at last taken effect. They have been serious, but 2 years ago they became far less so, and in the past 9 months I have lived moderately in every way, unless (which is unlikely) I have worked or walked too much’ (SL, 27).

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Several instances might be given to show that fortunately this too exclusive philosophy has not been perfectly followed in practice, but it has fettered him nevertheless. For it is an attempt to exalt a personal habit into a law. It is his habit to look for that loading of every rift with ore, and undoubtedly it has been valuable to him and is interesting to us. But it is not his whole nature, which is far too subtle for that. His whole nature has guided him to a very notable reconsideration of the romantic movement; it was by an error that he came to attribute so much importance to that one side of it as to think it a judge instead of a witness. He has lighted upon many truths. But the truth he cannot extricate. He cannot show us what lies in his own mind behind such statements as that Blake is ‘the only poet who is a poet in essence’, Wordsworth ‘the supreme master of poetical style’, Shelley one who cannot ‘write unpoetically’, Keats one to whom ‘the thing itself and the emotion were indistinguishable’. MP: 20 January 1910

Rudyard Kipling, Actions and Reactions Mr Kipling is as successful as usual in his new book. It contains eight stories which will not surprise his readers. ‘An Habitation Enforced’ tells of an American millionaire’s settlement in the dear beautiful old English home of his wife’s forefathers. ‘Garm’ is about a soldier and his dog and their perfect affection. ‘The Puzzler’ describes the visit of a Colonial Minister to a Law Lord at his country retreat which began with a chase after an organ-­grinder’s monkey and ended, nevertheless (or therefore), in the accomplishment of a matter of immense importance. ‘The Gihon Hunt’ shows how two Englishmen established a pack of foxhounds in Ethiopia and governed a province while seeming only to hunt. ‘A Deal in Cotton’ is the story of the marvellous beginning of a cotton plantation in Africa. ‘The House Surgeon’ is of a house that was for some time desolated by the discontented spirit of one who had fallen from a window in it—­accidentally, but according to rumour intentionally—­ and died. And so on. At the end of each is a poem, to draw the moral or enforce it. It is the combination of strength and tenderness that makes Mr Kipling’s work remarkable. Or would these virtues of his be more accurately named brutality and sentimentality? It depends on the point of view; and the point of

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view depends on whether the style of these three hundred pages appears to you vigorous, manly speech, or the ranting and whining of an unpleasantly accented unpleasant voice.1 Both views are possible, and we propose to give a few examples from this book which may simplify the choice between the two. The two virtues which we will call strength and tenderness are nearly always found here in combination, as, for example, where the woodman, Billy Beartup, ‘lays his broad axe at the feet of ’ the American millionaire’s wife—­an act which few other authors can have witnessed. That story has, however, more of the tenderness than the strength. The millionaire succumbs to the beauty of the Kentish countryside where he goes at first only to restore his nerves: his wife curtsies to the old house, saying ‘Cha-­armed to meet you, I’m sure . . . George, this is history I can understand. We began here.’ She discovers her maiden name on the floor of her pew at church. She kisses both door-­posts of the old house which they have bought, when she finds that she is to be a mother in England. ‘Be good to me’, she addresses the posts. ‘You know! You’ve never failed in your duty yet.’ And then the poem at the end implies that English soil actually calls American millionaires to come and settle on it: I am the land of their fathers,   In me the virtue stays; I will bring back my children   After certain days.

The verses ought to be invaluable to estate agents in Kent, Sussex, and Surrey, especially on gravel soils. [. . .] The virtues are only latent in ‘The Puzzler’, as when the magnificent Law Lord with the nineteen-­inch collar ‘lobs off at a trot which would not have disgraced a boy of seventeen’. The story shows that high imperial business is best accomplished in flannels—­it is a kind of moral version of the story of Nero fiddling while Rome was burning. Even in ‘The Mother Hive’ the bees talk, not like Moth and Mustardseed, but like cockney soldiers after a wet night in their rough island strength. In the tale of ‘The Gihon Hunt’ a certain Sheikh illustrates the two virtues by weeping over a dead foxhound as if it had been his son. Later on, the caricature of a humane reformer is introduced with consuming mirth in order that we may be prepared for the moral verses at the end, where Gallio, the 1  The review is headed ‘Vigour or Rant?’ ET commented to Walter de la Mare (14 October): ‘Alas, I could not say all I feel about Kipling in the Saturday Review. I should have been taken for a Little Englander’ (PTP, 72). ‘Little Englander’ then signified, not a parochial patriot, but an antiImperialist, an opponent of the Empire’s expansion.

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too-­long-­abused Gallio, sings a triumphant song, disdaining the ‘crazed Provincials’ like St Paul:2 One thing only I see most clear,   As I pray you also see. Claudius Caesar hath set me here   Rome’s Deputy to be. It is Her peace that ye go to break—   Not mine, nor any king’s, But, touching your clamour of ‘conscience sake’,   I care for none of these things!

The strong man knows when to be only strong and can shed his tenderness with ease. That is the consummation to which the stories lead us. Is it really strength and tenderness? Claudius Caesar might think so. SR: 16 October

William Watson, New Poems Poets may be divided according as they have little or much in common with ordinary men.1 The poets of the early eighteenth century must have had much in common with the majority of their contemporaries; their usual attitude of mind is one in no way unfitted for everyday social intercourse. Pope might have talked the Essay on Man before writing it. The same might be said in different degrees of other poets, and among them Lord Tennyson. In reading them we are astonished by their knowledge or by the depth or quickness of their thought, but however great our difficulty or admiration we are not 2  Kipling has characteristically lauded the British Empire by invoking imperial Rome. Lucius Junius Gallio was Proconsul of Achaea/Achaia in Greece (51–2 ce), when the local Jews brought charges against St Paul. Gallio dismissed the charges in order to maintain Roman impartiality between different faiths. The event is recorded in Acts of the Apostles XVIII.12–17, where we are told: ‘And Gallio cared for none of those things.’ 1  ET would toughen this approach to Watson in his subsequent review of Sable and Purple with Other Poems, the title-poem of which laments the death of Edward VII: ‘Mr Watson takes an interest in his times, and very much as an ordinary man does. His distinction is his magnificent deportment. He can put a leading article into the form of a sonnet which will deceive ninety-nine celebrated critics out of a hundred. . . . Mr Watson is always open to the accusation of writing English like a dead language, and never more so than in this poem [the title-poem]’ (MP: 22 June 1910).

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aware of any considerable barrier between us and them. We might even fancy that we could ourselves write like that, had we the gift of writing. But no ordinary man could fancy himself writing the ‘Ode to the West Wind’, or ‘Kubla Khan’, however his gifts might be increased. The poet who has most in common with the majority of his contemporaries might be expected to appeal to them most during his lifetime. Of living writers Mr Watson seems to us to hold this position. He is more liberal, more sensitive, more lucid, more decided, more dignified, more eloquent than the ordinary man, who would not be likely to speak like this to a pianist:2 Lovelier and sweeter from those hands of might   The great strange soul of Schumann breathes again; Through those two hands the over-­peopled brain   Of Chopin floods with dreams the impassioned night.

But neither here nor in any of Mr Watson’s writing do we see anything which causes the least surprise when understood. No unusual mood is necessary to approach him. He is a plain man raised to a very high power, one whose simple secret is usually dressed ceremoniously in ‘lace and braid’, to use his own phrase. [. . .] DC: 22 October

Exultations of Ezra Pound Mr Ezra Pound’s verses look so extraordinary, dappled with French, Provençal, Spanish, Italian, Latin, and old English, with proper names that we shirk pronouncing, with crudity, violence and obscurity, with stiff rhythms and no rhythms at all, that we are tempted to think that they are the expression or at least the mask of an extraordinary man.1 It is a relief to us to turn from all but meaningless suavity and skill to something that appears to be individual. And doubtless no ordinary man could or would write like 2  The poem is ‘On Hearing Madame Olga Samaroff Play’. 1 This review confirms ET’s change of heart after his initially enthusiastic response to Pound’s Personae: see [358] and note. On 14 December he told GB: ‘Ezra Pound’s second book was a miserable thing & I was guilty of a savage recantation after meeting the man at a dinner. It was very treacherous & my severity was due to self-contempt as much as to dislike of his work’ (LGB, 197).

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Mr Pound. But having allowed the turbulent opacity of his peculiarities to sink down we believe that we see very nearly nothing at all. Thus in the poem on Pierre Vidal, the fool, who ‘ran mad, as a wolf, because of his love . . . and how men hunted him with dogs’, we find nothing which we cannot ourselves feel with the help of the introductory note in prose. The verses themselves show us only such things as the writer’s effort to imagine what it would be like to be a wolf: God! how the swiftest hind’s blood spurted hot Over the sharpened teeth and purpling lips!

In some of his poems he produces no effect at all, and we are at leisure to note the peculiar taste of the writer with astonishment, as, for example the Irish turns in this verse:2 White Poppy, heavy with dreams, Though I am hungry for their lips     When I see them a-­hiding And a-­passing out and in through the shadows —And it is white they are— But if one should look at me with the old hunger in her eyes, How will I be answering her eyes? For I have followed the white folk of the forest.

Here it may be that there was something to be expressed which failed to be, because it was difficult. But in the poem addressed to the beautiful women of London: I am aweary with the utter and beautiful weariness And with the ultimate wisdom and with things terrene, I am aweary with your smiles and your laughter, And the sun and the winds again Reclaim their booty and the heart o’ me—

the thought is simple and plain enough, and interesting as a human fact, but it can hardly be claimed that it is expressed in a beautiful way or in any way which gives it an individual value as a cry of the heart. When Mr Pound has a subject, as in the ‘Glaucus’ of his first volume, he can treat it in a manner deserving attention, not always, but now and then. When he writes in the first person he is so obscure as to give some excuse for finding him incapable of self-­expression. And both in personal and detached poems he is, as a rule, so pestered with possible ways of saying a thing that at present we must be 2  The poem is called ‘Planh’: the term for a Troubadour funeral lament.

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content to pronounce his condition still interesting—­perhaps promising—­ certainly distressing. If he is not careful he will take to meaning what he says instead of saying what he means. DC: 23 November

Thomas Hardy, Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses It would be interesting to learn how a great prose writer regards his verse.1 He will have a tenderness for it as for the fairer and perhaps the elder child; but in what frame of mind does he who can say so much in prose, and denies himself no subject or mood in it, turn to verse? Is it an instinct for finality in form, a need of limitation and strict obedience to rule, or a desire to express but not to explain, or is it partly for the sake of the royalty of the robes and the great ­tradition? Mr Hardy is silent. That he cares much for the forms of verse is clear from the number which he uses, and there is one at least which he has made distinctively his own, that of the poem on ‘One We Knew (M. H. 1772–1857)’: She told us how they used to form for the country dances—   ‘The Triumph’, ‘The New-­rigged Ship’— To the light of the guttering wax in the panelled manses,   And in cots to the blink of a dip.

And yet, though he indulges in many varieties of rhyme and stanza form, it is hard to believe that it is for any sensuous quality. For they have almost none, and we wonder what subtle reason he had for using a lyric stanza like the following for a narrative full of conversation:

 

We moved with pensive paces,   I and he, And bent our faded faces,  Wistfully, For something troubled him, and troubled me.2

1  Hardy, like George Meredith and D. H. Lawrence, brings to the critical surface ET’s concern with the frontier between prose and poetry. In these reviews he quotes more than usual, and from over twenty different poems: a mark of his attraction to Hardy’s work. See his subsequent writings on Hardy [498], [563]. 2  The poem is ‘The Noble Lady’s Tale’.

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There are sonnets in the book, but so unlike sonnets in spirit that many will read them without observing that they have this form. Often it might be thought that he dresses his thoughts in these noble and famous garments in a mood of solemn mockery. That, whether its intention or not, is its effect. He laughs at the external beauty of verse by making it clothe a corpse, a withered old man, or a woman of faded youth. The utmost positive effect of the verse is to give brevity and solemnity. The poems do not materially differ from his stories except that they are shorter than anything he has done in prose, and that they gain a greater solemnity from their more uniform ­colouring, their greater simplicity and lack of explanations. Many of the poems are narrative. Even when called lyrical they suggest a chain of events. They are full of misunderstandings, forebodings, memories, endings, questionings. These the subjects, and they are the atmosphere of the book, from which there is no escape. Other poetry allows a great richness and diversity of interpretation; Mr Hardy’s allows none. He will not give his readers a moment’s liberty. He gives them not only actions and characters, but their results; not only their results, but what is to be thought of them. He may not give us these things in so many words, but, if not, he does so by unmistakable implication. We cannot think of any other poetry so tyrannous; and this in part makes us restive under the conventional form, which adds a grotesqueness by means of the necessary inversion and other poetic licence to the philosophic prose diction. The work belongs to very different periods, but chiefly to an early one, about 1866, and to a late one, ending in the present year with a fine poem on George Meredith. There is little difference in character, and the following might belong to 1907 instead of to 1867. It is called ‘1967’: In five-­score summers! All new eyes, New minds, new modes, new fools, new wise; New woes to weep, new joys to prize; With nothing left of me and you In that live century’s vivid view Beyond a pinch of dust or two; A century, which, if not sublime, Will show, I doubt not, at its prime, A scope above this blinkered time. —Yet what to me how far above? For I would only ask thereof That thy worm should be my worm, Love!

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The one difference is that the later method is less fluent, more rich and dramatic, and the sonnets, for example, belong to the earlier period. The obvious quality to point to in all the poems is the sense of the misery and fraudulence of life. The men and women have been happy and are not, and the happiness is now nothing; or they are or ought to be happy, but there is an inexplicable sigh; or they compare their own day unfavourably to an older. The poems abound in phrases such as— Before the birth of consciousness,   When all went well—

or— Yet, Dear, though one may sigh,   Raking up leaves, New leaves will dance on high—   Earth never grieves!— Will not, when missed am I   Raking up leaves—

or— But she will no more stand   In the sunshine there, With that wave of her white-­gloved hand,   And that chestnut hair—

or— O friend, nought happens twice thus; why,   I cannot tell!3

The book contains ninety-­nine reasons for not living. Yet it is not a book of despair. It is a book of sincerity, ‘sweet sincerity’, and to a poem of that name4 there is a memorable conclusion. It is dated 1899: —Yet, would men look at true things, And unilluded view things, And count to bear undue things, The real might mend the seeming, Facts better their foredeeming, And Life its disesteeming. 3  ET has quoted from ‘Before Life and After’, ‘Autumn in the Park’, ‘The Rejected Member’s Wife’, ‘On the Departure Platform’. 4  The poem’s title is ‘To Sincerity’.

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He does not believe that life is worth living as these men and women lived, even if they did, and he gives us little chance of believing so. But he thinks it is to be altered. He has a poem on a christening, where a lovely child makes the congregation smile with pleasure—­while the unmarried mother weeps on the gallery stair: ‘I am the baby’s mother;   This gem of the race The decent fain would smother, And for my deep disgrace I am bidden to leave the place.’

Bitter as the poem is there is hope in it. For it demands, at least, if it does not foresee, a time when values and judgments will be truer than they are, when we of our day shall be held as callous as those who hung men for sheep-­ stealing. Mr Hardy looks at things as they are, and what is still more notable he does not adopt the genial consolation that they might be worse, that in spite of them many are happy, and that the unhappy live on and will not die. His worst tragedies are due as much to transient and alterable custom as to the nature of things. He sees this, and he makes us see it. The moan of his verse rouses an echo that is as brave as a trumpet. DC: 7 December *** Mr Thomas Hardy’s new book, Time’s Laughingstocks, consists of not far short of a hundred poems, of which the first score are specially grouped under that title. It is almost unnecessary to say that there is hardly one poem to which the title does not perfectly apply, though the other sub-­titles are ‘Love Lyrics’, ‘A Set of Country Songs’, and ‘Pieces Occasional and Various’. Perhaps the only exceptions are ‘The Dark-­eyed Gentleman’, founded on a popular song—‘And he came and he tied up my garter for me’; and a playful little piece on the blackbird in Wessex.5 In fact, these sub-­divisions are quite arbitrary, since many of the lyrics are narrative, nearly all the narrative poems are in stanzas of lyrical quality, and love or the death of love is in all of them. The only other possible arrangement would be chronological, for a number of them are dated, the earliest belonging to nearly fifty years back, the latest 5  The poem is ‘The Spring Call’, in which Hardy gives the blackbird’s call, heard as ‘pretty dear’, in the phonetics of different dialects: the Wessex version (‘the proper way’) being ‘pret-ty de-urr!’ ET included ‘The Spring Call’ in TE, and his own poem ‘Lob’ contains the lines: ‘Our blackbirds sang no English till his ear / Told him they called his Jan Toy “Pretty dear” ’ (ACP, 77).

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to this year. We rejoice to see that the new are more than equal to the old in form, in substance, and in spirit. Many stanza forms are used; the rhymes are often elaborate; and assonance is sometimes used instead of rhyme. This enduring ripeness and strength of Mr Hardy’s is not so surprising as at first sight when we consider that in his verse, at least as much as in his prose, his work is mainly intellectual and its emotion chiefly dramatic, if we accept the general emotion which pervades it all. There is no ecstasy or glory or magic for him to lose, save what is in the things themselves as distinct from his treatment of them. His austere, condensed, and fateful manner has lost nothing. His felicity in detail may be witnessed by phrases such as ‘blasts that besom the green’ and ‘leaden concaves round her eyes’, and by such a verse as Dance; how ’a would dance! If a fiddlestring did but sound She would hold out her coats, give a slanting glance,     And go round and round.

In at least one—­a poem describing the homecoming of a bride to her husband’s unknown, desolate house—­there is a changing burden which is full if not of magic yet of a deep and strong suggestion of something which the intellect alone cannot handle— Gruffly growled the wind on Toller downland broad and bare, And lonesome was the house, and dark; and few came there.6

The movement of that last line is characteristic. Another poem also of three perfect verses, ‘The Voice of the Thorn’, though precise and severe, creates the personality of a tree comparable with Wordsworth’s thorn, but quite different in its lack of expressed emotion. As a rule Mr Hardy’s poems are the sum of their parts, and it would be easy to show what it is that produces their strong, calm effect. Seldom does anything creep in from Nature or the spirit of humanity to give his work a something not to be accounted for in what he actually says. His mood is that of Tess and Two on a Tower, and the ‘President of the Immortals’ is the dominant figure, if not always personally introduced.7 There is something plaintive, 6  ET has quoted from ‘The Division’, ‘ “In the Night She Came” ’, ‘Julie-Jane’ (a favourite poem), ‘The Homecoming’. The lines he picks out from ‘The Homecoming’ point to an affinity between some of Hardy’s scenarios and poems in which ET variously mixes houses, wind-sounds, loneliness, and darkness: poems such as ‘House and Man’, ‘The New House’, ‘Wind and Mist’ (ACP, 60, 68, 73). 7  Hardy published Two on a Tower in 1882, Tess of the d’Urbervilles in 1891. One of the last sentences of Tess is the famous: ‘ “Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess.’

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almost naïve and rustic, in Mr Hardy’s unvarying sadness—­ not mere despondency or melancholy or weakness, but the positive and hopeful quality of sadness; as there is something rustic in the question ‘And what’s the good of it’ following ‘I have finished another year,’ said God.8

There is, too, a religious quality, as of darkened lights and voices intoning. Sometimes the sadness might seem almost perverse, as in his poem of the pine-­planters where, after the beautiful lines describing how the tree begins to sigh as soon as it stands upright, he interprets that sighing as Grieving that never [ever?]   Kind Fate decreed It could not ever   Remain a seed.

But that is only because it is more unmistakable here than usual that the sadness is definitely Mr Hardy’s (or Marty South’s) and not that of life itself.9 It is true that he wishes the poems to be regarded as ‘dramatic monologues’,10 yet the prevalent tone must be his, and so is the tone of many separate poems, such as that on a deathbed, which ends: We see by littles now the deft achievement Whereby she has escaped the Wrongers all, In view of which our momentary bereavement   Outshapes but small.11

He cannot escape from his own slow muffled cadences, which at their liveliest suggest old people dancing an old dance, his reluctances and pauses; or from his sombre intellectual vocabulary. He makes no concession to the fact that he is writing verse except by using the word ‘swain’ and by such construction as in And nevermore sighted was even   A print of his shoe.

8  The poem is ‘New Year’s Eve’. 9  ‘The Pine Planters’, subtitled (Marty South’s Reverie), involves a character from Hardy’s novel The Woodlanders (1887). ET’s bracketed question points to an illogical double negative in the quoted lines. Hardy (who may have read this review) changed the third line to ‘It should for ever’. 10  Hardy’s Preface refers to ‘dramatic monologues by different characters’. 11  The poem is ‘After the Last Breath’.

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He is not in the least afraid of colloquial prose as in I faltered: ‘Well . . . I did not think   You would test me quite so soon!’12

He would abide with equanimity and certainty of ultimate approval any too nice questioning as to whether his verses are poetry. Whether his poems are a few lines or several pages long they are almost always stories, and it is to his repeated triumphs in representing a sequence of events and emotions and enduing them with a clear colouring and form that we should point if this question were raised. Only poetry could produce with such economy and sureness the effects in ‘A Trampwoman’s Tragedy’, ‘A Sunday Morning Tragedy’, ‘The Rejected Member’s Wife’, ‘On the Departure Platform’, ‘The Dawn after the Dance’, and ‘The Dead Quire’. These are too long and closely knit to quote, but we will give an example from one of the early poems which are least dramatic in character: The grey gaunt days dividing us in twain Seemed hopeless hills my strength must faint to climb, But they are gone; and now I would detain The few clock-­beats that part us; rein back Time, And live in close expectance never closed In change for far expectance closed at last, So harshly has expectance been imposed On my long need while these slow blank months passed. And knowing that what is now about to be Will all have been in O, so short a space! I read beyond it my despondency When more dividing months shall take its place, Thereby denying to this hour of grace A full-­up measure of felicity.13

Here the form is a sonnet, and if it is in a sense a ‘moment’s monument’,14 the moment is full of years, and it is an implied narrative. This one is particularly useful as showing probably the author’s own personality, and the tendency which controls the poems in which there are other actors. If this is so, two other poems may be quoted as showing the far from negatively pessimistic conclusions at which he has arrived— 12  ET has quoted from ‘The Flirt’s Tragedy’ and ‘ “In the Night She Came” ’. 13  The poem is ‘The Minute before Meeting’. 14  Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sonnet ‘The Sonnet’, ‘Introductory Sonnet’ to his sequence ‘The House of Life’ (1870–81), begins: ‘A Sonnet is a moment’s monument’.

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Let me enjoy the earth no less Because the all-­enacting Might That fashioned forth its loveliness Had other aims than my delight . . .

And Yet, would men look at true things, And unilluded view things, And count to bear undue things, The real might mend the seeming, Facts better their foredeeming, And Life its disesteeming.15

These passages are a necessary key to the poems and to Mr Hardy’s work as a whole. MP: 9 December 15  As in his first review, ET quotes from ‘To Sincerity’, having previously quoted from ‘Let me Enjoy’.

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1910 Feminine Influence on the Poets The extracts below, from the first five chapters of Thomas’s Feminine Influence on the Poets, are headed by the chapter-­titles. These extracts represent the theoretical rather than historical dimension of the book. (The other four chapters are: ‘Mothers of Poets’, ‘Poets and Friendly Women’, ‘The Tenth Muse’ and ‘Patronesses’.) Thomas worked on Feminine Influence during the Spring and Summer of 1910. It was published in October: his first book with Martin Secker, who would later publish his Algernon Charles Swinburne (1912) and Walter Pater (1913). Feminine Influence is dedicated to A. Martin Freeman (1878–1959), Thomas’s friend and often his walking-­ companion since the days when they had belonged to the Literary Society at Lincoln College, Oxford. They also shared an interest in folksong, on which Freeman had contributed an essay to British Country Life in Autumn and Winter (1908), edited by Thomas. Feminine Influence is unusual among Thomas’s critical books in being named for a concept rather than an author. But he disliked the title—­Secker’s choice. In November 1909, when he first mooted the book to Charles Cazenove, his literary agent, its working-­title was ‘Women & Poets’.1 On 14 December Thomas wrote to Gordon Bottomley: I am perhaps about to begin a book on poets & women. Originally it was to have been the influence of women on English poets. But that is too difficult: so it will be mainly the attitude of poets to individual women & the idea of women & so on. Please send suggestions, warnings etc. as they come to your mind.2

On 15 March 1910 he again appealed to Bottomley for ‘any pregnant suggestions that occur to you & . . . any books & passages to be consulted’, describing the book as being ‘on Women & Poets—­i.e. on the influence of women on English poets & on the position of women in their poetry, the attitude of the poets towards the ideal & the real woman etc.’3 It’s unclear when ‘Women as Poets’ (my italics) entered the equation. For this chapter, Thomas mainly 1  Letter to Cazenove, 27 November 1909 (ABL, 399).   2  LGB, 196.   3  Ibid., 199.

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seems to have relied on Alexander Dyce’s pioneering anthology Specimens of British Poetesses (1825; see note 20). Perhaps his acceptance of a tight deadline (see below) prevented him from going farther into the nineteenth century and beyond. Despite Thomas’s enthusiasm for Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti, for instance, neither poet is discussed here. Nonetheless, he takes a distinctive critical approach to their precursors. The contract with Secker, to quote Cazenove, was ‘for 60,000 words with an advance of £60’; for 70,000, ‘he is willing to give you another fiver’. Thomas told Cazenove that he ‘would rather do “Women & Poets” for Spring 1911 but will do it by August this year if necessary’. This he achieved, being able to ‘deliver all the MSS before the end of August’.4 In December Thomas lamented to Jesse Berridge: ‘Feminine Influence came out 6 weeks ago & was killed by its price (10/6) & the Election.’ He added rather more positively: ‘It was an interesting book but shockingly put together.’5 Here he may have been responding to the positive and negative aspects of Walter de la Mare’s review in the Times Literary Supplement. For de la Mare, the book is ‘not so deftly arranged as it might be, nor without overlapping and repetition’. Yet he calls it ‘a kind of delightful labyrinth’ with ‘refreshing, delusive, beckoning alleys’, and says: ‘It’s Mr Thomas’s wayside comments . . . his subtle inferences, flashes of enthusiasm and his literary criticism that make his study so interesting and original.’6 Even so, five months later Cazenove had to inform Thomas: ‘I have . . . seen Secker who tells me that he has only sold 160 copies of your book, and is consequently rather heavily out.’ Secker therefore proposed ‘to re-­issue a portion of it—“Poets and Friendly Women” [Chapter 7]— possibly under some such title as “Women and Poets”, at 2/6d. net’.7 In the event, Secker re-­issued Chapter 8: ‘The Tenth Muse’, with some adaptations by Thomas. The Tenth Muse was published in Autumn 1911. Writing to Bottomley on 25 November 1910, Thomas calls Feminine Influence ‘a wretched wretched book but full of material you may like to have gathered together’.8 Earlier, he had summed up the whole experience thus: I gave about 3 months to hard reading for my Women & Poets & allowed myself, or was allowed, 2 months to write. It was not enough so I have really been bent 4  Letter from Cazenove to ET, 29 July 1910 (ABL, 10); letters from ET to Cazenove, 2 March and 26 July 1910 (ABL, 413, 446). 5  8 December 1910 (LJB, 65). The election of December 1910, which hinged on abolishing the House of Lords veto, resulted in a victory for the Liberals, supported by Labour and Irish Nationalists. 10s 6d in 1910 is over £50 today: a high price. Hence the partial re-issue proposed by Secker, to be sold at less than a quarter of that amount. 6  Times Literary Supplement, 1 December 1910. 7  1 May 1911 (ABL, 22).   8  LGB, 207.

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on finishing anyhow & satisfaction at producing something by the end of a weary day has nearly overcome my disgust at what it really was. The result is I have worked—­in a kind of suppressed panic—­much faster than I need, & the thing is now nearly at an end . . . I am sick at having to do it but I believe I am justified in not doing as well as possible a piece of work I never could do really well with my powers.9

The most ‘original’ parts of Feminine Influence, the parts most in touch with Thomas’s poetic unconscious, might now seem to be his stress on the ballad tradition; his approach to women poets; his psychological concern with the relation between love or desire and the lyric poem. On the third count, he undertook some first-­hand research: asking poet-­friends about their ex­peri­ ence of that relation. Among them was Berridge, an Anglican clergyman who had published two collections of sonnets: It has just occurred to me you might answer an impertinent question I have just been putting to three other poets. It is to help me in my book on Women & Poets. I want to find out as many different ways as possible of establishing a relation between ‘reality’ and a poem to or about an individual woman. I want to know how & when poets write such poems, whether in the quiet of the end, of satiety, of anticipation, or of an interval in love’s progress, or etc. Well can you help me? Can you single out any poem of which you feel able to tell me the circumstances under which it was written & what relation it bears to ‘reality’ IF ANY, & if none then the nature of the fancy or whatever you think it might be called. . . . I will ensure that nobody but myself has any suspicion of the authorship of the remarks, if I use them in any way. No matter how brief, or long, or obscure. Try.10

It’s unclear who two of the ‘other poets’ were; and, à propos ‘Passion and Poetry’, Thomas may have ultimately sounded his own psyche. But we know that he asked Bottomley about ‘the condition under which any particular [love] poem of your own was written’, and received a helpful reply: Thank you for answering a question that must have looked inept & rather like that of a Daily Mail special correspondent. I really wanted to have my own surmises strengthened or shattered. You have strengthened them especially by your remark that ‘all poems are love poems’ which is almost exactly what I had hit upon myself in one of my cloudy cogitations on the whole vast vague question.11

9  24 July 1910 (ibid., 203).    10  14 April 1910 (LJB, 62–3). 11  22 April 1910 (LGB, 202 and note).

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However cloudy or hasty Thomas’s cogitations might sometimes appear, however they look in the light of Feminism then or now, Feminine Influence on the Poets involves a serious enquiry into the sources of lyric poetry. 1: The Inspiration of Poetry ‘By Heaven,’ says Biron in Love’s Labour’s Lost, ‘I do love; and it hath taught me to rhyme and to be melancholy.’ By far the greatest part of the influence of women upon poetry has hitherto been of the unconscious kind; they have been the subject and the inspiration of many poems. In civilisations where the conscious intelligence of men treated women as altogether inferior, this was the only direct influence possible. [. . .] Love poetry can only exist where women have some freedom of choice, and where men therefore run the risk of refusal. When marriages are arranged, as in antiquity and the Middle Ages, by the parents, love poems are addressed only to courtesans and to women who have married some one else. Accordingly, love poetry has advanced with the position of women, and in no branch of literature is the gain upon the ancients so positively great as in this. Here the influence of individual women is again and again apparent. They give the impulse and the subject. When the subject changes the impulse will remain, and the influence, though not easily definable, is not the less great. [. . .] The influence of women upon poetry began at a period beyond the reach of literary history. In folk poetry it was principally the woman who sang, and our own ballads abound in beautiful evidence of this.12 A woman sings: O waly, waly, but love be bonnie   A little time while it is new! But when it’s auld it waxeth cauld,   And fadeth awa’ like the morning dew,

and ends: But had I wist before I kiss’d   That love had been so ill to win, I’d lock my heart in a case o’ goud,   And pinn’d it wi’ a siller pin. 12  ET seems to have drawn on several textual sources for his quotations in this chapter; but he certainly took the texts of some ballads from English and Scottish Popular Ballads, edited from the collection of Francis James Child by Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman Kittredge (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904): see review [162]. See also his reviews of Francis  B.  Gummere, The Popular Ballad, and Cecil  J.  Sharp, English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions [271].

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Oh, oh! if my young babe were born,   And set upon the nurse’s knee; And I mysel’ were dead and gone,   And the green grass growing over me.13

A woman sings ‘The Lowlands of Holland’, and ‘Fine Flowers in the Valley’. ‘The Lament of the Border Widow’ is one of the bravest of all: she sews her knight’s sheet out in their woodland bower; she watches the corpse alone; she digs the grave alone; she fills it in alone— But think na ye my heart was sair, When I laid the moul’ on his yellow hair? O think na ye my heart was wae, When I turn’d about, awa’ to gae? Nae living man I’ll love again, Since that my lovely knight is slain; Wi’ ae lock of his yellow hair I’ll chain my heart for evermair.

It is the woman that sings. [. . .] What share women had in the composition of the now surviving ballads and songs cannot be shown. But it might fairly be contended that some, if not all, of the qualities in which they differ from the individual art poetry of England, especially after the Renaissance, are due largely to the influence of women and of the feminine tradition. And this means very much, not only on account of the essential value of the ballads, but on account of their power­ful part in the romantic revival which began with Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.14 There is nothing finer in these ballads than the descriptions of women, the narratives of their actions, and the words they speak. The heroic and romantic figure of a woman is frequent. Such, above all, is the lady who defends her castle against Edom O Gordon and his men; and when, to save her from the flames, she lets down her daughter over the wall, only to fall unhappily on the enemy’s spear, he speaks in words exactly equal to Webster’s, ‘Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young’:15 O bonnie, bonnie was her mouth,   And cherry were her cheeks, 13  This ballad is best known as ‘The Water is Wide’. 14  Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromore, published his influential anthology in 1765. 15  Famous quotation from speech by Duke Ferdinand in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (IV.ii), after Ferdinand’s sister, the Duchess, has been killed.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 And clear, clear was her yellow hair,   Whereon the red blood dreeps. [. . .] ‘Busk and boun, my merry men a’,   For ill dooms I do guess;— I cannot look on that bonnie face   As it lies on the grass.’

In this world of the ballads how bold, beautiful and tender the women are; and they seem to be as free as they are bold. Fair Janet, sitting at her needlework, no sooner wishes to be in Carterhaugh, ‘amang the groves sae green’, than she lets fall the needle and is away to Carterhaugh. Fair Ellen cuts her yellow locks ‘an inch above her e’e’ and puts on a page’s dress to run after her cruel mounted lover over land and water, though his child stirs in her womb; and ‘Young John’s’ mistress does the same and when he bids her turn back only cries: ‘But again, dear love, and again, dear love,   Will ye never love me again? Alas for loving you sae weel,   And you nae me again.’

In the end both women achieve marriage with their lovers. Nothing could be more pitifully eloquent than the pleading of the betrayed Annie of Lochroyan, and though she is drowned through the cruelty of Lord Gregory’s mother, she seems to triumph in death. Fair Catherine in the ballad of ‘Young Redin’ shows how swift can be a mistress’s revenge. He tells her he is riding away to wed another: nevertheless, she bids him stay one night with her and gives him ale and wine, and out of her bed he never rises again until he is taken and thrown into the Clyde water. In ‘Little Musgrave and the Lady Barnard’ there is an heroic adultress who, seeing her husband strike her lover dead and with the dagger bright in his hand, cries out: ‘Although thou’rt dead thou Little Musgrave,   Yet I for thee will pray. And wish well to thy soule will I,   So long as I have life; So will I not for thee, Barnard,   Although I am thy wedded wife.’

A strong mother is painted by the first verse of ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’: There lived a wife at Usher’s Well,   And a wealthy wife was she;

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She had three stout and stalwart sons,   And sent them o’er the sea.

When they come home their hats are made from a birch tree that grew ‘at the gates o’ Paradise’. She gets the fire lit and a feast laid, and when they are gone to bed she sits down at their bedside but falls asleep. The eldest brother says it is time to go because the cock crows, but the youngest replies: ‘Lie still, lie still but a little wee while,   Lie still but if we may; Gin my mother should miss us when she wakes   She’ll go mad ere it be day. ‘Our mother has nae mair but us;   See where she leans asleep; The mantle that was on herself,   She has happ’d it round our feet.’

He who looks for effects of this kind must go either to ballad poetry or to the poetry and fiction of the last hundred years. Perhaps the most remarkable of all is the ballad of four verses entirely about two women: O Bessie Bell and Mary Gray,   They were twa bonny lasses; They built a house on yon burn-­brae,   And theek’t it o’er wi’ rashes. They theek’t it o’er wi’ birk and brume,   They theek’t it o’er wi’ heather; Till the pest cam’ frae the neib’rin town,   And strack them baith thegither. They werena buried in Meffin kirkyard,   Amang the rest o’ their kin; But they were buried on Dornoch Haugh,   On the bent before the sun. Sing, Bessie Bell and Mary Gray,   They were twa bonny lasses; They built a bower on yon burn-­brae,   And theek’t it o’er wi’ rashes.

Here the effect is made by the two girls in solitude, and without any mention or suggestion of a man. Altogether these ballad women are a very noble company, worthy of a people that once fought under the command of women, and made sex no bar

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to rule, worthy of Cartimandua, Boadicea, Rowena, the Empress Helena and Bertha, and the poet’s women, Esla, Rosmerta, Embla, Fridia, Corwen, Herfryd, and the rest, some bold, some tender, all of them beautiful and of high courage.16 Could English poetry have been founded earlier upon the native ballad instead of upon conceited ceremonious and exotic work, it would have not spent two centuries in an almost exclusively masculine world. But there is very little English poetry in which the paternity—­or, we should rather say, the maternity—­of the folk ballad can be felt until we come to the more or less deliberate discipleship of the romantic movement. [. . .] 2: Women and Inspiration As life has been refined and made secure, as the arts of life, and especially of indoor life, and of peace, have multiplied and developed, so women have drawn more and more level with men in many ways, and their voices have been more often and more clearly heard. But until recent times their voices have passed rapidly into silence, like those of the average man, except in so far as they have lived on in the enduring books of men. In this matter of their influence upon poets men have been by no means explicit, and only when letters and contemporary records begin to abound can we find much evidence that is not vague or conjectural. [. . .] From several modern poets, whom I am not alone in admiring, I have had letters giving some indication of the connection between certain poems and certain facts in experience. One sends me a chain of love-­songs and sonnets where the wild flames flicker still above the calm glow of the verse. None of these, he says, represents emotion remembered in tranquillity. They were written ‘out of emotion as white hot as his nature was capable of ’. Some were composed in the very presence of the inaccessible beloved, others within a few days after an everlasting farewell. Another whom I should like to reveal, that I might by quotation add some to the too few who know his work, says that one of his lovely portraits of women was ‘based on Beardsley’s illustration of one of Chopin’s

16  Cartimandua: mid first-century Queen of the northern Brigantes tribe, who sided with the Roman invaders of Celtic Britain; as Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni in East Anglia, did not. Rowena: probably fictional Anglo-Saxon femme fatale and Queen of Britain. Empress Helena: English medieval chroniclers falsely claimed that this Roman Empress and Christian saint (c.248–328), mother of Constantine the Great, came from Britain. Bertha (mid-500s–­early 600s): Queen of Kent (wife of King Æthelberht) and saint, whose Christian faith prepared the ground for St Augustine. ‘The poet’s women’: female figures in Charles M. Doughty’s epic The Dawn in Britain, so highly regarded by ET. Rosmerta: Celtic goddess of fertility, health, and prosperity.

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Ballades’. Another poem is ‘a kind of medley hung round, I should think, some childish memory, probably of a sister; possibly in one of the quite still, absorbed, all-­eyes moments little children have’. One poet will say no more than that ‘a subject must be not only lived but re-­lived, before it can be written about, and it is the re-­living that makes the poem’, and this re-­living may be prolonged over many years or a few minutes. Coleridge says the same thing, speaking of the rule that the artist must first put himself at a distance from Nature ‘in order to return to her with full effect’, because mere painful copying would produce ‘masks only, not forms breathing life’.17 A fourth writes to me of his love-­poems: ‘I never write a love-­poem’, he says, ‘but what I have some real woman in my mind; either one I have met in the past or one I meet now, and whose looks I  like. Perhaps the woman that has affected me most was one I met on the Thames Embankment, whom I had never met before and have not seen since. I followed her about for a considerable time, and noticed that every one, no matter of what age or station in life, stared hard at her. Her own apparent indifference gave them a good chance to do this. It was with much disappointment that I at last came to the conclusion that she had nothing to do with me and let her pass out of sight. I was thinking of that woman when I wrote—.’ He ­continues: ‘The poem called—­was written after hearing a woman, whom I had taken a fancy to, laughing a welcome to another. It was the sweetest laugh that I have ever heard, beginning quite merrily and ending in a sweet sad fall that died away softly.’ Again: ‘The poem called—­was written from the memory of how a bird at home used to burst out singing when he heard my sister’s voice. And yet it was always I that fed him, and in fact troubled myself so much about his life and comfort that my sister was jealous and wished him dead.’ One writer seems to contradict what Coleridge says by the statement that what he has done best was done under the almost crushing weight of painful memory, and fearful expectation which it described. But the truth probably is that even here the same ripening took place, but with fierce rapidity, as flower seeds hurry to ripeness in the breath of the fire. Says another: ‘Love satisfied of itself would, I suppose, be complete and would need no literature; but the heat and burden of desire seek to record something.’ Having been moved by beautiful things, ‘an instinct rebukes any “use” of such feelings; but they rise easily, as I write, out of a store of images unconsciously accumulated’. And so we are brought round to Keats and Rossetti again.18 17  The quotation is from Coleridge’s lecture, ‘On Poesy or Art’ (1818). 18  Earlier in this chapter, ET has bracketed Keats and Dante Gabriel Rossetti with reference to unconscious creative processes. He says that the genesis of Keats’s sonnet ‘On sitting down to read King Lear once again’ (as described by Keats) ‘must mean that the ferment in his brain came to a head unsought and unexpected upon the opening of King Lear’; and cites W. M. Rossetti’s

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3: Women as Poets19 It would not be easy to show that women have had any great influence upon English poetry by their own practice of the art. Far too often they have written as if they were only an inferior kind of man. They have written, as they still often write, love-­poems upon a masculine model. ‘The Complaint of a Lover’, for example, was written by the gifted and early dead Anne Killigrew (1660–1685) as if from a man: Sees’t thou yonder craggy rock,   Whose head o’erlooks the swelling main, Where never shepherd fed his flock,   Or careful peasant sow’d his grain? No wholesome herb grows on the same,   Or bird of day will on it rest; ’Tis barren as the hopeless flame,   That scorches my tormented breast—

yet the image is one of the grandest in poetry. Women are more earthly than men, more directly and practically connected with the circumstances and foundations of life. The earth and this life are nearly good enough for them; not from them has there ever been much whining about their souls and immortality. There are more Marthas to be found than Marys. They do not easily detach themselves from things as they are here and now, and are less inclined than men to see themselves as a spectacle. Something of the truth at least appears in some lines prefixed by Mary Oxlie of Morpeth to Drummond’s poems of 1656: Then do not sparks with your bright suns compare, Perfection in a woman’s work is rare; From an untroubled mind should verses flow; My discontents make mine too muddy show; report that Dante Gabriel ‘wrote after fits of apparently indolent brooding, “out of a large fund or reserve of thought and consideration, which would culminate in a clear impulse or (as we say) in inspiration” ’ (FIP, 35–6). Perhaps ET’s own unconscious was taking note. 19  Both textually and contextually, the third chapter of FIP is much indebted (although the debt is unacknowledged) to Specimens of British Poetesses; selected and chronologically arranged by the Rev. Alexander Dyce (London: T.  Rodd and S.  Prowett, 1825). Dyce (1798–1869) became an important scholar and editor of Renaissance literature, as well as a pioneer of feminist criticism. His Preface attacks the injustice whereby: ‘from the great Collections of the English Poets, where so many worthless compositions find a place, the productions of women have been carefully excluded’ (iii). He anticipates future anthologies ‘more interesting and more exquisite than our own, because the human mind, and, above all, the female mind, is making a rapid advance’ (iv–­v).

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And hoarse encumbrances of household care, Where these remain the Muses ne’er repair.20

It might be supposed that it is true of women what every poet says at one time or another of himself, that he thinks ‘good thoughts, whilst others write good words’, that he writes ill because he is so sincere: Then others for the breath of words respect, Me for my dumb thoughts, speaking in effect.21

So Shakespeare puts it. As men have written little poetry upon love for their friends, so women have written very little expressing their affection for l­ overs or children. It is rare for a woman to write as Aphra Behn (1640–1689)22 did, giving as good as she receives, after this fashion: When my Alexis present is, Then I for Damon sigh and mourn; But when Alexis I do miss, Damon gains nothing but my scorn. But if it chance they both are by, For both alike I languish, sigh, and die. Cure then, thou mighty wingèd God, This restless fever in my blood; One golden pointed dart take back: But which, O Cupid, wilt thou take? If Damon, all my hopes are crost; Or that of my Alexis, I am lost.

This is so much like a man’s poem with ‘Alexis’ and ‘Damon’ substituted for ‘Corinna’ and ‘Chloe’ that it may possibly have been written as a deliberate revenge. Perhaps not so much can be said of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s (1690–1762) ballad, ‘The Lover’. She explains why she is not in a hurry to love; not because she is cold, but because she fears to be cheated and will not buy ‘Long years of repentance for moments of joy’. She wants a man who is no pedant, yet learned, obliging and free to all her sex, but fond only of her: But when the long hours of public are past, And we meet with champagne and a chicken at last, May every fond pleasure that moment endear; 20  Little is known of Mary Oxlie except this poem, ‘To William Drummond of Hawthornden’. 21  Quotations from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 85. 22  Aphra Behn, dramatist, poet and novelist, proved that women could be professional writers. The poem quoted is ‘On Her Loving Two Equally’ (1682).

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 Be banish’d afar both discretion and fear! Forgetting or scorning the airs of the crowd, He may cease to be formal, and I to be proud, Till lost in the joy, we confess that we live, And he may be rude and yet I may forgive.

It is a middle-­aged ambition, and suggests the woman who in becoming the equal of men and in seeing much of them has become very much like them. Not even Suckling23 has coupled love with champagne and chicken in poetry, though he and many another knew that in fact they often are so coupled. It is much commoner to find the poetesses writing of the sober devotion of a wife. The lines ‘To my Husband’ of an anonymous seventeenth-­century writer have a sound of the best epitaphs. The conclusion justifies it as a piece of true genius: When from the world I shall be taen, And from earth’s necessary pain, Then let no blacks be worn for me, Not in a ring, my dear, by thee. But this bright diamond, let it be Worn in rememberance of me. And when it sparkles in your eye, Think ’tis my shadow passeth by.

The ‘necessary pain’ is characteristic of many poems by women. The verses written to her husband in London by the Hon. Mary Monk (1677–1715), as she lay on her death-­bed at Bath, are marvellously like what her husband might have put into her mouth in an epitaph. None the less, she may be sincere when she says that Death woos her ‘with a cheerful grace’ and without one terror, promising her ‘a lasting rest from pain’, showing her that ‘life’s fleeting joys are vain’, and when she bids her husband . . . rejoice to see me shake off life, And die as I have liv’d, thy faithful wife. [. . .]

The Countess of Winchilsea is celebrated, if not well known, for her love of Nature. Her poetry is at least full of observation and genuine sentiment, while her ‘Nocturnal Reverie’, opening though it does with ‘gentle Zephyr’ and ‘lonely Philomel’, makes us feel that she has had the magical experience which has been perfectly expressed only by much later poets.24 23  Sir John Suckling (1609–42): ‘Cavalier poet’, known for celebrating the joys of the flesh in poems such as ‘A Ballad upon a Wedding’. 24  For ET’s high opinion of Anne Finch’s ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’, see review of The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea [27].

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[. . .] Mary Leapor (1722–1746), a real gardener’s daughter,25 wrote ‘The Temple of Love, A Dream’, in which there is a temple of Cytherea and in it a blooming damsel and a wealthy swain attended by Riot, Pride, Flattery, Pomp, Pleasure, and Folly. The temple shakes: Suspicion, Loathing, Hate, and Rage enter, and the hall fills with tumult. The dream changes to a ‘ruin’d nymph’ amid gloomy walls, with phantoms of Reproach, Scandal, Despair, and Death. In the eclogue of ‘The Month of August’ a courtier woos a country Phillis. Her reply is pretty: Believe me, I can find no charms at all In your fine carpets and your painted hall. ’Tis true our parlour has an earthen floor, The sides of plaster, and of elm the door; Yet the rubb’d chest and table sweetly shines And the spread mint along the window climbs.

She is for her ‘Long-­keeping russets’ and Catherine pears. She departs to the harvest feast with Corydon: Then beef and coleworts, beans and bacon too, And the plum-­pudding of delicious hue, Sweet-­spiced cake and apple-­pies good store, Deck the brown board, and who can wish for more?

In the same key Henrietta, Lady Luxborough, Shenstone’s friend, contrasts the artificial song of the caged bullfinch with the song of the wild blackbird.26 Elizabeth Pennington (1732–1759) is also among the eighteenth-­century Arcadians. Her ‘Ode to Morning’ records her preference for the fields to bed on a spring morning. Hester Chapone (1727–1801), who would probably have married Gilbert White if any woman could,27 wrote an ‘Ode to Solitude’, but chiefly because it was the ‘nurse of pleasing woe’, the playground of Fancy, and the home of Resignation. I like Anna Seward’s December morning in 1782:28 25 Although a self-educated kitchen-maid, and despite dying young of measles, Leapor attracted enough patronage to have her work published posthumously. Her poems include ‘An Essay on Woman’, which begins: ‘Woman, a pleasing but a short-lived flow’r, / Too soft for business and too weak for pow’r’. 26  The letters of Henrietta Knight, Lady Luxborough (1699–1756) to the poet and landscapegardener, William Shenstone (1714–63), were published in 1775. 27  Chapone, a ‘Bluestocking’ and celebrated writer of conduct-books, corresponded with the pioneering Nature-writer, Gilbert White (1720–93). She was the sister of his lifelong friend, John Mulso. Her poem is ‘The Bullfinch in Town’. 28  Anna Seward (1742–1809) was known as ‘The Swan of Lichfield’.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 I love to rise ere gleams the tardy light,   Winter’s pale dawn;—and as warm fires illume   And cheerful tapers shine around the room, Thro’ misty windows bend my musing sight, Where, round the dusky lawn, the mansions white,   With shutters clos’d, peer faintly thro’ the gloom,   That slow recedes; while yon grey spires assume, Rising from their dark pile, an added height By indistinctness given.—Then to decree   The grateful thoughts to God, ere they unfold To Friendship, or the Muse, or seek with glee   Wisdom’s rich page:—O hours! more worth than gold, By whose blest use we lengthen life, and free   From drear decays of age, outlive the old!

It is a most delicate and original picture, and though she wishes to over-­ emphasise the emotion of the hour she cannot spoil its charm. [. . .] It may be said of this poetry written by women between 1600 and 1800 that it is mostly like that of the contemporary men. It differs because it is inferior, yet that is not the only difference. It cannot indeed be called a body of distinctively feminine thought and emotion; to call it that would be flattering to the poetry and unfair to the women of those generations. But it does express something of the woman’s point of view, and it is coloured over by a feminine colouring and as much by a lack of masculine colouring. I think also that it bears almost as much resemblance to the poetry written since the romantic revival as to contemporary work, and that this means an increasing feminine element in the character of poets, due partly to the refinement of the conditions of life which are favourable also to women, and partly to the direct influence of women themselves, not to their poetry. 4: Women, Nature and Poetry [. . .] Love opens the door, but it does not know what is within, whether it be treasure, nothingness or devils; and of the unimagined things beyond the door love-­poetry is the revelation. That love-­poetry seems so often to have little to do with love is because we forget that there are matters in the presence of which any man and Shakespeare are equally impotent and silent. Many love-­ poems were never shown to their begetters, many would not have moved them nor were in a sense meant for them at all. The love-­poem is not for the beloved, for it is not worthy, as it is the least thing that is given to her, and none knows this better than she unless it be the lover. It is written in solitude,

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is spent in silence and the night like a sigh with an unknown object. It may open with desire of woman, but it ends with unexpected consolation or with another desire not of woman. Love-­poetry, like all other lyric poetry, is in a sense unintentionally overheard, and only by accident and in part understood, since it is written not for any one, far less for the public, but for the  understanding spirit that is in the air round about or in the sky or ­somewhere.29 It is not only the present or past lover of one particular woman that can read and penetrate and enjoy love-­poems, and this fact alone might show how vain it is to regard them as addressed merely to those whose names they may bear. When do the words of love-­poems come into the mind or on to the lips? It is upon a hundred different occasions having nothing in common save that beauty is there or is desired. The sight of a fine landscape, recovery from sickness, rain in spring, music of bird or instrument or human voice, may at any time evoke as the utterance of our hearts the words long ago addressed to a woman who never saw them, and is now dead. And as these things revive poems in the mind of a reader, so certainly they have given birth to some of those poems in the minds of poets; and the figure of a woman is introduced unwittingly as a symbol of they know not what, perhaps only of desire; or if there is no woman mentioned, it will as often as not bring one into the thoughts and so prove, if need were, that hers was the original incantation. We treat them as parts written for ourselves to act, in the spirit, as they were written by the poet, in the spirit. There is much of the poetry of Shelley and of Spenser, for example, written since they knew a woman, which has no mention of woman, and yet is full of love and fit to awaken and to satisfy love. The proof is that the heart of the youth when it is most loving fastens upon their words for its expression. How many times has Shelley—­Shelley and the daffodils of Devon or the wild thyme of Wiltshire—­ been the half of a first love?30 To how many does his poetry not seem, during a great lovely tract of life, to have been the half of spring and summer and autumn, of night and dawn and noon, and of youth enjoying these things? At the time when youth is most exultant, this poetry is thumbed night and day; a page is opened at random, as Virgil used to be, for a word big with fate; and his lines come to the lips, seeming as suitable to light and darkness as 29  ET’s analysis, in this chapter and the next, prefigures his own rather nebulous love poems, with their structures of ‘desire’, their tendency to ‘sigh’: poems such as: ‘Will you come?’, ‘The clouds that are so light’, ’The Unknown’, ‘Like the touch of rain’, ‘It rains’, ‘After you speak’ (ACP, 71, 105, 112, 118, 121, 124). 30  Here ET repeats and extends part of his second review of The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Thomas Hutchinson: see [144].

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Cassiopeia’s crown or the sun waking in radiance and precious clouds on the long hills. [. . .] Love, Nature and Liberty are three, but indivisible on the pages of many poets, of young poets who sit like Lamartine upon an island like a poet’s dream in a fair sea,31 and foster the double dream of those who are worthy to dream great things: Love and Liberty. To that island they have gone to look upon sky and sea, to let the spirit evaporate in the sun, to feel and to record the ferment of youthful impressions, sentiments, and ideas which some day will make poetry. So the young poet explains himself to the island girl who wants to know why he has left his home and his family; and the sweet-­voiced, dark-­haired girl, Graziella, laughs at him merrily, and when he is too long at his book steals up behind him and suddenly grasps book or pen and runs off with it, only replying when caught with the question, Is it not pleasanter to talk to me than to read? Perhaps the most unanswerable testimony of all is to be found in the poetry which John Clare wrote during his twenty years’ imprisonment in a madhouse.32 He had already in earlier days called his Muse a wild enchantress, and had wooed her on a bed of thyme, and had seen solitude as a woman with wild ringlets lying unbound over her lily shoulders. He had already written a poem on the ‘Death of Beauty’— Now thou art gone, the fairy rose is fled, That erst gay Fancy’s garden did adorn. Thine was the dew on which her folly fed, The sun by which she glittered in the morn. . . .

But he was to get far beyond this statement that with the death of the woman died Nature’s beauty. These latest and finest poems leave personifications far behind. His native trees and fields, and the women he loved after they had died or vanished, haunted him in his prison. His mind seemed to shed all its mere intelligence and all its conventionality in the use of words. He was left free as a spirit in his ghastly solitude. Then to him his Mary became a part of the spring, a part inexplicably absent. He had talked to the flowers when a child, and when a man they had ‘told the names of early love’: now that he was alone, they decked ‘the bier of Spring’.33 But if one of the Marys came into his mind it was in as complete a harmony with Nature as one of 31  ET refers to the novel Graziella: A Story of Italian Love (1852) by the French poet, novelist and politician (a founder of the Second Republic), Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869). Graziella reflects Lamartine’s experiences as a young man on Procida: an island off the coast of Naples. 32  For other discussions of Clare by ET, see [342], [624]. 33  The poem is ‘The Tell-tale Flowers’.

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Wordsworth’s women, yet with little or nothing of his thin spiritual quality. The woman of ‘The Invitation’ is real: Come with thy maiden eye, lay silks and satins by; Come in thy russet or grey cotton gown; Come to the meads, dear, where flags, sedge, and reeds appear, Rustling to soft winds and bowing low down.

If she is a spirit, she is a spirit of the English earth, not of the transparent air. Another ‘Lover’s Invitation’ shows the same union of woman and earth and sky. So too such poems as ‘Evening’ with its— I walk with my true love adown the green vale, The light feathered grasses keep tapping her shoe.

In ‘The Morning Walk’ the country maid climbing the stile in the early summer morning is as much a flower as the rose that she crops— She cropt a flower, shook off the dew, And on her breast the wild rose grew; She blushed as fair, as lovely, too,   The living rose of morning.

He has a poem to the ‘Maid of the Wilderness’, a nymph of place made of firm flesh. When primrose and celandine come in March, he says, ‘The sun shines about me so sweet, I cannot help thinking of love’.34 In a poem on Evening that begins with a verse of description, he says: The evening comes in with the wishes of love

and For Nature is love, and finds haunts for true love,   Where nothing can hear or intrude; It hides from the eagle and joins with the dove,   In beautiful green solitude.

He breaks out into a wild cry for a ‘bonny lassie O!’ and it might be thought, so full of natural things is the poem, that she was a flower maid like the Welsh Blodeuwedd whom Math framed out of blossoms,35 but she is an English country girl notwithstanding and he wants her 34  The poem is ‘The March Nosegay’. 35  ‘Bonny Lassie O!’ is the poem’s title. Clare also uses the phrase as a refrain in ‘The Gipsy Lass’. The Welsh Mabinogion contains the story of how the magicians Math and Gwydion create a wife for Lleu out of flowers, including meadowsweet and broom. Blodeuwedd: ‘Flower Face’.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 In a grassy nook hard by, with a little patch of sky     And a bush to keep us dry,        Bonny lassie O!

The gipsy lass in the smoky camp among the scented woodbine is a fellow to her. Perhaps the maddest and most perfect of the asylum poems, ‘Love lives beyond the tomb’, is remarkable for nothing so much as for its eloquent but inexplicable expression of this harmony of nature and love. It must, therefore, be quoted in full:   Love lives beyond the tomb, And earth which fades like dew!   I love the fond, The faithful, and the true.   Love lives in sleep: ’Tis happiness of healthy dreams:   Eve’s dews may weep, But love delightful seems.   ’Tis seen in flowers, And in the morning’s pearly dew;   In earth’s green hours, And in the heaven’s eternal blue.   ’Tis heard in Spring, When light and sunbeams, warm and kind,   On angel’s wing Bring love and music to the mind.   And where’s the voice, So young, so beautiful, and sweet   As Nature’s choice, Where Spring and lovers meet?   Love lives beyond the tomb, And earth, which fades like dew!   I love the fond, The faithful, and the true.

This and perhaps all of his best poems show Clare as one of those who have in them the natural spirit of poetry in its purity, so pure that perhaps he can never express it quite whole and perfect. They are songs of innocence, praising a world not realised, or, it is more reasonable to say, a world which most old and oldish people agree to regard as something different. For such a writer the usual obstacles and limits are temporary or do not exist at all, and

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as with children the dividing line between the real and the unreal, either shifts or has not yet been made. No man or woman is a poet who does not frequently, to the end of life, ignore these obstacles and limits, which are not just and absolute but represent the golden mean or average, and have less reality than the equator. Few, except idiots, can escape them altogether, since they are produced by weariness and compromise, which are produced by time and without effort. Some great men escape while seeming to accept them, but there is hardly a pleasure in the world equal to that of seeing one who is not a child and has yet escaped them so happily as Clare. He reminds us that words are alive, and not only alive but still half-­wild and imperfectly domesticated.36 They are quiet and gentle in their ways, but are like cats—­to whom night overthrows our civilisation and servitude—­who seem to love us but will starve in the house which we have left, and thought to have emptied of all worth. Words never consent to correspond exactly to any object unless, like scientific terms, they are first killed. Hence the curious life of words in the hands of those who love all life so well that they do not kill even the slender words but let them play on; and such are poets. The magic of words is due to their living freely among things, and no man knows how they came together in just that order when a beautiful thing is made like ‘Full fathom five’. And so it is that children often make phrases that are poetry, though they still more often produce it in their acts and half-­suggested thoughts; and that grown men with dictionaries are as murderous of words as entomologists of butterflies. Here, I think, in ‘Love lives beyond the tomb’, in this unprejudiced singing voice that knows not what it sings, is some reason for us to believe that poets are not merely writing figuratively when they say, ‘My love is like a red, red rose’, that they are to be taken more literally than they commonly are, that they do not invent or ‘make things up’ as grown people do when they con­ des­cend to a child’s game. What they say is not chosen to represent what they feel or think, but is itself the very substance of what had before lain dark and unapparent, is itself all that survives of feeling and thought, and cannot be expanded or reduced without dulling or falsification. If this is not so, and if we do not believe it to be so, then poetry is of no greater importance than wallpaper, or a wayside drink to one who is not thirsty. But if it is so, then we are on the way to understand why poetry is mighty; for if what poets say is true and not feigning,37 then of how little account are our ordinary assumptions, 36  See ET’s poem ‘Words’ (ACP, 91). 37 In As You Like It (III.iii) Touchstone says: ‘the truest poetry is the most feigning’ (W. H. Auden wrote a poem with this title).

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our feigned interests, our playful and our serious pastimes spread out between birth and death. Poetry is and must always be apparently revolutionary if active, anarchic if passive. It is the utterance of the human spirit when it is in touch with a world to which the affairs of ‘this world’ are parochial. Hence the strangeness and thrill and painful delight of poetry at all times, and the deep response to it of youth and of love; and because love is wild, strange, and full of astonishment, is one reason why poetry deals so much in love, and why all poetry is in a sense love-­poetry. [. . .] 5: Passion and Poetry In the last chapter women were regarded as influencing poetry in their guise of minor rustic deities or nymphs of wood and water and mountain, a guise due in part to their nature and their traditional connections, and in part to their lovers and love itself. But this, though perhaps often a strong un­detect­ed form of their power, is not a chief one to more than one or two poets. Their chief influence in love has been exerted by the stimulation of desire—­desire to possess not only them but other known and unknown things deemed necessary to that perfection of beauty and happiness which love proposes. It is a desire of impossible things which the poet alternately assuages and rouses again by poetry. He may attempt to sate it by violence in pleasure, in action, in wandering; but though he can make it impotent he cannot sate it: or he may turn his attempt inward upon himself. In either case he comes late or soon to poetry. There may seem to be infidelity in the act of writing, with its inevitable detachment from the very object of praise or complaint. If there were no night, no need of rest or food, no limit to the strength of the body or the vigour of the spirit, no obstacles of distance, custom, necessity and chance, not to speak of the woman’s possible inability to love in return, it would be reasonable to speak of infidelity. There could be no love-­poetry in Paradise. It is made by unsatisfied desire, and that is made by our mortality and the conditions of life, which are essentially unalterable. [. . .] It is rash at best to attack Petrarch because we may feel uncertain regarding his twenty-­one years’ devotion to Laura. The uncertainty is as much due to irrelevant biographical discovery as to the quality of the sonnets themselves. Of these each man must judge finally in his capacity as human being, but not without having learnt and perhaps forgotten again those conventions which the poet used without conscious artifice. As the sonata can be true-­hearted as the folk-­song, so the elaborate sonnet or epithalamium can be no less so than ‘Whistle and I’ll come to ye, my lad’. One may be just as difficult to write as the other, and the authors of the two have an equal need of detachment and dramatic power. Shakespeare tried both extremes in

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‘How should I your true love know’ and ‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold’,38 and in neither is there any impediment to the emotion. A man may some day arise who can understand Pope’s Windsor Forest, and, getting behind its convention, see just what love of old trees it meant in Queen Anne’s time. What must never be forgotten is that in any poem the trad­ ition­al art element is the all but necessary medium for expressing any passion, whether simple and fleshly or hesitating and complicated. [. . .]

The Dublin Book Of Irish Verse 1728–1909, edited by John Cooke (Oxford University Press)1 The Dublin Book of Irish Verse, edited by Mr John Cooke, covers a period of about a hundred and fifty years, for though it is said to begin in 1728 and end in 1909 it really begins with Goldsmith, who was born in 1728. Nine-­tenths of its five hundred poems will be new to the far-­browsing English reader, and a large number will be unknown even to the student. It is a book which all interested in English poetry, and especially in modern Anglo-­Irish poetry, should possess and study. It is also one which will give pleasure to many who are not disposed to study. But a warning should be offered to these. They must remember that the majority of the poems are in a real sense foreign, though written in English: not perhaps quite as foreign as provincial American newspapers, but nearly so. How many of these writers were bilingual or had some considerable knowledge of Gaelic we should like to know, but are not told. The spirit of their poems is Irish, and it often happens that subject matter, cadence, and feeling are such as are practically unknown in English poetry. This foreignness adds to the difficulty as well as to the interest of the book, and it must be allowed for in forming first impressions. It is probably true also that English is used as a foreign tongue by writers who were born to it. The result is twofold. On the one hand, the writers have not a medium perfectly and by long traditional use adapted to their modes of feeling and thought. On the other, English readers may be inclined to condemn methods of expression so different from those of their own poets. 38  ET refers to one of Ophelia’s ‘mad songs’ (Hamlet, IV.v) and to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73. 1  This anthology, ‘modelled on the lines of The Oxford Book of English Verse’, marks the high status of Irish literature at that date. The Preface says: ‘Due prominence has been given to the new school of Irish writers, the rapidly increasing volume of whose verse is, perhaps, the most remarkable feature of the Irish literary revival of our time.’

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What is most distinctive and attractive in the book first appears in writers of the early Nineteenth Century, who began to translate from the Irish or to show proudly their native lore. Callanan,2 for example, is not a great poet, but he partly reveals and partly hides a something so strange and powerful that we get from his work a pleasure, imperfect enough, but almost equal to that given by a great poet. His ‘Outlaw of Loch Lene’, described as ‘From the Irish’, is perhaps the loveliest piece in the book. It is also the centre and the key. It touches clearly the notes which are the source of the charm of all that is best in the book in the first verse— Oh, many a day have I made good ale in the glen, That came not of stream or malt—­like the brewing of men. My bed was the ground; my roof, the greenwood above, And the wealth that I sought, one far kind glance from my love,

and its last verse— ’Tis down by the lake where the wild-­tree fringes its sides, The maid of my heart, my fair one of Heaven resides; I think as at eve she wanders its mazes along, The birds go to sleep by the sweet, wild twist of her song.

Yet even here—­and even in Mangan3—the language has a foreign tinge which denies the rarer perfection. When the Irish poets handle wild Nature and the love of woman in this manner we acknowledge the spell as great and singular, and we feel with them more than with those writers—­like Darley4—who are already fairly well known but whose qualities do not appear to be exclusively or decidedly Irish. It is a song    . . . which alway, sublime or vapid,   Flowed like a rill in the morning beam, Perchance not deep, but intense and rapid—    A mountain stream.

So Mangan sang. Another attractive and important excellence is the sense of locality and of personality, the provincialism in the attitude of those poets towards particular places and persons. They do not appear to be singing for 2  Jeremiah Joseph Callanan (1795–1829). 3  James Clarence Mangan (1803–49). His poem, quoted later, is ‘The Nameless One’. 4 George Darley (1795–1846). ET had reviewed Darley’s Complete Poetical Works rather unenthusiastically; finding a few lively lyrics, but saying: ‘it must be confessed that these have to be disentangled with some difficulty from the mass of trifles and failures’ (DC: 20 June 1908).

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all time, but for one definite passionate day or year, not to a muse or an idea, but to one woman—­O’Donovan’s daughter—­who appears before us, in the light of every day, a moorland or mountain maid. Wonderfully real their women are, like the one who . . . lived beside the Anner,   At the foot of Slieve-­na-­man . . . And a snow-­drift ’neath a beechen bough   Her neck and nut-­brown hair.5

They sing of Ireland herself with an intimate reality often missing from English patriotic poetry, where Britannia is a frigid personification. They utter their feelings—‘I love the drip of the wetted trees’6—in words which seem meant for an audience of neighbours and contemporaries, not merely for posterity and men reading the same tongue. For this peasant homeliness we must seek far and almost in vain in English poetry for things like— She brought us, in a beechen bowl,   Sweet milk that smacked of mountain thyme, Oat cake, and such a yellow roll   Of butter—­it gilds all my rhyme!7

MP: 6 January

Laurence Binyon, England and Other Poems; etc. Mr Laurence Binyon has done nothing better than England and Other Poems for seriousness and felicity of expression, and nothing perhaps so good in consistency of thought and vigour of feeling. Time after time here, in poems of description, of reflection, and of passion, he reaches a fine rapture which he has seldom touched before. He preserves his old severity of style, but it is no longer open—­except in one or two poems—­to the charge of being academically cold; and the union of this style with a freer attitude makes the book a very notable one. In fact the beauty of his emancipation seems to 5 ‘O’Donovan’s Daughter’ is a poem by Edward Walsh (1805–50); the lines subsequently quoted are from ‘The Irish Peasant Girl’ by Charles Joseph Kickham (1828–82). 6  From ‘My Grave’ by Thomas Davis (1814–45). 7  From ‘The Pretty Girl of Lough Dan’ by (Sir) Samuel Ferguson (1810–86).

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have been due to something little short of revelation, for it has brought not only a greater vigour and clarity but a harmonious breadth of view in which he has all but entirely lost the pensive loneliness so characteristic of recent poets. Thus he writes a poem on England which is remarkable for its well-­ poised attitude towards present, past, and future, and is worthy to stand with any patriotic poem of the past fifty years. In ‘Sirmione’, a long and rapturous love poem, he strikes a yet deeper note, and shows us perhaps the perception which is at the root of the book’s goodness— And silent rings a cry from star to sun, Through all the worlds, light, life and love are one!

Nor is it only in a single ecstasy that he has seen     as in a furnace burning Time, a swiftly shrivelled leaf.1

A sense of the oneness of all things and a sense of continuity are evident in several poems and underlie all, and as they have deepened the beauty of nature and humanity and love for him, so they have enriched his poetry for us. The poems to a woman and a child compel us to say that as a poet of marriage Mr Binyon has few equals. We will give only one example of the felicity of his writing— Tongues talk of truth; but truth is only found Where the heart runs to be poured utterly, Like streams whose home is in their motion, bound To follow one faith and in that be free.2

MP: 10 January

William H. Davies, Farewell to Poesy And Other Pieces1 Farewell to Poesy is another of those collections of short poems which we begin to expect from Mr William H. Davies once a year. There are not two score pieces altogether, and many are but a few lines long. For those who 1  Quotation from ‘The Crucible’.    2  From ‘The Clue’. 1  ET wrote a third review of this collection (DC: 28 March).

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already know his Soul’s Destroyer and Nature Poems it is enough to say that in the new book he repeats old successes. Once or twice, it is true, he uses old subjects again, and where he does not the poems have a familiar sound, because his style is so matured and its intensity so narrow, and his range of ideas so limited. It is full of the loveliness of trees and birds, women and children, of simple and strong passions, of the cruelty of London and fate, of the goodness of the sun, of ale, and of books. He uses such simple and familiar words and such well-­known stanza forms that at times he is flat, while he still lacks the mere dexterity to eliminate weaknesses due to the difficulty of rhyme. Probably he will always lack it, just as he will always be more pleased than his readers with variations upon ‘God made the country, but man made the town’. These weaknesses are not frequent or obtrusive. We even find them reassuring, because they make it more certain than ever that Mr Davies’s good things come of just that inexplicable unconscious simplicity which used to be called inspiration and has never had a more sufficient name. It is therefore only to be expected that when a writer of this instinctive kind comes to the end of a period of composition he should fear that no other will succeed. This fear must have dictated the Farewell to Poesy. It is not easy to define this poetry which appears to owe nothing to any directly literary influence since Wordsworth. It is simple in vocabulary and rhythm and thought, and it is without conscious art; and yet the forms, the occasional conceits, and certain turns of expression make it clear that it owes much to the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline lyric as well as to Wordsworth and Blake. The spirit which subdues those influences and combines them to a perfectly original result is that of a man who knows modern civilisation only through the hideousness of its towns. It could probably be asserted without injustice that the only subject which Mr Davies knows anything about is tramping. He has very little knowledge of facts, and what he knows he leaves out of his verse, and still less acquaintance with modern ideas. He loves animals, birds, and flowers, but he would probably have done so had he lived a thousand years ago. And withal he has no living equals except Mr Charles M. Doughty and Mr Yeats. He sees things entirely afresh. In writing poetry only one or two conventions beset him, and those either superficially or only at long intervals. He cannot judge himself, but writes in a kind of natural hypnotism in forms unconsciously suggested and tinged by Herrick or Blake, about the wren, a milkmaid singing, a trustful young bird, death taking the lovely child and leaving the idiot, about the happiness of the selfish rich and the beggar, about the poppy that dies as soon as its beauty is gone, about his mistress knitting and angry, about clouds, an old house in London built ‘When Southwark was a lovely waste’, on expecting some

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books, etc. The most perfect verse he has ever written is the second of ‘The Sluggard’: Let me be free to wear my dreams,   Like weeds in some mad maiden’s hair, When she doth think the earth has not   Another maid so rich and fair; And proudly smiles on rich and poor,   The queen of all fair women then: So I, dressed in my idle dreams,   Will think myself the king of men. [. . .]

MP: [?] February *** Mr W. H. Davies’ new poems reveal no new qualities to those who know his other books, but as they are so few that these books are still in their first editions, it may be necessary to repeat what has been said before. The title piece causes no alarm. It is due to one of those moods, probably common to lyric poets in particular, where the writer realises that his work is out of his control and fears that it cannot be continued. It may be that Mr Davies is now doing the best he will ever do. Nature Poems, his last book of poems, was finer as a whole and in its parts than the others, and it can hardly be excelled. But Farewell to Poesy is equal to it, though it might be disputed which of the two contains the best single piece. His only dangers appear to be that of repeating himself—­for example, in using the contrasts between town and country, duty and vagrancy, too often—­and of writing long poems. His range has never been and will never be great. He does not get beyond a few simple emotions and moods of his own, in solitude, or with Nature, a woman or a child, and Life has no problems which must or can be solved by him, nor Nature any mystery which he must try to penetrate. In ‘Fancy’, one of those long poems welcomed chiefly because they contain half a dozen or more short ones, he shows us the pleasures of his life, so long as Fancy, his ‘life’s Love’, is with him. So soon as she is gone, despondency comes to his heart: And perched on it, e’en as a Hell’s black rook Will stand upon the head of a white Ewe.

That is a simple, vivid image, felt by a man who would have believed in witchcraft and magic a few generations ago, but of their simplicity and vividness comes his poetry, and when they are clouded he must sing: Sweet Poesy, why art thou dumb!   I loved thee as my captive bird,

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That sang me songs when spring was gone,   And birds of freedom were not heard; Nor dreamt thou wouldst turn false and cold When needed most, by men grown old. [. . .]

Freshness and simplicity are such obvious qualities in Mr Davies that his others are in danger of being overlooked. In— Gone are the days of canvas sails! No more great sailors tell their tales In country taverns, barter pearls For kisses from strange little girls,

and in the drinking song— Ye who have nothing to conceal, Come, honest boys, and drink with me,2

the simplicity has an archaism, doubtless quite unconscious, which is part of its charm and is far removed from a really modern simplicity, like Walt Whitman’s. There is one quality usually combined with his simplicity which is superficially unlike it and might even be opposed to it by some. I do not know what to call it; but it is actually akin to simplicity, if it be not simplicity itself playing truant; and I believe that only a simple man could have written the conclusion of the ‘Milkmaid’s Song’—he has asked her to marry him as she sang over her pail: She laughed in scorn, and tossed her head. And she had milked the crimson flood E’en to my heart’s last drop of blood.

Only simplicity could be unaware of the barriers which common sense can see between this and itself. There are place where this faculty—­or absence of control—­strays so deep that, as in ‘The Kingfisher’, it leads almost to a new myth: It was the Rainbow gave thee birth,   And left thee all her lovely hues; And, as her mother’s name was Tears,   So runs it in thy blood to choose For haunts the lonely pools, and keep In company with trees that weep.

I enjoy this heartily, but am not sure if it is not rather fancy still working than poetry achieved. Closely allied to this quality is a charming artificiality probably due to a combination of nature and memory of books, as in 2  Quotations from ‘The Call of the Sea’, ‘Come, Honest Boys’.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 My Love she is so fair   When in this angry way, That did she guess my thoughts,   She’d quarrel every day.3

This artificiality is part of Mr Davies’ simplicity. For it is of the essence of simplicity that it is without fear. The improbable, the unusual, the hackneyed, the grotesque, are not known to it by their names. Hence the wide, vague, indescribable beauty of           the Sun that sank long since At Severn’s Mouth, with that great sail of gold, That covered all the West.

Hence the huge scale of this, which is so effective:               since Time Has sent forth one white hair to draw the black Into that treason which dethrones my youth.4

Hence, too, the slips of grammar and syntax in his work, the formality of words and phrases and apparently bookish fancies adopted and made real as Blake adopted ornament. These are trifles. They are the very low price which he has to pay for his freedom of the world visible and invisible, and the unique beauty of his poetry. B: May

W. J. Courthope,1 A History of English Poetry, Vol. VI: The Romantic Movement in English Poetry: Effects of the French Revolution With this volume, the sixth, Mr Courthope has achieved his great task of writing a history of English poetry from the time of Chaucer to the time of 3 From ‘Angry’.   4  The last two quotations are from ‘Fancy’. 1 W[illiam] J[ohn] Courthope (1842–1917): primarily a scholar of eighteenth-century literature, editor of works by Alexander Pope, biographer of Joseph Addison. This is the final volume of Courthope’s six-volume History of English Poetry, of which the first volume had appeared in 1895. His lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry (1895–1901) were published in 1901 as Life in Poetry: Law in Taste. Courthope’s inaugural lecture was on ‘Liberty and Authority in Matters of Taste’.

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Scott. And it is a very great achievement. He has no grace and certainly no grandeur of style. He is not original, he discovers nothing, he has no genius. But in the lucidity and consistency with which he keeps to his principles throughout, there is an austerity which men of this age ought to admire, since it is a virtue apparently inaccessible to all but one or two. If Gibbon’s Decline and Fall had appeared in our day it would have been hardly more astonishing than Mr Courthope’s History of English Poetry, such is its magnitude, its imperturbability, and its remoteness from modern atmosphere. Gibbon himself is not more remote. We suspect, indeed, that Mr Courthope has been spared, not altogether kindly, from the eighteenth century to illuminate this age; and if he had not done this work, we doubt if anybody else would have done it or could in this spirit. ‘The art of poetry, as I conceive it’, he says, is ‘a mirror for the imagination of men living in a society at once historic and free’; and by ‘historic’ he means having a history and an his­tor­ ic­al process behind it. He goes on to quote the following passage from Shelley, whom he usually admires but with disapproval: Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age. . . .  They cannot escape from subjection to a common influence which arises out of an infinite combination of circumstances belonging to the times in which they live; though each is in a degree the author of the very influence by which his being is thus pervaded.2

Mr Courthope continues the same thought when he says that, ‘on the one hand, poetry is the art of expressing imaginative ideas universally existing in any free society, and on the other, as every such society possesses a life of its own, analogous to that of the individual human being, these fundamental ideas are being constantly so modified as to adapt themselves to the thought and language of successive ages’. The words ‘universally existing’ are perhaps not accurate, but it is upon this principle as a foundation that his book has been built—­it really is a building, or, to use a more subtly appropriate word, an edifice. He regards poetry as the reflection of social life, and at his best he shows us poetry as if it were a flower of the State. When it is not so, as in most of the poetry discussed in this volume—­that of the age of the French Revolution—­he describes his distrust of it by saying that it is separated from ‘the organised course of national life and action’, and ‘unconnected with the stream of national tradition’. He is too quick to jump to this conclusion, and he may 2  ET conflates Courthope’s quotations from Shelley’s prefaces to Prometheus Unbound and The Revolt of Islam.

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have been moved to it, not so much by an impartial consideration of the age in comparison with preceding periods, as by unconsciously using his own taste and mood as a text. That is to say, that what he regards in Wordsworth and Keats as astray from the development of English poetry through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray, and Johnson, may or may not be so, but is very far apart from what he himself imagines to be the line upon which that development would or should have proceeded, had it not been for the French Revolution, for Rousseau, for Wordsworth. This is not con­vin­cing. We see that he does not deal with contemporary poetry or with any after Keats, because ‘We are too near the object to see it in the right perspective’. Perhaps he should have stopped short at Doctor Johnson. As it is, we come near to feeling that his is only a more reasoned form of a man’s usual attitude towards the ideas of his children and grandchildren; and, taking Mr Courthope as an eighteenth century man, Keats and Shelley are of the same generation as his children, and even Wordsworth, if a brother, is a younger one. This volume is one of the most interesting, certainly the most exciting, of the six. We venture to say that it is the least satisfying, for the reasons suggested above. The poets discussed are most of them really alive, and may still be regarded as engaged in being examined and judged, in pleading and explaining. Many of us would take sides and pooh-­pooh any system which cannot admit Shelley, for example, as of Milton’s and Spenser’s line. Some of us may dimly wonder where, if the great men of the early nineteenth century were wrong—­where are we? Mr Courthope suddenly cuts right across our pedigree, in a manner all the more painful because unimpassioned. Yet it would be possible to show that he is impassioned to the extent of being preju­diced. Otherwise, could he have expected us to trust him when he gives as an example of Keats’ ‘pictorial genius’, the sonnet beginning ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’? It is a sonnet nothing like so pictorial as Shakespeare’s ‘Full many a glorious morning have I seen’, or ‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold’; only Mr Courthope is so possessed with the idea that in all these Revolutionary persons a too pictorial tendency is one of the worst abominations. Possibly Mr Courthope, unknown to himself, regards Mr Courthope, by virtue of his training and position, as a living embodiment of English historic development as it was and ought to be; and he may be so. But possibly it is he who is out of the line of development, not Keats. Although he is justifiably lofty when he sees that poet calling Johnson an infant swaying on a rocking-­horse which he believes to be Pegasus,3 yet history is for Keats, we 3  In ‘Sleep and Poetry’ (186–7) Keats attacks neo-classical poets who ‘sway’d about upon a rocking horse, / And thought it Pegasus’.

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suspect, though it may be against his metaphor as impolite. And then again Mr Courthope says of the same poet: His brilliant fancy brought into prominent relief the qualities that delight the imagination in the pictorial allegory of The Faerie Queene and in the descriptions and similes of Paradise Lost. But this was to exalt one side of poetry at the expense of the whole: the scope of Spenser’s and Milton’s creation was far more comprehensive.

To which it might be retorted that Spenser and Milton are largely read for the qualities which they have in common with Keats, though these qualities are not powerful enough to keep their two long poems alive. But it is useless and ungracious to multiply more instances of disagreement. We cannot dissociate ourselves from Keats and his contemporaries. We are bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh. Evidently Mr Courthope is not, and there is an end of it. Where he writes of earlier poetry he moves with dignity through multi­tudes of opinions, and emerges without having lost his identity; and even when he comes to the Revolutionary age, he is so careful and consistent that these chapters make a useful monument to a point of view, albeit an obstructed view. There is no history of English poetry by one man which compels us to feel admiration, and even veneration, in such a degree as Mr Courthope’s. DC: 23 February *** The sixth and last volume of Dr Courthope’s History of English Poetry is the most revolutionary book that has come from Oxford for many years. It is nothing less than an attempt to persuade us that the last century’s progress in poetry has been upon mistaken lines, and that the last really English poets, upon the old and right lines, were Gifford and Canning. Who was Gifford, and what did Canning do except write ‘Needy Knife-­Grinder’?4 The answer 4  William Gifford (1756–1826): right-wing satirical poet, editor of the Anti-Jacobin, or, Weekly Examiner (1797–8); subsequently revived as the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, or, Monthly Political and Literary Censor (1798–1821). Gifford also edited the Quarterly Review (1809–24). His long poem The Baviad (1791), modelled on Pope’s Dunciad, attacked the poetry of the Della Cruscan group (see note 5), led by Robert Merry (1755–98) who supported the French Revolution. Another long poem, The Maeviad (1795), attacked some contemporary playwrights. George Canning (1770–1827): satirist and powerful Tory politician, Prime Minister for the last months of his life. Canning collaborated with John Hookham Frere (1769–1846) on ‘The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-Grinder’: a poem that parallels right-wing attitudes to ‘virtue-signalling’ today. It parodies Robert Southey, and features a radical who, blinded by ideology, refuses charity to a ‘needy knife-grinder’.

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to these questions will be found in two chapters on the ‘Exhaustion of the Classical Influence in English Poetry’, and on ‘Anti-­Jacobinism in English Poetry’, together with much about William Mason, Erasmus Darwin, the Della Cruscans, Thomas James Mathias, John Hookham Frere, and the Latin poetry of the Anti-­Jacobin.5 Dr Courthope has also a weakness for Rogers, Campbell, and Moore.6 It is only on arriving at the Lake School that his plan really unfolds. But before then our suspicions had been very gravely stirred. For example, he treats Mason at some length, gives us some account of his life, and quotes what he considers the ‘remarkably beautiful lines’ placed upon Mrs Mason’s monument in Bristol Cathedral, and written partly by Mason and partly by Gray.7 We can confidently assert that this elegy has nothing to do with the progress of English poetry. It is significant only as giving away one of the naïve preferences of Dr Courthope, once Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Then again the pages on Campbell are disconcerting. He makes no mistake about Gertrude of Wyoming it is true, but he says that ‘It would be hard to find any short poem in the English language that contains so many elements of the sublime as “Hohenlinden” ’;8 he goes no further, but he leaves in our minds the impression that it thoroughly satisfies him, that he fully understands it, and that, in short, it is great poetry. We begin to suspect that a theory is at the back of these preferences when we find him saying, of the ‘direct and lucid form of diction’ employed by Campbell and Tom Moore, that it was ‘based immediately on the conversational usages of refined society’. He is tremendously impressed by Byron’s remarks about only Moore and himself being ‘free of the corporation’, i.e., of ‘high life’. There is one extraor-

5  William Mason (1725–97): clergyman, author of Musaeus: A Monody to the Memory of Mr Pope (1747), friend of Thomas Gray; Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802): Enlightenment polymath, fore-runner of his grandson Charles in evolutionary and ecological thinking, author of long poems The Loves of the Plants and The Economy of Vegetation, combined in The Botanic Garden (1791); Della Cruscans (see note above): proto-Romantic poets named for the Florentine Accademia della Crusca, Whiggish in politics, mocked for sentimental content and ornate style; Thomas James Mathias (c.1754–1835): author of serial (and popular) literary satire, The Pursuits of Literature (1794–7). 6  Samuel Rogers (1763–1855): famous poet in his day, known for The Pleasures of Memory (1792); Thomas Campbell (1777–1844): Scottish poet, whose The Pleasures of Hope (1799) derives from Rogers’s poem; Thomas Moore (1779–1852): Irish poet, friend of Byron, a London celebrity owing to songs such as ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’ in his best-selling Irish Melodies (ten numbers, 1808–34). 7  This ‘Epitaph’ includes the line: ‘Speak, dead Maria! breathe a strain divine’. 8  Gertrude of Wyoming (1809): sentimental epic in Spenserian stanzas, which had a certain vogue, and which Courthope calls ‘third-rate’; ‘Hohenlinden’: ballad-like verses about a battle between the Austrians and the French in 1800.

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dinary phrase applied to a poem of Moore’s which we verily believe is enough of itself to convict Dr Courthope of heresy. ‘These spirited and poetical lines’ he calls them. What wonder that he can regard Moore as ‘scarcely less the national poet of Ireland than Burns is of Scotland’ when he can use the word ‘poetical’ in praise of the work of this very man? In the chapter on Anti-­Jacobinism we find such phrases as: In Canning the civic genius of the Renaissance, acting on English statesmen and men of letters, finds its most admirable representative. . . . As the genius of the civic Renaissance is the inspiring principle of Canning’s satire, so the ancient traditions of the English language, formed by the influence of the Renaissance, are preserved in his style.

When he comes to Frere he explains that he ‘belonged to the order of country gentlemen, whose manners had experienced the refining influence of the Renaissance’. In fact underlying, surrounding, overhanging, and darkening all Dr Courthope’s views of poetry is the principle which, he tells us, he has deliberately adopted, ‘of regarding poetry as the reflection of our social life’. Thus it would appear that those who knew most of ‘social life’, using those words without any very liberal interpretation, would be most likely to write great poetry. Wordsworth was wrong because he relied too much on ‘his own individual experience . . . without reference to that general course of action in English society which had been gradually evolved by centuries of civic and religious conflict’. Up to the close of the Eighteenth Century, but no farther, English poetry had been ‘a mirror to what Shakespeare calls “the age and body of the time” ’. Much as he admires Byron, he refuses him and Wordsworth the first rank because ‘the greatest poetry must in some sense always be a reflection of social action’. To which it can be objected that the facts are other­wise. When he has to censure Shelley he pronounces that ‘judgment and artistic good sense would have prevented any Greek poet’ from writing as Shelley did about Emilia Viviani.9 He further reveals the dark secrets of his breast by saying, of some Eighteenth Century poets who used the Spenserian stanza, that ‘the poet’s imagination dwelt rather on the nature of the external object described than on the feelings which the object excited in his breast’; and that was to be ‘classical’. Hence he considers the smug ig­nor­ ance of the Monthly Review10 in its treatment of Alastor not unreasonable. 9  Emilia Viviani: teenage daughter of the Governor of Pisa, who locked her in a convent to await a suitable husband. Shelley championed this ‘noble and unfortunate’ woman, who became the Muse and addressee of his effusive Epipsychidion (1821). 10 The Monthly Review (April 1816) made no attempt to penetrate the ‘sublime obscurity’ of Alastor.

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‘The world’, he says, ‘is not bound to acquaint itself with the postulates of any particular poet.’ To this we reply that the world has done so in this case and in several other cases most distressing to Dr Courthope. The essence of Dr Courthope’s heresy is that he fixes an arbitrary limit beyond which poetry ceased to be historical, to be national, and upon sound traditions, and that consequently he has taken far too narrow and pedantic a view of what is national and traditional. This, we are disposed to say, is due to temperamental dislike or indifference to the impulses of the French Revolutionary period and the poetry clearly or obscurely related to it. He feels no uncertainty in the presence of some brassy couplet of Gifford’s, and does not hesitate to call it poetry. When he opens Shelley or Keats he probably does feel that here there is a finer spirit; but—­well—­it is wrong, that is all. Phrases here and there suggest that he really believes poetry to be ‘poetical’, that it is a first-­rate garment thrown over ideas which are all at once intelligible to educated persons who have not such garments at their disposal and are therefore grateful for the exhibition. We doubt very much whether he would admit a difference in kind between Pope’s Windsor Forest and Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’. Too much Pope has spoiled him for poetry—­Pope and his theory that poet and poetry must be obviously connected with social life. Some perversity has entered in, or he would not have accused the Lake poets of ‘deliberate’ individualism, and have implied that their refusal to take Johnson or Gifford as a father was disloyal to the tradition, according to which, in Dryden’s words, ‘Milton was the poetical son of Spenser’, and so on. He assumes far too much self-­consciousness on the part, say, of Wordsworth, and implies that the good old style of poetry was really alive—­because it was being written by Canning. He wishes everything to grow like the British Constitution, and finding that English poetry has grown a little more like the French he expresses his indignation by telling a whole century that it has made a mistake. This prejudice makes the volume before us more astonishing than true and more quixotic than professorial. But it must be affirmed that at no point does it lose its dignity or its philosophic method, qualities which, nevertheless, we believe to be insufficient to gain any supporters to this reactionary revolt. MP: 28 February

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George Meredith, Poems Written in Early Youth (1851), Poems from ‘Modern Love’ (first edition) and Scattered Poems1 The poems in this book are mainly Meredith’s very early work. More than half of them are taken from the volume published in 1851. [. . .] Both the good and less good are seldom without some captivating touch from that robust, amorous and joyful spirit. When Meredith was at his best he combined sensuousness with a vigour both manly and intellectual in a manner which no other English lyric poet has equalled, except William Morris. His early work has glimpses of this combination. It was already strong in the man himself, but in his writing it is obscured by a rather unusual fault in a young man—­the superabundance of his material from natural observation. This observation is good in itself, and even here, out of its place, is often pleasing and always interesting as a personal if not a poetic quality. It is all the easier to excuse because it is only the untrained exuberance of the very quality which makes ‘Daphne’, for example, so fine. He treats the myth of Daphne and Apollo with great voluptuousness, as Keats would have done, but with none of Keats’ languor. It is altogether an open-­air piece. The sun, and no pale remembered orb, and the wind itself sweeten and brace the voluptuousness. We see and feel the events of the poem in full sunlight and on the rich solid earth, not any shadowy substitute from a poetic underworld. It is like the work of Rubens, yet delicate too. And what gives it the singular quality is the interaction of English landscape and this sensitive but vigorous mind. We scarcely dare to quote from the poem. For it consists of nearly a hundred short stanzas, and movement and continuity are the soul of it, which quotation would destroy. Also, the poem is not free from the roughness of diction which shows up in a few lines. At no time did Meredith become sure of a style which was equivalent to, as well as suggestive of, the effect desired. For example, in ‘South-­West Wind in the Woodland’ we are given an impression which few will ever wish to go back to the words in order to regain, and when we quote the following we do so reluctantly because its original effect is still so much bigger in our mind than the words now appear:

1  Meredith had died in 1909. This volume, containing poems assembled from several sources, may have had a memorial function. See ET’s earlier review of Meredith’s A Reading of Life [9].

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 For lo, beneath those ragged clouds That skirt the opening west, a stream Of yellow light and windy flame Spreads lengthening southward, and the sky Begins to gloom, and o’er the ground A moan of coming blasts creeps low And rustles in the crisping grass; Till suddenly with mighty arms Outspread, that reach the horizon round, The great South-­West drives o’er the earth, And loosens all his roaring robes Behind him, over heath and moor. He comes upon the neck of night, Like one that leaps a fiery steed Whose keen black haunches quivering shine With eagerness and haste . . .

But already in these early poems Meredith’s treatment of Nature is distinctly his own, and not Tennyson’s or Wordsworth’s. In the manner in which he allows himself to be seen sharing the emotions of Nature he bears some resemblance to Byron, but his personality and his Nature are more subtle than Byron’s. He does not stop at Wordsworth’s ‘One impulse from a vernal wood’,2 but seeing a sordid London crowd exclaims: Could I but give them one clear day Of this delicious loving May, Release their souls from anguish dark, And stand them underneath the lark;— I think that Nature would have power To graft again her blighted flower Upon the broken stem, renew Some portion of its early hue.3

Probably he changed this opinion. Nevertheless Nature and Meredith will continue to inspire and console, and the alliance between the two, between a splendid human being and the beauty of wild earth, is a wonderful thing to

2  Line from Wordsworth’s ‘The Tables Turned’, a poem that exhorts: ‘Let Nature be your teacher’. 3  The poem is ‘London by Lamplight’.

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see here, whether in the philosophy, in the descriptions, or in the love poetry of ‘Love in the Valley’ and the seventh ‘Pastoral’.4 SR: 12 March

Frances Cornford, Poems; James Elroy Flecker, Thirty Six Poems; etc. Mrs Cornford’s Poems contain some of the most purely delightful verses we have seen for years. They are the work of a fresh and joyous spirit with a natural gift of expression. So far Mrs Cornford has not set this spirit anything to do but to utter brief ejaculations of a lyrical kind, but these are so well done and in forms chosen so happily that they are almost as much beyond criticism as Nature. In the first poem, called ‘Autumn Morning at Cambridge’, it will be seen that the simplicity is of a cultured kind and has a long literary tradition behind it. I ran out in the morning, when the air was clean and new, And all the grass was glittering, and grey with autumn dew, I ran out to the apple tree and pulled an apple down, And all the bells were ringing in the old grey town. Down in the town off the bridges and the grass They are sweeping up the leaves to let the people pass, Sweeping up the old leaves, golden-­reds and browns, Whilst the men go to lecture with the wind in their gowns.

Here the visible objects, the cadences, and the words combine to produce a clear picture just touched with spirit. It is in these simple forms that Mrs Cornford does best, and though she attempts triolets many times her only success is ‘To a Fat Lady seen from the Train’. Her two nursery rhymes, ‘The Dandelion’ and ‘The Ragwort’, are among her best, though these, as a matter of fact, are far removed from the nursery rhyme in character, and disappoint us a little at first by showing how literary and critical her simplicity really is. It is in one or two poems, particularly in ‘The Watch’, where she does things 4 The collection includes an early version of Meredith’s ‘Love in the Valley’: a rhapsodic narrative of love amidst the natural world, which ultimately ran to twenty-six eight-line stanzas. His seventh ‘Pastoral’, which begins: ‘Summer glows warm on the meadows’ and depicts haymakers, has parallels with ET’s poem ‘Haymaking’ (ACP, 94).

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in a more solitary and less completely calculated manner, that she is best. This is ‘The Watch’: I wakened on my hot, hard bed, Upon the pillow lay my head; Beneath the pillow I could hear My little watch was ticking clear. I thought the throbbing of it went Like my continual discontent; I thought it said in every tick: I am so sick, so sick, so sick; O Death, come quick, come quick, come quick, Come quick, come quick, come quick, come quick.

Hers is a gift for which it is hard to foresee the future. Her achievement is interesting already, and it may well be that her lack of a well-­developed style and manner is a sign that the first ferment is not over. Mr James Elroy Flecker’s Thirty Six Poems are so full of contemporary qualities of thought and style that it is almost impossible to see him apart from his age. He writes ‘To a Poet a thousand years hence’ chiefly to ask But have you wine and music still,   And statues and a bright-­eyed love, And foolish thoughts of good and ill,   And prayers to them who sit above?

He goes to a graveyard and hears the dead men speak, and concludes: ‘Dark with no dream is hateful: let me live!’1 He writes a ballad of Camden Town, and one of Hampstead Heath. On the subject of self-­murder he reminds us of one of John Davidson’s prefaces: I am young, I am strong, I am brave, It is therefore I go to the grave.2

So sings the self-­murderer. Then he has several half Morrissy poems on the Holy Family, decorative and purely external. He translates Baudelaire’s ‘Litany to Satan’, and in doing so says that the children outside the room where he works ‘are as terrible as death’. He writes a ‘War Song of the Saracens’, not of the Crusaders. In ‘No Coward’s Song’ he is afraid to think about his death, and exclaims:

1  The poem is ‘The Town without a Market’.    2  The poem is ‘Felo de se’.

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         O I’d rather be A living mouse than dead as a man dies.

He seeks through moor and dale for a flower—‘The name of it Forgetfulness’.3 He uses the word ‘nenuphars’.4 He is tired of Oxford, but loves its canal. He translates Leconte de Lisle.5 Yet again his friend wanders out among graves to ‘think of dead men lying in a row’, and at last When love became a loathing, as it must, He knew not where to turn; and he was wise, Being now old, to sink among the dust, And rest his rebel heart, and close his eyes.6

He questions the Magdalen about the cause of her forsaking pleasure and sin, and gains the answer: ‘For love of Him’. Satiety, wantonness, fear of old age and death are characteristic of the joy of life in Mr Flecker’s page. For not only do we feel sure that they are valiant affectations, but there is positive evidence in the beauty of some of his images, rhythms, and combinations of words that he has adopted them out of fidelity to his time rather than to himself. The fantastic ‘Sonnets of Bathrolaire’ are full of joy, notwithstanding the words describing horror and shame and sickliness. The humour of ‘The Ballad of Hampstead Heath’ is only possible to healthy high spirits, as in He spake in Greek, which Britons speak   Seldom, and circumspectly; But Mr Judd, that man of mud,   Translated it correctly.

Mr Flecker is interesting, but we shall be glad when he shows that he has got up out of the mud of his time or else covered himself with it a little more convincingly. MP: 31 March

3  The poem is ‘A Western Voyage’. 4  ‘Nenuphars’: water-lilies. The word occurs at the end of Flecker’s poem ‘Fountains’, which concerns stars reflected in a pool so that ‘Among the stars the goldfish play, / And high above the shadowed stars / Wave and float the nenuphars.’ Perhaps ET recalled this conceit when he adopted the perspective of a fish in ‘The Lofty Sky’, which ends: ‘I / Would arise and go far / To where the lilies are’ (ACP, 53). 5 Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle (1818–94): leader of the French ‘Parnassians’. This nineteenth-century poetic movement, which stressed form, precision and beauty, influenced Flecker: see [577]. The translated poem is ‘Hialmar speaks to the Raven’. 6  The poem is ‘My Friend’.

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Frances Cornford, Poems; etc. If we see a hundred books of verse in a year seldom more than one has the natural spirit of poetry in such purity as Mrs Cornford’s Poems. They are songs of innocence, praising a world not realised, or, it is much fairer to say, a world which most old and oldish people agree to regard as something different. For such a writer none or few of the usual obstacles and limits exist, and as with children, the dividing line between true and false either shifts or has not yet been made. No man or woman is a poet who does not frequently to the end of life ignore those obstacles and limits, which are not just and absolute, but merely represent the golden mean, or average, and have less reality than the equator. Few except idiots can escape them altogether, since they are produced by weariness and compromise, which are produced by time and without effort. Some great men escape while seeming to accept them, but there is hardly a pleasure in the world equal to that of seeing one who is not a child and has yet escaped them so happily as Mrs Cornford—­of seeing them, their pictures, their writing, or merely hearing stories of them. It is a pleasure quivering with possibility of pain, for though this innocence can transform the world, yet itself passes away as easily as a flower. Fortunately Mrs Cornford has other qualities. She has a great measure of partly instinctive skill: she has humour: she has a critical faculty—­though a poem called ‘The Two Armies’ might seem to deny these two last gifts.1 We could have said all that we have said on the strength of any poem in the book, save that one; we felt it as soon as we had read the first one, ‘Autumn Morning at Cambridge’: [quoted in previous review]. That produces a flawless, consistent impression upon the mind, pictorial, and in a sense symbolical. There are greater poems, but none that is more purely a poem than this, since it creates its own world and dwells in it with beauty. We will quote another poem which has no great merit and yet illustrates just as clearly as the best what we mean. It is an epigram, ‘To a Lady in Mourning’: I liken thy attire of sober grey Unto a quiet lake, at shut of day: The collar round about thy neck, I take For one white sail upon the quiet lake.

1  This poem sets up a rather stereotypical opposition between ‘Bohemians’ and ‘Philistines’.

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The eye which sees things so, and the mind which is not afraid to set them down so, have the visionary faculty most essential to an artist. At present the writer sees chiefly herself, and is unintentionally the centre of nearly all her best work, such as ‘The Child Stealer’, ‘Pre-­Existence’, ‘The Watch’, ‘The Mountains in Winter’, and ‘Autumn Evening’. That this will not always be so we are inclined to conclude from the ‘Dirge’.2 But even if there were no vis­ ible seed of development, her achievements, and those foretold by these pieces are enough to make Mrs Cornford a most interesting figure, with her freshness, her curiosity, and her observation, which is at its best in ‘grass . . . soft as the breast of doves’.3 DC: 24 May

Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance: An Attempt to Define Somewhat the Charm of the Pre-­Renaissance Literature of Latin Europe1 Mr Ezra Pound’s Spirit of Romance deals with the poetry of the Latin races, roughly speaking, from the Provençals to Villon, Camoens, and Lope de Vega.2 It does not pretend to be exhaustive, but to express the opinions of Mr Pound upon certain representative poets. He is ‘interested in poetry’, both as a scholar and as a human being, and he writes probably for those who have more humanity than scholarship. His aim is to instruct, his ambition ‘to instruct painlessly’, and he confines himself to ‘such medieval works as still possess an interest other than archaeological for the contemporary reader 2  ‘Dirge’ is a parable-poem, which starts from the premise: ‘The Devil has taken my Soul to eat’. 3  Phrase from ‘To a Fat Lady seen from the Train’: a poem that begins with Cornford’s bestknown lines: ‘O why do you walk through the field in gloves, / Missing so much and so much? / O fat white woman whom nobody loves’. 1  At college in the US, Pound had studied the classical and Romance languages, especially late medieval vernacular literature. He drew on these studies for a series of lectures in London, which became The Spirit of Romance. In his early poetry collections, Personae and Exultations, Pound imitates poets represented in his critical book (especially the Provençal Troubadours), and makes them masks for himself: see ET’s reviews [364], [392]. Throughout Pound’s poetic career, The Spirit of Romance would remain a source-text for him. 2  Provençal (Occitan) poetry, the first poetry in a Romance language, emerged in the twelfth century: Pound particularly admired the work of Arnaut Daniel (fl. 1180–1200), who influenced Dante and is said to have invented the sestina. Camoens (Luís Vaz de Camões) (c.1524/5–80): the most celebrated Portuguese poet; Lope Félix de Vega Carpio (1562–1635): pre-eminent playwright and poet of the Spanish Golden Age.

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who is not a specialist’. His quotations are long and numerous; as they are often from little known or difficult writers they are valuable. Whatever may be thought of his opinions and his way of expressing them, there can be no doubt that his translations are in the main admirable, having the two qual­ ities of intelligibility and of suggesting the superiority of the original. He says himself that his criticism has ‘consisted in selection rather than in presentation of opinion’. If that were so we should have nothing but praise for the book, but it is not. It is restlessly opinionated. He has, or desires to have, an opinion upon everything; and if he has not then his eccentric speech makes it appear that he has. He relies, in fact, as much upon his personality as upon his learning. We are delighted to agree with him far more often than we dis­ agree. On the subject of classic and romantic, for example, he says a number of true things, though he must admit that he is just as far as ever from the truth, even if he did not confound everything by saying: Certain qualities and certain furnishings are germane to all fine poetry; there is no need to call them either classic or romantic.

He might have given more space than he does to proving that certain lines of Ovid are ‘as haunted as anything in Ossian’. All he does is to show that the substance of these lines is very much like the substance of some ‘Celtic’ writer. This is not enough, and he seems to admit as much himself, when he speaks of Ovid’s ‘polished verse’ and his demand for ‘the definite’. Apuleius is far nearer to Ossian,3 and in him Mr Pound rightly perceives a different ‘atmosphere’, and the ‘indefiniteness’ of later writers, ‘who speak of “the Duke Joshua” and “that good Knight Alexander of Macedon’ ”. It is altogether a question of atmosphere and style, and Mr Pound should not have plunged so heavily into disagreement without more circumspection. The same is true of his assertion that the Oedipus Coloneus has ‘all the paraphernalia of the “Romantic” school’. It is just conceivable that he is right, but his bare assertion of the contrary to received opinion is not enough to raise the question. The fact is that he is too much bent upon being interesting, upon being something more than a scholar. He is thus lured into digressions which could only be sustained by a strong personality. There is no reason why a writer of strong personality should not turn aside to abuse Whitman in a chapter upon ‘Montcorbier, alias Villon’; but Mr Pound is not such a one. His p ­ ersonality is negative, and rises to the appearance of being positive only by contradiction. His aim at being better than dryasdust by allowing 3  Lucius Apuleius (c.124–170): writer, teacher of rhetoric and Platonist philosopher, born in Numidia, who broke away from ‘classical’ Latin; author of the picaresque comic fiction, The Golden Ass. For ET on ‘Ossian’, see [151].

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his personality free play is therefore not so successful as it is laudable. At one moment he is a scholar writing in a way which is over the heads of the unlearned, and at another he is the free, courageous man wearing his learning lightly like a daisy. He cannot combine the scholar and the man. We regret to say this, because a point has been reached where men refuse to take works of learned dullness, and of this the learned are aware and they are considering their ways. Mr Pound has considered his ways, but on the whole we had rather he confined himself to translation and the severest exposition. If he does so he will do extremely well, for already in this volume he has almost done what nobody else has done—­given an account of the Provençal writers which to some extent accounts for Dante’s admiration and their surviving repute. MP: 1 August

John Masefield, Ballads and Poems; etc. Nearly half of Mr John Masefield’s Ballads and Poems is new; the rest came from the same publisher under the title Ballads about seven years ago.1 Both new and old are interesting and often beautiful. No one who reads ‘Captain Stratton’s Fancy’ ever forgets that strain of: Oh some are fond of fiddles, and a song well sung, And some are all for music for to lilt upon the tongue; But mouths were made for tankards, and for sucking at the bung,   Says the old bold mate of Henry Morgan.

Nor is it possible to forget the three verses of ‘Cargoes’—one for the ‘Quin­ quireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir’, one for the ‘Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus’, and a third for the ‘Dirty British coaster with a salt-­ caked smoke stack’. Nearly all his work has an undeniable rhythm, smacking half of the old ballads and half of the Irish revival. They suggest a tune and many 1  ET had briefly reviewed Ballads [76]. In 1909, reviewing three plays in prose by Masefield, he had compared The Tragedy of Nan to a ballad, adding: ‘Or it would be like a ballad if there were one that had all the mournfulness of its music wrought into its very words. For Mr Masefield’s play combines the effect of music and words. It has the rusticity, the breath of Nature, and the passion . . . which the best of the ballads have at those best moments where their words are all but mad with the inexpressible extremity of love and misery . . . this poet has been able to preserve the simplicity of the ballad while enriching it with the beauty of a grave and sensitive modern spirit that has long brooded upon it’ (B: November 1909).

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doubtless were suggested by tunes. It was a little hard to say what in the original volume was Mr Masefield and what was skilful and feeling experiment in current modes, for with all its charm and workmanship it was evidently imperfect expression. The one unmistakable characteristic was a conscious contrast of rude experience and fact with delicate vision, as­pir­ation, and revulsion. In the added pieces there is far less that is active, lively, and singable, and what there is may belong to the earlier period and is not different, and if anything is less attractive. ‘Tewkesbury Road’, for example, is in too familiar a strain with its O, to feel the beat of the rain, and the homely smell of the earth,   Is a tune for the blood to jig to, a joy past power of words; And the blessed green comely meadows are all a-­ripple with mirth   At the noise of the lambs at play and the dear wild cry of the birds.

It is well done, but it is too much like the ordinary tourist’s poem in feeling. So, too, are ‘Sea Fever’ and the use of the word ‘call’ now so hackneyed in: I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied.

These two and ‘The West Wind’—with a faint hint of Borrow’s ‘Wind on the Heath’2—might well have made one poem, the matter and feeling of all being the same. The other poems reveal very little but workmanship and a melancholy refinement and concern with important things. One beginning ‘In the dark womb where I began’3 is, it is true, very personal, but it is also in a sense private. Most of the love poems seem to have been written according to conventions, Elizabethan or modern, which conceal genuine expression under graceful hyperbole as in: Woman, beauty, wonder, sacred woman, Spirit moulding man from brute to human, All the beauty seen by all the wise Is but body to the soul seen by your eyes.4

Which is perhaps a compound of Maeterlinck and Donne. Several are more like Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella than modern life, and most exquisite they are, especially ‘When bony Death has chilled her gentle blood’. ‘A Creed’ is perhaps a genuine confession of faith, beginning: 2 In Lavengro: The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest (1851) by George Borrow, the gypsy Jasper Petulengro famously celebrates the ‘sweetness’ of life: ‘There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise the wind on the heath.’ In Masefield’s poem, the wind addresses the speaker as ‘brother’. 3  The poem is ‘C. L. M.’    4  The poem is ‘Imagination’.

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I hold that when a person dies   His soul returns again to earth . . .

but it has a plangent tone; the use of ‘In Thebes, in Troy, in Babylon’ is not fresh, and with the exception of a fine phrase in the conclusion5 it is not of much interest unless it is to be taken literally as a distinguished Twentieth Century writer’s confession. Altogether the book cannot add to Mr Masefield’s reputation, except among those who did not know Ballads before, and it leaves us with admiration, but also with a feeling that he has done well to make prose his chief instrument.6 MP: 3 October

Irving Babbitt,1 The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts Mr Babbitt attempts to do for our time something of what Lessing2 did for his—­to meet the questions which have arisen between Lessing’s time and 5  The phrase is probably life defined as ‘this long war beneath the stars’. 6 Besides The Tragedy of Nan, ET had recently praised another prose drama by Masefield: saying that The Tragedy of Pompey the Great (1910), for ‘mingled severity and sensuousness . . . has no superior among prose plays of our time’ (DC: 26 August 1910). He had also praised Masefield’s prose fiction: the sketches and short stories collected in A Mainsail Haul (1905) and A Tarpaulin Muster (1907). Preferring A Mainsail Haul to Masefield’s use of verse-rhythms tainted by Kipling, he claims: ‘But in his prose he is alone, with a style that can attain strength and wildness and exuberance and tenderness and combine the moods of an active sailor and a contemplative landsman wonderfully’ (A: 5 August 1905). ET thought more highly of Masefield’s narrative poems, which may combine the best qualities of his fiction and verse: see reviews of The Widow in the Bye Street [526] and The Daffodil Fields [594]. 1  Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), Professor of French Literature at Harvard and pioneer in the field of comparative literature, was a conservative cultural critic whose intellectual bête noire was JeanJacques Rousseau. Together with his friend Paul Elmer More (see [121] and Introduction [xlviii]), Babbitt conceived and propagated the ‘New Humanism’: a body of ideas which stressed individual self-discipline. A key text here is his Democracy and Leadership (1924). The New Humanism did not find favour with American liberal thinkers or with the New Critics. But Babbitt influenced the professed ‘classicism’ of his student T. S. Eliot (although Eliot became more Christian than Humanist); and laid the ground for later anti-Romantic critiques, such as Jerome J. McGann’s The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (1983). It’s a coincidence that, in 1910, ET should have reviewed Babbitt and works by two older-style opponents of Romanticism: W. J. Courthope [430] and Francis Jeffrey [456]. 2  Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81): German philosopher, dramatist, and critic, author of Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie/ Laocoon or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766). Lessing’s Laokoon, which hinges on the thematic link between an ancient statue

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ours ‘as to the proper boundaries of the arts, especially the boundaries of painting and writing’. He has read widely and with some freshness, he is a capable though not a remarkable writer, and he has a certain number of opinions, chiefly negative. The developments of modern life and literature have alarmed him. He does not like men who paint their sonnets and write their pictures, though ‘within proper bounds’ he thinks suggestive word-­ painting a legitimate art. He is troubled by men to whom sounds suggest colours and colours sounds, by those who call architecture ‘frozen music’, and hold that the arts approach perfection as they approximate to music.3 The servile following and flattering of instinct and liberty disgust him, and even make him prophetic. Rousseau said that man should feel instead of reasoning, and this man, whose great period was ‘ten years of fever and delirium’, is the fountain, if not the origin, of the evil which Mr Babbitt deplores. He points out how wide is the gap between ‘the primitivism of the Rousseauist and the genuinely primitive traits that reveal themselves in the childhood of either the individual or the race’. He contrasts with the Wordsworthian who lets Nature be his teacher, Socrates, who said: ‘The fields and trees will not teach me anything but men in the city do.’ Not content with accusing the romantics of spontaneity, he calls it a lower spontaneity of instinct instead of insight; but this is a matter of opinion which Mr Babbitt takes no further. ‘The exaltation of music’, he says in an admirable passage, ‘is only a corollary of something still more fundamental in romanticism, namely, the theory of spontaneity’. In his opinion there are two elements in beauty—‘expansive and vital’ expression and the ‘element of form that is felt rather as limiting and circumscribing law’; but there is ‘a diminishing emphasis on the formal element in beauty and a growing emphasis on the element that is described by such epithets as vital, characteristic, picturesque, individual,—in short, on the element that may be summed up by the epithet “expressive” ’. Like

and a passage in Virgil’s Aeneid, remains a reference-point for theorists of the relation between poetry and painting, and between all the arts. Lessing questions the hallowed axiom ut pictura poesis (from Horace’s Ars Poetica), and Babbitt summarizes his ‘great central generalisation’ thus: ‘poetry deals with temporal, painting with spatial relations, poetry with the successive and painting with the coexistent’ (New Laokoon [Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910], 52). ET was interested in poetry’s appeal to the eye: see his reviews of The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti [113] and George Saintsbury, The Later Nineteenth Century [264]. 3  Babbitt’s guilty parties are Friedrich Schlegel, to whom he attributes the idea that architecture is ‘frozen music’ (although Goethe lays claim to this phrase in Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe [1836, 1848]); and Walter Pater, who contends in ‘The School of Giorgione’ (added to his Renaissance in 1888) that: ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.’

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Matthew Arnold, he compares Keats’s ‘Isabella’ with Boccaccio’s, which few modern readers could read with any pleasure. Expression has become everything—­there are even some who hold that expression is beauty. He says himself the more expressiveness the better, but ‘Right design is the first requirement’, and ‘there should also be colour and movement and illusion’. There is, by the way, an awkward touch of formalism in this passage as if he thought colour, and movement, and illusion could be added to something else, and he speaks elsewhere in an equally suspicious manner of the ‘divine illusion of poetry’. The result of the artist’s following of instinct has been a particularising which Mr Babbitt regards as largely dehumanising as when a poet describes something peculiar to himself, to which he cannot give others the key. He even speaks of life as well as literature being dehumanised by the emotional unrestraint and the pseudo-­science of the time. He thinks, however, that ‘some day, perhaps not remote’, there may be a ‘subliminal uprush’ of common sense, ‘however alarming this prospect may be to Mr Bernard Shaw and his followers’, which is a mysterious remark. More definitely he says that the man who believes in continual ‘miscellaneous expansion’ on modern lines ‘is rendering inevitable a concentration that will not be humane, but of the mili­tary and imperialistic type peculiar to epochs of decadence’. Nor is this the only sign in the book that the author is both academic and alarmist. But it must not be supposed that, because Mr Babbitt will not go all the way with those who believe seductiveness and suggestiveness the chief ­powers of the arts, he is therefore a classical reactionary. He is brilliant and merciless in his exposure of the false theory and frigid practice of the pseudo-­classic ­writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—­ladies singing of the ‘nymph Indifference’,4 critics announcing that there was little need to copy life when Virgil was at hand, poets turning on their ‘rages’ and ‘fires’ judiciously ‘as one might turn on a tap’. No. Mr Babbitt is for moderation. For him the laws of measure and of concentration are the supreme laws, and ‘Man grows in the perfection proper to his own nature in almost direct ratio to his growth in restraint and self-­control’. He would like to ‘recover humanistic standards without ceasing to be vital and spontaneous, or in any way reverting to formalism’, and this implies reaction against science as well as romanticism, against both impressionism and dogmatism. His connection of these two supposed opposites is one of the most ingenious parts of the book. 4  The Irish poet Frances Greville (1724–89) wrote ‘A Prayer for Indifference’, which includes the appeal: ‘And for my guest, serenely calm, / The nymph Indifference bring!’ In fact, Greville is satirising the cult of ‘sensibility’.

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His own temper leads him to believe that literature has lost ‘virility and seriousness’ in losing ‘standards and discipline’, and to see in the romanticist a desire to have ‘illusion without reality’. He laughs shrewdly at the modern use of ‘love’ and ‘soul’. He cannot endure ‘indeterminate enthusiasms and vapid emotionalism’. In fact, he has plenty of acid for attack; only we doubt whether he would look so well had he less hostile criticism to do, and we should be afraid of the creative activity of one who believes it to be the work of the imagination ‘to throw as it were a veil of divine illusion over some essential truth’. He is probably himself the ‘clear-­cut type of person’ of whom he speaks, ‘a person who does not live in either an emotional or an intellectual muddle’, but will not mind begging a question to the extent of saying that he is ‘partial to music that is first of all music and to poetry that is above all poetry’. For a destructive critic he is hardly clear-­cut enough; he has not enough personality and cannot make up his mind whether the ‘renascence of wonder’ is ‘a mark of imaginative vigour or of a debilitated intellect’. On the other hand, for a critic who looks at both sides and really aims at the expression of a just view, his treatment is deficient. It is far too exclusively literary and artistic, and even so dwells very much on the sensuous expansiveness of modern poets, especially in France, and very little on the prodigious curiosity about conduct. He says much of humanism, and sees that his inquiry involves his attitude towards life as well as literature; but if he rises from his books it is seldom, then only to look out of a study window. He says nothing of the position of the artist during the period he discusses, little of the actual, and nothing of the desirable function of literature. He condemns the seductive purpose of literature as expressed in Keats’s lines: And they shall be accounted poet kings Who simply tell the most heart-­easing things5—

but he does not show what other view of poetry has been or can be held. His work is full of brilliant things, suggestive things, and of good debating; it is easy reading; but we doubt whether it is more than an uncommonly in­geni­ ous and laboured expression of the academic objection to life. DC: 5 October

5  Keats, ‘Sleep and Poetry’, 267–8 (favourite lines of ET’s).

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Arthur Ransome,1 Edgar Allan Poe:2 A Critical Study Mr Arthur Ransome’s book on Poe is always interesting, often ingenious, sometimes brilliantly written. To biography he gives but a small space, and even here he is far from mere repetition. The rest is criticism, both penetrative and digressive. Whatever he touches he makes his own, though we have felt more than once that perhaps if he were less determined to be original he might say the same things and say them better; or again, that he has been forced into adopting an appearance of certainty where no certainty is. There are many passages like the following, where we have at first swum on upon his style and then turned back to find all still a mystery. ‘It is plain’, he says, speaking of ‘The Purloined Letter’ and other ‘analytic’ tales:— It is plain that the form of the problems is sufficiently various. The constant factor in the reader’s intellectual enjoyment lies (apart from wonder, which certainly counts a little) in the swift and bracing gymnastic of following the mental processes that lead to the solutions. Our knowledge of the solution does not in the least affect it. Our aesthetic pleasure, dependent first upon the lyrical and concrete inspiration of the whole, is due to the perfection of the 1  Arthur Ransome (1884–1967): best known for his Swallows and Amazons series of children’s books; less known as a foreign correspondent, and perhaps double agent, in Russia during the revolutionary period (his second wife was Trotsky’s secretary). Before all that, he was a friend (from 1904) and sometime neighbour of ET’s. ET mentored Ransome’s early steps as a freelance writer and literary journalist; but could resent the success of his rather pushy protégé, nicknaming him ‘the Electrician’ because of his explosive energies. He confessed to GB (24 July 1905): ‘My liking for [Ransome] was never without artificiality. I cherished him because he was the nearest approach to a blithe youth I happened to know and it is natural I should be angry with him for a rather speedy disillusionment’ (LGB, 93n.; wrongly dated). ‘Ransome’s Poe is very poor stuff ’, he told GB on 25 November 1910 (LGB, 207); and a second review ends—­perhaps with a masochistic dig at Ransome’s mentor—­by calling it ‘a very highly literary book made almost entirely out of books’ (MP: 13 October). In both reviews, ET’s complicated feelings about Ransome may intersect with his dislike of Poe. Yet in March 1907 Ransome had written a generous and perceptive profile of ET for B: see Introduction [xxxix]. 2  Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49): American poet, fiction-writer, critic, and literary journalist, who led an erratic, alcoholic, and impoverished life: only his poem ‘The Raven’ (with its refrain, ‘Quoth the Raven “Nevermore” ’) was a popular hit. But he invented detective fiction, strongly influenced the Horror genre, and became strangely important to Charles Baudelaire and other French Symbolist poets. ET objected to Arthur Symons endorsing Poe’s claim, in ‘The Poetic Principle’ (1848), that there can be no such thing as a long poem: see [306], [387]. And, reviewing Some Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by J. C. Wright, illustrated and published by ET’s friend James Guthrie, he prefers the illustrations to the poems; anticipates the demise of Poe’s reputation as a poet; and says: ‘It was not the least of the miseries of his miserable life that he showed signs of a real genius for words, as well as a considerable talent for versification pure and simple, and that he failed to do justice more than once or twice either to his genius or his talent’ (DC: 24 December 1908).

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conditions under which our mental gymnastic takes place. These tales share the conditions of beauty that belong to Euclid’s propositions.

Pregnant sentences indeed, which we should like to see set as a subject of investigation to candidates for research degrees at the University. Mr Ransome is deeply interested in Poe from the point of view of a literary craftsman. In fact, we have wondered what public he is addressing, since he writes at times in a popular style, and again with a reticence intelligible only to the elect, as in his familiar references to Benedetto Croce.3 In his preface he declares that he has found ‘Poe’s brain . . . more stimulating than his art’, and elsewhere he remarks how much of his work as an artist is ‘merely illustrative of his adventures as a critic and thinker’. He gives most of his best pages to an exposition and consideration of Poe’s theory and practice of the art of writing. This thankless task he performs with extraordinary agility and enthusiasm, although after talking of Eureka4 he has to say: ‘I should like to wipe out three-­quarters of the book for the sake of the remainder.’ Yet, according to Mr Ransome, ‘His theory brought him as near perfection as his nature would permit’, unless the printer has transposed ‘theory’ and ‘nature’. It seems unnecessary to say that he fails to reach any fundamental truth among the emphatic and contradictory statements of Poe, who at one time laughed at the mysteries of composition as part of the poet’s vanity, and explained how he wrote his ludicrous ‘Raven’ on a system quite worthy of it; and at another elevated intuition above reasoning as a means of truth; who not only contrasted ‘Beauty’ with ‘Truth’ and spoke of ‘the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth’, but also recommended his Eureka for its Truth and ‘for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth, constituting it true’. The blatancy in Poe’s advertisement of his theories Mr Ransome condones by ­pointing out ‘that it is hard to make new principles clear, even to their discoverer, without throwing a limelight upon them that makes their shades black, and their whites almost too luminous’. But with all the disciple’s kindness, these ‘hard, sharp blacks and whites’ remain in the master’s theory and practice, and remain more impressive than the heavenly light which Mr Ransome sees in the words: ‘a perfect consistency can be nothing but an absolute truth’. Is not this, he asks, ‘the secret of art, the explanation of its

3  Benedetto Croce (1866–1952): Italian philosopher and politician, whose thought is grounded in aesthetics. An English translation of his work, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, had been published in 1909. 4 Poe’s Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848), also termed by him ‘An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe’, is an extraordinary work, which anticipates aspects of current cosmology.

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value to mankind, far above that of the things, colours, and lines that it may happen to represent or use?’ A little below these lines he quotes Poe himself, calling symmetry ‘the poetical essence of the Universe—­of the Universe which, in the supremeness of its symmetry, is but the most sublime of poems’, and arguing: ‘Now, symmetry and consistency are convertible terms; thus Poetry and Truth are one. A thing is consistent in the ratio of its truth, true in the ratio of its consistency.’ If this is the beauty of Euclid, it is the beauty of nothing else; and it is easy to see then how Poe came to write his dreary ­serious nonsense poems with their faultless symmetry, so obvious, hard, and lifeless in their deliberate attempts to impress. It is not difficult to see how he could frame a theory so opposed to the practice of other poets who seem agreed in the main that ‘all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of power­ful feelings’—a phrase of Wordsworth’s easily to be paralleled from a temperament so different as Shelley’s. It is not difficult to see how Mr Ransome is led to praise the man for ‘walking on the right track in eliminating from the beautiful any kind of passion’. In a hundred places, in prose and verse, Poe writes with a horrible lucidity and rigidity, as if there were no such thing as atmosphere or spirit. A pastoral of Pope’s is not more dead. We feel it in passages like:— The author who aims at the purely beautiful in a prose tale is labouring at great disadvantage. For Beauty can be better treated in the poem. Not so with terror, or passion, or horror, or a multitude of such other points.

as well as in:— Can vie with the modest Eulalie’s most unregarded curl— Can compare with the bright-­eyed Eulalie’s most humble and careless curl:

in a catalogue of beautiful objects quoted here, and in a poem which is only a catalogue of properties ending with:— The viol, the violet, and the vine;5

5  Poe on the ‘Single Effect in a Prose Tale’ (1842). The poems are ‘Eulalie—­A Song’ and ‘The City in the Sea’. The latter (which does not, in fact, end with the quoted phrase) concerns ‘a strange city’, ruled by Death and submerged in a western sea. ET’s unusually macabre poem ‘The Child on the Cliffs’ (ACP, 65), which evokes a lost town beneath the waves, shares a few words and images with Poe’s poem: e.g., ‘no ripples curl’ (Poe); ‘the foam there curls’ (ET). Here ET rhymes ‘curl’ with ‘girl’, as does Poe in ‘Eulalie’. Some emanations from Poe’s sensibility may have slipped under ET’s guard. He had argued with GB about his merits, and, even when allowing Poe some lyrical power, says (13 February 1909) that he will ‘never read’ him again because: ‘What he has enabled me to feel is so much beyond his words even to my purified eyes’ (LGB, 179). GB replied (9 March): ‘if you grant his essence, I willingly grant his faults’ (ETGB, 65).

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and in those passages where death is a mere personification. ‘Death’, says Mr Ransome very truly, ‘Death with Poe is Death.’ Working thus with Nature and humanity as so much dead, and therefore infinitely malleable, material, using the vocabulary of the weird and the beautiful as counters, not as symbols, this man of cold sensibility produced stories of fascinating perfection and poems equally inhuman, once or twice beautiful beyond comparison, but marred by the vanity of technique. Both prose and verse, it is significant to notice, are as good or better in French, for there was no spirit to be lost in transit. N: 15 October

Rudyard Kipling, Rewards and Fairies Mr Kipling takes the title of his new book from ‘The Faeries’ Farewell’ of Richard Corbet, that jolly prelate who is the subject of some of Aubrey’s most re-­readable pages.1 Mr Kipling does well not to quote any of the verses of this singularly English poem, beginning Farewell rewards and faeries!   Good housewives now may say; For now foule sluts in dairies   Doe fare as well as they; And though they sweepe their hearths no less   Than mayds were wont to doe, Yet who of late for cleaneliness   Finds sixe-­pence in her shoe?

Had he printed this or the verse ending with When Tom came home from labour,   Or Ciss to milking rose, Then merrily went their tabour,   And nimbly went their toes— 1  Richard Corbet (1582–1635): Anglican clergyman and occasional poet, Bishop of Oxford, then of Norwich. Corbet was known for his wit; and his poem, which he called ‘A proper new Ballad’, is a satirical attack on the Puritan suppression of English folk-traditions—­such as the ballad. He gives the fairies some Catholic characteristics. The Brief Lives, recorded by the antiquarian and archaeologist John Aubrey (1626–97), had only recently become available in a sound edition (Oxford University Press, 1898).

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he could scarce have expected the usual recognition of his own diminished verses, here to be found, as before, one at the beginning and one at the end of each tale. There are eleven tales, and in all of them reappear Dan and Una and Puck of Pook’s Hill.2 The children, though a year older, serve as well for an immediate excuse for Mr Kipling to tell his tales of the past. The children go out to see an otter or meet a woodman, and Puck appears, and straightway they begin to talk with Queen Elizabeth or another; or Puck does the talking while the children see and hear. If this be well done, then the end of Corbet’s poem may be changed and Mr Kipling’s name substituted for William Churne’s: To William all give audience,   And pray yee for his noddle, For all the faeries’ evidence   Were lost, if it were addle.

But probably this change will be approved only by readers so much under the spell of Mr Kipling’s power and reputation as to accept everything with awestricken gratitude. [. . .] Of the poems, one or two are vigorous in Mr Kipling’s usual clear-­cut archaic manner and iron sententiousness, but he frequently spoils his effects by a mysterious kind of nonsense peculiarly his own. The first verse of ‘A Charm’, for example, seems to be pure nonsense: Take of English earth as much As either hand may rightly clutch. In the taking of it breathe Prayer for all who lie beneath— Not the great nor well bespoke, But the mere uncounted folk Of whose life and death is none Report or lamentation.   Lay that earth upon thy heart,   And thy sickness shall depart!

This will be accepted by those who know that Mr Kipling is a downright strong man and no long-­haired poet, whereas if a real poem superficially resembling this had been put before them with no recommendation it would count as nonsense. Again, to show ‘How very little since things was made Things have altered in the shipwright’s trade’, he has a set of verses where an 2  Kipling had published Puck of Pook’s Hill in 1906.

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old stranger comes to Blackwall Basin and shows the men that he knows their trade as well as they; and, asked his name, he replies: It might be Japhet, it might be Shem, Or it might be Ham (though his skin was dark), Whereas it is Noah, commanding the Ark.

Just so, the young man learned in bricklaying replies: It might be Lot or Methusalem, Or it might be Moses (a man I hate), Whereas it is Pharaoh surnamed the great.3

Another case is ‘A St. Helena Lullaby’, where, as so often in Mr Kipling’s poems, we have no idea who is supposed to be speaking. Added to this there are many words used simply to fill up the line, as, for example, the last half of It’s South across the water underneath a setting star,

said of St. Helena. And in ‘Philadelphia’ what is the meaning of the words ‘Never say I didn’t give you warning’? and who speaks them? There are numerous other absurdities which we can only suppose are due to the jig and rant of his verse getting into Mr Kipling’s head to the detriment of his reason; but they are also absurdities inseparable from his manner and in several cases closely interwoven throughout the whole of a poem. We should suggest the substitution of ‘Hey derry down’, or ‘Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese’, or ‘With my dumble dum dollykin dumble dum day’, or some other cheerful nonsense which has no affectation of mystery any more than of sense about it. SR: 15 October

Jeffrey’s1 Literary Criticism, edited with introduction by D. Nichol Smith The disinterment of criticism is a rare and an unsavoury task. But in the case of Jeffrey, of the Edinburgh Review, the more unsavoury the result the better 3  The poem is ‘A Truthful Song’. 1  Francis Jeffrey (1773–1850), Lord Jeffrey after becoming a judge in 1834, helped to found the Edinburgh Review in 1802. He edited it for twenty-six years (1803–29), even while pursuing a legal and political career. This feared journal was Whig in politics, but (under Jeffrey) critically conservative, as in attacking the ‘Lake Poets’: Jeffrey’s would-be derogatory term for ‘the School

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modern readers will be pleased, and lovers of poetry will rejoice very much as Royalists may have done at the gibbeting of disinterred regicides. Except in so far as his confident brutality in error can provoke malicious mirth, there is little enough in his essays to hold a reader. In his old age he made a selection from his contributions to the Edinburgh, a very small selection, and it is from this that Mr D. Nichol Smith has compiled the two hundred pages of Jeffrey’s Literary Criticism. These include less than a score of essays and fragments of essays, expressing his opinions upon the Elizabethans, Shakespeare, Burns, Crabbe, Campbell, Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, Byron, Keats, Goethe, and Madame de Staël. In private life Jeffrey is said not to have been sanguine, so that he probably got a great deal of satisfaction out of his bluster in print. Perhaps the worst case is in his reviews of The Excursion and The White Doe of Rylstone. Those were written with his most insolent violence, mingled with a few gentle reminders that he had liked some of Wordsworth’s earlier work. His manner was that of the advocate and the judge; the poet under notice was as a man brought up on a criminal charge and regarded as guilty unless the contrary could be proved. This is his ­manner of viewing himself—­for he took himself, if not literature, seriously: When we look back . . . we feel half inclined to rescind the severe sentence which we passed on the work at the beginning; but when we look into the work itself, we perceive that it cannot be rescinded.

When this review was reprinted he added a note, observing that he had visit­ed mere faults of taste, ‘I fear, with an asperity which should be reserved for objects of moral reprobation’. Evidently something troubled him; or rather he perceived that something ought to trouble him. Nevertheless, the reprint was made without any alteration, for he said: when I reflected that the mischief, if there really ever was any, was long ago done, and that I still retain, in substance, the opinions which I should now like to have seen more gently expressed, I felt that to omit all notice of them on the present occasion might be held to import a retractation which I am as far as possible from intending; or even be represented as a very shabby way of backing out of sentiments which should either be manfully persisted in, or openly renounced, and abandoned as untenable.2 of whining and hypocondriacal poets that haunt the Lakes’. The Edinburgh’s motto fused the literary-critical with the juridical: judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur (the judge is condemned when the guilty is acquitted). 2 Jeffrey had called Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814) ‘a tissue of moral and delusional ravings’; The White Doe of Rylstone (1815) ‘the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume’.

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But virility is more noticeable a quality than manliness in Jeffrey’s work. It was his virility that kept him to pointing out the weakness of Endymion in his most crass eloquence rather than attempting to indicate the beauty which he declared he had detected.3 Here, again, he added a note regretting that he had not gone more largely into Keats’s merits, and excusing the absence of any remedy in the reprint on the ground of impropriety. We are inclined to wonder who told him that Endymion had any merit, or, for that matter, how he saw any good in Wordsworth, for he quotes— ‘O mercy!’ to myself I cried, ‘If Lucy should be dead!’4—

which is an extraordinary piece of realism, whatever else it is—­and proceeds apparently to class it with pieces ‘formed . . . upon certain fantastic and affected peculiarities in the mind or fancy of the author’, and not ‘drawn from that eternal and universal standard of truth and nature which’, he declares, ‘everyone is knowing enough to recognise’. One of the few good things of any delicacy in this selection is in a note approving Shakespeare’s ‘Night’s candles are burnt out’, and explaining, with some justice, why ‘candles’, though ‘homely’, was better than ‘lamps of heaven’, for example. No one will dispute that he was a man with plenty of ‘sense’, that he was well fitted to see the most prominent merits of men like Crabbe, Byron, and Scott, and to describe them in an unqualified manner, but even in their presence the sense of his own importance was so great as to render his truculent eulogies intolerable to modern ears, and to make his work the most grotesque of antique curiosities, especially when we remember that in condemning the vulgarity of Burns he announced that ‘The great boast of polished life is the delicacy, and even the generosity of its hostility’. MP: 17 November

‘The Bookman’ Gallery: Walter de la Mare Mr Walter de la Mare, it is still perhaps necessary to say, is the author of Songs of Childhood: by Walter Ramal (1902), Henry Brocken: His Travels and 3  Jeffrey describes Keats’s poetry as ‘full of extravagance and irregularity, rash attempts at originality, interminable wanderings, and excessive obscurity’, but concedes that Endymion is ‘at least as full of genius as of absurdity’. 4  Quotation from ‘Strange fits of passion have I known’.

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Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-­imaginable Regions of Romance: by Walter J. de la Mare (1904), Poems (1906). His novel, The Return (1910), and his narrative of the adventures of The Three Mulla-­Mulgars (1910)1 are the first books he has published since he passed from the almost twenty-­years-­old bondage of the City to that of Fleet Street. Apart from a few stories, not to be forgotten by readers of the English Review, Cornhill and other magazines, his work has been reviewing, and that chiefly anonymous, though not the less gladly sought, distinguished, and admired. Writing for a living has not made, and could not have been expected to make, any difference in his writing except that the prose has increased in quantity. He writes, as he has always done, airily but securely perched on a single tower whose foundation is English literature and his own personality in the proportion of one to three. He is connected with no party, school, fad, clique, or movement, but nourishes, to the satisfaction of those who know him, a curiosity, a discontent, and an optimism all equally boundless. In one thing, if only in one, he resembles many other poets of today—­and probably most original poets of any day at their first rising: in his apparent isolation. He speaks as a solitary individual who might perhaps not write at all were it not for this solitude. He does not speak as a member of any class or body, or on behalf of anything or anybody. He has written one of the truest and least rhetorical of poems on England,2 and a beautiful one, called ‘The Englishman’; but this visible England of the map-­makers, politicians, naturalists, and tourists could not easily be proved from his poetry to have had much to do with his com­pos­ition. Of the current conventional writing on ‘Nature’ he has not produced any specimens. His country is the one known to English faeries—­not, however Young Gam and Wern and Olp and Dru and Knop; Trippe, Ban and Bolt, and Clum and Pust and Tarpe: And Robin . . .3

but the less rustic and more pastoral of them, by whom in all probability he was changed at his birth. He has not bought land, nor inherited, nor rented, 1 ET also wrote three separate, highly positive reviews of The Three Mulla-Mulgars: an inventive story about ‘royal monkeys’. One review appeared in the same issue of B as this profile: ‘It is difficult to be moderate in speaking of The Three Mulla-Mulgars, it is so singular and so beautiful.’ Another review ends: ‘The book is original yet well founded upon venerable traditions; it is at once magical and merry; it is a beautiful work of art; it is entirely without mere pretty decoration, without condescension to any fashion of the day, without any motive except the desire of an imaginative and ingenuous mind to please children and itself ’ (MP: 8 December). 2  De la Mare’s poem ‘England’ begins: ‘No lovelier hills than thine have laid / My tired thoughts to rest’. 3  ET is quoting from Charles M. Doughty’s The Cliffs, which features elves: see reviews [374].

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nor cultivated, nor gone out to admire it, but is the master of an immeasurable strange tract. He might be thought to describe himself when he writes, in Poems, of a little child talking to himself at night: In his dark eyes lay a wild universe—   Wild forests, peaks, and crests, Angels and fairies, giants, wolves and he   Were that world’s only guests.4

Only this ‘wild universe’ seems something grander and more gigantic than Mr de la Mare’s. His world has all these things in it, and very many more, yet it is also a little world, such as Cherry of Zennor saw, with her charm-­ anointed eyes, under the waters.5 His peculiar faculty makes it so—­a kind of faculty with half the power of fern-­seed which confers invisibility. In the best of his short stories, called ‘The Almond-­Tree’, the lonely house standing upon a heath covered with snow really was not large enough to contain the enormous cakes which were set upon its tables. But it is legitimate magic, and it is alive; the story is a kind of microcosmography of Mr de la Mare’s world, with all its loveliness, its calm and mystery, over-­clouded and glimmeringly candle-­lit amidst the snow. This magic is—­or was until The Three Mulla-­Mulgars—­most effective and unquestionable in his poetry. For example, he gives in a few stanzas, without any deliberate aim at that, an extraordinary feeling of the great age, the smallness and insignificance of some isolated man or woman; his words, rhythms, and images combining indescribably to produce an effect as power­ful as the sense of infinity which we experience between sleeping and waking or in trance. By his sincerity, by the appropriateness of his words, he at once throws open a lattice for us to look out upon this ‘wild universe’. ‘The Three Cherry Trees’, for example, which appeared lately in the Saturday Review, needs no comment or context to admit us, though for a moment only, into the privacy of a world which is not the world of many of us. He has a sonnet in Poems called ‘Messengers’, where he speaks of certain things heard or seen which stir the spirit, and then asks: Whence are they in a world so alien?   Are they the waterdrops of that vast flood Death shall unloose?

And his own poems are full of these things, of images which are certainly ‘waterdrops of that vast flood’, such is the unstrained force in their suggestions of a world not alien to their beauty. It is a world of childhood, of morning 4  The poem is ‘The Universe’. 5  Cherry of Zennor: heroine of Cornish folk-tale in which she is transported to another world.

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freshness, of springs lovelier than are known to mortal senses, of a beauty which is capable of afflicting the beholder with keen remorse. Every one will recognise in it some elements familiar to himself. Here, for example, in Songs of Childhood, are elves, fairies, gnomes, ogres, dwarfs, witches, witch-­hares, wolves, and mariners, not carefully thought out and purged of what serious people think theatrical imperfections, but the elves, etc., of ordinary books, with only this difference—­that they are made alive and in place by the synthesis of genius. Nor is there any exaggeration or emphasis, and repetitions are very few. In six lines or in sixty the effect is equally complete and independent. These elves and the like live here as in the minds of some children, and you accept the poems sometimes against the weight of your traditions and intelligence, not only because they are so gay with things like this in ‘The Three Beggars’: The sweet feast was enough for nine,   But not too much for three.

not only because of these, but because the poems are lovely and enchanted. The enchantment is not easily explained. It is, however, easy to see in Mr  de la Mare a man with a deep love of living things, of English lyrics, ­ballads, and nursery rhymes, of Herrick, Coleridge, and Poe, of fairy-­tales, of nonsense, of music, of the sound and mystery of names. In him these things have mingled in an unprecedented and happy manner to form, with the help of his genius for words, a new beauty. His people humanise his fairies, his fairies bewitch his old men and women, his young women and his children, as in the poem where he prays the elves to care for a child: Ye little elves, who haunt sweet dells, Where flowers with the dew commune, I pray you hush the child, Cecil,   With windlike song. [. . .]

In the same way, perhaps, the goblins and ogres have tenderly corrupted or lessened the natural things with which they mingle in the world of such a poem as ‘The Child in the Story Awakes’. But this is less noticeable in Poems, where much of the work is more intellectual, and partly given up to reflection and curiosity, to dread of ‘Time—­with a poppied hand Stealing thy youth’s simplicity’.6 We see the author not merely by what he cannot hide, but by what he tells us openly, as in the poem called ‘Myself ’, where   Forlornly, silently, Plays in the evening garden   Myself with me, 6  The poem is ‘Foreboding’.

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and where he addresses a child:   O sweetest, stay! One moment in thy lonely play   Turn, child, and look Ev’n but a little on that great-­leaf book, Whose livelong record when thine eyes are old Will seem, how lovely a tale, how briefly told!7

in the noble ‘Keep Innocency’, and in the poem on ambition, which gives a good example of his style in the stanza: Ever the heavy billow rears   All its sea-­length in green, hushed wall; But totters as the shore it nears,     Foams to its fall; Where was its mark? on what vain quest Rose that great water from its rest?8

Though blank verse and the sonnet form are much used in Poems, and their rhythm does not suit Mr de la Mare and makes him eloquent, this volume succeeds in adding an intellectual element without losing the magical—­ which is no little thing. All the best work in Poems, and even more so the poems in Three Mulla-­Mulgars and those which have been appearing periodically in the last few years, show that Mr de la Mare is still moving onward, achieving beauty in new as well as in the old kinds, always original and instinctive, and producing effects beyond his calculation and probably beyond our explanation, except that they proceed from the alchemy of a spirit which can dissolve the earth, like a mere pearl, to sweeten a song. B: December

Walter Ramal, Songs of Childhood; Walter de la Mare Poems1 In 1902 appeared a book of one hundred and six small pages called Songs of Childhood with the name ‘Walter Ramal’ on the title-­page. Two years later 7  The poem is ‘Unpausing’.    8  The poem is ‘The Miracle’. 1  On 2 December ET wrote to de la Mare: ‘I have just seen the article on you in the English Review so mutilated & misprinted as to be infuriating’ (PTP, 88).

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the short prose romance of Henry Brocken revealed that ‘Walter Ramal’ was W. J. de la Mare. Poems by Walter de la Mare followed in 1906, of about the same length as the first book. Since then a few poems and stories by him have been seen in two or three different journals and magazines; but these three are all his books. He has made no other appearance, nothing has been told of him, nothing said or done which might connect in the public mind the name of Walter de la Mare with this small body of poetry, as the names of men and their work are in the course of time connected so that the name comes to smell, as soon as heard, simply or subtly of the whole work and awakens a rich image of it. For nothing in his books except the beauty could encourage curiosity. The personal quality is intense and consistent, but it has no obvious egotism, no significant first person singular, no confession, defiance, lament, or hinted mystery. Mr de la Mare’s work is, in fact, the perfection of personality, and, in an impersonal way, without deliberation or obtrusiveness. He remains an entirely hidden magician behind his work. Seldom does he show himself, the author, even as much as in the beginning of ‘Miss Loo’: When thin-­strewn memory I look through, I see most clearly poor Miss Loo . . .

For the most part his poetry has been what nearly all would agree to call lyrical. The chief exceptions are the series of ‘Characters from Shakespeare’ in Poems, and even these are not unquestionable exceptions, because, though in blank verse and relating to well-­known matters, they have an all but independent life. If it is of the essence of the lyric that it should have an independent life singing itself into the brain of the reader with no aid of past knowledge or present thought, but directly through the door of the individual spirit, then no question but Mr de la Mare’s poems are the purest lyrics. Most are very short and rhymed, the majority are no longer than a sonnet, but in a great variety of metres and stanza forms. The seconds during which the eye drinks up these few words are not too short for a door to swing silently wide open upon a dim-­spread and strange world. Neither is this power due to any violence, extravagance, or marked peculiarity of thought or of rhythm, or of vocabulary, nor to any extraordinary choice of subjects. The movement of his verse is always half-­hidden under the thought of which it forms a part. It is at his best in the inward melody, the spiritual or apparently bodiless rhythms, so characteristic of this age, in the work of men like Messrs Bridges, Yeats, and Sturge Moore. Yet he can do and many times does much with customary and decided rhythm as in

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No sound over the deep, only the desolate foam, White in the evening mist, of the last wave home . . .2 [. . .]

It is only in his poems of childhood—­not always poems for children—­that he uses conventions very noticeably. It is no journey for Mr de la Mare to his goblins, elves, witches, pilgrims, and mariners. They are as much a part of his world as the sea, or almond-­ trees, or flowers: his hooting goblins and droning bees are equally alive and impressive. He is Lord of Tartary, though he has written a poem on what he would do supposing that he were: If I were Lord of Tartary,   Myself and me alone, My bed should be of ivory,   Of beaten gold my throne; And in my court should peacocks flaunt, And in my forests tigers haunt, And in my pools great fishes slant   Their fins athwart the sun. . . .

And this is too nearly humorous to contradict what has been said of the poet’s habitual indifference to pomp or rather to the language of pomp. Nowhere is the triumph of his hushed magic more complete than in these poems of childhood. ER: December 2 First two lines of ‘Alone’ (‘Uncollected’ section, Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare [London: Faber, 1969], 632): a poem published in ER (February 1909), and which ET had told de la Mare he liked in a letter of 11 April 1907 (PTP, 35).

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1911 Maurice Maeterlinck Writing to Gordon Bottomley on 1 May 1909, Thomas told him: ‘I may be doing [a book] on Maeterlinck if I can bring myself to accept very bad terms from Methuen’.1 He had wanted ‘£100 on delivery, in advance of a fair r­ oyalty’, but agreed to £80 for 60,000 words.2 Maurice Maeterlinck, published in October 1911, is a critical study of Maeterlinck’s poetry, drama and prose, with a ‘Biographical Outline’ in its first chapter. The book’s second chapter, ‘First Poems: Serres Chaudes’, appears in full below. Thomas kept Bottomley informed about his progress, as on 15 March 1910: ‘I have undertaken—­very rashly but yet necessarily—­to produce three books in the next 12 months.’ One book, ‘a sort of country book’, remained unwritten; the others were Maeterlinck and Feminine Influence on the Poets. Thomas found it difficult to juggle the research for two such disparate projects. On 6  April, thanking Bottomley for advice about books on Maeterlinck, and seeking a loan of some ‘bearing on Maeterlinck’s origins’, he adds: ‘but no hurry, as I can do little until I have got through most of my reading for the book on women & poets’. On 25 November he wrote: ‘I am just setting about Maeterlinck with a sorry heart’; and (to Walter de la Mare) on 14 December: ‘I do nothing all day in the rain . . . but write away about the fellow. Everything that goes down has to stay & all afterthoughts are afterwritten. What a trade.’ On 16 January 1911 he announced the book’s (amazingly speedy) completion: I am taking 3 days holiday with some friends after getting to the end of the beastly Maeterlinck . . . It is merely a chronological series of reviews of each of his books with a Conclusion & a semi-­biographical introduction. His early plays are his best works. That is my firm opinion & I expect you will agree.3

To Jesse Berridge he wrote likewise: ‘I have just finished Maeterlinck; a dirty job I regret to say’.4 Published in October, Maeterlinck was reprinted in November, and again in November 1915. An American edition (New York: Dodd, Mead) appeared in 1912. The book is dedicated to Irene and Hugh McArthur: Helen Thomas’s sister and brother-­in-­law. 1  LGB, 184.   2  ABL, 378, 379. 3  LGB, 199, 201, 207; PTP, 88; LGB, 208.   4  LJB, 66.

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Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) grew up in the Flemish region of Belgium (Ghent); but his family was French-­speaking, and he wrote his plays, poems and essays in French. Drawn to French Symbolist writers, he left Ghent for Paris, and afterwards lived in France. His own Symbolist plays, especially Pelléas et Mélisande (1892), were themselves influential. His ‘Fairy Play’ L’Oiseau Bleu/ The Blue Bird (1908) had a popular vogue. Maeterlinck also became celebrated as a mystic and prophetic thinker. In the first chapter of Maeterlinck, Thomas terms him ‘an artistic metaphysician’; and, in the last chapter: ‘one who advocates more than he originates . . . more a rhetorician than a mystic, though he deals in mystical ideas’.5 In 1911, at the height of his international fame, Maeterlinck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Thomas’s book proved timely. W. B. Yeats, to whom Thomas refers in his critique of Serres Chaudes, was among European writers influenced by Maeterlinck’s drama and visionary prose. Yeats praises the essays in Maeterlinck’s Le Trésor des Humbles/The Treasure of the Humble (1896) as belonging to ‘a great revolution of thought’; but with the reservation that the book ‘lacks the definiteness of the great mystics’.6 Thomas’s responses to Maeterlinck take a similar course. Having been impressed by the holistic ambition of Maeterlinck’s early writings, he aligns him with his beloved Richard Jefferies in an overview (1909) which affirms: ‘Next to the great poets and to those among us who are drawing life imaginatively, few writers have done as much to proclaim the depth, the immensity, the mystery of life’.7 But Thomas also places Maeterlinck in an ‘ivory tower, where thoughts circle and soar and settle like doves about a dovecot’; and had already found the essays collected in Life and Flowers (1907), including ‘The Intelligence of the Flowers’ (L’Intelligence des Fleurs, also published in translation as a separate book) ‘a little disappointing’: ‘Both prophet and audience thought, or seemed to think, that if the oracle went on a little longer the age of gold would definitely draw more near . . . And yet we are where we were; we have been reminded yet again that lyric genius ­cannot furnish our homes.’8 Here, as elsewhere, Thomas sympathises with Maeterlinck’s ‘belief in the world as a commonwealth of diverse spirits’; but regrets his inability, when writing about flowers or insects (as in La Vie des Abeilles/The Life of the Bee [1901]), to fuse mysticism with science: The term ‘mystic’ is not to be dwelt upon too seriously, because it is now in an advanced stage of popular corruption. Yet the acceptance of science by a man to whom it is widely applied is very remarkable. M. Maeterlinck is the first ‘mystic’ to appear in the age of science, and all the more important because he 5  MM, 8, 313–14.    6  B: July 1897.    7  DC: 19 February 1909.    8  MP: 25 April 1907.

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really belongs to this age. But, for our part, we are inclined to think that he falls short, not because his poetic or mystic quality is strong, but because it is not strong enough. He is alternately a poet and a man of science, too seldom both at once . . .

This review concludes ‘with an uneasy suspicion that M. Maeterlinck rises into the chilly altitudes not only because his wings are stronger, but because he has less than most men to carry and to lure him to the fields below’. Similarly, in his 1909 overview, Thomas complains that Maeterlinck ‘can use words too elastically’ and ‘can pursue metaphor as if it were the Holy Grail’. Thomas’s reviews of Maeterlinck build towards the book he wrote when he no longer held him in much esteem. He admitted to Bottomley (August 1911): ‘I am very sorry to see how much I have allowed my intense disgust with the later work to give a carping & irritable tone to what I say about the earlier’. Even so, ‘M himself wrote me a comically extravagant complimentary letter’; on which Thomas ungratefully comments: ‘The man is nothing but wind.’9 In fact, this history, like the chapter that follows, attaches Maeterlinck to Thomas’s quarrel with Aestheticism and with himself: to his quest for a genuinely holistic symbolism. He is being self-­critical when he says of some floral and florid prose (‘prose poems’) by Maeterlinck: ‘The observation is beautiful, the detail true, and yet the total impression is not so much of Nature as of a gentleman in his study.’10 Thomas’s last word on Maeterlinck was a profile in the New Weekly (18 July 1914). He stresses Maeterlinck’s appeal to Anglophone readers: (‘there is much in his work which suggests rather an English author who has been translated into French than one who writes originally in French’), and attributes to him ‘two splendid gifts, the gift of an incomparable and untiring fancy, the gift of glamouring common things and not loosening his grasp of them’. But the profile’s often-­ironical tone represents Maeterlinck as a writer coarsened by success, who has sold his soul along with his soulfulness: ‘the advocate of certain tremendous nostrums instead of an artist in gossamers’. For Thomas, it is a ‘dubious’ gain that Maeterlinck ‘has popularised and familiarised what might long have lain dark, remote, and unpalatable’. Chapter 2 of Maurice Maeterlinck is important to the history of modern poetics because it contains Thomas’s most intensive thinking about Symbolist theory and practice. His poetry would absorb his conclusions, and transmit them by other means. In Chapter 8, writing on Maeterlinck’s later poetry, he is again largely negative; but not driven, as here, to frame his own aesthetic testament: to conceive an opposing (though not entirely antithetical) ars poetica. It’s relevant that, when Thomas regretted the ‘perhaps . . . too obvious 9  LGB, 213, 219.    10  MP: 13 December 1906.

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metaphor’ of his own poem ‘The Dark Forest’, he called the poem ‘a bad Maeterlinckian thing’.11

First Poems: Serres Chaudes When Maeterlinck was a young man of twenty-­four he met Villiers de l’Isle-­ Adam1 and other symbolists in Paris. He became a symbolist himself. His early poems, some of them published during that visit to Paris and collected afterwards with others in Serres Chaudes,2 are symbolist or they are nothing; his early plays were accepted as symbolist. It is not obvious what is here meant by symbolism, but it is not merely the use of symbols. ‘It is all’, writes Mr Symons, ‘an attempt to spiritualise literature, to evade the old bondage of rhetoric, the old bondage of exteriority. Description is banished that beautiful things may be evoked, magically . . .’ . Writing of the sonnets of Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855) he says that here, ‘for the first time in French, words are used as the ingredients of an evocation, as themselves not merely colour and sound, but symbol’.3 Probably it is meant that they are used solely as an evocation, and deliberately so. One of the examples, ‘El Desdichado’,4 has something like the magic of the not quite intelligible song of Taliesin, beginning: Primary chief bard am I to Elphin, And my original country is the region of the summer stars; . . . I was with my Lord in the highest sphere, On the fall of Lucifer into the depth of hell; I have borne a banner before Alexander . . .5

for it ends: ‘Am I Eros or Phoebus? . . . Lusignan or Biron? My brow is still flushed from the queen’s kiss; I have been dreaming in the grotto of the syren . . . and twice have I victoriously crossed Acheron playing on the lyre of 11  EF, 202, 219; ACP, 130. 1 Auguste, Comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–89): Symbolist poet, playwright, and fiction-writer, author of influential play Axël. 2  Serres Chaudes/Hothouses was published in 1889. Some poems are stanzaic, some in free verse. In the prose-translations here, each paragraph corresponds to a verse-unit. 3  Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899; London: Archibald Constable, 1908), 8, 32. For ET on The Symbolist Movement, see [305]. 4  ‘The Unhappy One’. 5  ET quotes from the translation (in Lady Charlotte Guest’s Mabinogion: see [64n.]) of a poem attributed to the legendary sixth-century Welsh bard, Taliesin.

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Orpheus, sometimes in the tone of a saint’s sighing and at other times of a fairy’s cry.’ It is hardly necessary to say that the words do not take us farther or deeper than certain phrases of older poets and even prose-­writers, like: And battles long ago;

or— Merry it was in Silver Wood;

or— Visit’st the bottom of the monstrous world;

or, ‘The famous nations of the dead’; or, ‘Apame, the King’s concubine, the daughter of the admirable Bartacus, sitting at the right hand of the King, and taking the crown from the King’s head, and setting it upon her own head’; or, ‘And the world shall be turned into the old silence seven days’.6 We know that the words of poets and of others who can handle words often mean much more than the same mean in another place or at another time. We are almost certain that their words have often come to mean something different from what was consciously present in their minds when they wrote, and often more vast. Maeterlinck knew this, and expressed it in 1890, in a criti­cism now printed in Gérard Harry’s Maurice Maeterlinck. ‘Is it not’, he asks, ‘by examining what he has not consciously intended that we penetrate the essence of a poet? The poet premeditates this, premeditates that, but woe to him if he does not attain something else beside!’7 But the symbolists, having come late into this world, are more self-­conscious than men before them, and it appears to be their task to produce consciously the strange echoing and branching effects of magic which came to earlier men straight from the gods. Mr F. Y. Eccles put it in this way in the brilliant Introduction to his Century of French Poets: Of the many tendencies imputed to symbolism this is the most characteristic—­ out of an acuter perception of what all poets have always known, that words are insufficient if their power is bounded by their meaning, emerged an audacious doctrine which branded their representative function as inferior, and sought to shift the poetical interest from what they signify to what they may suggest. In the Parnassian system description was paramount, and feeling sprang from it immediately: the emotion which Symbolism pursues bears no 6  ET casts his net wide for instances of pre-Symbolist symbolism: quoting from Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’; (probably) a version of the ballad ‘Childe Maurice’; Milton’s ‘Lycidas’; Homer’s Odyssey (X.526); and (twice) the Apocryphal Books of Esdras. 7  Quotation from Maeterlinck’s ‘Critique on Iwan Gilkin’s “Damnation de l’artiste” ’.

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constant relation to the objects represented or the ideas expressed; rather it aims at the recovery of vanished moods by curious incantations, by the magical influence of verbal atmosphere. To fashion a true likeness of the material world it holds a vain and illusory undertaking: it values sights, sounds, scents and savours for their secret affinities with states of the soul. . . .8

It is a little unkind to words to suppose that they can be bounded by their meaning, but apparently the symbolist must insist that his words are not only not so bounded, but have a further significance which is quite precise; other­ wise there were no difference between the old and the new. It is a dangerous difference. For a poem of the old kind has a simple fundamental meaning which every sane reader can agree upon; above and beyond this each one builds as he can or must. In the new there is no basis of this kind; a poem means nothing unless its whole meaning has been grasped. Take, for an example of the old, a seventh-­century Chinese poem from Mr Cranmer-­ Byng’s Lute of Jade. It is called ‘Tears in the Spring’: Clad in blue silk and bright embroidery At the first call of Spring the fair young bride, On whom as yet Sorrow has laid no scar, Climbs the Kingfisher’s Tower. Suddenly She sees the bloom of willows far and wide, And grieves for him she lent to fame and war.9

This is explicit enough and amazingly condensed; but, even so, the many elem­ents in it combine, and then fall away and leave something more than the sum of them all, and that something over gives the poem its great beauty, which we may call symbolical if we like, but not symbolist. A symbolist might have used the same scene, but probably with this difference, that he would have drawn no conclusions from it; he would have left it to make its own effect. In the same way a symbolist poet might have seen the Highland reaper as a symbol, but would not have interpreted the symbol like Wordsworth. But, look at ‘Ennui’ from Maeterlinck’s Serres Chaudes:

8  Francis Yvon Eccles, A Century of French Poets (London: Archibald Constable, 1909), 60–1. ET’s review of this anthology praises Eccles’s ‘fine concentrated criticism’ (DC: 30 August 1909). 9  ET wrote two reviews of L. Cranmer-Byng (ed.), A Lute of Jade: Being selections from the classical poets of China. In one review he calls the translations ‘delightful’ (DC: 15 May 1909); in another, ‘perfectly readable English verse in which it is easy to get a suggestion of the extraordinary beauty of the originals’, and which might make a reader ‘think that he was wandering in a world of modern European poetry newly discovered’ (MP: 3 May 1909). In both reviews he quotes ‘Tears in the Spring’.

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The careless peacocks, the white peacocks, have fled; the white peacocks have fled from the ennui of waking. I see the white peacocks, the peacocks of today, the peacocks in rows during my sleep, the careless peacocks, the peacocks of today, arriving lazily at the sunless lake. I hear the white peacocks, the peacocks of ennui, awaiting lazily the sunless days.

This is a dangerous poem for those who think that symbolist poems must be judged by new standards. There is no meaning upon which all of them would agree. The first wish of the tolerant reader seeking for profound and designed significance must be for a dictionary to explain ‘peacocks’, especially ‘white peacocks’. He will be all the more disturbed by his lack of comprehension, because probably he would like to think of white peacocks; but this the words will not allow. The birds have to be examined like an heraldic device. The most he can do is to think—­perhaps upon a suggestion from a remembered picture—­of a large grey house with white peacocks on the empty terraces, and over all a Sunday desolation of ennui and silence. Nor is this poem the most difficult—­not to understand, but to meet in such a way that understanding is possible. For the poem seems to contain interpretation as well as a symbol; so does ‘Fauves Las’, with its ‘yellow dogs of my sins’, ‘squint-­eyed hyenas of my hates’, ‘flocks of temptations’. ‘Chasses Lasses’ is a poem written in cypher, and containing a glossary of its own terms:   My soul is sick today; my soul is sick with absence; my soul has the sickness of silence; and my eyes light it with tedium.   I catch sight of hunts at a standstill, under the blue lashes of my memories; and the hidden hounds of my desires follow the outworn scents.   I see the packs of my dreams threading the warm forests, and the yellow arrows of regret seeking the white deer of lies.   Ah, God! my breathless longings, the warm longings of my eyes, have clouded with breaths too blue the moon which fills my soul.

If this method is characteristic of the ‘decadence’ and modern France, it is not new. Is it not upon the same model as the song which Musidorus, in Sidney’s Arcadia, sang to Pamela, ‘to show what kind of a shepherd he was’. This is the song: My sheep are thoughts, which I both guide and serve;   Their pasture is fair hills of fruitless love: On barren sweets they feed, and feeding starve:   I wail their lot, but will not other prove. My sheep-­hook is wan hope, which all upholds:   My weeds, desire, cut out in endless folds:    What wool my sheep shall bear, while thus they live,    Dry as it is, you must the judgment give.

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Then Pamela turns to Mopsa and says: ‘Take heed to yourself, for your shepherd can speak well . . .’ . This passed in Sidney’s time for the language of emotion, as that of ‘Chasses Lasses’ does in our own. Both appear to be purely fanciful writing according to a fashion, and more cannot be said of them than that the exposure of the symbols has given the lines a naïve decorative value. It is harder to speak of the poems which are not thus translated for us by the one man who has their secret, Maeterlinck himself. It would be simple to accept them all together as a not obscure symbol of something familiar—­ youth; or to take the words of them as bounded by their customary meaning, the words that recur, most of them, many times—­sadness, weariness, ennui, melancholy, pallor, feebleness, immobility. These are truly mots propres, the right words not sought but inevitable and significant, like Shelley’s ‘wingèd’, or Ruskin’s ‘entirely’. The poems seem to represent a weariness, a melancholy, an unrest that belong to the writer only when he writes. These feelings, when they are profound, are not so eager to be quickly told. The pallor and melancholy are parts of the writer’s refinement, and are unconsciously chosen, partly, perhaps, out of respect for the pictures by Burne-­Jones on his walls, and partly as an easy method of distinguishing himself from a vile world not in the least melancholy and pale, or desiring to be so. If there is anything here to be called sorrow it is no more passionate than wall-­paper,10 and it is not due to loss of faith, fortune, wife, health, leg, teeth, or the like, but to this excessive refinement in protest against those whom he despises, and in imitation of the admired. In the absence of information it is impossible to be certain, but it seems likely that most of Serres Chaudes is due to Paris and the literary life. The little of his still earlier work which I have seen has nothing of this character. ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’, a perfectly Flemish piece of objective realism, is as unlike as possible, and this may have been written before the visit to Paris, though, whether it was or not, its lucidity and entire lack of display of emotion make it a significant contrast with the languor and confusion of Serres Chaudes. When referring, years later, in The Buried Temple to his early plays, Maeterlinck spoke of them as the work of ‘some obscure poetical feeling’ within him which believed in a hostile and encompassing fate, and he claimed that, with the sincerest poets, a distinction has often to be made ‘between the instinctive feelings of their art and the thoughts of their real life’. What else is this than what Keats wrote in the dedication of Endymion 10  This analogy (perhaps unfair to his admired William Morris) recurs in ET’s attacks on lingering Aestheticism.

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when he was at the same age as the Maeterlinck of Serres Chaudes? ‘The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ­ferment . . .’ . In a young man of the middle class living an easy, sheltered existence, chiefly in our modern cities, as it is so natural and common to do, the brave fervour of youth is often girt up neither by experience in the past nor by a sufficient object in the present; it must spend itself, and it does so upon little things, borrowed things, which are presently seen for what they are, and share with the fervour the same neglect and even contempt. The poem called ‘Serre Chaude’ expresses the sense of strangeness and vanity which comes to this state when life is at once too languid and too difficult because it is all cloistered within the brain:   O hothouse in the midst of the woods, with your doors for ever closed; and all the things under your dome, with their counterparts in my soul!   The thoughts of a hungry princess; the weariness of a sailor in the desert; a brass band playing under the windows of incurables.   Seek the warmest corners! Such, a woman fainting on a harvest day. Postillions are in the courtyard of the hospital; while in the distance passes an attendant, once an elk-­stalker.   Look closely, by moonlight! How out of place is everything here! Such, a mad woman before the justices; a man-­of-­war under full sail on a canal; night-­birds perching on lilies; a noontide death-­knell (there, under those bell-­glasses!); a station for the sick in the open fields; the smell of ether during a day of sunshine.   Ah, God! God! when shall we have the rain and the snow and the wind in the hothouses?

Here, too, ‘with their counterparts in my soul’, if not a complete explanation, is a timid admission of the need of one. But the piece is hardly more than a catalogue of symbols that have no more literary value than words in a dictionary. It ignores the fact that no word, outside works of information, has any value beyond its surface value except what it receives from its neighbours and its position among them. Each man makes his own language in the main unconsciously and inexplicably, unless he is still at an age when he is an admiring but purely aesthetic collector of words; certain words—­he knows not why—­he will never use; and there are a hundred peculiarities in his rhythms and groupings to be discovered. In the mainly instinctive use of his language the words will all support one another, and, if the writing is good, the result of this support is that each word is living its intensest life. The first few words of a work of art teach us, though we do not know it at the time, exactly how much value we are to give to all the rest, whether they are to be words only, or images, or spirits. They admit us, or teach us that we cannot be

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admitted, to the author’s world. Any writer whose words have this power may make a poem of anything—­a story, a dream, a thought, a picture, an ejaculation, a conversation. Whatever be the subject, the poem must not depend for its main effect upon anything outside itself except the humanity of the reader. It may please for the moment by the aid of some irrelevant and transitory interest—­political interest, for example; but, sooner or later, it will be left naked and solitary, and will so be judged, and if it does not create about itself a world of its own it is condemned to endure the death which is its element. These worlds of living poems may be of many different kinds. As a rule they are regions of the earth now for the first time separated from the rest and made independent; they may be lit by the sun of every one, or by another, or by the moon, or by a green lantern: whatever they are, they are stronger than this world, and their light more steadfast than sun or moon. Wordsworth writes a poem in the hope of making it give the same impression as a certain hawthorn-­tree gives to him; Keats because he cannot dismiss from his mind the words, ‘Dost thou not hear the sea?’; Burns because a girl pleases and evades him.11 Anything, however small, may make a poem; nothing, however great, is certain to. Concentration, intensity of mood, is the one necessary condition in the poet and in the poem. By this concentration something is detached from the confused immensity of life and receives individuality, and this creativeness brings into my mind the inhuman solitariness of the world at the moment when Deucalion12 stooped to make the first men out of stones; and the waste of waters when the dove bore an olive-­leaf into the ark out of the monotonous waste. But the early Maeterlinck turned no stones into men, nor found the crest of a tree piercing the dead sea. Nothing in Serres Chaudes persuades us to see this creative high value in the words; they give no help to one another. It is as far from the writing of a sloven or a common man as from that of a master, but it says nothing save that it belongs to a school to which it has turned in the confusion of its unrest. Whatever its intention, it has not that quality of style which at once takes and retains possession of the reader. To give such a poem significance it would be necessary to make a key to it, like St Melito’s key to the Bible,13 where it is shown that in one place the 11  ET alludes to Wordsworth’s ‘The Thorn’; to Keats’s ‘On the Sea’, written because Keats was ‘haunted’ by Edgar’s question to Gloucester (King Lear, IV.vi): ‘Hark, do you hear the sea?’; and perhaps to Burns’s ‘O saw ye bonie Lesley’: ‘lover as he was, there can be no doubt that Burns wrote best for women whom he could never attain, or even think of attaining, like the “bonie Leslie” ’ (FIP, 292). 12  Deucalion: son of Prometheus, Noah-figure in ancient Greek myth of a great flood, creatorfigure in a post-flood creation-myth. 13  Not St Melito, theologian and Bishop of Sardis in the later second century, but an unknown medieval author compiled the Clavis Sanctae Scripturae ascribed to St Melito.

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word ‘Camelus’ stands for Christ, in another for love of this world; that ‘Leo’ means Christ, Mark the Evangelist, the Devil, Antichrist; that ‘Unicornis’ is Christ, but ‘Unicornes’ the proud. But the extreme example of such symbolism is found in a verse by Adam de St Victor,14 where the word ‘dragon’ is used three times in three different senses within two lines—­Christ, the Devil and something like Antichrist. But this is not literature; as well might algebra be called literature. It is not deep enough. It was no symbolism of this kind that gave the words, ‘I believe in the forgiveness of sins’ inexorable significance to Luther as if the door of Paradise had been thrown wide open. William James, from whom this example is taken, gives other examples of persons for whom ‘Philadelphia’ and ‘chalcedony’ had ‘a mighty fascination’, and ‘the words woods and forests would produce the most powerful emotion’. Most of us (says James) can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young; irrational doorways, as they were, through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them. The words have now perhaps become mere polished surfaces for us; but lyric poetry and music are alive and significant only in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility.15

A curious example of this value of a single word or phrase may be seen in George Herbert’s poem, ‘My Master’,16 and in the treatise on ‘The Song of Angels’, by a fourteenth-­century English mystic, Walter Hilton: Some man setteth the thought of his heart only in the name of Jesu, and steadfastly holdeth it thereto, and in short time him thinketh that the name turneth him to great comfort and sweetness, and him thinketh that the name soundeth in his heart delectably, as it were a song; and the virtue of this liking is so mighty, that it draweth in all the wits of the soul thereto. Who so may feel this sound and this sweetness verily in his heart, wete thou well that it is of God, and, as long as he is meek, he shall not be deceived. But this is not angel’s song; but it is a song of the soul by virtue of the name and by touching of the good angel.

14  Adam de St Victor (d. 1146): medieval French poet, composer of Latin hymns and chants. 15  William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), 383. 16  In this poem (actually called ‘The Odour’), Herbert compares the sound of the words ‘My Master’ (Christ) to ‘ambergris leav[ing] a rich scent / Unto the taster’. For ET on Herbert, see [83].

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This is an example of the extreme and highest symbolism of words. Were it common in this degree there could be no more poetry, or it would be more accurate to say that there could be nothing else but poetry. It is an old opinion that all visible things are symbols. Sallustius, the friend of Julian the Apostate, says Professor Gilbert Murray, held the world itself to be a great myth, and the myths to be all allegories. Paris, for example, being ‘the soul living according to sense’, and therefore only able to see beauty, which is Aphrodite. For him the value of a thing lay ‘not in itself, but in the spiritual meaning which it hides and reveals’. Heraclitus of Ephesus ‘deliberately expressed himself in language which should not be understood of the vulgar, and which bore a hidden meaning to his disciples’, and he said that ‘If Homer used no allegories he committed all impieties’—on which Professor Murray makes the illuminating comment that ‘On this theory the words can be allowed to possess all their old beauty and magic, but an inner meaning is added quite different from what they bear on the surface.’17 Ruskin seems to have held a similar opinion to this of Heraclitus, for he sees a designed significance in the fact that Ophelia’s name means ‘serviceableness’, and ser­ ious­ly writes: ‘Hamlet is, I believe, connected in some way with “homely”, the entire event of the tragedy turning on betrayal of home duty.’18 But had Shakespeare paused to secure effects of this kind, assuredly he could not have produced so many that are infinitely more powerful. The laws governing aesthetic and spiritual effects are innumerable; those which can be dis­ covered are probably few in comparison, and if these are deliberately followed it is more than likely that many others will be fatally disobeyed. Maeterlinck, for example, had learnt a few when he wrote ‘Feuillage du Coeur’:   Under the blue crystal bell of my weary melancholy moods, my dim bygone griefs take gradually their motionless form:   Symbolic growths! Brooding water-­lilies of pleasures, slow-­growing palms of my desires, cold mosses, pliant bindweed:   Alone among them a lily, pale and weak in rigidity, marks its motionless ascent above the grief-­laden foliage: 17  ET’s quotations from Gilbert Murray can be found in Murray’s Four Stages of Greek Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1912), 148–9. Parts of this collection of lectures had been previously published in the Hibbert Journal (1910); and ER (December 1909), the issue in which ET’s review of Ezra Pound’s Exultations appears, also contains Murray’s essay ‘A Pagan Creed: Sallustius’s “De Diis et Mundo” ’. Julian the Apostate: Roman Emperor (361–3), philosopher, and writer (in Greek), who abandoned Christianity for neo-Platonic Greek paganism, as espoused by Sallustius too. 18 John Ruskin, Munera Pulveris: Six Essays on the Elements of Political Economy (1872; Orpington: George Allen, 1894), 167n.

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  And in the glimmer which it radiates, gradually, moon-­like, lifts its mystical white prayer to the blue crystal.

But is there anything here in addition which can awaken and gratify the profound receptivity of spirit most fit for communion with a poet? Mr W. B. Yeats, in his essay on ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’, rebukes those—­the journalists—­ who, in his opinion, are certain ‘that no one, who had a philosophy of his art or a theory of how he should write, has ever made a work of art’ and supports himself by the words of Goethe: ‘A poet needs all philosophy, but he must keep it out of his work.’ The qualification he half rejects, but when he comes to give examples of potent symbolism he finds them chiefly in writers like Burns, who did not know the word and would perhaps have been astonished and even amused by the theory itself. Even Mr Symons, loyal critic of the professed symbolists, has to say that ‘Symbolism, as seen in the writers of our day, would have no value if it were not seen also, under one disguise or another, in every great imaginative writer.’19 It must now be apparent that entirely conscious symbolism comes very near to being allegory, which of all things is abhorred by symbolists. Mr Yeats himself is a poet who is far more than a symbolist, yet it is possible to see in his work this danger skirted, and sometimes upon the wrong side. He confesses, in the notes to his Wind Among the Reeds, that he ‘has made the Seven Lights, the constellation of the Bear, lament for the theft of the Rose, and has made the Dragon, the constellation Draco, the guardian of the Rose, because these constellations move about the pole of the heavens, the ancient Tree of Life in many countries, and are often associated with the Tree of Life in mythology’. It was natural that he should have said, after quoting from Goethe, that to keep his philosophy out of his work is not always necessary for the poet; for, had he kept his own out of the notes to The Wind Among the Reeds, the annotated poems must have fallen short of his reader. An example is ‘Mongan laments the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved’, beginning: Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns! I have been changed to a hound with one red ear; I have been in the Path of Stones and the Wood of Thorns, For somebody hid hatred and hope and desire and fear Under my feet that they follow you night and day. . . .

‘I got my hound and deer’, runs his note, ‘out of a last century Gaelic poem. . . . This hound and this deer seem plain images of the desire of man “which is for the 19  Yeats’s essay dates from 1900; quotation from Symons, The Symbolist Movement, 3.

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woman”, and “the desire of the woman which is for the desire of the man”, and of all desires that are as these.’ It may be that a day will come when the force of Mr Yeats’s genius will have added to common culture the special knowledge through which alone the poem is intelligible. At present the language of it is dead or merely private, like that of Heraclitus, and the note, so far from helping the poem, attracts attention exclusively to itself. It is again a question of style. The poet’s words refuse to make any impression corresponding to his intention; they speak to the brain alone, and can reveal only his interest in mythology. Similar notes to Serres Chaudes must have been extraordinarily interesting; but if Maeterlinck does not write them it is doubtful whether any one else can or will. The one piece in the little book which is perfectly intelligible is ‘Hôpital’. It should have been placed, instead of ‘Serre Chaude’, at the front of the collection, because it is like that poem, and at the same time reveals its own origin, real or imaginary. It is nothing but a series of the fantastic images in a feverish man’s brain. Each one of the images, like the hothouse in the midst of the snow, the churching of a woman in a storm, the banquet spread in a forest, the meadow sheep trotting sadly into the wood, may well have come up before one sick man lying in a hospital on the bank of a canal, and many of them are, taken by themselves, at least suggestive. As a whole the poem is neither realism nor impressionism, nor successful in any class, because the parts have nothing to hold them together and to transform them from the state of notes into poetry. Nothing sufficient is done to prepare the way for the procession of fever pictures, and no conclusion is drawn from them; each part is greater than the whole. There are half a dozen other poems—­such as ‘Cloche à Plongeur’ and ‘Ame’—which do not differ essentially from ‘Hôpital’. Instead of the dream of a fever-­patient the excuse is a hothouse, a bell-­glass, or a diving-­bell, and he sets off at once with a catalogue of such bric-­à-­brac as antediluvian beasts invading towns, all a king’s daughters (on a parliament day) wandering in the meadows, crows hatched by swans, a sister shelling peas at the foot of an incurable’s bed, a nuptial banquet celebrated in a cave, princesses going to bed at midday, like those in his play of Les Sept Princesses. The hospital recurs in more than one poem, for example in that on a diving-­bell he compares the pallor of those who are going to die with that of patients who listen to the rain tranquilly falling in the hospital garden. A sleeping, swooning, fainting, a feverish condition seems to be the foundation of all.20 The things seen are remote and solemnly absurd, 20  Despite ET’s apparent distaste for this underlying ‘condition’ in Maeterlinck’s poetry, a few of his own poems parallel its mood and imagery. In ‘Melancholy’, which brings images from the Romantic poets to a pitch of fin-de-siècle excess, such a mood is consciously indulged: the speaker suffers from ‘fever’ and is distanced from life, which seems ‘remote as if in history’. In ‘July’ ‘cool reeds’ are ‘hung / Over images more cool in imaged sky’ (ACP, 85, 88).

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like things seen very far away in an influenza dream at midday. Evidently Maeterlinck liked this magic of looking through the wrong end of a telescope: he was the amateur looking at a diving-­bell and thinking of going down in the green water and seeing ‘strange’ creatures round about. He speaks of ‘the water of dream’ and of the ‘profound reflections of things’—lilies, palms, roses, weeping under the waters and barred over by ‘the mournful ennui of reeds’. He was perhaps dazed by the seeming depth of reflecting water, and the flowers, seen as it were in the sky, were natural to his soul where things innumerable of different and far climates might blossom together, provided that there were enough hothouses. Many of the poems bring before the mind a man in either a conservatory or a hothouse looking out on a level, watered country with swans and flocks of sheep. Nearly all things affect him through his eyes only, and as if he had seen them by compulsion and not choice; he does not love any of them; his eyes have caught his soul in a trap, as he says in ‘Après-­midi’, and there again he is lying in bed listening to the hours, waiting for rain to fall on the turf and on his motionless dreams, while his gaze is following lambs in the towns upon the horizon. No wonder that he addressed his soul as ‘truly overmuch in shelter’— in shelter like the plants under the sweating and misty bell-­glass. ‘Ennui’, which has already been quoted in a translation, is, after all, the most perfect of this soul’s dreams. He saw white peacocks because he preferred what was less common—­a black kingfisher, or a white pillar-­box, and so on. But lull the mind and lay it back, as it were, on a pillow of sultry noon, and let the birds, the indolent, careless birds have their way, as they did in the poet’s dream. The poem is made of strange birds and beautiful, monotonous words full of nasal vowels: Les paons nonchalants, les paons blancs ont fui, Les paons blancs ont fui l’ennui du réveil; Je vois les paons blanc, les paons d’aujourd’hui, Les paons en allés pendant mon sommeil, Les paons nonchalants, les paons d’aujourd’hui, Atteindre indolents l’étang sans soleil, J’entends les paons blancs, les paons de l’ennui, Attendre indolents les temps sans soleil.

This is the music of words, and nothing but words—­words in their barbaric and unintellectual purity, and according to your ear for such will be the clearness, beauty, and significance of the white peacocks which they create. Banish all thoughts of symbolism and of different standards, and it is a beautiful poem of refined and luxurious indolence.

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The Complete Poems of Emily Brontë, edited by Clement Shorter, with introductory essay by W. Robertson Nicoll1 The poems by Emily Brontë published in her own and in Charlotte Brontë’s lifetime won no extraordinary or wide reputation. Her ‘too bold dying song’ shook the soul of Matthew Arnold ‘like a clarion-­blast’, and he spoke of her with less poetry than truth as one whose soul Knew no fellow for might, Passion, vehemence, grief, Daring, since Byron died . . .2

The poems were too naked for popular success, especially in an age when Tennyson had raised the standard of poetic diction to an intolerable degree. She had no style in poetry. She used commonplace rhythms and forms and obeyed them indifferently well; her vocabulary was lean where it was not tawdry. And only thirty-­nine of her poems were before the world until the editors of the present volume, Sir  W.  Robertson Nicoll and Mr Clement Shorter, privately printed sixty-­seven more in 1902. They have now added seventy-­one to these, but with no assurance that no more remain in the note-­ books of Charlotte Brontë from which they are taken. For giving us a book of very uncommon charm the editors are to be thanked, but their text is often inaccurate. In many places an error with an obvious correction has been left untouched and without comment, as, for example, in The wide cathedral Isles are lone . . .

and ’Tis wintry light o’er flowless moors . . .

and Better that I my own fate mourning, Should pine alone in this prison gloom; Then waken free on the summer morning And feel they were suffering this awful doom.3 1  Emily Bronte: 1818–48. ET wrote a third review of the Complete Poems (DC: 6 March 1911). Clement Shorter (1857–1926): journalist and literary critic, whose first wife was the Irish poet Dora Sigerson Shorter (1866–1918); for William Robertson Nicoll, editor of the Bookman, see Introduction [xxxvii]. 2  ET is quoting from Arnold’s poem ‘Haworth Churchyard’. 3  ET has quoted from ‘It’s over now; I’ve known it all’, ‘How still, how happy!’ and ‘I know that tonight the wind it is sighing’. Shorter defended his editorial practice, claiming that his

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In this last case the semicolon may have been inserted in order to justify the absurd ‘then’. In other cases the correction is not obvious, but the fault is; nor is any notice taken of these. We have counted about a score of such editorial oversights. These are all the more objectionable because the poetry is itself often rough and loose, and the delicate spirit behind it is very shy of appearing when serious misprints are added to these veils of the sense. The poems were worth more serious attention. It is true that Charlotte Brontë and Emily herself must have rejected most if not all of them when the volumes of 1846 and 1850 were arranged, and that many are fragmentary or relate to a scheme which is now lost. But the utmost roughness becomes significant and even attractive when we know the passionate and impatient nature of the writer. It was this which made her disdain or ignore questions of style which might seem to come between her and her immediate purpose. At times the style is merely feeble; at others it is a makeshift that has been trampled on by the passion which it expresses. Seldom can she pause for such still beauty as in The damp stands in the long, green grass As thick as morning’s tears . . .4

As a rule the words are subdued to the thought or feeling, not in any sense equivalent to it, except when, very rarely, the writer achieves something like Byron’s own vehement concentration, as in O Death! So many spirits driven Through this false world, their all had given To win the everlasting haven For sufferers so divine: Why didst thou smite the loved, the blest, The ardent, and the happy breast, That full of life desired not rest, And shrank appalled from thine? . . . At least, since thou wilt not restore, In mercy launch one arrow more; Life’s conscious death it wearies sore, reproduction of Brontë’s ‘errors’ was appropriate in a volume ‘of purely bibliographical interest’. ET responded to this claim when reviewing Wuthering Heights, Vol. II of Shorter’s edition: ‘We should suggest, however, that Mr Shorter should print “aisles”, and put Emily’s spelling, “isles”, in a footnote; and that if Emily wrote “flowless moors” by mistake or for brevity, he should substitute “flowerless”, and put “flowless”, if necessary, in a note’ (DC: 20 August 1912). ET uses the adjective ‘flowerless’ in his poem ‘A Tale’ (ACP, 73). 4  Quotation from ‘Mild the mist upon the hill’.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 It tortures worse than thee. Enough if storms have bowed his head, Grant him at last a quiet bed Beside his early stricken dead; Even where he yearns to be!5 [. . .]

As we look over these poems, nominally complete or fragmentary, we seem to be moving among the wreckage of very great poetry. The new ones are fully equal to the old in quality and far more numerous, and they will convince anyone not fundamentally unsympathetic that if they are not great poetry they could have been written only by a great poet. They depict a character more subtle than any in Wuthering Heights, and as bold and proud. The love of Nature is like Byron’s, without being theatrical. The ‘love of barrenness’, by no means a cockney’s, is the most passionate to be found in poetry; and all her feelings towards men and women, real or imaginary, and towards life and God, are keyed up to the pitch demanded by the wild moors, the storm, the night sky, and the wild heart of the solitary poet. It cannot be said of her broken style that it is the woman herself, yet the poems reveal a personality more directly than any others we know, and one that must have a singular fascination for this age. But it is to be hoped that the text will be thoroughly examined before it is reprinted. MP: 23 January

Complete Poems of Emily Brontë; Ernest Dimnet, Les Soeurs Brontë [. . .] The selections by Emily and Charlotte were evidently made according to a simple rule. Only what was finished or readily intelligible was included—­a rule which excluded almost all fragments and all poems relating to the im­agin­ary country and characters of the sisters. This rule was followed to our no small loss, because finish meant little to Emily’s poems, and because such poetry is not effective in a small number of examples. The poems admired by Mr Shorter and Sir W. Robertson Nicoll are those which are finished. These are characteristic, but, altogether, they do the writer less than justice. Any selection does her less than justice, and we sincerely welcome a 5  From ‘A thousand sounds of happiness’.

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‘complete edition’, consisting of over three hundred pages and including many imperfect poems, sketches, notes, and scraps. Charlotte Brontë, says M. Dimnet, one of the most sympathetic and just of her critics, whether English or French, wrote very good verses, ‘mais le brise de montagne n’y passe pas’;1 Emily, on the other hand, is continually achieving a rare effect. It is true, and it is not obvious. M. Dimnet speaks also of her ‘magic wand’, and it is a bold application. For hers is not the magic wand of style which everyone recognises or can be taught to recognise. All or many of her poems have to be read before the discovery is made that they are ‘rare’, and, even so, we should be more likely to discover it if we knew something of her short life, her pride, her independence, her moorland solitude, her slow, unresisted, and unfeared death. Hers is not poetry which can stand entirely alone and yet live. If it is to live it must be as the work of Emily Brontë. Through her and her known story it begins really to live, and this gift of life is fully paid back. Byron’s poetry owes much to Byron’s life and personality, and they in their turn to his poetry; and the same may be said of Emily Brontë. [. . .] She and Byron both had active temperaments which were impatient of the bonds of an art, and their achievements seem the somewhat rough-­shod triumphs of life over art; but while Byron wrote Mazeppa, and was the equal of that wild rider and of the King who heard the tale,2 Emily Brontë could only write straight out of her imagination a poem ‘To the horse Black Eagle, which I rode at the Battle of Zamorna’; and while Byron’s poems mark the map of Europe, hers are linked to Elbe, Gondal, Areon, Almedore, and other places in ‘the misty mid region of Weir’.3 [. . .] The slender Titaness4 is never so much at home as in the craggy setting of her own moors in wild or ominous weather, or by night. She cannot always hold her own in the sublimity which she creates in the storm—‘Darkness and glory rejoicingly blending’—and she cries with the magic rather of life than of poetry: Woods, you need not frown on me; Spectral trees, that so dolefully 1  ‘But the mountain-breeze does not pass there’. 2  For ET on Byron and Mazeppa, see [174]. 3  These names (including ‘Zamorna’) belong to the imaginary world, ‘Gondal’, which Emily Brontë created with her sister Anne: a Romantic-Gothic war-torn world, like that in Game of Thrones. Charlotte and Branwell Brontë created a similar world: Angria. Some of Brontë’s poems are ‘Gondal poems’. The quotation is from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘Ulalume’. 4  Titanism (from the Titans who opposed Zeus): a spirit of rebellion against authority and convention.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 Shake your heads in the dreary sky, You need not mock so bitterly.5

The poem in which she praises the ‘spot, ’mid barren hills, Where winter howls, and driving rain’6 is well-­known; and there are some among the new poems which take us deeper into this tumultuous love of the wild where she was born and was chained. One piece, which opens abruptly and perhaps imperfectly, gives to this love the sense of a kindlier and freer religion than that of the strictly devotional poems: Give we the hills our equal prayer,   Earth’s breezy hills and heaven’s blue sea; I ask for nothing further here   But my own heart and liberty.7

One of her characters is described as a spirit scarcely bound to its clay, but Lightened and soothed insensibly By the lone home of wind and tree—

a beautiful line; and one of the short jottings contains an ejaculation connecting this character with herself: I’m happiest now when most away I can tear my soul from its mould of clay, On a windy night when the moon is bright, And my eye can wander through worlds of light. When I am not, and none beside, Nor earth, nor sea, nor cloudless sky, But only spirit wandering wide Through infinite immensity.8

As a rule her enjoyment of Nature is too wild to be named happiness, but she has a beautiful poem ‘In memory of a happy day in February’ (1842), which she called happy probably from its unusual calm giving her ‘a glimpse of truths divine’. But it was rare for her to allow her religion to intrude upon or combine with Nature; it seems to have been usually a narrow and separate

5  Quotations from ‘High waving heather’. 6  From ‘A little while’. 7  From ‘And like myself lone, wholly lone’: a poem about a caged bird. 8  The ‘Gondal poem’ quoted, which connects with this poem, begins ‘Ladybird! ladybird! fly away home’ and concerns the character ‘Percy’. ‘Wind and tree’ is a frequent image in ET’s own poetry.

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thing. In one of his admirable phrases M. Dimnet says that she was herself like a ‘force of Nature’, and there are poems when she does seem a dark Oread passing in storm through the solitary places, or, if in calm, then a ‘bleak November’s calm’.9 But just as she has poems where the Titaness is meek, so there are others where the ‘force of Nature’ becomes the sad child of Nature who thinks earth sorry for the misery of man; she would not leave the earth For any world beyond the tomb. No, mother, on thy kindly breast Let us be laid in lasting rest, Or waken but to share with thee A mutual immortality.10

Wild or meek, the poems have an immediate passionateness which the finest poems lose before they reach their ultimate fineness. This is the advantage of her rough edges, uncertain rhythms, poor rhymes, and careless or hackneyed vocabulary, which are no more than a curtain hung between us and her life, and torn through again and again. Nothing here—­except by chance in a phrase like I cannot weep as once I wept Over my western beauty’s grave—11

seems to have passed out of life into the still world of art. It is beautiful because it sometimes vaguely, often sublimely, suggests a reality far more beautiful, the life of the blood and of the spirit itself. No wonder she asks:      O why has Heaven Denied the precious gift to me, The glorious gift to many given, To speak their thoughts in poetry?12

Her poetry is that of life. There is no rest in the book. It is full of a disturbing sense of those very realities which forced the pen of the poetess seventy years ago. The poems are herself, not her quiet ghost. They still live with beating pulses, quick breaths, dishevelled hair, and bright eyes, upon the mountains, and it would be an affront to life if they should fail to endure simply because

9  Quotation from ‘Redbreast, early in the morning’. 10  Last lines of ‘I see around me piteous tombstones grey’. 11  This poem is ‘Sleep, mourner, sleep!’: now thought to be the work of Branwell Brontë. It’s interesting that ET should think it untypical. 12  Quotation from ‘Alone I sat’.

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they never reached the tranquillity of pure art. That they do not reach it is at present their most stirring charm. N: 28 January

The Collected Works of William Morris,1 with Introduction by his daughter, May Morris: 24 Vols Speaking of William Morris’s character and looks, Professor J. W. Mackail, in his Life, says that as ‘among all his townsmen who have before our own day been eminent as men of letters or artists, it is to Chaucer that one would turn by the first instinct for a parallel’, so ‘the resemblance even extended to physical features: the corpulent person, the demure smile, the “close silent eye” ’. One of the most perceptibly enduring of Morris’s works is likely to be his noble folio edition of Chaucer. He himself admitted the resemblance between his Earthly Paradise and the Canterbury Tales, and already in his Life and Death of Jason he had addressed Chaucer as his master. Again in the Envoi of The Earthly Paradise, he bade his book go to one whom he believed to be a friend, his master, Geoffrey Chaucer. And in the Prologue to The Earthly

1 The publication (1910–15) of the Collected Works of William Morris (1834–96) was a significant memorial event. The first four volumes, here reviewed by ET (although he ranges across Morris’s career), contain The Hollow Land (1856), The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems (1858), The Life and Death of Jason (1867), the first half of The Earthly Paradise (1868–70). This review-article appeared in an issue of B, which also features an essay by Holbrook Jackson: ‘The Ideas of William Morris’. Both articles are lavishly illustrated with photographs, and with drawings and designs that reflect Morris’s activity as a visual artist. ET would review, again for B, four further tranches of the Collected Works. He remains more enthused by the idea of Morris than by his actual poetic achievement, with its backward look. Reviewing Vols IX–­XII, he sums up the style of Morris’s epic poem, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1876), as ‘archaism and euphemism imperfectly vitalised’; and says: ‘there can be no room for work which does not find or create a world in which it and the reader can live’ (B: March 1912). Reviewing Vols XIII–­XVI (three volumes of prose and a translation of Homer’s Odyssey), and perhaps seeing something of his own literary incoherence in Morris, he judges that Morris’s ‘written work . . . never culminates’: ‘His powers are never seen, all harmoniously and as one, attaining a difficult goal’ (B: December 1912). He similarly finds contradiction between the romances and lectures in Vols XXI and XXII: ‘It is likely that he kept the power of make-believe more than most people, and indulged it in his writings along with quite different powers’ (B: February 1915). For ET’s review of the last two volumes, see [652]. See, too, his earlier reviewarticle on Morris [345].

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Paradise, when he asks us to ‘forget six counties overhung with smoke’, he thinks of the clear Thames and its few ships below the Bridge: While nigh the thronged wharf Geoffrey Chaucer’s pen Moves over bills of lading. . . .

The resemblance is conscious, and on the whole superficial. Morris may have been aware of one of the chief differences when he used the words: ‘For thou, sweet-­souled, didst never stand alone’. He felt, perhaps, that he himself stood alone, and it is of the profound differences that I think in reading these passages again on the beautiful page of this Collected Edition. Chaucer is the only one of our great poets belonging to the middle ages, and consequently the only one whose life and work can remind us that there was a day when the poet was only incidentally, and as it were without knowing it, an artist.2 He was in no essential separated from the society in which he moved. He did many things in London, at Windsor and abroad, and his writing was one of them and harmonious with them. He reveals himself far less obviously and deliberately than other poets because the poet, like the man, was social and not isolated. His work was naturally and happily himself: it was not an individual but a corporate view of life, and represents his age more than it does Chaucer. He did not assert himself because he was not so cut off from his audience that he was bound to do so. In the changed world of the Reformation no writer shows this social quality except the maker of street ballads. Even Shakespeare is solitary and exceptional. The man himself stands apart from his age in a kind of inevitable exile: Chaucer, on the other hand, is his age and can merge his identity in it with safety. As for lyric poets, they appear but sudden sharp voices as of birds flying over in a dark night: only elaborate historical work can in part destroy this illusion. And as time advances more and more of the poets are in a like isolation. It has become an exaggerated truism that poets may mean far more to posterity than to their own age. They are unnoticed spectators standing on the outside or at the edge of the life which they record. Milton was consciously out of place in his age and out of sympathy with it. The poets of the Augustan age, through their politics, seem to be exceptional; but they are more professional than ever, and more­ over they have not weathered the passing of time as well as others. What a difference, again, between Chaucer and Cowper!—Chaucer with so little appearance of being exceptional save in the intensity of his powers, writing about neighbours for neighbours—­Cowper buried away with a few friendly

2  ET has already written on Chaucer in this vein [115].

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women and ministers, addressing the world as out of a hermitage, interesting largely as a curiosity, even to himself ‘a stricken deer.’3 This increase of solitude has continued. Shelley began by talking with a kind of gaiety about writing for a dozen people, and ended with a feeling, something like paralysis, due to the total lack of communion with an audience. Nor has the spurious publicity of gossip in our own times done anything to alter the conditions of authorship. The break-­up of religion, the dis-­organisation of society, the multiplication of readers, have isolated artists more and more. Hence an infinite variety, a tendency to insist upon individuality for its own sake. So that there are men of singular ability who only appeal to a handful, a hundred, a few hundreds, whom they may or may never reach. But from time to time men have arisen who have broken away by dint of extraordinary personality from the solitude of professional authorship, and have gained half their power by calling attention to themselves and their work at the same time, instead of remaining like needles in their own ­haystacks. Byron in poetry and Borrow in prose are supreme examples. Everything about their lives is eagerly devoured and discussed, and their work gains by additions from their lives: it is impossible yet to look at their work simply as art, as we can look at Wordsworth’s or Keats’s. William Morris was a man of such personality that his failure to become one of these men like Byron and Borrow is somewhat astonishing. He appears to have failed just because of the diversity which was his power. Had he been only a poet or a prose writer he might have become such a myth as Byron or Borrow. But instead of crushing and cramming all into a book or a series of books of one intense and narrow kind, like these men, he wrote two or three different kinds of poetry and prose, and what is more he lectured, he organised societies and movements, he designed wallpaper and chintz, he wove tapestry and got others to weave it, he dyed and experimented in dyeing, he built and adorned a house, he managed a business and kept a shop, he was a public examiner and an adviser to a museum, he refused the laureateship, he cooked admirably, he was a keen coarse fisherman and had times when he ‘was too happy to think that there could be much amiss anywhere’, he enjoyed life, he became an admirable citizen, and he neither talked nor wrote much about himself. Whatever he did he did well, and in many things he was an originator and more than a good performer. But for a modern artist he dissipated his forces too much. No one work of his can be taken alone

3  For ET on William Cowper, see [180].

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and fairly be held to represent his powers. His work shows him as a firm rather than as one man, as ‘Morris & Co.’, even though it was all essentially William Morris. So many qualities were related and united in the man which appear separate and weak in the poet and craftsman. Valuing as he did above all things ‘consciousness of manly life’, and thinking the arts a part of this, he was perhaps incapable of the artificial pampered concentration of a man like Tennyson. Modern conditions preyed upon him overmuch for this. In his lecture on ‘Art and its Producers’ he betrays a feeling that troubling about arts and crafts might seem ‘petty and unheroic’ to those who have been brought face to face with ‘the reckless hideousness and squalor of a great manufacturing district’. He cared for both, for the arts and crafts and for the ‘shabby hell’ of the city, and he did not think or find the two cares incompatible, but rather insisted that they were one, though he found one crowded life, busy, never hurried, and of no unusual length, too small for his purpose. A similar apparent division of passion is to be seen in ‘The Message of the March Wind’, where the lover on an eve when his mistress is given to him and to gladness asks: Shall we be glad always? Come closer and hearken: Three fields further on, as they told me down there, When the young moon has set, if the March sky should darken, We might see from the hill-­top the great city’s glare.

But here the division is healed in a beautiful union between love of one woman and of the world, and the lover ends: But lo, the old inn, and the lights, and the fire, And the fiddler’s old tune and the shuffling of feet; Soon for us shall be quiet and rest and desire, And tomorrow’s uprising to deeds shall be sweet.

This union makes the poem one of the finest single poems of Morris and his age. He would have made an interesting benevolent despot—­not too ben­evo­ lent either; yet he was a faithful Socialist,4 and his nearest approach to despotism, outside his own circle, was in reconstructing society inside the pages of News from Nowhere. In a sense he was too big a man to be as great as we could wish him to have been at any one point. He never quite made up his mind about himself. Mr Mackail’s Life, for example, reveals him as a hearty countryman and as a conscious and satisfied cockney. He tended to prefer calling 4  In fact, Morris intended the ‘message’ of ‘The Message of the March Wind’ (ET’s favourite poem by him) to be socialist.

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himself a cockney, as a citizen of the hideous town which was once ‘London small, and white, and clean’. As an artist he preferred to think of such a London, and he found it by looking back in The Earthly Paradise, and by looking forward in News from Nowhere. Miss Morris, by the way, prints a fragment of a rejected Prologue to The Earthly Paradise where this vision of London is varied thus: I tell of times long past away When London was a grey-­walled town, And slow the pack-­horse made his way Across the curlew-­haunted down.

He was, it must be remembered, born in Essex, at the edge of the city, and lived in several charming neighbourhoods which have now been overtaken by London; and in this may be seen, as so often in events of a great man’s life, a sort of allegory.5 For most of his life he was a somewhat dismayed countryman but an imperfect Londoner: he was probably one of the survivors who could not accept the modern distinction and separation between town and country. The country, as he painted it in News from Nowhere, or The Earthly Paradise, or Jason, or The Glittering Plain,6 has a clear, cool beauty of early morning that is purely his own and is worthy of the ‘unanxious’ women whom he sometimes sets to walk therein— Who joyously through flowering grass did go.7

His work as a citizen and craftsman is not to be calculated. Its influence is alive and has ramified out of sight. Of his poetical writing there can be little doubt that the best is chiefly the earliest. Yet his early poetry contains little of the manly artist and citizen which his name will always call up among those who saw him or heard of him by word of mouth. It contains nothing of the man whom a fellow once stopped and asked ‘if he was ever captain of the Sea Swallow’, of the florid man rocking to and fro on a platform facing his hecklers and speaking very well for a man who looked as if he would prefer deeds to words. It will be an odd insolence of fate if The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems and a few anecdotes are all that survives of this man. [. . .] 5  From his own experience, ET could identify with how Morris’s vision was conditioned by London’s encroachment on childhood fields and streets. He recalls ‘the charm of the older suburban houses and gardens, yielding nothing to the tide that has surrounded them on every side, until one day their cedars fall, and the air is full of mortar and plaster flying from ceiling and wall, and settling on the grass and prostrate ivy’ (RJ, 105–6). In ET’s poem ‘Gone, gone again’ such an ‘old house’ becomes an image for himself (ACP, 132). 6  The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891): pioneering fantasy-novel by Morris. 7  Quotation from The Life and Death of Jason.

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Books edited and produced with such care will invite the attention of posterity. It would be unjust to ourselves as well as insulting to posterity to pry into the results of this attention. Can we who still read and re-­read Paradise Lost, Childe Harold, Don Juan, and the Prelude, who read once through The Canterbury Tales, Endymion, and Hero and Leander, and at least once attempt The Faerie Queene and Polyolbion—­can we read Jason and The Earthly Paradise? Of course many can who like delicate speech and the kiss of rhymes. But are not even they sometimes aware that it is rather fantastic to retard a tale by such phrasing? They feel that the verse is frequently a quaint decorative addition, but always a retardation. Nor is it always that the necessity of rhyme incites Morris to a luxurious diction so lovely in detail that its total ineffectiveness is excused or need of excuse forgotten. A long narrative must hold us by a masterly sense of action, or by a richness of treatment that ‘loads every rift with ore’. Each is an all but superhuman task today. The richness cloys or falls off in poems longer than ‘St. Agnes Eve’, and it was not at this ideal that Morris aimed. The sense of action is dead or atrophied among moderns. In ideal narrative poetry the subjects should be national or generally known: it should be the work of a race or class as much as of one man. The Divina Commedia is so much greater than Paradise Lost because it is part of a civilisation. Spenser tried to fulfil the conditions by linking his Faerie Queene to the history of his country and the character of Queen Elizabeth. It succeeds only in so far as its parts are beautiful in themselves. Narrative like this perishes while the lyric composed in solitude for reading in solitude survives. Long poems in dramatic form survive because the social act of representing them can still foster their life. Morris is as solitary as is Spenser, and his subjects are all from literary sources. He falls between the two choices: his style is sweet and slow, too little so to be the principal beauty, yet too much so to allow action to predominate. Jason and The Earthly Paradise are not big in the impersonal kind, like the old epics, nor like Keats’s ‘Lamia’ justified by individuality of workmanship. Morris tells the finest stories in the world in a diction as delightful as that of the Elizabethans when first they exulted in blank verse, and with such power that the poetry-­reading public who approach him with the just prejudice of contemporaries must long enjoy them. Miss Morris’s notes show some of the earliest work for The Earthly Paradise, such as a form of ‘The Man Born to be King’, which was written before his poetry lost its youth. When Jason appeared it was lost. He more than recovered it in ‘The Message of the March Wind’ and ‘Thunder in the Garden’, and there are portions of The Earthly Paradise where it would be affectation or pedantry to want it. But these early poems had the narrow

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intensity of youth. As it gave them life it still keeps them young: they have never become old-­fashioned. When Morris’s interests increased and multiplied he might well think lightly of these buds, because he was so much more than they. But again it would be a cruel irony if these were remembered like the eagle’s feather—‘Well, I forget the rest’.8 Cruel but not wholly uncalled for by one who was so much a man—­who scoffed at inspiration and for want of amusement in books would ‘screw out’ his ‘tale of verses’ (two hundred and fifty in two days)—who despised solitary art, and in his News from Nowhere made the word ‘art’ disappear, because it was ‘a necessary part’ of every man’s productive labour—­who might have said to this generation, like Clara to her grandfather: ‘Books, books! always books, grandfather! When will you understand that after all it is the world we live in which interests us?’9—who seems to be speaking under the disguise of Love in Love is Enough: Rather caught up at hazard is the pipe That mixed with scent of roses over ripe, And murmur of the summer afternoon, May charm you somewhat with its wavering tune ’Twixt joy and sadness: whatsoe’er it saith, I know at least there breathes through it my breath.10

But what a man!—himself a poem. Such men, so far as we can know, are rare as the great poets. B: February

W. Hall Griffin, The Life of Robert Browning with Notices of his Writings, his Family, & his Friends, completed and edited by Harry Christopher Minchin [. . .] Among the most interesting features in the book are the many details as to Browning’s reading and the origin of certain poems. [. . .] One of the most 8  Allusion to Robert Browning’s ‘Memorabilia’: a poem about the arbitrariness of memory, which may have come to mind owing to ET’s work for the next review. 9  Scene in News from Nowhere (1890). 10  Lines spoken by ‘Love’ in Morris’s verse-play, Love is Enough; or, the Freeing of Pharamond. A Morality (1872).

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significant origins of all is indicated by his father’s poem on the Pied Piper, begun after Browning’s was finished, but long before he had seen it: Where the rats came from no mortal could say—   But for one put to flight   There were ten the next night;— And for ten over night, there were twenty next day:—   With double the numbers perhaps the next morning—   In vain did the lodgers and tenants give warning— And declared that unless they were driven away—   The rats and taxation   Would bring on starvation— And they wouldn’t stay to be famished—­not they!

This ‘not they!’ is the very trick of Browning’s written style. Was it his style in speech? The book does not show whether it was or not. He was a man of courage and force and humour: one who ‘by means hardly definable . . . contrived to keep his converse, even with the most commonplace of his acquaintance, on a certain high spiritual level’. But he does not appear in these pages as a man of such angular individuality as in his poems. After some anecdotes his biographers have to say: ‘In all this is nothing peculiarly characteristic of the poet’. Perhaps the extent of his social intercourse compelled him to conceal unconsciously the angles of the man who must obviously have resembled Fra Lippo Lippi and Caliban, since he makes both speak alike. Something of Browning there must be in:               ‘Who am I? Why, one, sir, who is lodging with a friend Three streets off—­he’s a certain . . . how d’ye call? Master—­a . . . Cosimo of the Medici, I’ the house that caps the corner. Boh! you were best!’1

The clipped and interrupted speech is often fatal to poems of a different kind.2 It is absurd, indeed, to charge Browning, as Leighton3 did, with ‘writing wilfully in cipher’, though cipher it is. That is not the worst. Many great poets have had their cipher which only time elucidates. But his effects are 1  Quotation from ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’. 2  While ET, as when discussing Emily Brontë, blamed Tennyson for ‘rais[ing] the standard of poetic diction to an intolerable degree’ [480], he did not necessarily approve the opposite Victorian stylistic extreme represented by Browning. 3 (Sir) Frederic Leighton (1830–96), Lord Leighton for one day before he died: popular academic-classical painter and sculptor, friend of Browning’s. His sister, Alexandra Orr, was the author of Life and Letters of Robert Browning (1891).

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continually being mutilated by these clippings and interruptions. What is the value of the interjected ‘speak truth’ in the song: Nay, but you, who do not love her,   Is she not pure gold, my mistress? Holds earth aught—­speak truth—­above her?

It is repeated in the second verse as if it had a special value. The absurd ‘Gold, of course’ is another case.4 Some of his crudities appear to be due to the difficulty of a man writing in a hurry and compelled to submit to rhyme and rhythm. Such is the comparison of Saul’s knees, walling in the youthful David, with         oak roots which please To encircle a lamb when it slumbers,5

the ‘please’ and the ‘when it slumbers’ being irrelevant. Such is the use of ‘indulged’ in the thirteenth verse of ‘By the Fire-­side’. Rhyme was a disease with Browning, and he introduced it with merely comical ingenuity into ‘Dis Aliter Visum’, and significantly into the song which Caliban sings; it is printed as blank verse:       What I hate, be consecrate To celebrate Thee and Thy state, no mate For Thee; what see for envy in poor me?6

His weakness is more than a matter of technique. It is a restless, crude, uncomfortable spirit which drives him to intrude with a breath of every-­day upon matters which are not of every-­day. These lines in ‘Gold Hair’ are out of keeping with the rest, and were introduced presumably with some false notion of galvanising the whole into something beyond the merely poetical: Hair, such a wonder of flix and floss,   Freshness and fragrance,—floods of it, too! Gold, did I say? Nay, gold’s mere dross . . .

4  The song quoted is called ‘Song’. The phrase quoted, a line from ‘Love among the Ruins’, refers to ‘chariots’. 5  Quotation from Saul. 6  In ‘By the Fire-side’ Browning rhymes a line about toadstools ‘peep[ing] indulged’ with ‘undivulged’ and ‘bulged’. In ‘Dis Aliter Visum’ the second line of each five-line stanza ends with an internal rhyme, e.g., ‘soft aloft’, ‘blurt out curt’; Caliban’s ‘song’, with similar rhymes, is from ‘Caliban upon Setebos’. In fact, ET himself makes (more subtle) use of this device in his poem ‘The Green Roads’ (ACP, 128).

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It is not a conversational poem, be it remembered. Browning intrudes upon himself, thrusts himself with sudden and awkward gestures upon poems which are progressing upon another plane. As a rule he does it through an interjected splash—­a ‘beseech you’—a buttonholing of the reader—­an ‘eh, what?’ But the same thing is to be seen in a rather different way at the beginning of most of his long poems. Here he shows us himself getting into his poetry: he does not find himself there at the beginning, but, as in The Ring and the Book, Fifine, Sordello,7 makes his preparations in public. It is as if the actor who is to play Hamlet were to come on to the stage in tweeds and straw hat and proceed to change into the dress of his part: sometimes he resumes the tweeds and straw hat.8 One of the most beautiful of his poems, and not a long one, is handicapped in a similar way: we mean ‘By the Fire-­side’. Most of the description in the first twenty verses is not only irrelevant but actively disturbing. The walk does not require that not only the boulders being lichened shall be mentioned, but that the lichens ‘mock The marks on a moth’, or that the chestnut balls are ‘each three in one’. The detail And yonder, at foot of the fronting ridge   That takes the turn to a range beyond, Is the chapel

is entirely ineffectual: it refers to something in the poet’s memory which it cannot bring into the reader’s mind. So, too, it is useless to mention that the dozen people in the little chapel are gathered there ‘By the dozen ways one roams’. That is the style of the indolent or purposeless prose essayist who has space to be filled. The following is prose and nothing else: It has some pretension too, this front,   With its bit of fresco half-­moon-­wise Set over the porch, Art’s early wont:   ’Tis John in the Desert, I surmise, But has borne the weather’s brunt— Not from the fault of the builder, though,   For a pent-­house properly projects Where three carved beams make a certain show,   Dating—­good thought of our architect’s— ’Five, six, nine, he lets you know.

7  The Ring and the Book was published in 1868–9; Fifine at the Fair in 1872; Sordello in 1840. 8  Here ET curiously anticipates how Yeats distinguishes art from life in ‘Lapis Lazuli’, by saying that Shakespearean characters/actors ‘Do not break up their lines to weep’.

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Such flaws must be due either to the use of untransmuted notes or memories or to the clumsy intrusion of the mere man, Robert Browning, into the sphere of a spirit who was both less and more than he was. Whitman changes his key far less than Browning does. In Donne there is perhaps no change of key at all. In Byron there is more; but we submit with ease and pleasure because Byron is not only the author but the subject in these cases. With Browning this is never so. All his fundamental brainwork,9 therefore, all his observation and dramatic lyricism, cannot often or for very long overcome the effects of this fault. SR: 4 February

A Book of Cambridge Verse, edited by E. E. Kellett (Cambridge University Press) The charm of locality in literature is a very delicate and rare one.1 As a rule, at least in all but recent work, it is an unpremeditated charm. An author mentions a place by its proper name, and the word immediately takes a rich or curious colouring from the man’s mind; we are thrilled by it, though we may have little or no knowledge of the place. A specially topographical writer is not likely to affect us this way. Drayton in his Polyolbion2 and Byron in 9  A famous phrase of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s (which ET likes and repeats), recorded by Rossetti’s secretary and companion, Thomas Hall Caine: ‘Conception, my boy, FUNDAMENTAL BRAINWORK, that is what makes the difference in all art’ (Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti [London: Elliot Stock, 1882], 249). 1  ET’s review of Poets’ Country, edited by Andrew Lang, takes a similar line to this review: ‘It is doubtful whether it is possible at present to do much towards connecting a poet’s work with his natural environment, but it is at least certain that it cannot be done except by critics with the most acute observation of Nature and letters, and none such is to be found in this book’ (B: September 1907). He rebukes a critic whose ‘principle is to assume that if a poet is a Warwickshire man, all that the critic has to do is to go to Warwickshire, and with the poetry singing in his head look lovingly at the fields’. ET’s complex use of place-names in his poems may at once prove and disprove his thesis about poetry and place. He says of Hardy’s poetry: ‘The general effect of using local names with no significance for the stranger, and no special private value of sound or association for the poet . . . is to aid reality by suggestions of gross and humble simplicity. It might become a trick or device, but in Mr Hardy it is not either, though it succeeds in different degrees. In a recurring line like the following, the name gives even a kind of magic reality, and perhaps magnifies the wind which has no name: “Gruffly growled the wind on Toller downland broad and bare” ’ (LPE, 150–1). 2  For ET on Michael Drayton, see [118], [291].

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Childe Harold seldom do. It would have been different had Shakespeare mentioned Stratford in one of his sonnets, or some remote place in South Wales, showing that he had really travelled to Milford Haven before writing Cymbeline. A great deal of the beauty of some old poems is due to this appeal to our feeling about actual places. The King’s Quair,3 for example, lives, if at all, by the help of passages reminding us that King James was really a prisoner at Windsor; the beauty of the description of Joan Beaufort walking under his window must have been far less, as it would have been far different, without this anchorage of reality. A place name is not essential to a poem producing this kind of effect, but it may be a priceless addition. Some great poems, most perhaps of the greatest, owe nothing to such accidents. Wordsworth is not chary of names, but, as a rule, they signify nothing. The significance of Yarrow is not of his making. When we are at Tintern we are indifferent to the poem conceived there. The lines written at Tintern and the lines on the Yew trees of Lorton Vale and Borrowdale neither owe nor give anything to localities. The mention of Tintern was probably dictated by a normal and methodical state of mind following composition. We should never go a mile out of our way to see Glaramara if we knew that it was Glaramara, because in the poem it is purely a spirit, and the rocks are another matter.4 The Sirmio of Catullus is a case of another kind.5 Without the exact name the poem would not have been what it is, and probably it must have been inferior. It has not passed into a spiritual state, though it is capable of producing one in the reader: it is a poem of this earth, and gathers about it purely mortal things in a manner above mortality. Therefore, if the house of Catullus, or any sign of it, remained, we should wish to see it. For the same reason we should wish to enter a house where Cobbett had slept and talked, or the inn at Llangollen where Hazlitt sat down to cold chicken, a bottle of wine, and La Nouvelle Héloïse.6 The majority of writers, at least of poets, do not mention many actual names, for the simple reason that poetry is not descriptive, and seldom tries to represent one place, and never succeeds. A place may be present in the 3  The Kingis Quair/King’s Book (c.1423), is attributed to King James I of Scotland (1394–1437). Joan Beaufort (c.1404–45), daughter of the first Earl of Somerset, became his Queen. 4 Wordsworth wrote three ‘Yarrow’ poems: ‘Yarrow Unvisited’, ‘Yarrow Visited’, ‘Yarrow Revisited’. His poem ‘Yew-trees’ begins: ‘There is a Yew-tree, pride of Lorton Vale’; refers to ‘those fraternal Four of Borrowdale’; and ends with ‘Glaramara’s inmost caves’. 5 Catullus, Carmina, XXXI begins: ‘Paene insularum, Sirmio’. 6 ET’s high regard for William Cobbett (1763–1835) appears in his Introduction to the Everyman edition of Rural Rides (1912): see ETPW II, 437–44. William Hazlitt (1778–1830) records this episode in his essay ‘On Going a Journey’. Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761): novel by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

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mind, but it bears too strange a relation to the poem to be mentioned by one with much nicety of discrimination. Some shyness of peeping topographers also may afflict the poets. They have mentioned foreign or famous places, especially if they have sounding names. Those which meant most to them were not to be brought into competition with a fictitious reality. These things are proved over and over again in Mr  E.  E.  Kellett’s large anthology. If a man retains any doubts that purely local poetry is impossible, let him read this book. [. . .] N: 18 February

F. A. Hedgcock, Thomas Hardy: Penseur et Artiste, étude dans les Romans du Wessex His name and the tameness of his French seem to prove the author of this book is an Englishman. But in writing for a French as well as an English audience he has reached something like the level of those French critics who have lately charmed and instructed us with studies of our poets. His management is not unimpeachable, but he is good in analysis, and has some very good pages on the influence of Wessex and its importance in Mr Hardy’s work, on the novelist’s so-­called realism and on his fatalism. He need hardly fear the usual objection to studies of living writers, though he might have been still more free from attack had he extended his notice to the poems and The Dynasts. The poems he only considers in so far as they throw light on Mr Hardy’s life and temperament. This, of course, is very far. So good and pithy are the early poems that Mr Hardy was perhaps fortunate in withholding them until his reputation was made as a novelist. He is now commonly thought of as a novelist who writes unlovely verses. But had these verses appeared earlier and had a just recognition, the novels could not but have seemed somewhat perversely artificial. [. . .] The poems, where he speaks in his own person and largely of his own thoughts and experiences, where he is obviously and naturally lord of the scene, are at their best more harmonious than his tales. They are the seeds of his later fiction. He has told us that he turned some of them into prose before he knew that they would see the light. It is a curious confession, and he has since shown an equally curious weakness in practically turning part of a tale into a poem, where he enlarges Marty South’s reflections on planting a pine

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tree beyond all bounds of probability, showing in fact that she is but a facet of himself.1 [. . .] Mr Hedgcock’s study of Mr Hardy’s style is on the whole excellent. He finds to blame in it the tendency to abstractness and a frequent inharmoniousness of words and comparisons: in his examples he often coincides with Lionel Johnson,2 whom, by the way, he never mentions. But if it was worth while to give space to pointing out Mr Hardy’s carelessness, it was not only useless but absurd to lament that he did not work like Pater or Stevenson or Flaubert. We prefer pedantry or slovenliness in detail here and there to pervasive dandyism. Mr Hardy has no touch of dandyism. If he had it would have come out in his verse. There, as it seems to us, his qualities appear in their intensity and in their most perfect harmony. What makes flaws in the novels is only an additional fullness of personality in the poems. They are the most transparent of all poems. Everything is sacrificed to truth; only a few words are sacrificed to rhyme and rhythm. He has no poetic mood. He says nothing in verse which he could not say—­at greater length—­in prose. Set the sonnet, ‘Confession to a Friend in Trouble’ beside an Elizabethan sonnet, and in the new we see life condescending to rhyme, and in the old, rhyme condescending to life. There is little felicity; there is much awkwardness and some sheer weight. But there is always a rich substance of action and feeling set down with a brevity beyond the reach of prose, but open to the ac­cus­ ation of being shorthand. In the narratives like ‘Leipzig’ he seems a street balladist in whom thought has spoilt the tune. But the best are a pure expression of his brooding solitude—­scores of them might have been made novels and been made worse. We should not be surprised if they conquered the artificial novels where the different ill-­assorted elements of the writer’s mind obscure not only life but one another. He was not, as Mr Hedgcock points out, a realist, nor even a naturalist save in the one matter of sex; yet the ­novels make us feel that he ought to have been. The poems never do. In them his personality moulds and masters the facts of life, while in the novels it is seen tyrannising over them but never governing. SR: 17 June

1  ET also refers to this poem, ‘The Pine Planters’ subtitled (Marty South’s Reverie), in a review of Hardy’s Time’s Laughingstocks [399], and in ‘Thomas Hardy of Dorchester’ [566]. Marty South is a character in Hardy’s novel The Woodlanders (1887). 2  ET admired Johnson’s The Art of Thomas Hardy (1894).

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Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry, translated by Kuno Meyer;1 etc. Most if not all of Dr Meyer’s translations have appeared before in journals and books not seen by the general reader. To him, therefore, they will be new, and if he wants to meet the Celtic spirit in its intensity and greatest beauty he should look here. The translations are admirable, being in unaffected prose that is always intelligible and suggests the beauty which it cannot wholly express far better than any verse but a great poet’s or any other prose whatever could do.2 Once only Dr Meyer uses verse, and though it is hard to point to the fault, it is very much inferior. The pieces range from four lines to about fifty in length; they number about fifty and are divided chiefly under the headings of ‘Myth and Saga’, ‘Religious Poetry’, ‘Songs of Nature’, ‘Love Poetry’ and ‘Bardic Poetry’. To enjoy some of them at once it is perhaps ne­ces­sary to have some slight prejudice in their favour. The strange names and the references to an unfamiliar mythology may be an obstacle; on the other hand, they can be a positive advantage. But a large proportion of them are of a clear if unusual beauty. There are, for example, the farewell of Deirdre to Alba, her lament over Noisi and his brothers, the sons of Usnagh.3 There are no more beautiful elegies. They combine in an extraordinary way a dramatic natural poignancy with a rich beauty of art. The most immediately attractive class is that of ‘Songs of Nature’. The natural element pervades every class, notably the religious—­the hermit’s song, e.g., is one of longing for ‘a hidden little hut in the wilderness’, and for leeks, hens, salmon, trout, and bees. When Carbery asked King Cormac his habits as a lad he began by saying: I was a listener in woods, I was a gazer at stars.

Then he went on with ‘I was mild in the mead-­hall’, etc. And this must have been exactly true of many in that civilisation. Many are the poems in Irish and Welsh of which the following is only a very brief and refined example. It is called ‘The Scribe’: 1  Kuno Meyer (1858–1919): influential German scholar of Celtic languages and literature. 2  Meyer writes in his Introduction: ‘In my renderings I have made no attempt at either rhythm or rhyme; but I have printed the stanzas so as to show the structure of the poem’ (Selections [London: Constable, 1911], xiii–­iv). In another review ET says that Meyer’s translations ‘act as an almost perfectly transparent medium through which to see far off the beauty of the originals’ (DC: 4 August). We may feel, as ET appears to do, that Meyer’s prose-translations have a poetic quality. 3  More usually ‘Naoise’ and ‘Usnach’ or ‘Usna’: for ET on W. B. Yeats’s play, Deirdre, see [260].

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A hedge of trees surrounds me, A blackbird’s lay sings to me; Above my lined booklet The trilling birds chant to me. In a grey mantle from the top of bushes The cuckoo sings: Verily—­may the Lord shield me!— Well do I write under the greenwood.

The finest poem of this kind in the book is a dialogue between a seventh-­ century king and his hermit brother, ending with the king’s wish to give up his kingdom for the hermitage. This had possibly become a convention,4 but only because the truth was so familiar; and whether kings or their brothers did so or not, the writer of the poem loved the wild and the wild life with a robustness and also a delicacy that it would be hard to parallel in modern writing. He loved not only the trees and singing birds and the flowers, but the badger’s brood that came to his haunts, and the ‘Goodly sweet tangle’. This combination of robustness and delicacy is characteristic. When the deli­cacy has the upper hand it transmutes everything out of this world into another—­into the Celtic world. For me one of the most attractive poems in the book is ‘The Hosts of Faery’, where this delicacy has the upper hand. It is composed of nothing but solid, tangible things, and yet the effect is something lighter than Botticelli’s ‘Spring’. It ends: No wonder though their strength be great: Sons of queens and kings are one and all; On their heads are Beautiful golden-­yellow manes. With smooth comely bodies, With bright blue-­starred eyes, With pure crystal teeth, With thin red lips. Good they are at man-­slaying, Melodious in the ale-­house, Masterly at making songs, Skilled at playing fidchell.

(Fidchell is a game like draughts or chess.) I have not space to analyse the charm, but I know that the antiquity of the piece is a great part of it: so much 4  Yeats’s poem ‘Fergus and the Druid’ is a version of this trope.

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of the beliefs and ideas of the composer have faded away and have left a skeleton to be clothed by some mysterious process of the reader’s mind, where those beliefs and ideas are not dead but metamorphosed. See also Colum Cille’s ‘Greeting to Ireland’: his angels are like those seen by Blake as a child.5 B: August

T. Sturge Moore, Mariamne; Harold Monro, Before Dawn (Poems and Impressions); etc. Mariamne is one of Mr Sturge Moore’s best poems, and probably his best play.1 Of its own kind it is perfect, except that it [?requires] the voices and groupings of good actors. His Herod and Mariamne2 and their relatives are undisciplined changeable people, who do and say violent things; yet the total effect is of a tapestry, still and rich and dim. The elaborate stage directions prepare for this effect but do not produce it. The effect is probably due to the cast of Mr Moore’s own decorative brooding mind acting like a drug upon his characters and his readers. Mr Harold Monro’s Before Dawn is one of the most readable, and re-­ readable, recent books of verse. It is full of matter, and a hundred extracts from it would give an intensely interesting picture of an enthusiastic progressive mind. But it will be re-­read because it insists on being understood, not 5  This poem includes the lines: ‘All full of angels / Is every leaf on the oaks of Derry’. 1  On 4 August ET wrote similarly to GB (another author of verse-plays), and became entangled in an argument about poetry and prose: ‘Sturge Moore’s Mariamne is about his best play. He will soon be doing one in prose—­I should think this would be perfect on the stage. No damned poetry about it & yet a very wonderful piece of art’ (LGB, 213–14). GB replied (27 August): ‘I agree with all you say about [the play] and about its stern economy and absence of garniture; but, to me, these things shew its quintessential poetry, and I cannot look on it as a transition to prose—­ for the bottom characteristic of prose is the choice of a different level of conception’ (ETGB, 138). ET countered (19 September): ‘I hope I did not imply that poetry could not be naked. I think it can & it was not because it approached nakedness that I thought Mariamne near prose. It was only because I found no effect in it which was not the sum of its parts,—I was going to say its words. But how do I know?’ (LGB, 215) Yet in 1910 ET had questioned the prose of Moore’s critical work, Art and Life: ‘Even where his writing is certainly clear and good we seem to detect too laborious (or not sufficiently laborious) a use of words after Pater’s manner. The words often have a mechanical, not a living, value’ (DC: 30 March). 2  Mariamne (c.57–29 bce): Jewish princess, wife of Herod the Great, executed by him for adultery, owing to dynastic intrigues.

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because it is fascinating. It represents the writer’s thoughts and feelings on the subject of religion, conduct, and society, as well as his own private emotions. It would be easy to find parallels for many of the poems in other books, but few single books give so many views of this type of unpolitical reformer. There is no reason why it should not have been a complete creed, except that the form of chiefly lyrical verse made that impracticable. The book is, however, valuable in so far as it approaches a creed. For this reason the form of verse discontents us. The form is used because Mr Monro is not a mere thinker. The verse is, as it were, a symbol of passion; but it is little more. It does not destroy his thought, yet it rarely illuminates it; as a rule it lightly veils it, and the reader wishes that the poet had used the common speech and put away even the modified singing robes of his sober verse. Nevertheless, his thoughts will not be put aside. As we have said, they insist on being noticed, and many readers will gladly enough perform the task of expanding and annotating the brief verses—­a task which, in our opinion, should have been Mr Monro’s. DC: 4 September *** To write a play on Herod and Mariamne is, it might be thought, a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance. But Mr Sturge Moore writes as if it were not a custom, and in reading his play it is easy to forget the fact. If he is a poet who can be accused of lacking ecstasy, there is no doubt at all that he lacks the gush and redundance which are the worst bane of poetry because they have so often successfully acted the part of ecstasy for a generation. Everything in the play—­the stage directions, the minutiae of every speech, the structure of each of the five acts—­has been the arduous, conscious labour of a man with one clear end before him. He takes nothing for granted, and never for a moment leans upon convention or tradition. The result is that his play is complete in itself, all ‘carved out of the carver’s brain’,3 and to understand and admire it no historic knowledge is necessary—­ nothing but an unprejudiced mind and a heart swept clear of yearnings for the poetical. [. . .] It is a study of psychology, richly coloured by a study of manners and costume; and this second element, though always subsidiary and relevant, is itself good enough to make a good book if not a good play. That it is a good play we have little doubt, though it is meant for the stage 3  From Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ (I.179–80), where a chamber is ‘Carved with figures strange and sweet, / All made out of the carver’s brain’: a favourite quotation of ET’s.

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which alone can fully approve it. Mariamne and her mother, Mariamne and Herod, are always vivid. The trial scene is a piece of painting and character-­ study that would save a poor play, but does not stand out unduly in the ad­mir­able whole. Mr Moore’s great triumph is to appeal directly at every point of the play to the eye and the mind together. Mr Harold Monro’s book is one in which we constantly see side by side, not often in full agreement, a serious thinker and a scrupulous writer of verse. He is always intensely interesting. We should select his book among one of half a dozen or so, if we had to show a Martian or an Elizabethan what emotional thinkers are like in our day. What may be called his sacred poems—­what some would call his blasphemies—­are perfectly representative. Where his thought and his chosen form are most harmonious and forcible is in the series of ‘Impressions’, which are, as it were, passionate epigrams, often in the form of portraits. We should like to quote the whole of one which ends: God, who ordained the British Sunday even To most resemble his own placid life, Looks, smiling out of comfortable Heaven, Down on the British grocer and his wife.

But we should be sorry thus to leave the impression that Mr Monro sneers. His book is most briefly to be described by quoting from his dedication, ‘to those who, with me, are gazing in delight towards where on the horizon there shall be dawn. Henceforth, together’, he continues, ‘humble though fearless, we must praise, worship, and obey the beautiful Future, which alone we may call God.’ B: October

G. K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse1 Mr Chesterton has taken the legendary Alfred and made the King into a hero after his own heart. The result is a perfectly readable narrative poem of about 500 verses. Alfred sees the virgin in a vision, and asks her: 1 Chesterton’s Ballad had a certain patriotic vogue during both world wars, and in 1959 it was set to music by the composer John Gardner (1917–2011). Its appeal exceeded that of two other patriotic epics reviewed by ET: Charles M. Doughty’s The Dawn in Britain and Alfred Noyes’s Drake.

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‘When our last bow is broken, Queen,   And our last javelin cast, Under some sad, green evening sky, Holding a ruined cross on high, Under warm westland grass to lie,   Shall we come home at last?’

She replies after the manner of Mr Chesterton. For she, like Alfred, has read Mr Chesterton. She compares the Christians who are ‘ignorant and brave’ with the wise men who know evil and useless things, and promises comfort only by asking the question: ‘Do you have joy without a cause,   Yea, faith without a hope?’

All through the poet insists upon the contrast between these ignorant, brave, simple Christians, who are capable of joy and a sense of order with the ‘Great, beautiful half-­witted’ heathen who believe in nothing, who ‘waste the world in vain’: Because man hath not other power, Save that in dealing death for dower, He may forget it for an hour   To remember it again.

He sees Alfred as the typical Christian fighting with darkness and ‘heathen nihilism’. But, as a matter of fact, his inmost heart goes out more to one of the leaders whom he has invented, ‘Eldred, the Franklin by the sea’. Alfred embodies Mr Chesterton’s ideas, but is a little dim, so that we can hardly imagine him laughing as the poet makes him laugh. But Eldred is a stout Saxon man who stands up clear from the first, a man whose farm is decaying: But smoke of some good feasting   Went upwards evermore, And Eldred’s doors stood wide apart For loitering foot or labouring cart, And Eldred’s great and foolish heart   Stood open like his door.

When Alfred gathers the men of Wiltshire and Hampshire at Egbert’s stone, it is Eldred whom we see most clearly: With one whole farm marching afoot   The trampled road resounds, Farm-­hands and farm-­beasts blundering by

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 And jars of mead and stores of rye, Where Eldred strode above his high   And thunder-­throated hounds. And grey cattle and silver lowed   Against the unlifted morn, And straw clung to the spear-­shafts tall, And a boy went before them all   Blowing a ram’s horn.

There are many such pictures in the poem. There is also a real movement throughout. The battle of Ethandune is better than anyone could have expected: the last charge of Alfred’s men is admirable, and follows upon a twilight scene after the main rout, which is one of the best things in the book. This warm life is sufficiently strong to carry us safely over talk about ‘that ancient innocence That is more than mastery’, over discords of style like that in the stanza about ‘the glittering towns Where hot white details show’, and over that mystery of phrases like this of the water maids: Under all graves they murmur,   They murmur and rebel, Down to the buried kingdoms creep, And like a lost rain roar and weep   O’er the red heavens of hell.

The main outline of the narrative is clear. The colouring is strong and vivid. The main figures are unmistakable. Seldom has a nursery tale come so near to being made an epic. Mr Chesterton is a little too innocent to have attempted it except quite consciously, which made only a moderate measure of success possible. Nor has he seriously handicapped himself by having a moral in view all the time. This comes out clearly enough in the dedication, and in Alfred’s vision of our own age at the end. In one talk ‘of trend and tide, And wisdom and destiny’, the King hails again ‘that undying heathen That is sadder than the sea’. The heathen can be fought only by the innocence, ig­nor­ ance, and bravery of men like Alfred and Mr Chesterton and Jack the Giant Killer. Mr Chesterton is lucky in writing for an age that is not innocent, for he is certain of a curious audience for his miracle. None of his work deserves it better than this lively and often beautiful ballad. It is good enough to survive its philosophy as even now it lives without it. DC: 11 September

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Lascelles Abercrombie, Emblems of Love: Designed in Several Discourses It is now nearly four years since Mr Abercrombie’s Interludes and Poems appeared. Since then he has been content to remind us that he has lost none of his power, and has published for himself two short poems, Mary and the Bramble,1 and The Sale of Saint Thomas. Now he storms us with a collection considerably larger than the first, and consisting, like that, of long dialogues with a few lyrics. But there is far less variety in the new book. The dialogue and the different titles and measures are little more than artifices to break up the surface of the book, which is really one poem or rhapsody on love. Over 200 pages of tremendous unflagging rhapsody is a work beyond the achievement of any other living writer of sound mind. I have read the poems at three sittings, and what I remember is frenzy and love—­Vashti, Helen, Sappho, St Theresa, Ahasuerus, Holofernes and Mr Abercrombie himself uttering magnificent things, and nothing but magnificent things.2 For another achievement of the same kind you will have to go back to the Shelley of Epipsychidion and the Marlowe of Tamburlaine. If Mr Abercrombie had any sweetness of sound he would remind one of Marlowe, but he has not; his ideas rush, but his words never flow. He suggests a man who jumps vertically instead of running ahead. His first dialogue is between two warriors clad in hides and preparing to defend an earthwork on the downs against wolves. If he had called them ‘early men’ or ‘Arcadian shepherds moving their flocks by moonlight’ I should never have questioned their blank verse and wonderful command of English, but as they remind me that they belong to an early part of the Stone Age and are still kept out of the lowlands and woods by wolves, I do not enjoy as perfectly as I otherwise might have done the lover’s declaration that women are— . . . things mine eyes enjoy as mine ears take songs, Vision that beats a timbrel in my blood, 1  For review of Interludes and Poems, see [293]. ET says in his brief review of Mary and the Bramble: ‘It is a narrative poem mostly in heroic couplets, and tells a story, apparently from folk lore, of the girlhood of Mary Virgin. The versification is vigorous, and gives a lively impression of the wild purity of early morning and solitude. But to philosophise the crude original is perhaps impossible, and certainly Mr Abercrombie’s attempt has few charms except an evident delight in naïveté’ (DC: 9 August 1911). 2  Vashti: (in the Book of Esther) wife of King Ahasuerus, banished because she refuses to display her beauty at a banquet; hence, a Feminist icon. In the (Apocryphal) Book of Judith, Judith seduces and kills the Assyrian general Holofernes.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 Dreams for my sleeping sight, that move aired round With wonder, as trembling covers a hearth,— It seems I must be fighting for them, must Run through some danger to them now before Delighting in them. I am here to fight Wolves for the joy of the world, marvellous women!

I do not wish Mr Abercrombie to modify his blank verse to meet the requirements of an archaeologist specialising in the Stone Age of Britain, but only to testify that the earthwork, the dress of hides, the attack of wolves, do not contribute anything in the poem except an incompatible framework. This is a trifle, or would be if the same kind of fault did not prevail throughout the book—­the fault of confining a rapture that is without form within the bonds of dialogue, and distributing the gift of tongues almost equally among a crowd of lovers. There is most drama where Mr Abercrombie’s own special powers are least conspicuous, e.g., in the scene between a girl and two men at a public house. Where they are most conspicuous there is no drama at all. Everyone speaks with the same contempt for action and almost the same exuberance of language as in Shakespeare’s soliloquies. A new character is only an excuse for Mr Abercrombie to jump or soar again in a slightly different direction. If he spoke in his own person or with some mere formal disguise, he would be more effective and give his reader greater confidence. When his poet is singing to Ahasuerus, he remarks:— You will have heard how lightning’s struck a man, Shepherd or wayfarer, and when they found The branded corpse, the raiment was torn off, Blown into tatters and strewn wide by that Withering death, and he birth-­naked stretcht: Bethink you, is not that now very like How woman smites your souls? [. . .]

He continues: ‘And hear another likeness.’ Mr Abercrombie says on prac­tic­ al­ly every page ‘Hear another likeness’. Each one separately is wonderful. The images are new and astonishing, and yet nearly always so completely mastered as not to be called far-­fetched. The richness and boldness of the vocabulary are almost equalled by the variety of the rhythms. But they have no c­ umulative value. The parts are greater than the whole, and so in the end are themselves of far less force than if they had filled a place. It is all glittering, crashing, hurrying abundance, endless multiplication, disorder, and sputtering ­ ­violence. I could quote a score of passages so brilliant that no one who had not read the whole could understand my disappointment. I could quote

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­ thers suggesting that Mr Abercrombie’s Elizabethan boldness in using lano guage has developed tricks. Twice he uses the portmanteau word ‘withinside’. He has become too fond of using ‘weather’ for atmosphere, and far too fond of using abstract nouns as in this passage:— The hills, wearing their green ample dresses Right in the sky’s blue courts, with swerving folds Along the rigour of their stony sinews.

This ‘rigour’ is very characteristic. He talks of meadows wearing ‘their golden pleasure of flowers’, and uses pleasure again in the same way. Nouns of quality fascinate him. He speaks of walls that ‘must be shored With borrowed firmness’; of women needing ‘poets to reckon your marvellousness’; of the senses of drinkers that ‘go among these wines’ and ‘Wander in green deliciousness and crimson’. Sometimes undoubtedly he avoids a precise or a commonplace phrase for the sake of one that is merely sprawling, as when he speaks of man:— The more he needs to announce upon the world, Over him going like a storming air, That fashioning word which utters the divine Imagination working in him like anger.

Mr Abercrombie seems, at present, to be the half of a great poet. [. . .] If he learns to write as well of lovers as of love he will be a great poet.3 DC: 28 December 3  ET also reviewed Emblems of Love in a round-up that included W. H. Davies and T. Sturge Moore [516]: ‘If poetry were a matter of brilliant passages these dialogues would surpass not only the same writer’s earlier work but most of his contemporaries’. As it is, not one of these poems is equal as a whole to “Blind” and “Indignation” in his Poems and Interludes’ (B: February 1912). ET became increasingly impatient with Abercrombie’s metaphysical ambitions. His review of Speculative Dialogues (1913) sees ‘the dialogue form, imperfectly dramatic, abounding in long speeches, and these . . . stuffed with metaphysics’ as a ‘squandering’ of Abercrombie’s gifts (B: March 1914).

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1912 Algernon Charles Swinburne: A Critical Study1 Anyone inclined to show and expect a stiff exactingness will be shocked at finding ‘summer’ and not ‘spring’, ‘autumn’, or ‘winter’,—‘remembrance’, without ‘forgetfulness’ and so on—­in the famous lyric: Before the beginning of years   There came to the making of man Time, with a gift of tears;   Grief with a glass that ran; Pleasure, with pain for leaven;   Summer, with flowers that fell; Remembrance fallen from heaven,   And madness risen from hell.2

This, however, has that appearance of precision which Swinburne always affected, which is nothing but an appearance. Nor would he have claimed that it was anything more. He was filling his verse with solemn images acceptable to that part of the human brain which is not occupied with the music of the words and the reverberation of earlier images. It may be that 1  Algernon Charles Swinburne, published in October 1912, appears in full in ETPW V. Three brief extracts are included here to suggest the direction of ET’s thinking about language and poetry as he worked on Swinburne during 1912. (For Swinburne himself, see Appendix [712].) Like Feminine Influence and Maeterlinck, Swinburne was a critical task by which ET felt burdened, if partly because other work was scarce. On 4 April he told his agent, Charles Cazenove: ‘I am working as fast as I can at the book but without much heart. I have nothing to go on with after it, apparently no prospect. My reviewing is still decreasing’ (ABL, 499). ET indeed wrote fewer reviews in 1912 than in 1911 (not much more than half as many), and spent more time working on books: by March he had virtually completed Walter Pater (see [537]), commissioned along with Swinburne by Martin Secker but not published until 1913. On 31 October he reported, however: ‘Just now I have got some reviewing again’ (LGB, 223). 2  This ‘lyric’ is a chorus from Swinburne’s verse drama Atalanta in Calydon (1865). T. S. Eliot, whose essay ‘Swinburne as Poet’ seems to draw on/plagiarize ET, calls the poem ‘effective because it appears to be a tremendous statement, like statements made in our dreams; when we wake up we find that the “glass that ran” would do better for time than for grief, and that the gift of tears would be as appropriately bestowed by grief as by time’ (The Sacred Wood [London: Methuen, 1920], 135).

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Time received the ‘gift of tears’ instead of the ‘glass that ran’ solely for the sake of alliteration. It would doubtless be better if it were not so, but nothing can be perfect from every point of view, and this deceitful deference to the pure intellect I speak of chiefly to show what Swinburne’s use of the sounds and implications of words can overcome. *** Love of sound and especially of rhyme persuaded [Swinburne] to a somewhat lighter use of words than is common among great poets. Space would be wasted by examples of words produced apparently by submission to rhyme, not mastery over it. The one line in ‘Hesperia’: Shrill shrieks in our faces the blind bland air that was mute as a maiden,

is enough to illustrate the poet’s carelessness of the fact that alliteration is not a virtue in itself.3 Since the adjective is most ready when words are wanted he used a great number, yet without equally great variety. He kept as it were a harem of words, to which he was constant and absolutely faithful. Some he favoured more than others, but he neglected none. He used them more often out of compliment than of necessity. Compare his ‘bright fine lips’ with the passages quoted by Ruskin from Shakespeare, Shelley, Suckling, and Leigh Hunt.4 They do not belong to the same school of language as ‘Here hung those lips’, or Suckling’s Her lips were red, and one was thin, Compared to that was next her chin; (Some bee had stung it newly) . . .5

‘Bright’ and ‘fine’ could doubtless be applied to lips with perfect aptness, but they are not applied so here. They are complimentary and not descriptive. Swinburne admired brightness, and he called a woman’s lips ‘bright’ and in the next stanza but one a blackbird ‘bright’. I do not know what ‘fine’ means, but I suspect that it is not much more definite than the vulgar ‘fine’ and his own ‘splendid’. A group of his epithets, as in ‘the lost white feverish limbs’ of the 3  Despite this critique, ET’s poem ‘Haymaking’, which records that the swift ‘shrill shrieked in his fierce glee’, echoes one of Swinburne’s alliterative effects (ACP, 95). 4  In ‘Of Imagination Penetrative’ (Modern Painters, Vol. II [1846)], John Ruskin discusses representations of ‘lips’ that rise from external observation to ‘the essence of lip, and the full power of the imagination’ in Hamlet (see next note). 5  These are Ruskin’s quotations from Shakespeare, Hamlet, V.i. (the lips had been Yorick’s), and from Sir John Suckling (1609–42): his richly sensuous poem ‘A Ballad Upon a Wedding’.

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drowned Sappho, has sometimes the effect of a single epithet by a master like Keats. Many epithets express the poet’s opinions of things as much as their qualities, as in ‘marvellous chambers’, ‘strange weathers’, ‘keen thin fish’, ‘mystic and sombre Dolores’, ‘strong broken spirit of a wave’, ‘hard glad weather’, ‘purple blood of pain’, ‘feverish weather’, ‘shameful scornful lips’, ‘splendid supple thighs’, ‘sad colour of strong marigolds’, ‘clean great time of goodly fight’, ‘fair pure sword’, ‘like a snake’s love lithe and fierce,’ ‘heavenly hair’, ‘heavenly hands’, ‘mute melancholy lust of heaven’, ‘fine drouth’, ‘fierce reluctance of disastrous stars’, ‘tideless dolorous midland sea’, ‘fresh fetlocks’, ‘fervent oars’, or the fourteen epithets applied to Dolores. The epithets in the last stanza of ‘A Ballad of Death’ are all appropriate to the intention of the poet—‘rusted’, ‘rain-­rotten’, ‘waste’, ‘late unhappy’—and in keeping with the ideas of fading, sighing, groaning, bowing down, evening and death—­but are for the most part but indifferently fitted for their respective places, and could perhaps safely be transposed in half a dozen ways without affecting the sense, though I shall not prove it. That transposition would change and probably spoil the total effect there is no denying. But Swinburne has almost no magic felicity of words. He can astonish and melt but seldom thrill, and when he does it is not by any felicity of as it were God-­given inevitable words. He has to depend on sound and an atmosphere of words which is now and then concentrated and crystallised into an intensity of effect which is almost magical, perhaps never quite magical. This atmosphere comes from a vocabulary very rich in words connected with objects and sensations and emotions of pleasure and beauty, but used, as I have said, somewhat lightly and even in appearance indiscriminately. No poet could be poorer in brief electric phrases, pictorial or emotional. [. . .] Perhaps the greatest of his triumphs is in keeping up a stately solemn play of words not unrelated to the object suggested by his title and commencement but more closely related to rhymes, and yet in the end giving a compact and powerful impression. The play of words often on the very marge of nonsense has acted as an incantation, partly by pure force of cadence and kiss of rhymes, partly by the accumulative force of words in the right key though otherwise lightly used. Hardly one verse means anything in particular, hardly one line means anything at all, but nothing is done inconsistent with the opening, nothing which the rashest critic would venture to call unavailing in the complete effect. Single words are used in some poems, verses in others, as contributive rather than essential; their growth is by simple addition rather than evolution. *** Such a lover of words and music could only spend his full powers on poems which essentially exist in his books or in the memories of his lovers, and

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nowhere else, having no important connection with anything outside. Sometimes, as in the ‘Elegy’ on Sir Richard Burton,6 he triumphed with a distinguishable subject; but his best work is where he makes no overt appeal to our interest or sympathy, though the richer we are in the love of life and of words the greater will be our pleasure. The same is true of all poets, but not in this degree. For it may be said of most poets that they love men and Nature more than words; of Swinburne that he loved them equally. Other poets tend towards a grace and glory of words as of human speech perfected and made divine, Swinburne towards a musical jargon that includes human snatches, but is not and never could be speech.7 ACS: 15–16, 94–8, 171; ETPW II: 6–7, 69–72, 129

William H. Davies, Songs of Joy and Others We usually open a new book of lyrics by Mr William H. Davies with some anxiety, because it seems impossible that such a lyrical gift should be long sustained. Hitherto, and certainly in those of his latest book, we have not to turn over many pages before being relieved and delighted. Once or twice he has seemed to pause, to repeat old successes, to vary old tunes, to sing something quite new, and yet exactly in the tone of a year or two years earlier; he has not gone back, but has distinctly paused. In his new book he distinctly advances. He still commands the pellucid, fresh, and sweet in which he has no equal or competitor, in poem after poem straight from that ‘Fancy’s Home’ which he describes in these two verses: Tell me, Fancy, sweetest child,   Of thy parents and thy birth; Had they silk, and had they gold,   And a park to wander forth, With a castle green and old?

6  Swinburne wrote two elegies for his friend, the soldier-explorer-author-linguist, translator of oriental erotica, Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–90); whom he celebrates as ‘Our demigod of daring, keenest-eyed’ and as one ‘Who rode life’s lists as a god might ride’. 7  Eliot again seems to borrow from ET: ‘It is, in fact, the word that gives him the thrill, not the object’; ‘Only a man of genius could dwell so exclusively and consistently among words as Swinburne’ (Sacred Wood, 134, 136).

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In a cottage I was born,   My kind father was Content, My dear mother Innocence;   On wild fruits of wonderment I have nourished ever since.

He has also, in ‘The Child and the Mariner’,1 given us his most perfect narrative descriptive poem in blank verse, a piece about two hundred lines long, and so full of good things that we refuse to be tempted into selecting one. In ‘The Sleepers’ and ‘The Heap of Rags’ he has written London poems that neither he nor anyone else has excelled. In ‘The Harvest Home’, again, is one of his best songs of drink, with this last verse: The landlord draws to suit my taste,   I never knew his wife to fail; But, somehow, what the daughter draws   Is—­by my soul and body—­Ale!

But mingled with these are several poems of passion and experience, which are all the more astonishing for their company. They are light and free like Herrick’s, or frank and happy, or frank and sad, in a manner so natural that we remember how seldom anyone else but Burns achieved it. Not that they are like Burns. They are almost as much like Father Gray.2 Some, again, are of an old literary mode charmingly and unconsciously revived, without any sense of artifice. No one can evoke so well the arch vitality and loveliness of perfect youth. But these poems need an essay to themselves. They are not the only kind in which Mr Davies shows that he is still developing. His reflective poems are still at times naïve and bordering on something else, but are none the worse for that; while several of them reach a simplicity in which even the virtue of naïveté is left behind, as in this: The boding Owl, that in despair   Doth moan and shiver on warm nights— Shall that bird prophecy for me   The fall of Heaven’s eternal lights?

1  ET remixes lines from this poem in his own ‘Lob’: ‘An old seafaring man was he; a rough / Old man, but kind; and hairy, like the nut / Full of sweet milk’ (Davies); ‘An old man’s face, by life and weather cut / And coloured,—rough, brown, sweet as any nut’ (ACP, 76). 2  Father Gray/John Gray (1866–1934): ‘decadent’ gay poet (a likely model for Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray), who converted to Catholicism, began to write religious poems, trained for the priesthood, and became a canon in Edinburgh.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 When in the thistled field of Age   I take my final walk on earth Still will I make that Owl’s despair   A thing to fill my heart with mirth.3

There is also a poem on ‘Christ the Man’, with two verses of extraordinary beauty, several about children in his old vein, and about earth and its animals and birds, and a reminiscence of ‘Days that have been’, which makes an exquisite music of some old Monmouthshire names that were sweet, but never so sweet. DC: 30 January

Davies, Songs of Joy; T. Sturge Moore, A Sicilian Idyll and Judith; etc. Songs of Joy is Mr Davies’ fourth volume of poems, and the best things in it are his very best, while the flaws and failures are less than in the other books. Several of the shorter pieces are perfect—‘Fancy’s Home’, for example, ‘The Owl’, ‘To Sparrows Fighting’, and ‘The Sleepers’. They are simple, in­stant­an­ eous and new, recalling older poets chiefly by their perfection. As he advances—­and he does advance both in range and fineness—­Mr Davies repeats himself more and more seldom, so that it is harder than ever to do him some kind of justice by quoting one poem. I would quote ‘Fancy’s Home’ but people would mutter ‘Blake!’ and condemn it. I will quote ‘To Sparrows Fighting’ in spite of the ‘Herrick!’1 with which some may deafen themselves: Stop, feathered bullies!   Peace, angry birds; You common Sparrows that,   For a few words, Roll fighting in wet mud, To shed each other’s blood. Look at those Linnets, they   Like ladies sing; See how those Swallows, too,   Play on the wing; 3  Cf. ET’s ‘The Owl’ (also in quatrains rhymed ABCB, but with decasyllabic lines), in which ‘An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry // Shaken out long and clear upon the hill’ is linked with ‘Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice’ (ACP, 65). 1  Allusion to Robert Herrick’s poem ‘Upon the Death of His Sparrow: An Elegy’.

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All other birds close by Are gentle, clean and shy. Any yet maybe your life’s   As sweet as theirs; The common poor that fight   Live not for years In one long frozen state Of anger, like the great.

That is a summary and perfect example of what Mr Davies has hitherto done. It has his characteristic simplicity and delicacy; the light spirit of it, and the thought, are peculiarly his own. His thought deepens without darkening or over-­weighting his verse. He has also done several things which are new to him, like the lines ‘To a Bore’, and like ‘Christ the Man’, which opens in a style that perhaps foretells yet farther advances.2 In his love poems he makes his most unquestionable steps forward; for he has gained in depth, and in var­ iety, and is grave and light with equal charm and truth. His longer poems in blank verse—­one of thirty and one of nearly two hundred lines—­are also good. They are familiar without commonplace: both abound in gusto, and ‘The Child and the Mariner’ has magic in it. Mr Davies does his good and his indifferent things by the grace of God or the lack of it. Mr Sturge Moore probably knows, or has tried to know exactly the effects he is producing, and has spared no conscious labour to make them clear and consistent.3 I doubt whether he has left anything in these two dialogues to provide against the needs of those who care nothing for the poet’s aims. There is nothing in them which seems to have a life of its own, a wild life, I mean; all is tamed and trained to the performance. But today at least the blitheness and lucidity of the Sicilian Idyll are irresistible. The whole dialogue is as clearly seen as the boy Amyntas: Twelve or thirteen he seemed, with clinging feet Poised on a boulder, and against the sea Set off. His wide-­brimmed hat of straw was arched Over his massed black and abundant curls

2  ‘Christ the Man’ begins: ‘Lord, I say nothing; I profess / No faith in thee nor Christ thy Son’. 3  In the round-up, where he also reviews Rupert Brooke [521], ET calls Sturge Moore ‘an artist as individual in thought as he is consummate in workmanship’, and says: ‘His blank verse rises from slightly concentrated common speech up to the real grandeur of passion and greater concentration’ (DC: 9 April). To GB he wrote, at Christmas 1911: ‘How good the Sicilian Idyll & Judith are, almost Miltonic but with no Miltonism except in the learned building of the line’ (LGB, 219).

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 By orange ribbon tied beneath his chin; Around his arms and shoulders his sole dress, A cloak, was all bunched up. [. . .]

Writing like Mr Sturge Moore’s has an exalted pedigree, but not exactly a tradition. Consequently it has only itself to depend on, having to convert the reader before gaining his ear. How good it is, then, in its kind, may be gathered from its perfect success in the Sicilian Idyll and a very severe pictorial beauty which it creates in the difficult story of Judith and Holofernes. B: February

The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,1 edited by William M. Rossetti, revised and enlarged edition [. . .] Nobody will deny that Rossetti treated some great subjects greatly. He addressed some of the grand poets and painters like one of their peers, and he wrote the sonnet ‘On Refusal of Aid between Nations’, and the stanzas on Nineveh.2 But did he not often write a little too greatly on matters which he cannot make us regard as great? One of his poems, as Mr W. M. Rossetti is careful to point out, was intentionally absurd in its solemnity. Some of the solemnity which he did not think absurd is almost equally so. No other English poet had so much pomp at his command. [. . .] The sonnet form has a certain majesty of its own, which favours and even conceals pretentiousness. It was, therefore, very dangerous to Rossetti, who seems to have alternated between the extremes of solemnity and jocularity in his life and not to have known much of the tragi-­comic mean. Thus it became easy for him to scribble a versified letter in a railway carriage after this manner: I was roused altogether, and looked out To where, upon the desolate verge of light, Yearned, pale and vast, the iron-­coloured sea. [. . .] 1  ET’s view of Rossetti (and his sonnets) does not change: see [113], [221]. 2  The poem is ‘The Burden of Nineveh’.

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Consider, too, how weighty in his serious work are words like ‘unimaginable’, ‘infinite’, ‘eternity’, ‘imperishable’; and how he first taught us to pronounce ‘abominable’ as ‘a bom in a bell’. One of his prose scraps is to inform the reader of ‘The House of Life’ that the ‘life’ involved is neither my life nor your life, but life representative, as tripled with love and death. How characteristically magnificent! He should have written those three words with capitals, for he was always personifying. At least nothing in the notes or in the poems themselves relieves him of the suspicion of personification replacing imagination. Sonnets like ‘Death-­in-­ Love’ are very impressive at first, but cannot long be regarded as mere sound and fury; then the reader examines them until the meaning is clear, too often to find that the imagery is quite separable and has been used to dress up the idea. There are, of course, others which do not suffer in this way. I think the ‘Willowwood’ sonnets do not, partly because the intricate play of rhyme in them is consummate.3 Mr W. M. Rossetti is very severe in the matter of ‘widowhood’, ‘pillow could’, etc., but they are only a quarter of the indignities therein offered to the pure sonnet. Rossetti did not often arrive at a complete harmony between his love of sounds—­as it were the mere bodies of sounds—­ and his ‘fundamental brainwork’.4 They are usually more or less at odds, while his experiments in pure sound are sometimes actually unpleasant, as in ‘Chimes’;5 even ‘The Stream’s Secret’ is not flawless. Again and again the attempt at a harmony results in obscurity, and the painful unravelling, seldom very profitable, destroys the mere sweetness or pomp for ever. Sometimes he is only too clear, and the lovely raiment is seen to deck nothing in particular. He was aiming at an impossible ideal of beautiful, divine nonsense. [. . .] DC: 22 February

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, Fires, Book I Ten years ago Mr Gibson was writing plays in which the characters were three kings named Garland, Arlo and Ashalorn, and also ‘Sea-­ Voices, 3  Four sonnets in Rossetti’s sequence ‘The House of Life’ (1870–81) involve ‘Willowwood’. 4  Famous phrase of Rossetti’s (liked by ET) about ‘what makes the difference in all art’: see [496n.]. 5  Chimes’, in which Rossetti plays with repetition and alliteration, begins: ‘Honey-flowers to the honey-comb, / And the honey-bee’s from home’. ‘The Stream’s Secret’, a poem that ‘whispers’ about lost love, contains the line: ‘Wan water, wandering water weltering’.

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­ ave-­Voices, and Wind-­Voices’, the scene being ‘A rock in the midst of the W North Sea, whereon the three kings, bound naked by conquering sea-­rovers, have been left to perish’. The Voice of the Dawn-­Wind began the play:1 Awaken O sea, from thy starry dream; Awaken, awaken! For delight of thy slumber not one pale gleam From dim star-­clusters remaineth unshaken. All night I have haunted the valleys and rivers; Now hither I come— Ere, quickened with sunlight, the drowsy east quivers— To waken thy song, night-­bewildered and dumb; To stir thy grey waters, of starlight forsaken, To loosen white foam in the red of the dawn.

But now he writes very differently. To use the words of a favourable critic of his Daily Bread, he has ‘forged a poetic method which is capable of man­aging, without violence, and with the constant achievement of beauty, the everyday laborious existence of those who are engaged in common trades’.2 There is an article on his work in the Poetry Review. His Daily Bread is in a second edition. Fires is a continuation of Daily Bread, without the dramatic form. It also deals with ‘the everyday laborious existence of those who are engaged in common trades’—quarrymen, miners, printers, fishermen, ­sailors. In this first volume there are nine of these tales. For the most part they are in irregularly-­rhymed verses of the kind that calls least attention to itself as verse. Simplicity is the most obvious aim. An incident is described and some conversations repeated almost without embellishment, yet without rudeness or dialect. Mr Gibson, for example, imagines two brothers in love with the same girl, quarrelling over her in the coal-­mine, when suddenly there is an explosion; one is wounded; the other drags him towards the pit mouth, but the way is blocked, and there they die. Mr Gibson imagines what they said as they waited, and then as they raved in the poisoning air. It is a modest and delicate attempt to translate ‘real life’ into poetry. Mr Gibson himself hardly ever intervenes. If he seeks poetry, he expects life to bring it to him. Sometimes, it is true, he chooses an extraordinary 1  Verse-play, ‘The Three Kings’, from The Golden Helm and Other Verse (see [75]). 2  Daily Bread (1910) comprises eighteen brief verse-plays, which achieved some popular success on the stage. Reviewing Gibson’s monologue, Akra the Slave (1910), ET had praised him for ‘discard[ing] the rich rhyming in which he was something of a master, and try[ing] to tell a tale without the help either of rhyme or of regularly recurring rhythms’; but found ‘an indescribable failure to give a consistent impression of actuality’ (DC: 9 August 1911).

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incident, as, for example, a blind fisher-­lad rowing home his father, dead without knowing it— And since he rowed his father home, His hand has never touched an oar. All day he wanders on the shore, And hearkens to the swishing foam. Though blind from birth, he still could row As well as any lad with sight; And knew strange things that none may know Save those who live without the light.

This is the most attractive poem in the book, and there is most of Mr Gibson in it. He has been lured into extraordinary things, more often than perhaps he is aware, in order to combat the natural dullness of a poetical copy from life; or he would not have made the hair whiten on two of his characters in the course of the tales, and two others die of sorrow. In his way of telling a story these things seem almost poetical intrusions. At the end of the book we have the feeling that, after all, he has merely been embellishing what would have been far more effective as pieces of rough prose, extracts from a diary, or even a newspaper. The verse has added nothing except unreality perhaps, not even brevity. The attempt may be interesting when it has travelled f­ arther; at present it is disappointing. DC: 9 March

Rupert Brooke, Poems; etc. Mr Rupert Brooke is a poet known only to those adventurers who look for poetry in the magazines, and find it. Of these five1 his book is the most interesting, as being a symptomatic quintessence of the rebellious attitude today. [. . .] We should like to devote a volume to the poet who writes of those       wanderers in the middle mist,   Who cry for shadows, clutch, and cannot tell Whether they love at all, or, loving, whom: 1  The other poets reviewed are T. Sturge Moore (see [517n.]), Sidney Royse Lysaght, Elinor Sweetman, and Gerald Gould.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916   An old song’s lady, a fool in fancy dress, Or phantoms, or their own face on the gloom;   For love of Love, or from heart’s loneliness. Pleasure’s not theirs, nor pain. They doubt, and sigh,   And do not love at all. Of these am I.

This is the same poet who laments the day when . . . infinite hungers leap no more In the chance swaying of your dress; And love has changed to kindliness.

He envies the stars, and then, thinking how far away, looking at men— God out of Heaven may laugh to see   The happy crowds; and never know That in his lone obscure distress Each walketh in a wilderness—

he pities and loves the stars who ‘In empty infinite spaces dwell, Disconsolate’.2 That is in perhaps his most perfect poem, if not his best. He writes of Helen, of London, of afternoon tea, of sleeping out, of sea-­sickness. He experiments in choriambics.3 He is full of revolt, contempt, self-­contempt, and yet of arrogance too. He reveals chiefly what he desires to be and to be thought. Now and then he gives himself away, as when, in three poems close together, he speaks of the scent of warm clover. Copies should be bought by everyone over forty who has never been under forty. It will be a revelation. Also, if they live yet a little longer, they may see Mr Rupert Brooke a poet. He will not be a little one. DC: 9 April

Charles M. Doughty, The Clouds Since the readers of Mr Doughty’s poetry are about one to each county and two, perhaps, in London, it may not be unnecessary to premise that The Clouds is his second poem on the subject of the coming invasion of England 2 ET has quoted from ‘I said I splendidly loved you’ (a sonnet), ‘Kindliness’, ‘The Jolly Company’ (twice). 3  Choriambics: metrical foot consisting of a troche and an iamb, which sets two unaccented syllables between two accented syllables. Choriambics are seldom used deliberately in English poetry, although some effects may be choriambic. Swinburne has a poem called ‘Choriambics’. Brooke’s poems are ‘Choriambics–­I’ and ‘Choriambics–­II’.

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by Germany. The Cliffs1 dealt with this subject dramatically, Englishmen, Germans, Spirits and elves took part, and the result was a poem of extraordinary dignity, fervour and sweetness, including fairy scenes unequalled outside A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The new poem is divided into 15 distinct but continuous parts, and the dominant form is narrative, with much dialogue interspersed, at times somewhat crudely and abruptly. It opens with a dialogue between the poet and the Muse of Britain, who gives him a vision of the land and its invaders, and in particular of one man. This man escapes from a town burnt by the Germans, and journeys across England to find his mother. What he sees and hears during this journey gives a vivid and various picture of the invasion, of the state of the realm and of men’s minds. Probably Mr Doughty’s intention is to warn England against unreadiness, and to enforce his belief that as former invaders have succeeded, so must the German. According to his vision the invaders triumph on land, but are checked at sea. A terrible explosive fatal to friend and enemy alike seems about to turn the war, but the end is hidden from the visionary—‘The rest untold, no living tongue can speak!’ But Mr Doughty is not to be judged by this intention, any more than Milton by his attempt to justify the ways of God to men. The point is that he has written a book that is interesting from first to last. A score of different incidents, even if taken separately, are powerful and beautiful enough to justify the book. Some readers will prefer to take them separately. But, never­ the­less, they are combined in a very noble whole, to which the spiritual sweetness of his master Spenser, the pastoral charm of Izaak Walton, the homely characterisation of Chaucer are subsidiary. His prophetic vision unites the lovely and the terrible and the humorous elements in one majestic structure of blank verse and lyric. With his opinions we have no sympathy, but neither have we with those of Swinburne; yet we can admire both Laus Veneris and The Clouds. Since Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ there has been no such attempt at a national poem, and The Faerie Queene, Drayton’s Polyolbion, and ‘Maud’ are the only other poems which might be classed with The Clouds. There can be no doubt that Mr Doughty can be classed with Spenser, Drayton and Tennyson as a high type of Englishman. We feel no hesitation in offering The Clouds as a proof that he may rank with them as a poet. DC: 4 June *** 1  See reviews [374].

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The Clouds, like Mr Doughty’s last book, The Cliffs, has been written under the very solemn belief that Britain is to be successfully invaded by Germany. Like The Cliffs, the new book depicts what Mr Doughty expects to take place unless we have a strong, perpetual Conservative Government, hundreds of Dreadnoughts, Super-­Dreadnoughts, Ultra-­Dreadnoughts,2 conscription, pills to purge democracy, and so on. I have not the least idea whether Mr  Doughty is a false prophet, and, if so, whether the War Office or the Admiralty is aware of his existence, but I hope that thousands of patriots, Conservatives, and Germanophobes, will buy his book when they hear that he blows the last trump of patriotism. Only thus does it seem still possible that Mr Doughty’s poetry might be discovered. Nor would it be a false alarm. For Mr Doughty is probably the most completely patriotic of English poets. His epic poem, The Dawn in Britain, treats this island as sacred, and the birth of the idea of British nationality as a holy and mighty thing, and the poem is worthy of the conception. It is no wonder, then, that fear for his country should move him with a religious emotion, a holy wrath, a prophetic pity and dread. Already, in The Cliffs, he has shown that his conviction has not spoilt his poetry, though it has led it into strange places, far away from Brennus and Caractacus,3 among German aeroplanists and newsboys calling ‘Piper!’ He is a patriot as not even Wordsworth or Milton was, as, perhaps, no Englishman of his class has been since Elizabeth’s time. When he speaks we understand that The Faerie Queene is not mere poetry. For him Britain is an abode of spirits, men, elves, birds and flowers, which are all children of the divine idea of Britain. He has spoken with the ‘Muse of Britain’. She has answered him, and has, in fact, inspired this book by giving him a vision of what is to come. The book is a narrative broken up in a not wholly satisfactory way by dialogue, merely to avoid oblique narration. Since only a tiny sacred band has bought The Cliffs, it is useless to compare The Clouds with it. The Clouds opens with an indignant lament over this ‘Negligent Isle’, warning it that never yet has an invader been repulsed from it. A perfectly distinct description follows of the ‘Muses’ Garden’, where Caedmon4 and Chaucer and Spenser dwell. Spenser is the English poet most venerated by Mr Doughty, and as is natural, this book of ‘The Muses’ Garden’ is very Spenserian in language and feeling, but with touches of a sublimity and activity which were beyond that poet. The Muse shows him Britain invaded, and gives him the power to follow ‘from 2  Dreadnoughts: state-of the-art battleships, see [374n.]. 3  Fourth-century Gaulish chieftain (who invaded Rome) and first-century British chieftain (who resisted Rome): both figure in Doughty’s Dawn in Britain. 4  Supposed seventh-century Anglo-Saxon poet and monk, to whom ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’, the oldest Old English poem, is attributed.

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day to day, with eye and ear’ some one among the sufferers. Presently the scene narrows to a workman’s family driven by German fire out of their town, and now sitting in a field round a fire of sticks, bidding farewell to one Carpenter, their ‘gentleman lodger’. Him it is that Mr Doughty is permitted to follow in his long walk homewards from the burned town, up through Ely, Stamford and Dove Dale, and then, finding his mother fled from the invaders, into Wales. The intruding dialogue, good in itself, makes the progress of the narrative uneasy, but granting Mr Doughty—­as the Muse has done—­his style and his vision, there is no other fault. Carpenter’s journey is through country not much directly afflicted by the invasion, but at every road and at every village he sees hunger, anxiety, sometimes despair, much confusion and dark uncertainty. Now and then a soldier or a sailor brings bad news. At inns and waysides men share news and views.5 Thus, through Carpenter and those whom he meets, a various and lively picture of the fighting and the effects of it is given. Several of the characters are drawn with some care and always with a manly archaic charm—­a publican, a magis­trate, a pedlar, a parson, a preacher, several officers, and a councillor gipsying on the banks of the Dove. Now and then companies of soldiers cross his path: Erect, alert, the young men hardily pass.

Some of the fields are trodden bare, but the book lacks no loveliness of Nature: Leap glad-­eyed children hither, gathering posies; Sweet violet, cicely, dainty ladies’-smocks; With jacinth, medleyed in the thicket grass . . . .]

When the angler in the Dove talks of Izaak Walton6 and sings a song between a herdgroom and a milkmaid— Thine eyes ben two cornflowers, they ben so blue

—it is hard to remember that we are in a country at the edge of famine and destruction, and harder to realise that we are in the twentieth century, where, 5  Carpenter’s odyssey oddly presages, or may have consciously or unconsciously prompted, ET’s journey through England in late August/early September 1914; when he gathered material for two articles, ‘Tipperary’ and ‘It’s a Long, Long Way’ (ER: October and December 1914), based on ‘listening to people, in railway carriages, trams, taverns, and public places, talking about the war and the effects of it’ (ETPW II, 539). See Introduction [xxxiv]. 6  Here again The Clouds may have imprinted ET’s own patriotism. Walton’s Compleat Angler is central to his thinking about ‘England’ in the article of that title, which followed on from the articles cited above: ‘Since the war began I have not met so English a book, a book that filled me so with a sense of England, as this, though I have handled scores of deliberately patriotic works’ (ER: April 1915; ETPW II, 536).

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916   Each Party outbiddeth other in the State; That sinks or swims, but through the greedy vote, Of blind, vindictive, Mafeking populace.

In any case it is a century where the League of Patriots have ‘Patria’ broidered on their caps by women’s hands, and a Welsh bard speaks as in the morning of the world, albeit his fairies are as certainly not Welsh as they are certainly good; but not so good as the English fairies in The Cliffs. The book ends inconclusively: The rest untold, no living tongue can speak!

The war is not at an end: ‘Britain begins, in airmanship, to excel’, and has some success by sea. Perhaps the trumpet note has waked to some purpose ‘virtue, manhood, fortitude of Isle Britain’, or the patriot Bard could bear no more of the horror. The end is not unsatisfactory. Even in a paraphrase the poem would justify itself as an imaginative forecast. The majestic, steady spirit of the poet makes it something altogether beautiful, in which the prophetic, the realistic and the idyllic are combined. The dignity and sweetness are Spenser’s as well as Mr Doughty’s, the sublimity and homeliness are his own, and peculiarly his own. At the same time, I hope that he is tired of ­airships and invasions. B: July

John Masefield, The Widow in the Bye Street Mr Masefield’s second long narrative poem1 tells the story of a poor widow and her only son, and how he falls in love with a light woman and murders a more favoured lover, how he is tried and hanged for it, and how the old mother lives on crazed. This simple story Mr Masefield tells with a refined but real simplicity in the beautiful stanza of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. I should like to give a score of examples showing what respect he shows for this form and yet with what apparent liberty he uses it for narrative, reflection, 1  The first was The Everlasting Mercy, initially published in ER: October 1911. Although voiced by a repentant sinner (Saul Kane), the poem caused a scandal, owing to Masefield’s depiction of sex, alcoholism, and swearing: ‘I drunk, I fought, I poached, I whored, / I did despite unto the Lord’.

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description and dialogue; there is, therefore, hardly a stanza out of nearly 300 which it is not a pleasure to read. Of the few possible examples, here is one: Her little son was all her life’s delight, For in his little features she could find A glimpse of that dead husband out of sight, Where out of sight is never out of mind. And so she stitched till she was nearly blind, Or till the tallow candle end was done, To get a living for her little son.

Not the metrical form only, but sometimes the direct and brief but sententious pathos is like Chaucer’s. The final couplet is used sometimes with this effect, and sometimes in the manner of the couplet in Byron’s Don Juan and Shelley’s ‘Witch of Atlas’. Mr Masefield uses a language simplified in harmony with that spoken by his characters. Of common poetical dignity there are few traces, of common speech there are many; and yet the whole is swift and clear, and also delicate, and I can imagine no better proof than this of the burning power of the poet’s sympathy. He does not, as in The Everlasting Mercy, combine and even confuse himself with his characters, but waits continually upon them with comments of this kind: She touched the lust of those who served her turn, And chief among her men was Shepherd Ern. A moody, treacherous man of bawdy mind, Married to that mild girl from Ercall Hill, Whose gentle goodness made him more inclined To hotter sauces sharper on the bill. The new lust gives the lecher the new thrill, The new wine scratches as it slips the throat, The new flag is so bright by the old boat.

It is possible that the story might have been told by another poet so as to imply and make unnecessary the commentary, but it is not excessive here, and, with the qualities of the language and the stanza, it does very much to put the poem unmistakably into the class of Keats’s ‘Isabella’ rather than one of Crabbe’s tales. Sometimes the poet overlooks in his descriptions a line like The showmen heave in an excited group.

Sometimes his mixed method results in perhaps undeniable incongruity, as here:

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 Her boots hurt (she had got a stone in one) And bitter beaks were tearing at her liver That her boy’s heart was turned from her forever.

It may be possible to use ‘liver’ seriously when Prometheus is thus suggested, but not in the same sentence with ‘boots’ and ‘heart’. Then, I do not know why, in one place, Mr Masefield should make death a ‘blind beggar’ as well as a card-­player. A little too often there is a full stop at the end of the fourth line, as if the poet were writing in a verse of four and not seven lines; and in one place he prints ‘th’ inn’ unnecessarily. But these are tiny things which do not make the reader pause in the first rapid reading of the tale for the tale’s sake. At the second reading he may pause at them, but also at scores of vivid things, sweet things, noble things. He will only have to compare it even with the best of the same writer’s prose to see how essential the verse is to the beautiful effect of the whole.2 Mr Masefield’s hero batters in his enemy’s head with a ploughbat;3 the brothers in ‘Isabella’ slay Lorenzo, we know not how; in neither case does the act of blood, enriching but not disturbing it, intrude with more than artistic force upon the whole. It is full of things which might be found in a ‘realistic’ prose narrative, but always so used as to be subdued in the poetic effect. Perhaps nowhere else as in these two narratives, particularly the second, has Mr Masefield so fulfilled his promise. DC: 15 June

Walter de la Mare, The Listeners and Other Poems Reverie has never made a more magical book than Mr Walter de la Mare’s third book of poems.1 For the most part, either they take the form of childish 2  ET has oscillated between thinking that Masefield ‘has done well to make prose his chief instrument’ (review of Ballads and Poems: see [445]); and calling The Street of Today (1911) ‘a novel by a lyric essayist’ (SR: 10 June 1911). He may now see Masefield’s gifts as having discovered their true fusion and form in the narrative poem. 3  Ploughbat (also plough-staff): long-handled spade for removing earth, roots, and weeds from the plough’s coulter and share. 1  ET had privately complimented de la Mare on the collection, writing on 15 May: ‘I think it is equal to Songs of Childhood & Poems together. It is as fresh as the first and it has the gray of the second book like gossamer over its blossom colours. I did not think one book could be so good’ (PTP, 130). He also noted ruefully (28 May): ‘It seems as if it must be so fine to write “The

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memories or their atmosphere is like that of overpowering memory. Never was child so tyrannous a father to the man. He does not recall things as Jefferies did the yellowhammer singing in the sun upon an ash branch in the field called Stewart’s Mash, but always drowned, softened, reduced, and with a more or less distinctly sad sense of remoteness. Sometimes he announces the element of memory by beginning ‘When thin-­strewn memory I look through’ or ‘Once’ or ‘one Summer’s day’, while in ‘The Journey’ voices ‘seemed’ to cry ‘vaguely from the hiding-­place of memory’. The number of poems thus labelled is small, but coming together at the beginning they give an unmistakable keynote to the whole.2 In one poem he relates how Martha used to tell the children stories beginning ‘Once upon a time’: And her beauty far away   Would fade, as her voice ran on, Till hazel and summer sun   And all were gone:— All foredone and forgot;   And like clouds in the height of the sky, Our hearts stood still in the hush   Of an age gone by.

Even so is the world often ‘all foredone and forgot’ in these poems, and the poet’s and the reader’s hearts thus stand still—­to see the three cherry trees:   There were three cherry trees once,   Grew in a garden all shady; And there for delight of so gladsome a sight,   Walked a most beautiful lady,   Dreamed a most beautiful lady . . .

or the very old woman living alone, who once was young,

Listeners”. Nobody will think it must have been fine to write my book on Swinburne’ (131). (ACS is dedicated to de la Mare.) This review suggests certain affinities between ET’s sensibility and de la Mare’s: the importance of memory; imagery of ‘lone houses’ and haunted landscapes; psychological ‘exile’. 2  As a touchstone for clear vision, both ‘physical’ and ‘spiritual’ (RJ, 44), ET always cites a passage from Richard Jefferies’s essay ‘Wild Flowers’: ‘One yellowhammer sat on a branch of ash the livelong morning, still singing in the sun; his bright head, his clean bright yellow, gaudy as Spain, was drawn like a brush charged heavily with colour across the retina, painting it deeply, for there on the eye’s memory it endures . . . . This one yellowhammer still sits on the ash branch in Stewart’s Mash.’ Besides ‘The Journey’, the poems quoted are ‘Miss Loo’, ‘Martha’, ‘The Sleeper’.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 But age apace Comes at last to all; And a lone house filled With the cricket’s call; And the scampering mouse In the hollow wall.

Once he goes far back—‘Hundreds of years away’—and sees a Guinevere, a Helen, and a Cleopatra, unlike those of any other poet. Once the witch’s eyes slant ‘through the silence of the long past’. Once he uses the device of an epitaph: Here lies a most beautiful lady, Light of step and heart was she . . .

The scene of one poem is a stone house, in a forest by a lake, named only ‘Alas’. At the moonlit door of another lone house a traveller knocks: But only a host of phantom listeners   That dwelt in the lone house then Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight   To that voice from the world of men.3

Or the scene is the palace of the King of Never-­to-­be or a graveyard, or in ‘the shades of Arabia’. Arabia is the name of one of Mr Walter de la Mare’s provinces, and it is a proof of his mastery that he can use this name and make it so perfectly his own while retaining all that the name means to those who are neither travellers nor geographers. It would be valuable and delightful to study the elements which contribute to the mystery of these poems. There are palaces, cottages, orchards, graveyards, all having something of the partly conventional, partly fantastic quality of those things to a child of small ex­peri­ence: the graveyard in particular is such a perfect idea of a graveyard as a child might make out of a story or a poem, yet I do not know where to find a more vivid sense of the grave than in this first verse of ‘The Bindweed’: The bindweed roots pierce down Deeper than men do lie, Laid in their dark-­shut graves Their slumbering kinsmen by.

3  ET has quoted from ‘Martha’, ‘The Three Cherry Trees’, ‘Alone’, ‘Ages Ago’, ‘The Journey’, ‘Epitaph’, ‘The Listeners’.

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Mr Walter de la Mare’s birds and flowers are most beautiful, but his book is not natural history. His ‘Owl and Newt and Nightjar, Leveret, Bat and Mole’, are of the sixteenth century. The Asphodel and Amaranth are among his flowers, as Lethe is among his rivers. Dreams come to him from ‘gloomy Hades and the whispering shore’. His hawthorn ‘hath a deathly smell’. His snow frightens the starlings with ‘its pale glare’. There are witches in his country who carry ‘Charms and Spells and Sorceries’ in their packs.4 Cupid has once been met there, certainly alive. But the dead in that country are more than the living. Without such a study, it is clear that Mr Walter de la Mare’s magic is very richly compounded of childish experience, of Nature and books, of queer, half-­understood or misunderstood things, and of the oldest mysteries. For all the atmosphere is tinged with sadness; very beautiful things—‘And clash of silver, beauty, bravery, pride’5—are seen in a faintly malevolent haze of time or distance. That when the poet speaks in his own person his melancholy should be overt cannot surprise anyone who realises how few of any man’s hours can after all be given to reverie; how difficult or unlovely must appear the broken, scattered, or jangled things outside that province. He writes as an ‘exile’, who would certainly not write if he were not exiled, if he could always be at ‘Alas’ or the ‘Dark Château’, or upon those mountains whose ‘untroubled snows’ his ghost is thirsting for. He is one of the most welcome of the many exiles who have been among us. B: August

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, Fires, Books II and III Mr Gibson’s two volumes contain 12 scenes or tales, several in stanzas, but most in irregularly rhyming verse. The characters are men and women of the more earthy sort, and they are revealed at a simple or central moment. A father and son are cast up by the sea on a lighthouse rock, and the father goes over the experience again in delirium. A woman is starved with £4 17s. 5d. on her corpse, and it turns out that the sum had been found years before on the body of her lover, burnt to death in a mine. 4  Quotations from ’The Witch’, ‘The Shade’, ‘ “The Hawthorn hath a Deathly Smell” ’, ‘There Blooms No Bud in May’, ‘The Witch’ again. 5  From ‘The Dwelling-Place’.

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In a way this is very solid poetry. However the stories were told they would be interesting. And Mr Gibson has made it his business to avoid disfiguring them with false poetical writing, with decoration. That has been no light business, for his early books proved him a lover of rich words, of goodly rhymes, and of romantic subjects. All this he has sacrificed in order to be free to write like— Just as the school came out, The first white flakes were drifting round about: And all the children shouted with delight To see such flakes, so big, so white, Tumbling from a cloud so black, And whirling, helter-­skelter Across the windy moor: And, as they saw the light flakes race, Started off in headlong chase, Swooping on them with a shout, When they seemed to drop for shelter Underneath the dry-­stone wall.1

As a rule he has to be content with a plainness which I cannot help thinking either inert or rather drearily galvanised into movement. The verse serves no purpose. It rarely helps Mr Gibson to be more concentrated than he could have been in prose. The rhythm is arbitrary and mechanical, having apparently no relation to the moods of the poet or his characters. Now and then he is as vivid as this: Six days and nights in thick, white mist had drifted, Until it seemed all time to mist had drifted, And day and night were but one blind, white night;2

or as when he speaks of the snow’s—         bewildering white, without a sound, Save rustling, rustling, rustling all around.

But for the most part his simplicity is equally far from the impersonal impressiveness of a newspaper report and from poetry like ‘Lucy Gray’.3 Not once 1  The opening lines of ‘The Snow’, in which ‘John, and his little sister Janey’ get lost on their way home from school, but (thanks to John) finally make it. The effect differs from the symbolic nexus of a child and snowflakes in ET’s brief poem ‘Snow’ (ACP, 51). 2  This passage (from ‘The Lighthouse’), which moves from realism to metaphor, has parallels with ET’s poem ‘Wind and Mist’, where mist figures a psychological state: ‘Many a day, day after day, mist—­mist / Like chaos surging back’ (ACP, 74). 3  Poem by Wordsworth about a child who dies on a moor during a snowy night.

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can he prevent me from seeing his story quite apart from his way of telling it, and that is fatal. I see a story which he has met in a book or a paper or in his own fancy, and I see him trying to present it gravely, tenderly, and with certain prejudices in favour of the primitive, of children, mothers and lovers. Not once, either in a story as a whole, or in a single line, does he relieve me from the state of wondering when the words are going to be significant. He seems to have neither realistic sympathy and grasp nor egoistic intensity. Where he has attempted dream or vision he is rather less than more successful, though he was free to employ any of his powers: his ‘Dancing Seal’ is only unreal, his ‘Hare’ is incredible (I do not say impossible), his ‘Red Fox’ unintelligible. What is best in the whole is the lost child’s memory of the fine clear morning before the snow: Each sprig of heath and blade of grass In the cold wind blowing lightly; Each clump of green and crimson moss Sparkling in the Wintry sun.

This is not the result of a theory, but of thinking Wordsworthily. How far Mr Gibson’s later method is deliberate is not easy to tell, but the earlier seems to represent his faculties more favourably. He was at least at ease there, and fell short only by the will of God, whereas in these tales I am inclined to accuse his own will of driving him to subjects, or at least methods, utterly alien and unresponsive. DC: 5 September

Henry Newbolt, Poems: New and Old Out of three children of 10, 11 and 12, I find that one sings ‘Hope the Hornblower’, one knows a good deal about ‘Admirals All’ and ‘Hawke’, and even the third has heard of them.1 What other living or dead poet would come as well out of this test as Mr Newbolt? Yet he has not shouted. His nature is not for shouting, but for— 1  Two of these children may have been ET’s own: Merfyn (b. 1900) and Bronwen (b. 1902). ‘Hawke’ celebrates Admiral Edward Hawke (1705–81), who defeated the French at the Battle of Quiberon Bay (1759) during the Seven Years War.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 Summer noons, beneath the limes,   Summer rides at evening cool, Winter’s tales and home-­made rhymes,   Figures on the frozen pool . . .

Though he writes of battle he is full of softness, so that, thinking of a sea life, he says: Not for us the warm life of Earth, secure and tender,   Ours the eternal wandering and warfare of the sea.2

He regards the south-­west wind as an enemy, the sailor’s chief enemy. When the sailor recalls messmates buried at sea he thinks: It’s a long, lone watch that he’s a-­keeping there, And a dead cold night that lags a-­creeping there, While the months and the years roll over him   And the great ships go by.

He transfers his own tenderness to death, who, he declares, has ‘the tenderest eyes of all’.3 It is characteristic of him to use ‘tender’ and ‘grave’ together. Also Mr Newbolt is too old-­fashioned to shout. When he is not writing of England he falls naturally into this style:   One day, when Love and Summer both were young,   Love in a garden found my lady weeping; Whereat, when he to kiss her would have sprung,   I stayed his childish leaping.4

In his masque of ‘Dream-­Market’ he has written to an air by Henry Lawes a song which begins almost like 1652.5 Furthermore, Mr Newbolt is too much an artist to shout: he loves too well the sweetness of words lovingly entreated, as in the beginning of his ‘Vae Victis’: Beside the placid sea that mirrored her   With the old glory of dawn that cannot die,

2  ET has quoted from ‘Pereunt Et Imputantur’ and ‘Sailing at Dawn’. 3  Quotations from ‘Messmates’ and ‘Admiral Death’ (Newbolt’s admiration for admirals knew no bounds). 4  This poem is ‘Love and Grief ’. 5 Henry Lawes (1596–1662): composer and prolific song-writer, who wrote the music for Milton’s masque Comus (1634). ‘Song’ in Newbolt’s ‘Dream-Market’ masque begins: ‘The flowers that in thy garden rise’, and is subtitled (To an air by HENRY LAWES, published in 1652).

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The sleeping city began to moan and stir,   As one that fain from an ill dream would fly . . .6

Towards this sweetness his instinct and skill have excellently combined. From beginning to end of these collected poems almost every verse, almost every line, has a grace that not seldom thrills as well as charms. In his sweet voice Mr Newbolt utters much what others try to express by shouting. Only Tennyson among our greater poets has used this same note of patriotism. There is nothing like it in Drayton, Milton, Wordsworth, or even Campbell,7 who all wrote in times of great wars. Mr Newbolt’s patriotism is more chaste and more complacent. He sings an England of country houses, ancient churches, public schools and universities, and delicious orchard land, and of piety to all these things. But much as his heroes love them and what they express, they love something else more—­namely Duty. He and they make of their country their religion. There is a curious mixture of sternness and tenderness in the book. The combination of the two is best expressed in the verse on the fly-­leaf: O strength divine of Roman days,   O spirit of the age of faith, Go with our sons on all their ways,   When we long since are dust and wraith.

The poems are full of extreme courage and chivalry and honour, and also in less degree of merriment and delicate pleasure. The tenderness, probably the deeper instinct, predominates. The sternness is the ideal, connected with people in far lands or in the past, whom the poet broods over. But the two do not combine sufficiently. I can always see both the performing hero, Blake, Nelson, Gillespie, or Baird, and the worshipping poet.8 I feel that the poet’s tenderness, if some violence had not been done, would more appropriately be employed in considering, for example, the atrocities at Tabriz a few months ago, than in so humbling itself before war as to exclaim on the proclamation of peace in 1902 (observe the date):9 6  The city, about to be destroyed, is Carthage. 7  Thomas Campbell (1777–1844): Scottish poet, given to patriotic compositions (see [434]). 8  Blake, Nelson, Gillespie, Baird: two naval and two military British ‘heroes’ celebrated in poems by Newbolt: Admiral Robert Blake (1598–1657) laid the foundations for British naval power; MajorGeneral Sir Hugh Robert Rollo Gillespie (1766–1814) brutally put down a mutiny of sepoys at Vellore in India (1806); General Sir David Baird (1757–1829) led the assault on Seringapatam (1799), thus ending the fourth war between the East India Company and the Kingdom of Mysore. 9  This four-line poem, ‘Peace’, hails British victory in the bloody Second Boer War (1899– 1902). For reasons of power and commerce, the British were complicit in the Russian occupation

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No more to watch by Night’s eternal shore,   With England’s chivalry at dawn to ride; No more defeat, faith, victory—­O! no more   A cause on earth for which we might have died.

Thus has one of the tenderest singers consecrated himself to war and sung martial strains of a unique sweetness.10 DC: 18 November (1909–18) of Tabriz: an Iranian city where the citizens wanted constitutional reform. In December 1911 the Russians had suppressed a rebellion there, and executed well over a thousand people. Edward Granville Browne (1862–1926), a distinguished Cambridge scholar of Persian history and culture, campaigned on behalf of Tabriz. The politics of DC may have raised ET’s consciousness of ‘the atrocities’. 10  Three years earlier ET had been less ironical, but equally astute, about Newbolt’s tenderness towards war, when reviewing Songs of Memory and Hope: ‘The thought is characterised by a somewhat melancholy chivalry, a sweet stoicism. . . . It must be said that he looks back more easily than forward, as if he wrote in an ancient building full of monuments . . . we feel sure that he would joyfully live in any world where heroism continues to be possible and necessary’ (DC: 6 November 1909).

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1913 Walter Pater: A Critical Study1 Much good poetry is far from the speech of any men now, or perhaps at any recorded time, dwelling on this earth. There would be no poetry if men could speak all that they think and all that they feel. Each great new writer is an astonishment to his own age, if it hears him, by the apparent shrillness and discordancy of the speech he has made in solitude. It has to become vulgarised before common ears will acknowledge the sweetness and wisdom of it. Pater still astonishes men with his falsetto delicacy, but may lift posterity up to him. The more we know of any man the more singular he will appear, and nothing so well represents his singularity as style. Literature is further divided in outward seeming from speech by what helps to make it in fact more than ever an equivalent of speech. It has to make words of such a spirit, and arrange them in such a manner, that they will do all that a speaker can do by innumerable gestures and their innumerable shades, by tone and pitch of voice, by speed, by pauses, by all that he is and all that he will become. *** The most and the greatest of man’s powers are as yet little known to him, and are scarcely more under his control than the weather: he cannot keep a shop 1  Walter Pater was published at the end of 1913, although ET had completed most of his work on it by April 1912. Together with Algernon Charles Swinburne (see [511]), Pater appears in full in ETPW V. In late 1911 Martin Secker had commissioned both books for the same ‘Critical Studies’ series. Several brief extracts, from ET’s twelfth chapter ‘The Essay on Style’, are included here, since they are central to his thinking about ‘speech and literature’ before he met RF in October 1913. ‘Style’ (1888), reprinted in Pater’s Appreciations with an Essay on Style (1889), is both a key expression of Pater’s doctrines and representative of his own prose ‘style’. Writing to GB (22 March 1912), ET said: ‘I am only just learning how ill my notes have been making me write by all but destroying such natural rhythm as I have in me’; adding: ‘Criticising Pater has helped the discovery’ (LGB, 220). He recognized that Pater had become caught up in his quarrel with himself—­perhaps sometimes unfairly. He commented to Walter de la Mare (26 October 1913): ‘I am afraid it’s formless & does not admit as it ought to that Pater is good of his kind, & wastes too much time in trying to prove the kind bad’ (PTP, 171); but told RF more positively and significantly (19 May 1914): ‘you really should start doing a book on speech and literature, or you will find me mistaking your ideas for mine & doing it myself. . . . However, my “Pater” would show you I had got onto the scent already’ (RFET, 9–10).

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without trusting somewhat to his unknown powers, nor can he write books except such as are no books. It appears to have been Pater’s chief fault, or the cause of his faults, that he trusted those powers too little. The alternative supposition is that he did not carry his self-­conscious labours far enough. On almost every page of his writing words are to be seen sticking out, like the raisins that will get burnt on an ill-­made cake. It is clear that they have been carefully chosen as the right and effective words, but they stick out because the labour of composition has become so self-­conscious and mechanical that cohesion and perfect consistency are impossible. The words have only an isolated value; they are labels; they are shorthand: they are anything but living and social words. *** Pater was, in fact, forced against his judgment to use words as bricks, as tin soldiers, instead of flesh and blood and genius. Inability to survey the whole history of every word must force the perfectly self-­conscious writer into this position. Only when a word has become necessary to him can a man use it safely; if he try to impress words by force on a sudden occasion, they will either perish of his violence or betray him. No man can decree the value of one word, unless it is his own invention; the value which it will have in his hands has been decreed by his own past, by the past of his race. It is, of course, impossible to study words too deeply, though all men are not born for this study: but Pater’s influence has tended to encourage meticulosity in detail and single words, rather than a regard for form in its largest sense. His words and still less his disciples’ have not been lived with sufficiently. Unless a man write with his whole nature concentrated upon his subject he is unlikely to take hold of another man. For that man will read, not as a scholar, a philologist, a word-­fancier, but as a man with all his race, age, class, and personal experience brought to bear on the matter. *** When words are used like bricks they are likely to inflict yet another punishment on the abuser, so making it more than ever impossible that they will justly represent ‘the conscious motions of a convinced intelligible soul’.2 They refuse to fall into the rhythms which only emotion can command. The 2  Quotation from Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures (London: Macmillan, 1893): ‘the essence of all artistic beauty is expression . . . the line, the colour, the word, following obediently, and with minute scruple, the conscious motions of a convinced intelligible soul’ (107).

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rhythms satisfactory to the mere naked ear are of little value: they will be so much sonority or suavity. [. . . ] Here again appears the necessity for the aid of speech in literature. Nothing so much as the writer’s rhythm can give that intimate effect ‘as if he had been talking’. Rhythm is of the essence of a sincere expressive style. *** It is, of course, true that writing stands for thought, not speech, and there is a music of words which is beyond speech; it is an enduring echo of we know not what in the past and in the abyss, an echo heard in poetry and the utterance of children; and prose, if ‘born of conversation’, is ‘enlivened and invigorated by poetry’.3 Walter Pater: 209–19; ETPW II: 326–33

Georgian Poetry 1911–19121 It has for some time been debateable whether anything could be done for contemporary poetry which would leave a little less of its fate to chance. 3  ET is quoting from John Earle, English Prose: Its Elements, History, and Usage (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1890), 161. 1  The editor of Georgian Poetry, only named by the initials E. M. attached to a Prefatory Note, was the well-connected Edward Marsh (1872–1953): a civil servant who became Winston Churchill’s private secretary, and received a knighthood in 1937. Marsh was a noted patron of the arts. Besides poets, he sponsored young painters like Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer. His closeness to (and passion for) Rupert Brooke led to his acting on Brooke’s idea that contemporary poetry should be promoted. As Brooke’s literary executor, Marsh continued to look after his work. Georgian Poetry 1911–1912 (1912) was succeeded by volumes covering 1913–15, 1916–17, 1918– 19, 1920–2. Although he consulted with Brooke and others, Marsh took editorial charge of Georgian Poetry, funded it at the outset, and marketed it astutely: 15,000 copies of the first volume were sold, 19,000 of the second. Only the last dropped below 10,000 sales. The Poetry Bookshop and the poets benefited financially from this comparative popular success. Davies, de la Mare, and Gibson appear in all five volumes; Lawrence in all but one. ‘War poets’ (Robert Graves, Robert Nichols, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon) arrive in the third and fourth volumes. Marsh never included American poets (no RF) or dead poets: hence no poems from ET’s collections, although he had helped ET to obtain a grant from the Royal Literary Fund in 1916. ET’s friend John Freeman rebuked Marsh for this omission (5 August 1917): ‘it would be splendid if the next Georgian book included any other new poetry of comparable individuality and power’ (quoted, Robert H. Ross, The Georgian Revolt: Rise and Fall of a Poetic Ideal 1910–1922 [London: Faber, 1967], 177). In fact, when GB wanted to show Marsh some of his poems, ET had responded

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Anyone with £5 can get a book of verse printed. Reviewers and booksellers have not been able to keep their heads above this stream. But now there has been opened at 35 Devonshire Street, Theobalds Road, a ‘Poetry Bookshop’, where you can see any and every volume of modern poetry.2 It will be an impressive and, perhaps, an instructive sight. ‘The Poetry Bookshop’ has, as a good beginning, given us an anthology of the poetry published under George  V.  The editor, ‘E M’—Mr Edward Marsh—­introduces it with the remarks that ‘English poetry is now once again putting on a new strength and beauty’, and that this collection may help readers to see that ‘we are at the beginning of another “Georgian period” which may take rank in due time with the several great poetic ages of the past’. The authors represented are Messrs Abercrombie, Bottomley, Brooke, Chesterton, Davies, de la Mare, Drinkwater, Flecker, Gibson, D. H. Lawrence, Masefield, Monro, Sturge Moore, Ronald Ross, E. B. Sargant, Stephens and R.  C.  Trevelyan.3 Not a few of these had developed their qualities under (1 August 1915): ‘If Marsh likes any of them well & good. But I should not be vastly interested in his adverse opinion’ (LGB, 254). The term ‘Georgian’, intended to mark the dawn of a new poetic age, has come to denote an aesthetic conservatism that preceded or ignored the ‘Modernist’ innovations of Pound and Eliot. These categorizations can be seen as both unhistorical and unfair. Indeed, Marsh approached Pound for a contribution, and his example may have prompted Pound’s own anthology, Des Imagistes (see [621]). But Marsh did not help matters with his Prefatory Note to Georgian Poetry 1920–1922: ‘Much admired modern work seems to me, in its lack of inspiration and its disregard of form, like gravy imitating lava. Its upholders may retort that much of the work which I prefer seems to them, in its lack of inspiration and its comparative finish, like tapioca imitating pearls.’ Given that ET had been promoting new poetry since 1900, his response to Georgian Poetry 1911–1912 seems generous enough; although in a letter to Harold Monro he worried that his Chronicle review might appear ‘chilly’ (Poetry Wales 13, 4 [Spring 1978], 55). The second review here, clearly by ET and preserved by him, was signed PF. The pseudonym may have been adopted to deflect criticism of him for writing multiple (or logrolling) reviews. Since ET did hardly any reviewing in 1915–16, he did not review Georgian Poetry 1913–1915; but he told RF (6 December 1915) that he had ‘had a faint chance of getting in’, and said: ‘The only things I really much like are de la Mare’s & perhaps Davies’’ (RFET, 112). 2  For Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop, see Introduction [xl], Appendix [709]. 3 See Appendix for most of these poets. John Drinkwater (1882–1937): poet, playwright, theatre-manager, and critic, best known for his poem ‘Moonlit Apples’. Reviewing Drinkwater’s Poems of Men and Hours, ET condemns his ‘facility—­a fluency of words that leaves no more behind it than a five-minute shower on a hot day’ (DC: 16 December 1911). Two odd choices by Marsh are Edmund Beale Sargant (1855–1938), a colonial administrator, and Ronald Ross (1857– 1932): better known as a doctor who won the Nobel Prize for his work on malaria than as a poet. Marsh included Ross as part of a deal for securing the popular Masefield (Georgian Revolt, 123). James Stephens (1880–1950), poet and fiction-writer, author of the humorous fantasy The Crock of Gold (1912), is sometimes called the ‘Irish Georgian’; although another Irish poet, Francis Ledwidge (1887–1917), who was killed at Passchendaele, appears in Georgian Poetry 1913–1915. ET writes of Stephens’s The Hill of Vision: ‘It can be said of him, as it can be said of very few modern writers, that his style has movement. It has verbs in it rather than adjectives. It is more active than pictorial’ (DC: 19 April 1912). For R. C. Trevelyan, see [76n.].

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Victoria and Edward, and it cannot be said that any uncommon accession of power has very recently come to Messrs Chesterton, Davies, de la Mare, Sturge Moore and Trevelyan, though it has to Messrs Bottomley, Masefield and Gibson (whose ‘Queen’s Crags’ in the current English Review is a fine thing and his best work).4 These three, together with Messrs Abercrombie, Brooke, Lawrence, Sargant and Stephens, have most of the Georgian tone, and would alone give a scientific critic material for defining that tone. Messrs Brooke, Lawrence and Sargant, are, as it were, the core of the group. Most of the poets are well represented. The 200 pages include the whole of Abercrombie’s ‘Sale of Saint Thomas’, W.  H.  Davies’s ‘Child and the Mariner’, Masefield’s ‘Biography’, James Stephens’s ‘Lonely God’, and the first part of Sturge Moore’s ‘Sicilian Idyll’.5 Room might have been made for several other writers whose work has lately appeared in books and magazines. There are writers more Georgian than half a dozen of these, and as worthy of inclusion. Then, to be precise, ‘The Kingfisher’ of Mr  W.  H.  Davies, is Edwardian in date. But the volume is more representative and striking than if twice the number of poets had been drawn from. It shows much beauty, strength, and mystery, and some magic—­much aspiration, less defiance, no revolt—­and it brings out with great cleverness many sides of the modern love of the simple and primitive, as seen in children, peasants, savages, early men, animals, and Nature in general. Everyone, except Messrs Davies and de la Mare, is represented either by narrative or by meditative verse, and by practically nothing else. DC: 14 January *** This book is a selection from the poetry published during the reign of George the Fifth, especially by writers who then first became known or who then made some notable advance. It is the work of a comprehensive student who has no coterie to boom and no circulation to make absolutely safe. That it is very interesting goes without saying. Only those who are prejudiced against modern poetry—­who are opposed at heart to the spirit of poetry—­can fail to find what is beautiful as well as interesting in this great variety of lyric, narrative, meditative, and dramatic verse chosen from seventeen living and flourishing poets. 4  Marsh had included older poets, such as Chesterton and Moore, to attract readers. 5  For ‘The Child and the Mariner’, see ET on Davies’s Songs of Joy and Others [515]; for ET on Moore’s A Sicilian Idyll, see [517].

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The book is more than a mere anthology. It is as much an independent living book as England’s Helicon, or any of the other anthologies of the Elizabethan age which still maintain their original form.6 It represents an age; in the main, the youth of an age. It has been so well compiled that the individuality of the age is, if anything, clearer than that of the majority of the men representing it. Perhaps only three men’s work emerges new, beautiful, and complete above the rushing tide of the times, Messrs Sturge Moore, Walter de la Mare, and W. H. Davies. But all three are men whose work had culminated or had taken an unmistakable direction before the accession of George the Fifth. They achieve what the others are still fervently and loudly pursuing—­some form of magic, rapture, or beauty. First in the book comes Mr Lascelles Abercrombie, and in his ‘Sale of Saint Thomas’ he might seem to be preaching to his fellow-­poets the one beatitude:— But prudence, prudence is the deadly sin . . . Thou must not therefore stoop thy spirit’s sight To pore only within the candle-­gleam Of conscious wit and reasonable brain; But search into the sacred darkness lying Outside thy knowledge of thyself, the vast Measureless fate, full of the power of stars, The outer noiseless heavens of thy soul.

The sermon, not now preached for the first time, has gone deep. In Mr Gordon Bottomley’s ‘End of the World’, the lovers in the snowstorm rejoice To be so safe and secret at its heart, Watching the strangeness of familiar things.

Mr Rupert Brooke refers to a Cambridge sect who, . . . when they get to feeling old, They up and shoot themselves, I’m told.

Mr Drinkwater takes to his wings To greet the men who lived triumphant days, And stormed the secret beauty of the world.

Two of Mr Gibson’s heroes exclaim:—

6  ET had made this Elizabethan comparison ten years earlier: see [72].

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We’ve left the fat and weatherwise To keep their coops and reeking sties, And eat their fill of oven-­pies, While we win free and out again To take potluck beneath the sky With sun and moon and wind and rain.

Mr D. H. Lawrence concludes an amorous piece with And death I know is better than not-­to-­be.7

Mr Masefield ends his ‘Biography’ saying:— Best trust the happy moments. What they gave Makes man less fearful of the certain grave . . . .

Mr Harold Monro hails the dawn, saying:— Life, with thy breath upon my eyelids, seems Exquisite to the utmost bounds of pain. I cannot live, except as I may be Compelled for love of thee. O let us drift . . . .

Mr E. B. Sargant has a long poem intended to convey the madness of panic glee in the forest. Mr James Stephens pictures a Creator and a human wife ‘sowing jollity Among the raving stars’.8 All in some way adore Aphrodite, Mr Sturge Moore’s ‘Goddess of Ruin’, or one of her priestesses, ‘gay invulnerable setters-­at-­naught Of will, of virtue’. Nearly all would give anything to be beyond good and evil.9 Messrs Davies and de la Mare alone have penetrated far into the desired kingdom, and that without having been certain of their goal or of their way, or possessing any guide or talisman known to any one but themselves. Unknown newspaper: 15 January

7  The poems quoted are Brooke’s ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, Drinkwater’s ‘The Fires of God’, Gibson’s ‘The Hare’, Lawrence’s ‘Snap-Dragon’. 8 Quotation from Monro’s ‘Child of Dawn’; description of Sargant’s ‘The Cuckoo Wood’; quotation from Stephens’s ‘The Lonely God’. 9  Quotations from Moore’s ‘A Sicilian Idyll’; allusion to Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886).

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Poetical Works of Robert Bridges excluding the eight dramas (Oxford University Press); Georgian Poetry 1911–1912; Lascelles Abercrombie, Deborah: A Play in Three Acts; Evelyn Underhill, Immanence: A Book of Verses; Lucy Masterman, Poems; etc. Whether it is or is not a compliment to publish all the poems, except the dramas, of the chief of living poets, at as low a price as if he were a classic, by a happy chance something more than a compliment is simultaneously paid by the dedication to him, on the part of editor and poets, of an anthology of Georgian poetry. The poets are Messrs Abercrombie, Bottomley, Brooke, Chesterton, W.  H.  Davies, de la Mare, Drinkwater, Flecker, Gibson, D.  H.  Lawrence, Masefield, Monro, Sturge Moore, Ronald Ross, Sargant, Stephens, and R. C. Trevelyan; and if only Mr de la Mare among the number bears any obvious relationship to Mr Bridges, the dedication is the more remarkable, as showing from how many different young men—­dwelling in how different a world from that of ‘I love all beauteous things’ and ‘I have loved flowers that fade’1—his loveliness, his purity and his originality command homage. Georgian Poetry contains ‘beauteous things’. It includes for example long poems by Messrs Abercrombie, Davies, Masefield, Sturge Moore, and James Stephens. It includes the two most impressive of Mr Gordon Bottomley’s recent poems, five remarkable pieces by Mr Rupert Brooke, and five representative poems from Mr de la Mare’s Listeners.2 Altogether it is a brilliant selection from the poetry of 1911 and 1912. But it is less and more than that. It excludes many poems because it aims at showing what young men are typ­ ical and promising, what elder men notably reflect the spirit of the moment. Nobody not jaded by excess of poetry or starved for lack of it, will fail to see that there is such a spirit when he meets it thus concentrated. Compare it with a similar book of poetry from 1901 and 1902 and its novelty is apparent. There is, by the way, no anthology of 1901 and 1902, but if it is now too late to make one, it is to be hoped that similar volumes will henceforward be compiled decennially or even quinquennially. If they find editors as generous and impartial as ‘E. M.’ they will, like this Georgian anthology, be valuable and delightful. Was there ten years ago such vividness—­or such hectic and excited striving after vividness—­as in Mr Abercrombie? In his new play—­where he 1  First lines/titles of poems by Bridges, soon to be Poet Laureate. 2  See ET’s review [528].

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redresses the long-­troubled balance by putting into the mouths of fishermen such poetry as used to be held too good for any but kings—­a man speaks of a plague thus: The whole earth’s peoples have been fiercely caught Like torn small papers in a wind, in this Great powerful ailing.

Another speaks of a sailor: With the ribs of his breast crusht like a trodden hamper, Lying three days crampt in a boat, and thirst Terrible on him, and he for ever groaning.

Ten years ago Mr Chesterton was consoling and praising the ass by recalling the day when Christ rode one into Jerusalem. Today Mr Rupert Brooke sincerely and (so far as an unbewitched landsman can judge) powerfully endeavours to sympathise with a fish and its ‘dark ecstasies’ where: Those silent waters weave for him A fluctuant mutable world and dim, Where wavering masses bulge and gape . . .3

Ten years ago Mr Gordon Bottomley was not picturing the end of the world and the building of Babel in blank verse like the quintessence of G. W. Steevens’ prose.4 Ten years ago nobody knew that Mr W. H. Davies was a poet,—not even himself. But then he is a fortunate accident that might have happened at any time, but did not. Ten years ago the surviving Yellow Book men would have been pleased with Mr D. H. Lawrence’s subjects, enraged with his indifference to their execution. Nor would they alone have been enraged, and not only Mr Lawrence would have given offence. They would have contracted a chill from so much eagerness both to come at truth and to avoid the appearance of insincerity, the fidelity to crudest fact in Messrs Abercrombie, Gibson and Masefield, the fidelity to airiest fancy in Mr de la Mare, and to remotest intuition or guessing in Mr Brooke, the mixture everywhere of what they

3  ET is comparing G. K. Chesterton’s religious poem, ‘The Donkey’, with Brooke’s obliquely erotic ‘The Fish’, which contrasts the fish’s world with that of ‘lips’ and ‘laughter’. His own poem ‘The Lofty Sky’ (ACP, 53), while less erotic, may be conscious of Brooke’s poem. ‘The Lofty Sky’ also evokes a fish’s element of weeds and mud to represent constricted (or sensory) experience, as opposed to a ‘loftier’ state of being. 4  G.  W.  Steevens (1869–1900): journalist, author, and war-correspondent, noted for his wit and style, who died of typhoid during the Siege of Ladysmith when reporting on the Second Boer War.

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would have called realism and extravagance. They could not have endured the simplicity of Mr Abercrombie’s Deborah as here: Is it only a small thing to you, this That once was David’s? . . .

or the violent subtlety of his ‘Sale of Saint Thomas’, as here: Gigantic thirst grieving our mouths with dust, Scattering up against our breathing salt Of blown dried dung, till the taste eat like fires Of a wild vinegar into our sheathèd marrows . . .

The anthology does not include all that is typical, or all that is best. It excludes women altogether, and therefore tells us nothing of Miss Underhill’s spiritual and definitely mystic lyric, of which her new book gives many perfect ex­ amples: nor in any case could it have included anything from Mrs  C.  F.  G.  Masterman’s first book, so gravely, courageously and widely sympathetic, so graceful and finished in a variety of metrical forms.5 B: March

D. H. Lawrence, Love Poems and Others If the readers of The White Peacock and The Trespasser1 do not buy Mr Lawrence’s poems, those who buy his poems will want to read his novels. For it is certain that the writer of these extraordinarily original close-­packed poems has plenty of material for novels, and must have had good reason for adopting the form. More than half are the quintessences of novels. Not mere novels in little, not mere sketches or embryos of novels; but, as it were, the tiny but solid beings of which novels are the shadows artificially made gigantic. 5  Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941): known for her religious writings, such as Mysticism (1911), rather than for her poetry or fiction. Lucy Masterman (1884–1977), like her husband Charles Masterman, author of The Condition of England (1909), was involved in Liberal politics. In a slightly longer review of Poems, ET says: ‘it would be impossible for her to write what was not delicate, reverent and sympathetic. She is complete mistress of a large variety of metres’ (DC: 10 January). Only two women poets were included in any of the Georgian anthologies: Fredegond Shove in the fourth; Vita Sackville-West in the last. Both had Bloomsbury connections. 1  The White Peacock was published in 1911; The Trespasser in 1912.

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Most of them are in uniform sets of stanzas, in some of which the rhyme is almost indifferent and unnoticeable, while in others it is made the more conspicuous by its apparent arbitrariness. But three or four of the poems, like the ‘Snap-­Dragon’, which is in Georgian Poetry but not here, are remarkable because the metre changes three or four times, both in dialogue and in monologue. In either case, it is not easy to say at first how much of Mr Lawrence’s power is due to these forms. But it is obvious at once that the poems would be impossible in In Memoriam stanzas, for example. Their metrical changes, like their broken or hesitating rhythms, are part of a personality that will sink nothing of itself in what is common. They have the effect which Whitman only got now and then after a thousand efforts of rhymeless lawlessness. Mr Lawrence never runs loose. You can call him immoral or even incontinent, but not licentious. He is no more licentious than a dervish. Moreover, his senses are too wakeful and proud. He sacrifices everything to a certain mood, emotion, or frame of mind, but nothing to fine lines, or to false emphasis. There are no ‘fine’ verses or lines of the usual sort, and the whole of a poem is intense and unchangeable like some of the beautiful single lines of old, when poets were still rhet­oricians. Yet his separate phrases are often of a prose type. If I were to quote a verse from one of the ‘Schoolmaster’ set of poems the reader might get an impression of prose, possibly of obscurity—­and there is obscurity in the book, due to abruptness and lack of rhetorical flow. If I were to give the outline of a poem, he might say that it ought to have been a ‘thing seen’. He would be wrong. But I have no space for his best, which are his longest, poems, though never more than a couple of pages long. If I quote one of the pieces short enough to be given whole, like ‘Morning Work’: A gang of labourers on the piled wet timber That shines blood-­red beside the railway siding Seem to be making out of the blue of the morning Something faery and fine, the shuttles sliding. The red-­gold spools of their hands and faces shuttling Hither and thither across the morn’s crystalline frame Of blue: trolls at the cave of ringing cerulean mining, And laughing with work, living their work like a game—

it must not be supposed that he often describes appearances. What he does best might have been inspired by Browning and by a feeling that ‘Parting at

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Morning’,2 for example, is none the better for being shorn of particularity. Mr Lawrence’s poems are not mere private disclosures of men and women, but all are particular, and do not offer themselves as symbolic or of general application. So honest and patiently vivid are they that no man can regard them as foreign to him. DC: ?February *** The book of the moment in verse is Mr D. H. Lawrence’s. He is remarkable for what he does not do and for what he does. Thus, he does not write smoothly, sweetly and with dignity; nor does he choose subjects, such as blackbirds at sunset, which ask to be so treated. For some time past it has been understood that verse is not best written in jerks of a line in length. Mr Lawrence goes further, and at times seems bent on insulting rhyme, as in this stanza from ‘Dog-­Tired’: The horses are untackled, the chattering machine Is still at last. If she would come, I would gather up the warm hay from The hill-­brow, and lie in her lap till the green Sky ceased to quiver, and lost its tired sheen.

Correspondingly, he writes of matters which cannot be subdued to conventional rhythm and rhyme—­chiefly the intense thoughts, emotions, or gropings of self-­conscious men or women set on edge by love or fatigue or solitude. If he trusts to make a general appeal, it is by faithful concentration on the particular—­ ­ a woman receiving a lover straight from bloodshed, a man repulsed, standing like an ‘insect small In the fur of this hill’ in the night when The night’s flood-­winds have lifted my last desire from me, And my hollow flesh stands up in the night abandonedly,

and saying to the woman: And I in the fur of the world, and you a pale fleck from the sky, How we hate each other tonight, hate, you and I, As the world of activity hates the dream that goes on on high, As a man hates the dreaming woman he loves, but who will not reply.3 2  This poem by Robert Browning which implies, but does not specify, a night of passion, consists of one quatrain: ‘Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, / And the sun looked over the mountain’s rim: / And straight was a path of gold for him, / And the need of a world of men for me.’ 3  This poem is ‘Repulsed’.

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The last comparison would be a flaw were it not that Mr Lawrence sacrifices everything to intensity, particularly in amorousness. His triumph is, by image and hint and direct statement, to bring before us some mood which overpowers all of a sick, complex man save his self-­ consciousness. Mr Lawrence is fearless in treatment as in choice of subject. He will be exact in defining an intuition, a physical state, or an appearance due to the pathetic fallacy—­herein resembling the man in ‘We have bit no forbidden apple’.4 He will give us in dialect the plainest outlines of a working-­class tragedy, and in careful abstract monologue a schoolmaster’s moment of satisfaction when it is sweet in the morning to teach boys who are his slaves: Only as swallows are slaves to the eaves They build upon, as mice are slaves To the man who threshes and sows the sheaves.

Such moods he will sometimes follow with a painful curiosity that makes us rather sharers in a process than witnesses of a result. He does not refuse external things, a gang of labourers at work on timber, a picture by Corot,5 the Moon. A surprising number of his poems are tributary to the moon, but a moon of his own world, ‘Divesting herself of her golden shift’, or bringing him a pang of reminiscence, or reddening: The moon lies back and reddens. In the valley, a corncrake calls  Monotonously, With a piteous, unalterable plaint, that deadens   My confident activity: With a hoarse, insistent request that falls   Unweariedly, unweariedly,   Asking something more of me,    Yet more of me!6

I doubt if much of his effect is due to rhythm. Verse aids him chiefly by allowing him to use a staccato shorthand which would be more uncomfortable in prose. But, whether the verse is always relevant or not, Mr Lawrence writes in a concentration so absolute that the poetry is less questionable than the verse. B: April

4  Quotation from ‘Renascence’.    5  ‘Corot’ is this poem’s title. 6  Quotations from ‘Aware’ and ‘End of Another Home Holiday’.

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Ella Wheeler Wilcox From all that I have heard it seems likely that more copies of Wilcox’s works have been sold than during their lifetime were sold of Wordsworth’s, Coleridge’s, Shelley’s and Keats’s together.1 (I drop the ‘Mrs’ and the further unnecessary distinction of ‘Ella Wheeler’ because one says ‘Wilcox’ just as one says ‘Shakespeare’.) Some nibbling faddists may argue that, since ours is not an age of poetry, her very circulation proves her no poet. Others would have it that she must be a greater writer than Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, or Keats: ‘not perhaps’, they would say ‘of pure literature, whatever that may be, but of palpitating human stuff ’. I should not care to go so far. Only, a poetess who has slain her thousands can no more be ignored than the Crystal Palace or Sandow’s Cocoa.2 We must be on our guard lest this distinction between pure literature and palpitating human stuff should have become an accomplished fiction unknown to us. We must not be content to sniff the empyrean with unpublished or unsold poets. ‘The most widely read poet of the day’, as her publishers proudly entitle her, concerns the superior person as well as the man, woman, or child who is allured by this addition sum on the cover of her Selected Poems: 21 from Poems of Passion. 21 “Poems of Pleasure. 14 “Poems of Power. 8 “Poems of Cheer. 8 “Kingdom of Love. 6 “Poems of Progress. 6 “Poems of Sentiment. 6 “Poems of Experience. 1  Ella Wheeler (1850–1919), born in Wisconsin, wrote poetry from an early age. In 1884 she married Robert Wilcox, and their estate beside Long Island Sound became a centre for likeminded people. The Wilcoxes espoused Spiritualism and Theosophy; believed in reincarnation; and were attracted to New Thought: an American movement that stressed God’s omnipresence, the divinity of the human spirit, the capacity of ‘right thinking’ to heal the body. Wilcox’s bestknown lines, the opening lines of her poem ‘Solitude’, are: ‘Laugh, and the world laughs with you; / Weep, and you weep alone’. But her globally best-selling verse more usually promoted optimism and positive thinking, as in another much-quoted poem: ‘Whatever Is—­Is Best’. 2  The iron-and-glass Crystal Palace was built in Hyde Park to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, transported to Sydenham Hill, and destroyed by fire in 1936. Sandow’s Cocoa, widely advertised as a ‘Health and Strength’ drink, went out of business during the First World War because its manufacturer was German: Eugen Sandow (1867–1925), a strongman, body-builder, and fitness entrepreneur.

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6 “Maurine. 4 “Yesterdays. 100 Poems.

Even if we can resist her and her tens of thousands, ought we to resist her? Should we not rather sink ourselves in the multitudes joyously devouring this palpitating human stuff? There are many inducements. For example, her poems are to be had every­where, not only at the Poetry Bookshop. Furthermore, the price is uniform and low—­one shilling a volume. Also the titles cannot be forgotten, though a little confusion may arise from their very simplicity, so that I am never sure whether Poems of Vice and Poems of Fun have yet appeared. Then, again, such inspiriting reports as to the potency of her works are current. They will move an elephant and will not hurt a child. Only the other day I was assured that at a dinner (whether given by or to Wilcox) her publishers, printers, binders, and the rest of the humbler auxiliaries of her fame, with others of the outer world, had voluntarily stood up to announce either that they were the better for reading Wilcox or that they never let a day pass without doing so. Is there any other living poet, even with a small circulation, of whom this can be said? Has Mr Yeats had the pleasure, or Mr W. H. Davies, or Mr Crowley? I doubt whether even among prose writers, whose temptations are notoriously by comparison inconsiderable, there is one who has made so many better men. The poetess is not unaware of her exalted position. Her manner of accepting and holding it is the best proof of her greatness. Take the sonnet3 where she refutes the opinion that ‘Anticipation is sweeter than realisation’: It may be, yet I have not found it so.   In those first golden dreams of future fame   I did not find such happiness as came When toil was crowned with triumph. Now I know My words have recognition, and will go   Straight to some listening heart; my early aim,   To win the idle glory of a name, Pales like a candle in the noonday’s glow. So with the deeper joys of which I dreamed:   Life yields more rapture than did childhood’s fancies,   And each year brings more pleasure than I waited. Friendship proves truer than of old it seemed, 3  The sonnet is called ‘Refuted’.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916   And, all beyond youth’s passion-­hued romances,   Love is more perfect than anticipated.

I have quoted this entirely because it admits us to intimacy with one of the forces—‘Does it?’ interrupts an old Wilcoxian; ‘if so, then the less Wilcox she.’ For the moment the interruption can be ignored; if, that is to say, it is not refuted by the further quotations I shall give. Describing a female character with a great talent for lowering things,4 she says: Whenever I encounter her, in such a nameless way She gives me the impression I am at my worst that day. And the hat that was imported (and which cost me half a sonnet), With just one glance from her round eyes becomes a Bowery bonnet.

This can hardly be other than a graceful, half-­humorous allusion to her princely prices. And if the end of ‘All in a Coach and Four’ is artistically questionable, so it gives us beyond question another glimpse of the poetess: It is only a foolish and fanciful song, That came to me as I rode along,   All in a coach and four. [. . .]

It is pleasant to think of Wilcox in full enjoyment of the simple good things of this world. For domestic felicity raised to the point of ostentation, there is nothing in the life of Keats to equal it, nothing in that of Wordsworth to ­surpass it. Wilcox is not lavish of such glimpses. She is not very fond of talking about herself. As the Wilcoxian aforementioned implied, she does not frequently and unmistakably unlock her heart. Great care must be taken not to attribute to her what she wrote dramatically or histrionically. Sometimes I feel safe. Surely it is the poetess herself who vindicates against a certain decadent school the ‘old rhythm and rhyme’:5 Oh! the strong pulse of it, right from the heart,       Art or no art.

Surely hers are the sentiments of ‘The Truth Teller’: Yet out of the blackness groping,   My heart finds a world in bloom; For it somehow is fashioned for hoping,   And it cannot live in the gloom.

4  The poem is called ‘A Pin’.    5  ‘Old Rhythm And Rhyme’ is the poem’s title.

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Nor should I much hesitate to say that her books prove her to be an upholder of her sex, a believer in progress, a sympathiser with advanced thought. Thus she has said, once and for all, in an address to men: We do appreciate God’s thought In forming you, before He brought Us into life. His art was crude, But oh, so virile in its rude Large elemental strength: and then He learned His trade in making men; Learned how to mix and mould the clay And fashion in a finer way.

Her belief in progress is written everywhere, whether or not she is recording a dream, as in— I dreamed a Voice, of one God-­authorised, Cried loudly thro’ the world, ‘Disarm! Disarm!’

or in the poem where she dreams of a world where there were no beggars or unemployed, each man owned a plot of ground, children ‘grew like garden flowers’, motherhood was an art, prisons were replaced by schools, and so on. [. . .] Her sympathy with advanced thought may be further briefly indicated by the fact that she has written:       Pain has its use and place; Its ministry of holiness and grace.6

With respect be it spoken, however, there is little in what Wilcox says under these important headings which distinguish her from other members of circles in sympathy with advanced thought, etc. ‘But’, says the old Wilcoxian, ‘they speak in prose; Wilcox in song.’ It is a fine distinction. She says in verse what nearly all who think with her have said in the ephemeral form of prose. I say this, with the reservation that perhaps, after all, Wilcox is not expressing her own convictions in her poetry. For it is a great and notable part of her faculty to constitute herself the spokesman of large bodies of her fellow-­creatures. [. . .] Like Shakespeare, she is a plagiarist,7 but her motive—­to do good and to sell—­justifies her, as art would not. In her opinion it is the artist’s business, 6  Quotations from ‘To Men’, ‘The Voice’, ‘The Forecast’, ‘Pain’s Purpose’. 7  e.g., Wilcox’s ‘Whatever Is—­Is Best’ plagiarizes the ending of Epistle I of Alexander Pope’s An  Essay on Man (1733–4): ‘And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite, / One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.’

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even the actor’s, to serve mankind, and to this service he must consecrate himself, must ‘weed from his heart the roots of wrong’. She herself has achieved this self-­mastery. It is to be seen, for instance, in her confessed scorn of mere art, and a hundred times in her practice. She writes that he who runs may read: therefore she writes as she runs along—­always thinking of others, what they would like, what would be good for them. [. . .] And she bids common men— Come up where the rare golden wine is   Apollo distils in my sight, And your life shall be happy as mine is,   And as full of delight.

If they cannot in the flesh ascend to her heights she can tell them what will be gained in the next world by a thoroughly well-­conducted life; for she depicts a simple soul in heaven meeting the friends who had preceded her: They led her through the Palace halls; From gleaming mirrors on the walls She saw herself, with radiant mien, And robed in splendour like a queen, While glory round about her shone.8

Here she says what the simple oft have said, and though perhaps they have never so well expressed it, they may feel that, with a better education, they might approach her. That is her triumph. She says familiar things en­er­get­ic­ al­ly, for the most part cheerily, not once but many times. A man who has his Wilcox needs no Shakespeare. The more he reads Wilcox the less he thinks of Shakespeare; he growls: ‘I never heard of any one rising from Shakespeare a better man.’ Not that Wilcox is a jealous god; it simply happens that Wilcoxians do not want the mere art of those who—   . . . sing no more unto the hearts of men,   But for the critic’s pen.9

They can be content with the fiery-­hearted, stainless lady who gives them ‘that feeling of reserve force and energy’—as one of her countrymen has written—‘which does not easily tire, and is so necessary for the successful prosecution of one’s life-­work’. Who, if he had to choose between Wilcox and Life on the one hand, Shakespeare and Poetry on the other, would hesitate, 8  Quotations from ‘Noblesse Oblige’, ‘A Song Of Life’, ‘Realisation’. 9  From ‘The Muse And The Poet’.

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even had I never written this little and all too-­imperfect encomium? Her glory is the more bright that it has been attained with the help only of a metrical skill commonly possessed by minor poets, a light sympathy with all sorts of ideas, and without principle or sense of beauty. PD I, 1: March

W. B. Yeats, Poems: New Edition entirely Revised and Reset A new edition of the collected Poems of 1895 is a poor substitute for a new book by Mr Yeats: it is, however, very interesting. The poet has been altering Countess Cathleen and The Land of Heart’s Desire—­Countess Cathleen to such an extent that he calls the first two scenes ‘wholly new’: the same with the last scene. The shorter poems are untouched, I believe; but two or three pages that he ‘always knew to be wrong’ have been changed in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’. Those who have seen Mr Yeats’s other late revisions—­of The Shadowy Waters, for example—­are more likely to be annoyed here than surprised.1 Of the theatrical improvements in Cathleen I can say nothing, except that some of the characters are now more sharply defined, the action is clearer, the stage directions more full. The piece is no longer a musing narrative divided artificially by dialogue, but a play intended to attain only on the stage its most perfect life. All through, Mr Yeats has been striving to convert the sort of reader who will not care much for a drama where a peasant can say: They are off again: some lady or gentleman Roves in the woods with tympan and with harp.

He now says:          Who’s passing there? And mocking us with music?

and his son answers:               A young man plays it, There’s an old woman and a lady with him. 1  ET’s review of Yeats’s Poems 1899–1905 discusses earlier revisions [231]. In the text of this review, the following names, which vary in Yeats’s and ET’s usage, have been standardized according to the canonical version: Oisin (Usheen), Niamh (Niam), Edain (Adene).

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Mr Yeats has removed the ‘strange weariness’ from the merchants. Aleel is no longer a poet not unlike his creator as he appears to us in his books:           A man of songs: Alone in the hushed passion of romance, His mind ran all on sheogues and on tales Of Fenian labours and the Red Branch kings, And he cared nothing for the life of man.

In the Collected Works Cathleen, on her journey to the ‘long empty castle’ (it is no longer such) in the woods, apologises for the music with these words: I was bid fly the terror of the times And wrap me round with music and sweet song Or else pine to my grave.

Now she says: The doctors bid me fly the unlucky times And find distraction for my thoughts, or else Pine to my grave.

The play is thus relieved of a little poetical unreality. So where Oona once ended the second act with— The demons hold our hearts between their hands, For the apple is in our blood, and though heart break There is no medicine but Michael’s trump. Till it has ended parting and old age And hail and rain and famine and foolish laughter; The dead are happy, the dust is in their ears.

Now Mr Yeats dares to sacrifice what was due to the excess of lyricism created in him by his work. I doubt if he has done more than substitute another, perchance more relevant, merit, by the words: She has found something now to put her hand to, And you and I are of no more account Than flies upon a window-­pane in the winter.

(Oona speaks to Aleel, bandaging his wound.) Where Oona used to sing ‘Who will go drive with Fergus now’, Aleel sings to his lute: Lift up the white knee; That’s what they sing, Those young dancers That in a ring

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Raved but now Of the hearts that break Long, long ago For their sake. But the dance changes. Lift up the gown, All that sorrow Is trodden down.

So the spirits in the third scene are given, not blank verse, but lyric to speak. Another set of changes discloses the poet’s wish not to insist on Celtic terms. Where Cathleen once said, ‘Aengus of the birds’ she says ‘one of the old gods’; and in the acting conclusion, here printed as an appendix, Balor and the rest become ‘Fat Asmodel and giddy Belial’. As a rule Mr Yeats, by altering, attains brevity. If he lengthens it is for the play’s sake, though here it is neither for brevity nor in any sense a gain when the merchants, instead of crying ‘They have still their souls’, and making Maire cry out, speak thus: For there’s a vaporous thing—­that may be nothing, But that’s the buyer’s risk—­a second self, They call immortal for a story’s sake.

(Why should he speak thus to peasants?) There is little gain in the change from—           We are two merchant men, New come from foreign lands.

to— We are merchants, and we know the book of the world Because we have walked upon its leaves . . .

Some changes are trifling. Thus: You shall eat grass, and dock, and dandelion,

becomes— You shall eat dock and grass, and dandelion.

Thus the swallow who gazes on the nest ‘before He wander the loud waters’ is now the hen; and the sound gains. The play now boasts more of Mr Yeats’s intellect. It is likely to be more entirely effectual on the stage; it is more austere in style: but it is often less like Mr Yeats, and, while it is no longer youthful, it is not mature work—­it is an interesting revision, not a fresh creation.

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The changes in ‘Oisin’ are less numerous, less important. Instead of My father and my mother are Aengus and Edain, and my name Is Niamh, and my land where tide And sleep drown sun and moon and star,

Niamh says: My father and my mother are Aengus and Edain, my own name Niamh, and my country far Beyond the tumbling of this tide.

A vagueness has gone, but with ‘tumbling’ perfection is unachieved. Some of the changes are certainly not improvements. The lines— And with quenchless eyes and fluttering hair A beautiful young man followed behind

are now transposed and ‘gaze’ put instead of ‘eyes’. Where Oisin used to say: I drew out of the numberless White flowers of the foam a staff of wood From some dead warrior’s broken lance,

[he] now says: I found in that forgetfulness Of dreamy foam a staff of wood . . . .

This is surely a piece of intense and most inappropriate Yeats, with the further disadvantage of abstractness, and it substitutes what is limp for what was only limp in another kind. Nor is it any better when Nor shook my firm and spacious soul one jot

(a poor, unnecessary sort of line) is struck out for moved not My angry, king remembering soul one jot.

Here the printer interferes, by no means for the only time, in a dangerous manner. One or two weakish expressions have been left. For example in— For we knew well the old was over,

‘the old’ without any help from the sentence before, is still made to stand for something like ‘the old life’. The line

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For there moves alive in your fingers the fluttering sadness of earth

and the phrase ‘with much-­toil wet’ are still causes of pausing. Why the hyphen? Has it strayed from ‘king-­remembering’? On page 285 the printer gives ‘foam-­pale distance’, but ‘mist cold hair’, and on page 251 ‘foam wet feet’, which is followed by a new imperfection in— Yet now I choose, for these four feet Ran through the foam and ran to this That I might have your son to kiss,

where ‘this’, without help from the context, must mean something like ‘this land’. Here Mr Yeats still falls short of the quite possible best which was open to him. He seems to have been revising in cold blood what was written in a mood now inaccessible. I cannot but be surprised that he has made the attempt, since it is one which he might find it necessary to renew indefinitely at intervals, should his energy remain unclaimed by creation. PD I, 1: March

The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, including poems and versions of poems now published for the first time, edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press)1 This is not a Coleridge for the pocket, or for a first reading; but for study, for the less rapturous yet perhaps more gorgeous second, third,—hundredth, re-­reading, there is no better edition. It contains all Coleridge’s verse, however fragmentary or redundant: practically every variation of stanza, line, and word, is recorded, both in footnotes and in the appendix of first drafts, early versions, etc. [. . .] The new poems are not disappointing save to extravagant and impossible hopes. They include a dignified poem on the Easter holidays written in 1787,—before Coleridge was fifteen,—a familiar topical piece written at Highgate in 1824, and a number of metrical experiments with notes by Professor Saintsbury. Among all the novelties one of the metrical experiments

1  ET used part of this review to pad out Chapter IX of IPS, in which he visits Nether Stowey, Somerset, where Coleridge had lived.

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is the most worth reading as well as the most interesting: it is called simply: ‘A Plaintive Movement’: Go little Pipe! for ever I must leave thee,       Ah, vainly true! Never, ah never! must I more receive thee?       Adieu! adieu! Well, thou art gone! and what remains behind,     Soothing the soul to Hope?       The moaning Wind— Hide with sere leaves my Grave’s undaisied Slope.

As to the boyish poem, it tends, in Mr E. H. Coleridge’s opinion, ‘to throw doubt on the alleged date’ (Coleridge’s date) ‘of “Time, Real and Imaginary” ’. It is notable, however, because all but two of its thirty-­six rhyming syllables have long vowel sounds, and because it contains three epithets compounded with participles, and a choice of words that is distinctly prophetic.2 Here, too, Misfortune, Woe, Wisdom, Virtue, Fortune, and Content, are personified with capitals; yet Coleridge had to do worse things in the style of the passing age before he superseded it. Since the poems are in chronological order, it is easy to have the pleasure of watching Coleridge rising up out of the conventions of that style, sinking back to lines like Thro’ vales irriguous, and thro’ green retreats,

rising again, falling again, until finally the conventions have all either slipped away or been adopted and subdued. Perhaps it was not in vain that he personified The hideous offspring of Disease, Swoln Dropsy ignorant of Rest, And Fever garb’d in scarlet vest, Consumption driving the quick hearse, And Gout that howls the frequent curse, With Apoplex of heavy head That surely aims his dart of lead.

Whether we can follow him or not into intimacy with those ‘Beings of higher class than Man’, Fire, Famine, Slaughter, Woes and young-­eyed Joys, the

2  Coleridge’s compound epithets in ‘Easter Holidays’ are ‘sweetly-smiling’, ‘smoothly-flowing’, ‘bitter-smiling’.

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more or less than fleshly and human creatures of his later poems may owe something of their reality to that early dressing-­up.3 Some of the early poems show that underneath the dismal tawdry vesture of contemporary diction lay waiting what we now know as Coleridge. It is to be seen in the sonnet of 1788 ‘To the Autumnal Moon’, beginning: Mild Splendour of the various-­vested Night!   Mother of wildly-­working visions! hail!

and then again more subtly in 1795, where he looks for a Pantisocratic dell, Where Virtue calm with careless step may stray, And dancing to the moonlight roundelay, The wizard Passions weave an holy spell . . .4

though here, perhaps, the collocation of calm and careless, wizard and holy, would have meant little if Coleridge had not advanced much farther. The combination of wild and mild is a characteristic one, partly instinctive, partly desired intellectually, as he shows when he speaks of a ‘soft impassion’d voice, correctly wild’. The two come quaintly together in his image of          Affection meek (Her bosom bare, and wildly pale her cheek),

and nobly in the picture of Joan of Arc:             Bold her mien, And like an haughty huntress of the woods She moved: yet sure she was a gentle maid!5

Coleridge loved mildness and wildness equally.6 Mildness, meekness, gentleness, softness, made sensuous and spiritual appeals to his chaste and voluptuous affections and to something homely in him, while his spirituality, responding to wildness, branched out into metaphysics and into natural magic. Some time passed before the combination was complete. [. . .] 3  ET has quoted from ‘A Wish’, ‘Happiness’, ‘The Destiny of Nations: A Vision’; and alluded to ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter: A War Eclogue’ (an attack [1798], from a radical viewpoint, on William Pitt the Younger’s conduct of the Seven Years War with France) and ‘Ode to the Departing Year’. 4  These lines appear in Coleridge’s sonnet, ‘Pantisocracy’, also in the second version of his ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’. 5  ET has quoted from ‘To the Rev. W. J. Hort’ (a poem about teaching a young lady ‘song-tunes on his flute’), ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’, ‘The Destiny of Nations’. 6  ET may identify with these rhyming qualities. In his poem ‘The Chalk-Pit’ he characterizes a man, who seems to be, in part, a self-portrait, as ‘Mild and yet wild too’ (ACP, 89).

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In the work of his best period the combination—­of richness and delicacy, of sweetness and freshness, of sensuousness and wildness, of spirit and sense,—can be seen either as in When in some hour of solemn jubilee The massy gates of Paradise are thrown Wide open, and forth come in fragments wild Sweet echoes of unearthly melodies, And odours snatched from beds of Amaranth, And they, that from the crystal river of life Spring up on freshened wing, ambrosial gales!

irresistibly intruding on ‘Religious Musings’, or, as in ‘Christabel’ and ‘The Ancient Mariner’, raised again and again to a peculiar harmony from the innermost parts of our poetry’s holy of holies. The notes to ‘The Ancient Mariner’ show by how many corrections this was attained. We see Coleridge rejecting the brutality of Thro’ the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth;

the imperfect solution of This Ship it was a plankless thing, —A bare Anatomy! A plankless spectre—­and it mov’d Like a Being of the Sea! . . .

the over-­emphatic reality of And I quak’d to think of my own voice, How frightful it would be! . . .

the mere archaism in scores of places. We see him making serious changes in events, without disturbing the rhyme: for The strong wind never reach’d the ship: it roar’d And dropp’d down like a stone . . .

becomes The loud wind never reached the ship, Yet now the ship moved on!

In the same relentless way the person addressed in ‘Dejection’ turns from Wordsworth to William, to Edmund, and to a Lady: even O Wordsworth, friend of my devoutest choice,

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is altered to Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice.

But never is the poet faithless in these poems of his greatness to the nature unveiled when he was a boy, in those lines to the moon already quoted: Mild Splendour of the various-­vested Night!   Mother of wildly-­working visions! hail!7

Orpheus 22 (April)8

Thomas Hardy of Dorchester There may be as many reasons for writing verse as for drinking, but it would be interesting to know how certain men, and Mr Hardy in particular, took to verse and kept to it; how so calm-­sighted a man, who can write prose, should come to put in print rhymes like this: On that far-­famed spot by Lodi   Where Napoleon clove his way To his fame, when like a god he   Bent the nations to his sway . . .

and like this: So loudly swell their shrieks as to be heard above the roar of guns and the wailful wind, Giving in one brief cry their last wild word on that mock life through which they have harlequined!1 7  There is a relation between the moon’s role in Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’, which ends with icicles ‘Quietly shining to the quiet Moon’, and in ET’s poem ‘Liberty’. Also a nocturnal meditation, ‘Liberty’ begins with an impression of ‘moonlight lying on the grass like frost’, and ends: ‘And this moon that leaves me dark within the door’ (ACP, 103). 8  ET also contributed several original pieces to Orpheus, including ‘Green and Scarlet’ in the same issue as his Coleridge review-article. Styled ‘The Art-Movement of the Theosophical Society’, Orpheus appeared from 1908 to 1914. Writing to GB (31 October 1912), ET calls it ‘an occultish quarterly’, and describes its editor, his friend Clifford Bax (brother of Arnold Bax), as ‘a local magnate, cricketer, theosophist, and an amusing talker who knows poetry because he likes it’ (LGB, 224). Bax was also a prolific writer in various genres, including poetry. 1  Quotation from ‘The Bridge of Lodi’; lines spoken by Semichorus I of the Pities (aerial music) in The Dynasts: Hardy’s ‘Epic-Drama’ of the Napoleonic wars.

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It is possible sometimes to wonder if he is poking fun at verse by first making it so unwontedly substantial, then adding a considerable amount of rhyme, alliteration, and assonance, as frills. He never sacrifices anything to rhyme, except appearances, while he owes to it a richness and closeness that neither his nor other men’s prose possesses. There is something rustic and old-­fashioned in Mr Hardy’s use of verse, as there is in his language when he speaks of a lover telling ‘the zephyrs many a tender vow’. When he writes one of his sonnets that are like the précis of ­love-­letters it is as if he set out to honour his feelings by giving them the form which, in fact, he honours in the use. The result is that a certain awkwardness is almost as constant in his work as truth is. Now it is the awkwardness of unfamiliar and imperfectly harmonious words, which is familiar to critics of his prose; now it is the awkwardness of making many rhymes obtrusive and his stanza forms often arbitrary; now the awkwardness of saying— And still sadly onward I followed   That Highway the Icen . . . .2

Re-­reading all Mr Hardy’s poetry in this new edition I notice, and not only in the form, something which I hope I may with respect call rustic.3 It en­ables him to mingle unexpected elements, so that, thinking in 1867 of the year 1967, he not only speaks of the new century having ‘New minds, new modes, new fools, new wise’,—but concludes: For I would only ask thereof That thy worm should be my worm, Love!4

It is as antique as Donne’s ‘Flea’. The same rusticity manifests itself at other times as Elizabethanism, and he is something of a ‘liberal shepherd’ in his willingness to give things their grosser names or to hint at them.5 He has a 2  Quotations from ‘The Revisitation’, ‘My Cicely’. 3  The new edition is the upmarket Wessex Edition of the Works of Thomas Hardy in Prose and Verse (1912). ET’s review-article is based on these volumes: Wessex Poems and Other Verses, Poems of the Past and the Present, The Dynasts, Time’s Laughingstocks. He incorporated the core of the article, with some additions and alterations, into Chapter V of IPS: ‘Three Wessex Poets’ (the other poets are Stephen Duck and William Barnes). Compare his earlier reviews of Time’s Laughingstocks [394], in which, as here, ET’s deep knowledge of Hardy’s poetry is suggested by his quoting from many poems. Yet Hardy may not have found his use of the term ‘rustic’ entirely ‘respectful’. ET told Walter de la Mare (early 1915) that he had ‘heard [Hardy] was annoyed by my article in Poetry and Drama. (I said he was a peasant)’ (PTP, 199). 4  Quotations from ‘1967’. 5 Reporting Ophelia’s death (Hamlet, IV.vii), Gertrude refers to flowers (probably wild orchids) in Ophelia’s ‘garlands’ as ‘long purples / That liberal shepherds give a grosser name’.

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real taste for such comparisons as that made by the French officer looking at the English fleet at Trafalgar: Their overcrowded sails Bulge like blown bladders in a tripeman’s shop The market-­morning after slaughterday!

Then those drawings of his—­the spectacles and the landscape, for example, following ‘In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury’,—remind us of a seventeenth-­ century book of emblems! Sometimes his excuse is that he is impersonating a man of an earlier age, as in ‘The Sergeant’s Song’: When Husbands with their Wives agree, And Maids won’t wed from modesty; Then Little Boney he’ll pounce down, And march his men on London town!   Rollicum-­rorum, tol-­lol-­lorum,   Rollicum-­rorum, tol-­lol-­lay!

This is a descendant of the rustic ballad-­maker. An unexpected rusticity is his reference to Queen Victoria in 1901 as ‘The norm of every royal-­reckoned attribute’.6 Another form is his use of ‘bride-­ale’ for bridal, and of phrases like ‘brightsome of blee’, and of all the gross alliteration in ‘The Sick God’.7 Another is his obsession by Roman remains on the road near his home ‘Where Legions had wayfared’ and his mother had guided his infant steps.8 And how often is he delighted to represent a peasant’s view, a peasant’s contribution to the irony of things! a capital instance being the story of the man who killed Grouchy to save his farm, and so lost Napoleon the battle of Waterloo.9 With this rusticity, if it be that, I cannot help connecting that most tyrannous obsession of the blindness of fate, the carelessness of nature, and the insignificance of man, twitched hither and thither by the Immanent Will 6  From ‘V.R. 1819–1901: A Reverie’. 7  ‘From bride-ale hour to grave’: line in ‘The Dance at the Phoenix’; ‘blee’: dialect-word for complexion (Old English bleo). Hardy later cut ‘brightsome of blee’ from ‘My Cicely’; perhaps, as with ‘The Pine Planters’, paying attention to ET’s judgement (see note 10). ‘The Sick God’ contains lines such as: ‘On bruise and blood-hole, scar and seam, / On blade and bolt, he flung his fulgid beam’. 8  Quotation from ‘My Cicely’. 9  Hardy’s poem ‘The Peasant’s Confession’ is based on a theory as to why Marshal Grouchy, one of Napoleon’s generals, failed to prevent the British and Prussian troops from joining forces: i.e. the possibility that a peasant may have protected his land by killing Napoleon’s messenger to Grouchy (not Grouchy himself).

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crawling in multitudes like caterpillars. Over and over again, from the ­beginning up to The Dynasts, he is amplifying the words of God:  

‘My labours—­logicless— You may explain; not I:’

and (referring to the Earth): It lost my interest from the first . . .

‘Sportsman Time’ and ‘These purblind Doomsters’ are characteristic phrases. Of birth he utters many things to be summed up at the end of a death-­bed poem: We see by littles now the deft achievement Whereby she has escaped the Wrongers all, In view of which our momentary bereavement   Outshapes but small.

As gravely he descends to the ludicrous extreme of making a girl planting pine-­trees sing: It will sigh in the morning,   Will sigh at noon, At the winter’s warning,   In wafts of June; Grieving that never   Kind Fate decreed It could not ever   Remain a seed, And shun the welter   Of things without, Unneeding shelter   From storm and drought . . .

and of putting into the mouths of field and flock and tree—­because while he gazed on them at dawn they looked like chastened children sitting silent in a school—­the question:     ‘Has some Vast Imbecility,       Mighty to build and blend,       But impotent to tend, Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry?’10 10  Quotations from ‘New Year’s Eve’, ‘God-Forgotten’, ‘She, to Him’, ‘Hap’, ‘After the Last Breath’, ‘The Pine Planters’, ‘Nature’s Questioning’. In his review of Time’s Laughingstocks ET had pointed out an illogical double negative in the quoted passage from ‘The Pine Planters’ [399]. Hardy later changed ‘It could not ever’ to ‘It should for ever’.

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Napoleon, in The Dynasts, asks the same question, ‘Why am I here?’ and answers it: ‘By laws imposed on me inexorably! History makes use of me to weave her web.’

Twentieth-­century superstition can no further go than in that enormous poem, which is astonishing in many ways, not least in being readable. I call it superstition because by rustic imagination a truth, or a genuine attempt at truth, has been turned into an obsession so powerful that only a very great talent could have rescued anything from its weight. A hundred years earlier Mr Hardy would not have been reading ‘that moderate man Voltaire’,11 but inventing an heretical creed. All these Spirits of the Years, and of the Pities, Spirits Sinister and Ironic, Rumours and Recording Angels, would not then have been ‘contrivances of the fancy merely’, and the ghosts ‘on the wainscot’ and elsewhere in so many of his poems would have been real ghosts, and not poetic fictions.12 Even his use of irony verges on the superstitious. Artistically, at least in the shorter poems, it may be sound, and is certainly effective, as in the poem where an old man laments at finding that his wife is to be in the same wing of the workhouse instead of setting him ‘free of this forty years’ chain’.13 But the frequent use of it changes the reader’s smile into a laugh at the perversity. Mr Hardy must have discovered the blindness of fate, the indifference of nature, and the irony of life, before he met them in books. They have been brooded over in solitude until they afflict him as the sinfulness of man afflicts a Puritan. The skull and crossbones, Death the scythed skeleton, and the hour-­glass, have been real to him. Very real, too, is Mother Earth mourning: I had not proposed me a Creature   (She soughed) so excelling All else of my kingdom in compass   And brightness of brain As to read my defects with a god-­glance.

A little step from this takes us to ‘The Lonely God’, but whereas Mr Stephens’s poem seems a wanton fancy, Mr Hardy’s is ghastly serious.14 11  From ‘The Respectable Burgher on “the Higher Criticism” ’. 12  ET refers to personifications in The Dynasts; quotes from its Preface; and quotes from ‘The Flirt’s Tragedy’, in which ‘Spent flames [are] limning ghosts on the wainscot / Of friends I once knew’. 13  This poem is ‘The Curate’s Kindness: A Workhouse Irony’. 14  ET is comparing Hardy’s ‘The Mother Mourns’ with a poem by James Stephens (mentioned in a review of Georgian Poetry [543]), which posits God’s loneliness after Adam and Eve have left Eden.

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If I were told that Mr Hardy had spent his days in a woodland hermitage, though I should not believe the story, I should suspect that it was founded on fact. That the hut contained a considerable library I should be certain, and how real the books have been to him may be learnt from the poems on Gibbon, on Shelley’s lark, and on the Pyramid of Cestius.15 The New Testament has also been real to him, or the dead soldier’s phantom would not ask:              I would know By whom and when the All-­Earth-­gladdening Law Of Peace, brought in by that Man Crucified, Was ruled to be inept, and set aside? And what of logic or of truth appears In tacking ‘Anno Domini’ to the years?16

The woodland, and the country in general, have given Mr Hardy some of his consolations. One, at least, of these is almost superstitious. I mean the belief that ‘A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore’ know ‘Earth-­secrets’ that he knows not.17 In ‘The Darkling Thrush’ it is to be found in another stage, the bird’s song in winter making him think that it knew of ‘Some blessed Hope’ of which he was unaware. Also, in comparison with the town, the country is paradise, for he speaks of the Holiday Fund for City Children as temporarily ‘Changing their urban murk to paradise’. Country life, especially love and death in the country, he has handled with a combination of power and exactness perhaps beyond any other of our poets, and for countrywomen I should give the palm to his Julie-­Jane.18 His other consolations are beauty, truth, and antiquity. Like the man ‘In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury’, I think he would say: Still, I’d go the world with Beauty,   I would laugh with her and sing, I would shun divinest duty   To resume her worshipping.

His sense of truth is exquisite and strong: even in the lines for the Children’s Holiday Fund he spoke of ‘scenes which at least ensure Some palliative for ill 15  These poems are: ‘Lausanne: In Gibbon’s Old Garden: 11–12 pm’, ‘Shelley’s Skylark’, ‘Rome: At the Pyramid of Cestius: near the Graves of Shelley and Keats’. Hardy refers to Shelley’s longdead lark as ‘That tiny pinch of priceless dust’; ET’s poem ‘After you speak’ calls the lark ‘A mote / Of singing dust’ (ACP, 125). 16  Quotation from ‘A Christmas Ghost-Story’.    17  From ‘An August Midnight’. 18  ‘Julie-Jane’ was a favourite poem, see review of Time’s Laughingstocks [398].

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they cannot cure’, and I cannot imagine him saying, like the lover in ‘The Dawn after the Dance’: Be candid would I willingly, but dawn draws on so chillingly As to render further cheerlessness intolerable now.

As for antiquity, he refuses an invitation to the United States with a confession that, in spite of all, he liked ‘wonning in these ancient lands’,19 and he has given a poem to a man for refusing to help dismantle a beautiful old house. How much these things are to him—­beauty, truth, and antiquity—­ may be guessed from the opening of ‘Let me enjoy (minor key)’: Let me enjoy the earth no less Because the all-­enacting Might That fashioned forth its loveliness Had other aims than my delight.

They are mightier than his superstitions. PD I, 2: June

The Works of Francis Thompson, three volumes Francis Thompson is the one poet of the generation after Swinburne, Morris and Meredith, who is now virtually chosen to represent us to posterity. One man says that he cannot take to Thompson, another that he is over-­estimated. They would speak in the same tone of Chatterton or Crabbe. Perhaps the only disconcerting thing about the chorus of praise, besides the fact that it is a chorus, is that everyone compares him to some other poet. For this might mean that Thompson’s literary affinities were too strong, that he owed overmuch to books. It is, however, more likely that most of these comparisons, whether made at first or at second hand, glorify the critic instead of illuminating the poet. In any case, if Thompson had done no more than make a gorgeous harmony of the most gorgeous poets, Spenser, Crashaw, Coleridge, and Shelley, it ought to be admitted a great achievement. Thompson belonged to 1895 at least as much as to Spenser’s, or Crashaw’s, or Shelley’s age. He is an astonishing but not an incomparable neighbour to 19 Quotation from ‘On an Invitation to the United States’; ‘wonning’: dialect-word for ‘dwelling’.

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Coventry Patmore, Lionel Johnson, Mr Arthur Symons, Mr Binyon, and Mr Laurence Housman.1 He has, in fact, the advantage of being the greatest of a distinguished group. He satisfies the thirst which most of them do little more than create. One of his advantages over contemporaries is that he is opulent and energetic where they are costly at most, and inclined to be languid or motionless: he is wildly sorrowful while they make dismal, half-­stoic lamentation. There have been other Catholic poets, but most of them owe to their religion obscurity or provincialism. With Thompson it was different. Obscurity and narrowness are to be found in him, but for the greater part it may be said that he held the gorgeous Church in fee,2 its history, its theology, its ceremony. No other poet in English does the same. The Church meant to him something like what Italy meant to Shelley. For most of us, of course, the result is a measure of foreignness, which makes us unfair, if we dislike, and correspondingly flattering if we like. How prodigal we should be of gratitude to an English poet who had lived in Spain and absorbed Spanish literature and then gave us poetry which confirmed our richest dreams of Spain! Thompson’s Catholicism is a similar boon. I do not mean that he represents Catholicism or that Catholicism explains him. The hues which he took from it suited the native hues of his spirit. He helped himself from other sources which were part of his life, from Spenser, Crashaw, Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, De Quincey, and from dreams which he is reputed to have fortified as Coleridge and De Quincey did. Together he and they made that world to which his poems have opened the only door: Far-­storied, lanterned with the skies, All Nature, magic-­palace-­wise,   Did from the waters come: The angelic singing-­masons knew How many centuried centuries through   The awful courses clomb.3

A critic once objected to his phrase, ‘the heart’s burning floors’. His sonnets in reply are excellent and true: The heart you hold too small and local thing   Such spacious terms of edifice to bear. 1  Laurence Housman (1865–1959): prolific author (mainly known as a playwright), illustrator, activist on behalf of progressive causes such as Women’s Suffrage. He was the younger brother of A. E. Housman, whose editor and literary executor he became. 2  Allusion to Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic’, which begins: ‘Once did She hold the gorgeous east in fee’. 3  Quotation from ‘Carmen Genesis’.

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And yet, since Poesy first shook out her wing,   The mighty Love has been impalaced there . . . .4

It was particularly true of Thompson. Nothing for him was small or great according to anybody’s foot-­rule, because every solid thing had a living soul or received one at his touch; and because every soul had a visible body. Equally real were Charing Cross, Storrington, Heaven, and ‘the land of Luthany, and the tracts of Elenore’.5 The battlements of Eternity in the passage— I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds; Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds From the hid battlements of Eternity; Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then Round the half-­glimpsèd turrets slowly wash again6—

are not less real than the street in ‘A Holocaust’: O God! Thou knowest if this heart of flesh   Quivers like broken entrails, when the wheel Rolleth some dog in middle street . . . .

And thus he himself is as great as the prodigious imagery of his poems. [. . .] DC: ?June

Alice Meynell, Poems Mrs Meynell has had sincere praise from Ruskin, Meredith, Patmore, and Francis Thompson. But there are other reasons for welcoming her collected poems: as, for example, that, unlike the collected poems of worse poets, they only cover 117 pages. They include no experiments, fragments, or mistakes. Mrs Meynell offers the fit, though few, to readers who must be fit and may be few—­she writes neither for glory nor for gain. Her readers are born, not made. 4  Thompson’s poem, ‘The Heart’, is addressed ‘To my Critic who had objected to the phrase— “The heart’s burning floors” ’. The critic may have been Alice Meynell: the phrase ‘the heart’s floors’ occurs in an early version of Thompson’s poem ‘Contemplation’. 5  Thompson wrote ‘The Hound of Heaven’ and another much-praised poem, ‘Ode to the Setting Sun’, when recovering from opium-addiction at the Premonstratensian Priory in Storrington, West Sussex. The quotation is from ‘The Mistress of Vision’. 6  Quotation from ‘The Hound of Heaven’.

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Mrs Meynell is not a comfortable, accommodating poet who inspires every­one at once with the remark: ‘I have often felt like that’, or ‘I should like to have said that’.1 At first the reader may think that this is on account of the poet’s rare personality, a personality as different from most others as her ‘Cradle-­Song at Twilight’ is different from most other cradle-­songs: The child not yet is lulled to rest.   Too young a nurse, the slender Night So laxly holds him to her breast   That throbs with flight. He plays with her, and will not sleep.   For other playfellows she sighs; An unmaternal fondness keep   Her alien eyes.

But at last the reader decides that it is not the personality, but the lofty and austere humility with which the personality is subdued. She has written ‘To Any Poet’ a poem reminding him that until he is dead ‘All the earth’s wild creatures fly’ him and his truth is a narrow shred: but then, Then the truth all creatures tell, And His will Whom thou entreatest, Shall absorb thee; there shall dwell   Silence, the completest Of thy poems, last, and sweetest.

Nor is this an obscure fancy, as the reader will learn who masters her ‘Letter from a Girl to her own Old Age’, the poem sung by ‘The Spring to the Summer’, and ‘Singers to Come’, which begins: No new delights to our desire   The singers of the past can yield.   I lift mine eyes to hill and field, And see in them your yet dumb lyre,   Poets unborn and unrevealed. 1 ET had written similarly of Meynell’s prose-collection, Ceres’ Runaway & Other Essays (1909): ‘Mrs Meynell is a delicate thinker and delicate writer, and perhaps the most sincere and uncompromising of those authors who appear to believe that Walter Pater wrote good English. Her new book, Ceres’ Runaway, is full of genuine and novel thoughts produced by the contact of a thoroughly-individual temperament with life. . . . In fact, one of the most striking things about her is her separateness . . . it is possible to read through this book without once having the human satisfaction of thinking that this is a thing you nearly thought or might have thought or would like to have thought yourself ’ (MP: 16 December 1909).

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It continues: Something of you already is ours;   Some mystic part of you belongs   To us whose dreams your future throngs, Who look on hills, and trees, and flowers,   Which will mean so much in your songs.

The future, the past, Nature and God are so much to this writer that they would obliterate, instead of blessing, any but an intense personality. Her thoughts and her emotions do not instantaneously delight us as do the rash firstlings, with their glib gladness and sadness, to which we are accustomed. They are not firstlings, and, moreover, they have been refined still further by the influence of a creed, a creed which allows her thus to write of the earthquake at Messina in 1908:— Lord, Thou hast crushed Thy tender ones, o’erthrown   Thy strong, Thy fair; Thy man Thou hast unmanned. Thy elaborate works unwrought, Thy deeds undone,   Thy lovely sentient human plan unplanned; Destroyer, we have cowered beneath Thine own   Immediate, unintelligible hand. Lord, Thou hast hastened to retrieve, to heal,   To feed, to bind, to clothe, to quench the brand, To prop the ruin, to bless and to anneal;   Hast sped Thy ships by sea, Thy trains by land, Shed pity and tears; our shattered fingers feel   Thy mediate and intelligible hand.

This creed explains why the humility, and not a few of its products, are for those who are born readers of Mrs Meynell. To them she is without peer, except among the highest, as to all careful readers she must appear a singer elect and remote. Both classes will welcome this volume and the portrait by Mr Sargent.2 DC: 1 July

2  John Singer Sargent (1856–1925): leading portrait-painter, whose soulful drawing of Meynell contributed to her (deceptively) ethereal image: see Appendix [708].

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Felix E. Schelling,1 The English Lyric Professor Schelling’s three hundred pages prove his acquaintance with a vast amount of lyric poetry, but not much more than that. He has no theory to put forward: the book had to be written, and he wrote it.2 The result is that the book is neither exhaustive nor suggestive, and, after a chapter or two, becomes a much-­padded chronicle. We knew already that a lyric is either a poem written for the lyre or one descended from the type which had been more or less fixed by that instrument. It may be personal with Shelley, and, what Professor Schelling calls impersonal, with Blake. All songs are lyrics, and the nearer a poem is to a song, or to what would have been a song in a singing age, the more lyrical is it. Professor Schelling admits ‘vers de société’. Unless a lyric is any short poem in stanzas the name should not be used for what is mainly narrative or dramatic. It should be possible to see in the modern lyric a core like that in an old ode. Whether it be true or not that all the arts tend to the condition of music,3 certainly a lyric is most lyrical when it is most like music and most unlike the best possible paraphrase of itself. Poetry tends to be lyrical when it is furthest from prose, and most inexplicable. A song makes its effect in the few minutes of its duration. Experience or circumstances may give it a background in memory, but no explanation can aid it. So with lyric. It must be as nearly as possible instantaneous, and for that reason, if at all, the elegiac, with its tangible subject matter, is to be excluded. Later readings may add to it or deepen its effect, but by music and suggestion it must, incalculably and at once, sow in us a seed of emotion. We cannot be converted to a lyric. Its appeal is to the central part of our nature, not to intelligence or experience merely. It should convert us by ecstasy or by whatever approach to ecstasy our natures are capable of.4 Professor Schelling insists on its combination of personality and

1  Felix Emmanuel Schelling (1858–1945): Professor of English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, mainly a scholar of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature. 2  The English Lyric had been commissioned for an American educational series: ‘The Types of English Literature’. Francis  B.  Gummere’s The Popular Ballad, about which ET is far more enthusiastic [271], also belonged to this series. Yet Schelling sparked some ideas about poetry that entered ET’s poems: see notes below. 3  ‘The School of Giorgione’, in Walter Pater’s Renaissance, contains Pater’s famous formulation: ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.’ 4  ET was then planning a ‘booklet . . . on Ecstasy’ (LGB, 228), a project which he abandoned. ‘Ecstasy’ contributes to the concept of poetry in his poem ‘Words’: ‘Let me sometimes dance / With you, / Or climb / Or stand perchance / In ecstasy, / Fixed and free / In a rhyme, / As poets do’ (ACP, 93).

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s­ ubjectiveness with universality, yet when it is commonplace in its universality, or employed, like a hymn, merely as a rough symbol of common sentiments, it is least lyrical. It is most lyrical when it brings before us what we knew nothing of until then, dispensing with great things and famous names, and appealing to us, not as soldiers or tradesmen or historians, but as men.5 So we come back thus early to what Professor Schelling echoes from Poe when he says that ‘in the lyric alone have we the actual spirit and essence of poetry’, and that ‘the epic and the drama become poetry only in proportion as they contain the elements that add the soul of passion and the wings of song’.6 The professor should, therefore, have considered the nature of poetry a little more thoroughly. He would then have found it unnecessary to say that ‘It matters less than nothing whether Sidney loved Stella or not, whether Shakespeare unlocked his heart in the sonnets, or Spenser married the lady whom he courted so absolutely in accord with the canons of Petrarchan art.’ We have a suspicion that he has been in too great a hurry to fill his three hundred pages. If he had had three instead of three hundred to fill, he might have come to the conclusion that there was nothing to say just yet. Pall Mall Gazette: 8 July

Poetical Works of Robert Bridges excluding the eight dramas (Oxford University Press)1 Mr Robert Bridges is the first living poet to be included in the ‘Oxford Poets’. All his work, except the eight dramas, and his prose essays, will be found 5  Another poem by ET, ‘The Word’ (written just after ‘Words’ during the weeks before he enlisted), also echoes his concept of ‘lyric’ in this review, once again combining theory with practice. The speaker has forgotten ‘the names’ and deeds of ‘mighty men’, but not ‘a pure thrush word’ (ACP, 93). 6  Here, as contrasted with his reviews of Arthur Symons’s criticism (e.g., [387]), ET seems partly sympathetic to Edgar Allan Poe’s argument, in ‘The Poetic Principle’ (1848), that ‘the phrase, “a long poem” is simply a flat contradiction in terms’. 1  DC headed this review: ‘The New Poet Laureate’. Bridges’s appointment had been announced on 16 July. In a letter of late August, ET complained to Walter de la Mare about DC: ‘They delay so: have only this day printed a tiny notice on Bridges I did before Christmas’ (PTP, 164). No doubt Bridges’s Laureateship had prompted the belated publication—­a rather lukewarm marking of the event. In his B review of Georgian Poetry 1911–1912 ET had already briefly noticed the Oxford Poetical Works, published earlier in 1913: see [544].

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within these 464 pages, and that too without suffering in essentials from the necessities of a cheap edition. Here, then, are to be read the sonnet sequence of 1876, The Growth of Love; the verses of Eros and Psyche equalling the days of the year in number; the Shorter Poems, five books of lyrics already obtainable at a modest price; the ‘New Poems’, some uncollected ‘Later Poems’ and ‘Poems in Classical Prosody’; and the two masques of Prometheus and Demeter.2 It is hardly to be expected that the low price and the imprint will turn Mr Bridges at a blow into a popular poet. In The Growth of Love he revealed something of his own feeling about his work when he said: O my uncared-­for songs, what are ye worth, That in my secret book with so much care I write you, this one here and that one there, Marking the time and order of your birth? How, with a fancy so unkind to mirth, A sense so hard, a style so worn and bare, Look ye for any welcome anywhere From any shelf or heart-­home on the earth? Should others ask you this, say then I yearn’d To write you such as once, when I was young, Finding I should have loved and thereto turn’d. ’Twere something yet to live again among The gentle youth beloved, and where I learn’d My art, be there remember’d for my song.3

But this desire can seldom have been granted. This ‘well-­languaged’ poet is hardly more likely to appeal to young men and maidens than Daniel.4 The even tenor of his narrative makes no such cry as [?rowdier] poetry. Young poets perhaps have loved him, but not the multi­tude of ‘the gentle youth’. He is distinguished from his contemporaries at first sight by what he apparently lacks. His purity will seem barrenness, his restraint will seem torpidity, his simplicity will seem ­ Elizabethanism. Then he has no amiable offences of extravagance, sudden temper, or mere youthfulness. His poetry lacks sediment no less than froth. It is a crystal, quietly glistening, cool strain of natural freshness and learned refinement also. It has nothing to lose by age. Whether it will prove to be for all time, as it certainly has not proved to be for this age in particular, 2  See review of Demeter: A Mask [128].   3  This is Sonnet 51. 4  Given Bridges’s ‘Elizabethanism’, presumably Samuel Daniel (?1562–1619): author of Delia (1592), a sequence of love-sonnets.

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it is idle to predict. Yet it might well survive as the sole example from its epoch of classic sweetness. DC: August

James Elroy Flecker, The Golden Journey to Samarkand; etc. Mr James Elroy Flecker is an attractive poet who stands somewhat apart from the other Georgian poets. He makes no attempt, on the one hand, at realism, or, on the other hand, at magic. Among English poets whom he has very possibly admired are Ben Jonson, Dryden, Byron, Keats, and, after a long interval, Wilde. Above all, he must admire the Keats of ‘Lamia’, for what he seems to desire most is clear, massive and ringing verse. He begins with an aim which few of the younger poets share. It is an aim, derived, at least in part, from the French Parnassian school, whose ‘desire in writing poetry is to create beauty’, whose ‘inclination is toward a beauty somewhat statuesque’, which is ‘apt to be dramatic and objective rather than intimate’.1 This aim is implicit in the verse: We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage   And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, We Poets of the proud old lineage   Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why . . .

He scorns a ‘message’. He is not continuously anxious to unlock his heart. But he would, if possible, ‘build the stately rhyme’,2 of how— Beyond the bay in utmost West old Solomon the Jewish King Sits with his beard upon his breast, and grips and guards his magic ring.

Not the stately only; but the pretty, the costly, the delicate. And what he aims at doing he does sufficiently well to disarm critics who wince at his Parnassian 1  The French ‘Parnassian’ poets of the later nineteenth century favoured formalism, objectivity, precision, and restraint: see [351n.]. But their quest for beauty also drew them to the culture of exotic lands and past civilizations. ET may be making an anti-Parnassian aesthetic point, when he alludes to Flecker’s ‘Samarkand’ in his own poem ‘What shall I give?’ His symbolic legacy to ‘my daughter the younger’ is ‘Steep and her own world’, as contrasted with ‘Samarcand, / Or the mountains of a mountain land’ (ACP, 116). 2  ET either adapts or misquotes Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, in which Lycidas ‘knew / Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme’.

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views and his implied dislike of the new ‘writers of manly tales in verse’. His emotion is English, his tone is classic and French, his medium is frequently Eastern. Perhaps the finest complete poem is ‘Areiya’: This place was formed divine for love and us to dwell;   This house of brown stone built for us to sleep therein; Those blossoms haunt the rocks that we should see and smell;   Those old rocks break the hill that we the heights should win. Those heights survey the sea that there our thoughts should sail   Up the steep wall of wave to touch the Syrian sky: For us that sky at eve fades out of purple pale,   Pale as the mountain mists beneath our house that lie. In front of our small house are brown stone arches three;   Behind it, the low porch where all the jasmine grows; Beyond it, red and green, the gay pomegranate tree;   Around it, like love’s arms, the summer and the rose. Within it sat and wrote in minutes soft and few This worst and best of songs, one who loves it, and you.

It might be a translation, the line has the disadvantage of being one that is not easily saved from nervelessness. One more quotation, from the title poem, where the chief grocer at Baghdad speaks to the travellers: We have rose-­candy, we have spikenard,   Mastic and terebinth and oil and spice, And such sweet jams meticulously jarred   As God’s own Prophet eats in Paradise.

I doubt if ‘meticulously jarred’ is quite right even for a Parnassian, but it does not spoil this choice gilded poem. DC: Summer

James Elroy Flecker, The Golden Journey to Samarkand; John Gould Fletcher, Fire and Wine, Visions of the Evening, The Dominant City; Ralph Hodgson, Eve and Other Poems; etc. Mr Flecker believes that poets and critics today need a theory to redeem poetry from ‘formlessness’ and ‘didactic tendencies’. His preface and his

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own practice recommend the theory of the French Parnassian, whose ‘desire in writing poetry is to create beauty: his inclination is toward a beauty somewhat statuesque’. The Parnassian was saved from being Augustan only by having in his veins Romantic blood. Mr Flecker is saved, and that very barely, by having not only Parnassian theory, but some modern blood. He will have to show still more modern blood if his theory is to make headway. It is not enough to be hard in outline, lucid in atmosphere, and to have subjects which a Royal Academician would be bound to recognise as beautiful. Messrs  A.  E.  Housman, Lawrence Binyon, Gordon Bottomley, Sturge Moore, Lady Margaret Sackville, Mrs Rachel Annand Taylor,1 and others, have done as well, and often better, without reproaching the age or drawing attention to themselves. But Mr Flecker maintains a high level, spirited if uninspired, and reminds us of Leconte de Lisle2 in passages like the following: Behind, the plain’s floor rocks: the armies come: The rose-­round lips blow battle horns: the drum Booms oriental measure. Earth exults. And still behind, the tottering catapults Pulled by slow slaves, grey backs with crimson lined, Roll resolutely west.

Of their kind, Mr Flecker’s poems are all but flawless, but is ‘blue-­shadow-­ sweeping’ the right word for a plain that blue shadows sweep over?3 Mr Fletcher is less certain of himself and less certain in technique; he has broader notions of beauty, if that word troubles him. But he also has gone to foreign sources, to Baudelaire and Verhaeren,4 for example, for his potions. He expresses himself through images that are largely sinister, shadowy, gaunt, terrific, disastrous, desperate, and in ‘Golgotha’ says:

1  ET writes ambiguously of Lyrics, a rather airy-fairy collection by Lady Margaret Sackville (1881–1963): ‘In a great many of her new poems, the subjects are perfectly in accord with the metrical poem, with the result that we feel the force of verse can scarcely further go’ (DC: 10 January 1913). Reviewing The Hours of Fiammetta, an elaborately wrought sonnet-sequence by the Scottish poet Rachel Annand Taylor (1876–1960), he judges that ‘the effect . . . of poets like D. G. Rossetti has been to rob her verse of all inwardness, or at least to compel her reader to see in her work, above all, a hard and death-like physical beauty, which may or may not be symbolic’ (DC: 9 August 1911). 2  Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle (1818–94): leader of the French Parnassians; Flecker had translated his work: see [441]. 3  ET has been quoting from ‘Taoping’. 4  Émile Verhaeren (1855–1916): Francophone Belgian poet and art-critic, prominent Symbolist.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 Christ only once trod Golgotha:   Christ only knew one day of woe. Through life I feel my agony,   And life is slow.

He will not have ‘patented magic casements, And copyright nightingales’ but satisfies his sincerity by saying to a woman: ‘I cannot love you, but for an instant only’, and of his art: Welcome each sorrow with full heart,   As freely as you welcome bliss; Never to flinch is the best art,   And to receive all, giving is.5

The Dominant City contains his best work. He is still experimenting, both in technique and in moods, so that his ‘dominant city’, London, might be any huge city in the presence of a solitary, sensitive questioner. But already his words and his solemn or tortured feelings seem to promise an achievement that should satisfy readers, if not himself. Mr Ralph Hodgson cares nothing for Parnassian or any other theory. The difference between his chapbooks and Messrs Flecker and Fletcher’s bound volumes is the difference between a spinning wheel and a factory. But his spinning wheel is a genuine survival, not a revival. His is a blithe, truly lyric gift, swift and sweet, matchable today only in the best work of Messrs Charles Dalmon and James Stephens.6 He is one of the few authors to whom it would be a pure compliment to say that they pipe but as the linnet sings, and as Tennyson didn’t sing. Truly, as Mr Hodgson says in a sententious moment: God loves an idle rainbow,   No less than labouring seas.

And the form of the little book, twenty-­four small cut pages, with a few lines to each page and a decoration dropped on to it by Mr Lovat Fraser,7 is p ­ erfect. 5  Quotations from ‘Fatigue’, ‘I cannot love you’, ‘Poetic Art’. 6  Charles Dalmon (1862–1938): a truly minor poet, with literary origins in 1890s Aestheticism, whom ET had known for years, and whose ‘best work’ celebrates the Sussex countryside. ET gave some of Dalmon’s characteristics to the unworldly Aurelius in The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans (1913). He also wrote a half-affectionate, half-ironical article about his ‘Arcadian’ poetry: ‘A Modern Herrick: The Lyrics of Charles Dalmon’ (T.P.’s Weekly: 11 July 1914; reprinted in LS, 71–7). ET begins the article: ‘It is rumoured that Mr Charles Dalmon is still alive’; and proceeds to illustrate Dalmon’s ‘mingling of what is rustic with what is pastoral and literary’. Dalmon’s ‘Elegy for Edward Thomas’, in A Poor Man’s Riches (London: Methuen, 1922), salutes Thomas as ‘my friend of singing days’ and ‘dear mate of lanes and fields’. For James Stephens, see [540n.]. 7  Claud Lovat Fraser (1890–1921): artist, designer, and author.

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They go into the pocket like a letter, and come out more easily. They invite reading. [. . .] B: October

John Gould Fletcher, Poems1 Mr John Gould Fletcher has published five volumes of verse this year. Somewhere he speaks with satisfaction of not having published his ‘teething pains’; yet these are presumably his first books, and they do not present an achieved style or character. Since they are personal without being very individual or revealing, it might be concluded that the greater part is experiment, in which the author has not been able to extend his powers to the full. In his poem ‘To the Immortal Memory of Charles Baudelaire’— Baudelaire, green flower that sways   Over the morass of misery Painfully, for days on days,   Till it falls, without a sigh . . .

he does no more than show that he has had a common experience. Defiance, violence, ambition, seem the most natural qualities in the book. It is possible to suspect exaggeration in the defiance and violence, as when he speaks of the rain beating and wind howling round his grave: Like the rhymes and cries I have torn   From my heart with desperate might.

But the ambition is unquestionable, as when he writes to unwilling editor and publisher: Who knows in acid-­bitten bronze to scrape   His thought, he need not fear to die unknown

and— Now though I live or die, it matters not.   I see great cliffs of granite clothed in sun, 1  The collections reviewed are: The Dominant City, Fool’s Gold, The Book of Nature, Visions of the Evening, Fire and Wine.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916   And up those cliffs I climbed apart, alone. It is enough. The rest of me can rot.2

The nature of the ambition is not quite clear. It may be ambition pure and simple, restless and unsatiable—­ambition to be a great and admired man. He says in his ‘Hymn to the Sun’: Not as in grey northern regions, Where sad sickly men put life itself to the question, Would I live, but in uttermost power: Borne up, overwhelmed by thee!

In more than one other place the ambition seems to be a desire chiefly for conspicuous and tragic isolation, as in ‘Failure’: Some fail because they never chose to strive: . . . . But I have failed,—for I reject success,— Because success is the only failure I know: Far better death or madness.

The meaning is uncertain, but the ambitious drift is not. Once he compares his sufferings favourably with those of Christ. The following is a stanza written in an inn on the St Bernard Pass after breakfasting: Napoleon took his breakfast here,   And after rode afar: Napoleon conquered Italy,   I wage internal war.

Whatever this ambition, it has isolated, tortured the author, to the point of inspiring this utterance on ‘Fatigue’: Sing, O ye poets, sing on,   Of golden summer’s gales; Of patented magic casements,   And copyright nightingales! ’Gainst all these harmless follies   I do not stir up strife, I am only weary of two things,   And these are—­death and life.

2  Quotations from ‘My Grave’, ‘On an Editor’s Refusal of My Poems’, ‘To the Publisher Who Refused to Publish My Poems’.

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Yet ambition has not been a stern taskmaster. It has admitted into print a rather large number of poor rhymes, some thin sense, some impossible constructions, and even such tame and unskilful trickling as— Next the cherry from which song Shakes the white shower all day long,   Ringing to stir the sluggish growth   Of a thousand others bursting forth On the glowing green hillside, Which becomes a mosaic pied,   A vast galaxy of hues   Whose perfume breezes catch and lose.3

Yet Mr Fletcher has a wide acquaintance with literature. His ambition is certainly directed towards literature, and in the prelude to Fool’s Gold, he has prayed: Let me have strange new song, so that my soul   May not grow sad and cold   By the ashes of the old; Let me have strange new song to rhyme and roll.

He desires, and that violently, to be a great new poet. All his books, save The Dominant City, show him more or less being tortured by this ambition, and by troubles connected with it, rather than striving to gratify it. The Dominant City is his greatest effort. It is an effort to present visible London, together with its effect on the poet’s spirit. A verse from ‘The Hoardings’ will help to define its modernity: Poet, do not vainly dream Of a past forgot for long, Let the wonderful hoardings stream In their splendour through your song. [. . .]

In ‘London at Night’ you get ‘Life and Death and Lust’, and also—    a thousand chimney-­stacks and more, That shatter the skyline’s black brute jumble . . . .

Sometimes the chimneys are not a mere black brute jumble, but— Blackened with grief, blistered with lust of life, Unconquerable and unconquered . . . . 3  From ‘April: The Blossoming’.

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One idyll there is: ‘Saturday Night: Horses going to Pasture’: Hark! through the city, quiet, cool, and starred, Longing for sleep and for repose in dreams, Dull rattling hoofs in hundreds echo hard: The deep reverberant groundswell upward streams. [. . .]

If it is open to the imputation of being idyllic, it is artistically true and pleasant. But the total effect is of a sinister, multitudinous confusion, a less phantasmal ‘City of Dreadful Night’,4 and of a solitary man’s brave attempt to make poetry of his observation, his reading, and his ambition. He succeeds in reminding us of sublime impressions, ours and his own. He proves that he can do better than in the other four volumes. PD I, 3: September

Ralph Hodgson, Eve and Other Poems Mr Ralph Hodgson was one of the poets who were missed from the anthology of Georgian Poetry. He had published one book before King George’s time,1 and since that about a dozen of his poems had appeared in The Saturday Review. One of these, ‘To Deck a Woman’, a passionate, an astonishing poetic pamphlet addressed to men and angels, on the matter of plumage as headgear, was of such disproportionate length for a weekly as to draw attention to the poet and to an editor’s confidence. Neither love of fame nor love of birds has persuaded the author to republish it. But now, by a very happy collaboration with a printer and the artist, Mr Lovat Fraser,2 two of these poems from The Saturday Review have been revived in an appropriate form, consciously yet prettily modest. The poems, ‘Time, you old Gipsy Man’, and ‘Eve’, were in any case quite remarkably readable. They lacked all weight of mere words, of undigested thought, of mechanical rhythm. Their present homely and friendly form puts nothing between their beauty and the reader, and in the last few months they have been giving many a pleasure like that of 4  The Scottish poet James ‘B. V.’ Thomson (1834–82) published this long poem, noted for its psycho-social pessimism, in The City of Dreadful Night and Other Verses (1880). ‘B. V.’ denotes Thomson’s pseudonym, Bysshe Vanolis. 1  The Last Blackbird and Other Lines (1907), reviewed by ET [247]. 2  See [580n.].

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the ballads which were sold in the street and stuck about inn walls two hundred years ago. Without too much insisting on the form it must be pointed out that it really has helped these blithe poems to communicate their pure and unique charm. No other page but Mr Lovat Fraser’s could have been so favourable, for example, to the opening of ‘Time’: Time, you old gipsy man,   Will you not stay, Put up your caravan   Just for one day? All things I’ll give you Will you be my guest, Bells for your jennet Of silver the best, Goldsmiths shall beat you A great golden ring, Peacocks shall bow to you, Little boys sing, Oh, and sweet girls will Festoon you with may, Time, you old gipsy, Why hasten away?

It is difficult to think of Eve and the serpent, a girlish and rustic Eve flower-­ gathering in a very English paradise,— Picture that orchard sprite, Eve, with her body white, Supple and smooth to her Slim finger tips, Wondering, listening, Listening, wondering, Eve with a berry Half-­way to her lips, . . .3

without remembering the joy of meeting her on this homespun page. One of the sweetest voices of this age sings its happiest in these clear, light, rapid verses. They recall what poetry was before Keats and Tennyson had so adorned it that it could run and sing too seldom, when words were, and

3  ET may have recalled the effect of Hodgson’s short line when he wrote poems such as ‘Words’ and ‘Bright Clouds’ (ACP, 91, 125).

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more often than they now are, dissolved and hidden in the beauty which they created. PD I, 3: September

Walter de la Mare, Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes How pleasant it would be only to review books when I like them—­not when I think I see from afar off that they are good, but when I really like them. Yet I am not sure, because the muscles of happy praise become stiff and I shrink for the other man’s sake and my own, from giving a display of ungainliness. I feel this very much after reading Peacock Pie. I do not suppose that Jack Horner would have been harder hit than I am, if he had been asked to extend the words ‘What a good boy am I’, to a sonnet’s length. I am continually putt­ ing in my thumb, pulling out a plum, and experiencing a sensation which cannot, I should say, be surpassed by consciousness of virtue. The book is worthy of its name. That is to say, in the first place, it is a pie. It is something to be eaten. Furthermore it consists of pastry and of something else covered up by the crust. In the second place, that something else in the pie is discovered to be so much above the ordinary pigeon, steak and kidney, or veal and ham, that it must be called Peacock Pie. Most of it can be eaten with only one possible cause of regret, namely, this undoubted fact, first delivered by Mr de la Mare: It’s a very odd thing—   As odd as can be— That whatever Miss T. eats   Turns into Miss T.1

Not all can be eaten, or it would not be Peacock Pie. What cannot be, what does not give precisely that feeling which, I suggest, is as pleasant as con1 Hailing Peacock Pie (he would have been already acquainted with its contents) in a letter to de la Mare (c.24 June 1913), ET similarly plays on the gastronomic metaphor of its title: ‘I promise it to myself as I should strawberries & cream, liver & bacon, or Salad Gruyère & home made bread. And it is just as definite a pleasure. If I had to imagine a book to fit your title, I should imagine your book; at least I should imagine something which only your book would embody. I love it . . . . Hudson’s are the only other living man’s books that give me such perfect pleasure, with its edge perhaps a little keener for the faintest taint of envy’ (PTP, 157). The poem quoted is ‘Miss T.’

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sciousness of virtue, what represents the peacock’s glorious uneatable ­plumage, is none the worse for that. I mean the poems like ‘Nobody Knows’: Often I’ve heard the Wind sigh   By the ivied orchard wall, Over the leaves in the dark night,   Breathe a sighing call, And faint away in the silence,   While I, in my bed, Wondered, ’twixt dreaming and waking,   What it said. Nobody knows what the Wind is,   Under the height of the sky, Where the hosts of the stars keep far away house   And its wave sweeps by— Just a great wave of the air,   Tossing the leaves in its sea, And foaming under the eaves of the roof   That covers me. And so we live under deep water,   All of us, beasts and men, And our bodies are buried down under the sand,   When we go again; And leave, like the fishes, our shells,   And float on the Wind and away, To where, o’er the marvellous tides of the air,   Burns day.2

It is now pretty well-­known that Mr de la Mare is a master, is the master, in this style. And in the new book he gives us a variety of choice examples: I will quote one more: I heard a horseman   Ride over the hill; The moon shone clear,   The night was still; His helm was silver,   And pale was he; And the horse he rode   Was of ivory.3 2  Like Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Fish’ (see [545n.]), this poem, with its imagery of underwater and sky, may have influenced ET’s ‘The Lofty Sky’ (ACP, 53). 3  This poem, the first in the book, is ‘The Horseman’.

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You cannot be said to eat these things, but to absorb them chameleon-­ fashion. But except to those who saw the Christmas number of the Poetry Review, and the fortunate ones who bought (with the deservedly less fortunate ones who borrowed and returned) The Three Mulla-­ Mulgars,4 an unrivalled romance for many sorts of children, it is perhaps not so well-­known what good pastry, and what peacock flesh, succulent and spicy, Mr de la Mare does bake—­he do. It is not generally known that he sees huntsmen in scarlet also: Three jolly gentlemen,   In coats of red, Rode their horses   Up to bed.5 [. . .]

There is always at least a phantom of a peacock feather about your helping, but nobody else can mingle so variously jollity with magic as Mr de la Mare can. His first book, Songs of Childhood, contained a poem—­contains a poem—­called ‘Bunches of Grapes’, differentiating three children in three verses, of which the last is: ‘Chariots of gold,’ says Timothy; ‘Silvery wings,’ says Elaine; ‘A bumpity ride in a wagon of hay For me,’ says Jane.

Now, I cannot be more exact than if I say that Mr de la Mare’s new book will satisfy Timothy, Elaine and Jane. Maybe Timothy will see a silveriness about his chariot horses; the wings may sometimes carry Elaine to a region so far off and magical as to be melancholy; Jane may have doubts whether her wagon be not winged; but personally, I am content to travel any part of England or no man’s land with this poet, on chariot of gold, silvery wings, or wagon. Songs of Childhood was distinguished by its chariot, The Listeners by its wings: Peacock Pie triumphs upon all three. B: September *** The best of English ballads, songs and nursery rhymes, the best of Coleridge and Poe, have combined with something, not to be found anywhere else, to 4  ET’s reviews of de la Mare’s novel, The Three Mulla-Mulgars (1910), are full of superlatives, e.g., ‘at once magical and merry . . . a beautiful work of art’ (MP: 8 December 1910). See [459n.]. 5  First quatrain of ‘The Huntsmen’.

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make Mr de la Mare’s poetry the most featherweight original poetry of our time. It is poetry, and nothing but poetry. It is never only good verse. Some will complain that there is too much poetry in it, that it has no body to hold its spirit and to give variety of form to the unvarying pure essence. But no one of the five volumes of his poetry—­Songs of Childhood, Poems, The Listeners, A Child’s Day, and this—­gives less cause to complain. That they are so much alike is a proof of their sincerity. That they are all so different is a proof that the poet can avoid the seductions of his own delicious tunes. Even those who know all the four earlier volumes will meet with some surprises. They will not, I think, have any disappointments. They will find the same feeling as before for children, old people, houses, trees, and England, but they will find also much that they could not have foretold from that gamesome but visionary eye watching the modern and the timeless world: Behind the blinds I sit and watch The people passing—­passing by; And not a single one can see   My tiny watching eye. They cannot see my little room, All yellowed with the shaded sun; They do not even know I’m here,   Nor’ll guess when I’m gone.

What he sees varies from ‘Old King Caraway Supped on cake’, and— Three jolly Farmers Once bet a pound Each dance the others would Off the ground . . . .

(which is a tale to make Caldecott yet again resent death),6 to ‘The Song of Shadows’: Sweep thy faint strings, Musician,   With thy long lean hand; Downward the starry tapers burn,   Sinks soft the waning sand;

6  ET has quoted the whole of ‘The Window’, the opening lines of ‘Cake and Sack’ and from ‘Off the Ground’. He suggests that Randolph Caldecott (1846–86), a pioneering illustrator of children’s books, would have found a good subject in ‘Off the Ground’. Perhaps de la Mare had himself been influenced by Caldecott’s delightful rhymed picture-book, The Three Jovial Huntsmen (1880).

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The old hound whimpers couched in sleep,   The embers smoulder low; Across the walls the shadows     Come, and go. [. . .]

The fact is that his book does away once and for all with the suspicion that peacock pie is a thing to be looked at. The fine feathers do make a fine bird in this case, but they also cover excellent meats. The poetry is good enough for those who take their peacock pie only once a year, and it is homely enough for ‘human nature’s daily food’.7 DC: 18 September

A.E., Collected Poems A. E. is a poet and a man of affairs. This world is to him ‘a world of grey’; he is ‘mad’ when he returns to it from the ‘mystic mountains’.1 He thinks our age huckstering, servile, blind; and the fairies have told him it is the twilight of the ages. At the same time he declares for the future, not the past. This is interesting. The two hundred and fifty pages are extraordinarily interesting, apart from the poetry, which is concerned very little with this world and age, but chiefly with another and ‘deeper’ world, shared by him with the bright host of the old gods of Ireland, ‘the lean and skinny’.2 I do not see what advantage that mythology has over Christianity, except that nobody minds what you do with it. But for A. E., Lu, Angus and the rest are apparently more real than living men, and are the constant inhabitants of the world to which he retreats in visions. For I do not suppose that their names have been chosen merely to give potency to figures of dreams and trances. Not that the book creates perfect confidence in A. E. For he uses ‘I think’ and ‘surely’ and ‘as if ’ in a manner suggesting fancy rather than vision, though his solemnity is invariable, and his fairies are stiff as with consciousness 7  Phrase from Wordsworth’s poem, ‘She was a Phantom of delight’. 1  Quotations from ‘On a Hillside’, ‘A Return’. 2  Probably a misprint or misquotation of ‘plumed yet skinny’: adjectives applied to ‘Shee’ (fairies) in J. M. Synge’s poem ‘The Passing of the Shee’, After looking at one of Æ’s pictures: see ET’s review of Synge’s Poems and Translations [379].

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of a mortal audience. Then, too, his dissatisfaction with towns and this life seems inconsistent with the fact that they enable or permit him to escape so often, and that the rudest clod is for him ‘haunted by all mystery,’ and that he has met a starry being in Patrick Street: ‘Is it not beautiful?’ he cried. ‘Our Faery Land of Hearts’ Desire Is mingled through the mire and mist, yet stainless keeps its lovely fire . . . .’3

Did he, or did he not, meet this being? I should like to know what truth he is trying to represent when he says so incomprehensibly that in days of old he was ‘like the forest glooms’, and also ‘seemed’ either a Titan or a morning star, he cannot be positive which.4 It is interesting, assuming there is a truth behind it, but is it poetry? Is it even speech? Seldom does A. E. do more than prove himself a man of uncommon temperament who is concerned with mysticism. In one poem he sees through a cabin door a woman, and knows ‘all this was past ten thousand years away’: It is we who have passed from ourselves, from beauty which is not dead. I know, when I come to my own immortal, I will find there In a myriad instant all that the wandering soul found fair: Empires that never crumbled, and thrones all glorious yet, And hearts ere they were broken, and eyes ere they were wet.5

This, and much more, has some connection with beauty, but is not completely creative literature. However good A. E. is at both worlds, he suffers by not being able to relate them, which leaves this world shadowy and the other toy-­like. Sometimes he fatally mixes styles, and says of mountains thrusting ‘Their blackness high into the still grey light’; that they are ‘Bearded with dewy grass’. Are not the two from different note-­books? Then so many of his phrases and words need more explanation than his Celtic deities. They have a significance which he does not convey to us, as if he were addressing a sect. In fact, his language cannot get beyond outlining an intention. His style is marred by the trick of repeating words, as in ‘The sea was hoary, hoary’. Music is the rarest thing in his pages. He is more an alchemist than a mystic. When he speaks of mysterious things his language will not catch fire and become impressive instead of explanatory. Where he is best is in making this world become as a dream ‘amid the Danaan mirth’, showing us ‘the bubble planets tossing in the dead black sea of night’, and the faces of gods and heroes ‘Leaning from out ancestral spheres’. In that realm where love is ‘a pearl-­grey dawn in darkness’, and neither he nor we can know the dream of 3  Quotations from ‘Dust’, ‘The Heroes’.    4  From ‘Weariness’.   5  From ‘Recollection’.

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life from his own dreams of Babylon or the Country of the Young,6 he is an expert who can introduce us to things delicate, gorgeous, and sublime. DC: ?September

Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali (Song Offerings) Of Rabindranath Tagore one who read his poems in the original Bengali said: ‘We have other poets, but none that are his equal; we call this the epoch of Rabindranath. No poet seems to me as famous in Europe as he is among us. He is as great in music as in poetry, and his songs are sung from the west of India into Burma wherever Bengali is spoken.’1 This present book consists of Rabindranath’s own prose translation of 103 short poems. I will quote one to show his mastery of English prose. On the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying and I knew it not. My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded.   Only now and again a sadness fell upon me, and I started up from my dream and felt a sweet trace of a strange fragrance in the south wind.   That vague sweetness made my heart ache with longing, and it seemed to me that it was the eager breath of the summer seeking for its completion.   I knew not then that it was so near, that it was mine, and that this perfect sweetness had blossomed in the depth of my own heart.

So good is the writing that it relieves one from any necessity of trying to imagine what may have been lost in translation. It can hardly be called translation, but is pure creative language, easier to follow than that of some English or American contemporaries. The poems are chiefly about himself in relation to the One, to God, Nature, the Cosmos, or what you will. They depict a soul longing for the ecstasy of union with the One, that ecstasy which has made European saints and poets weep for joy. One of the earlier poems ends: ‘I live in the hope of meeting with him; but this meeting is not yet.’ In the next he says that day by day he is being made ‘worthy of the simple, great gifts that thou gavest to me 6  Quotations from ‘On a Hill-top’, ‘The Voice of the Sea’, ‘The Well of All-Healing’, ‘Fantasy’, ‘The Hour of Twilight’, ‘The Morning Star’. 1  Quoted by W. B. Yeats in his Introduction to Gitanjali.

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unasked—­this sky and the light, this body and the life and the mind’. But yet again he is ‘only waiting for love to give myself up at last into his hands’. He begs the spirit, his ‘only friend’, his ‘best beloved’, not to pass by like a dream. Once he came in sleep, and the poet laments. Again he sings: That I want thee, only thee—­let my heart repeat without end. All desires that distract me, day and night, are false and empty to the core.

He prays:   When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides shutting me out from beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest . . .   When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O thou holy one, thou wakeful, come with thy light and thy thunder.

Again he asks: ‘Is the time not come yet?’ Then begin the poems where expectation is itself an ecstasy. ‘The air is filling with the perfume of promise’. The poet feels ‘a faint smell of thy sweet presence’. He surrenders his mind in ‘glad humiliation’, forgets what he is expecting, and wakes to see the expected one. The gift is a sword, ‘this ­honour of the burden of pain’. The shining of the sword is compared to the ‘pure flame of being burning up earthly sense with one fierce flash’. He knows the pleasure of the mystic: The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

After this there is no other pleasure, but the least thing can yield it equally with the greatest. This book contains perhaps the most beautiful record in English of that pleasure. More passionate records of a broken pleasure, or a remembered or merely expected one, have been written, but this one was not possible until an Indian wrote pure English.2 DC: 23 September

2  ET also enthused about two other books by Tagore published in Autumn 1913, stressing their ‘symbolism’. He says of The Gardener that most of the poems ‘have the representative character of great poetry’; that they ‘may have sprung from particular and personal occasions, but they have a natural symbolism of universal significance’ (DC: ?October). He finds ‘the same quality’ in the ‘child poems’ of The Crescent Moon: ‘they take common things from common life—­little things, often trifling things—­and transmute them, not by the decorations of rhetoric, but by the supreme poetic power of relating the part to the whole, of suggesting the whole by the part, of creating intensely significant symbols, making men of dolls, gods of men, children of gods’ (DN: ?November).

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John Masefield, The Daffodil Fields The Daffodil Fields is a very moving story in about 300 seven-­line stanzas. It is easier to read than any other verse narrative of today or other days. The story would in itself attract men and women, and Mr Masefield is himself passionately interested in it. The chief characters are two men and a woman who have grown up as friends, the children of neighbouring farmers in Shropshire. Both young men love the girl, but she chooses Michael, the bolder and wilder of the two, who goes away to a South American ranch soon after the first kiss, lives with a Spanish woman, and forgets Mary. Lionel, in charge of a prize bull for the ranch, discovers Michael, tries to persuade him to return, and then by slow degrees wins Mary as a kind, cold wife for himself. When Michael gets the news he makes straight for home. Mary obeys his call instantly. The men have several meetings. In the last they wound one another mortally, and die before Mary’s eyes. Mary sings in the last stanzas very much as the woman does in The Widow in the Bye Street,1 but it is her death-­song. The poem is full of a sense of life’s beauty and sorrow. The stanza is itself one capable of the utmost loveliness; it is the same as that of Dauber,2 except that the last line is an alexandrine. It moves sometimes smoothly, sometimes brokenly, usually with a sad sweetness. It is perfectly suited to the narrative and to Mr Masefield’s tenderness and awfulness, to natural beauty as in this: There, when the first green shoots of tender corn Show on the plough; when the first drift of white Stars the black branches of the spiky thorn, And afternoons are warm and evenings light, The shivering daffodils do take delight, Shaking beside the brook, and grass comes green, And blue dog-­violets come and glistening celandine. 1  See review [526]. 2  ET’s review of this earlier narrative poem by Masefield, which centres on a would-be artist who goes to sea with fatal consequences, resembles his review of The Daffodil Fields. He praises the ‘variety of the cadences, in lyrical, narrative, and dramatic passages of different kinds, from the colloquial to the sublime’; but says: ‘The conflict is insisted on with almost intolerable intensity’ (DC: ?May 1913). The seven-line stanza (rhymed ABABBCC) of Dauber and The Daffodil Fields, termed ‘rhyme royal’ and derived from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, is also that of The Widow in the Bye Street.

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And to its opposite:     . . . a hut bestrewn with skulls of beeves, Round which the flies danced, where an Indian girl Bleared at him from her eyes’ ophthalmic eaves, Grinning a welcome; with a throaty skirl, She offered him herself; but he, the churl, Stared till she thought him fool; she turned, she sat, Scratched in her short, black hair, chewed a cigar-­end, spat.

Mr Masefield is too fond of these contrasts. When he reaches the fight he speaks of the ‘bloodied flower’, with variations, six times in ten stanzas. He must continually be turning from the mire to the ‘happy sunlight’, from the ‘courtyard muck’ to the ‘delicate life as soft as flame’, and bringing together lines like: There was all April in the blackbird’s cry. And lying there they felt they had to die . . .

The ‘springing grass’ is too often and violently insisted on in the midst of human misery or dirt—­too often to be effective—­and the reader comes at last to see Mr Masefield as a tyrant to his characters, driving them hither and thither in order to please his excessive love of contrast. It is apparent over and over again in the style, where delicate or passionate words and phrases are brought up against coarse and base ones. It is essential to the poem. It is the foundation of that license by which Mr Masefield mingles with local and particular realism the traditional lofty speech of poets, as where Mary sings her dying song ‘Like to the dying swan’. The result is that when the Shropshire farmer addresses his lady as ‘my bright bride’ or ‘You, in your beauty and your whiteness’, the reader is either unduly affected or feels uneasy: in either case he must wince when Mary calls the dead lover ‘My little friend, my love, my Michael, golden head’. Mr Masefield is too little concerned with the story, too much with his own piteousness. He protests too much for poetry—­enough for a moral tale—­and in the end we are conscious not so much of the contrast between extremes as of the poet’s devotion to that contrast. DC: ?October

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William H. Davies, Foliage: Various Poems The first, and almost the best, poem in his new book tells us something of Mr Davies’ way of work: My mind has thunderstorms,   That brood for heavy hours: Until they rain me words,   My thoughts are drooping flowers And sulking, silent birds. Yet come, dark thunderstorms,   And brood your heavy hours; For when you rain me words,   My thoughts are dancing flowers And joyful singing birds.

Other pieces in the book must have come to the poet midway between two thunderstorms. They do not lack a line or a verse good enough to excuse the poet’s error in admitting them; such is the last verse of ‘A May Morning’: I see no Christ   Nailed on a tree, Dying for sin;   No sin I see: No thoughts for sadness, All thoughts for gladness.

but they abound in the faults to which Mr Davies is peculiarly liable. Thus the charming poem that opens: Sweet Stay-­at-­Home, sweet Well-­content, Thou knowest of no strange continent: Thou hast not felt thy bosom keep A gentle motion with the deep . . . .1

is lowered somewhat by the dullness and commonness of the phrase, ‘as far as eyes can go’, and the dullness and looseness of two lines in his defence of ‘Sweet Well-­content, sweet Love-­one-­place’: For thou hast made more homely stuff Nurture thy gentle self enough . . . . 1  Like James Elroy Flecker’s ‘Samarkand’ (see [577n.]), the contrastingly local world of this poem, ‘Sweet Stay-at-Home’, may have contributed to ET’s poem for his younger daughter, ‘What shall I give?’ (ACP, 116).

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Mr Davies can be plain without being common, and loose yet expressive at the same time, but one who knew him only from this book might doubt it. There are too many lame or tame things like That Pleasure life wakes stale at morn,

And So will our love’s root still be strong When others think the leaves go wrong.

too many places where the simplicity comes down to saying that in spring the birds ‘would rather sing than eat’ and the sheep ‘would rather bleat’; where the conceits are merely conceits, as in The stars in ambush lie all day,   To take her glances for the night;

where I am not glad to meet for a second or third time the idea of a nightingale singing amidst thunder, a duchess bathing in milk, a blind man finding his way in fog, a homeless man stirred by an organ, the softness and warmth of a woman’s hair, and There’s no true joy in gold,   It breeds desire for more . . . .2

I do not suggest that Mr Davies should try to remedy these things. He is free to be as plain, as loose, as conceited, as extravagant, as his Maker likes. We must be patient while he writes like this: Man is a bird:   Eagles from mountain crag Swooped down to prove his worth;  But now they rise to drag Him down from Heaven to earth!3

For in the past this freedom has been one of his great advantages, and when his imagination was strongly moved it led him to some of the purest poetry. There is no reason to doubt that this will happen again. Several of the poems here would have been delightful had they not been echoes of more beautiful things in his other volumes.

2  Quotations from ‘The Two Lives’, ‘Hidden Love’, ‘Joy Supreme’, ‘Life is Jolly’. 3  From ‘The Bird-Man’.

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Twice Mr Davies has paused in his career, but this pause is less than the first, which was in New Poems, and it need give anxiety neither to him nor to his admirers.4 B: November

Alfred Noyes, The Wine-­Press: A Tale of War Mr Alfred Noyes having enlisted all his powers of rhythm and fancy and sentiment on the side of Peace, The Wine-­Press is one long bloody narrative to convert men to Peace. It is a very bold undertaking, as he knows well. For he knows that men’s peace is not shaken by what happens ten miles or ten thousand miles away, and he fancies men reading the news at a club: Play up, then, fiddles! Play, bassoon!   The plains are soaked with red. Ten thousand slaughtered fools, out there, Clutch at their wounds and taint the air, And . . . here is an excellent cartoon   On what the Kaiser said.

It is quite possible that Mr Noyes’ fiery indignation, scorn, and pity, his straightforward rhythms and simple emotional rhetoric, will move those who are not moved by newspapers, or Tolstoy, or Zola. He begins with a picture of five statesmen talking about balance of power and so on, and getting a secretary to strike a bell, which ultimately means war. There follows a scene where a young peasant tears himself from his wife and baby and mountain cottage, to fight for the fatherland: They say it’s for the Flag, the King,   And none must question why!

4  In fact, this review, like ET’s response to New Poems (see [232]), may have made Davies ‘anxious’. A few months later (24 May 1914) ET analysed for GB the ‘difficulty of Davies’: ‘I have said the true thing perhaps twice in print—­he thought it meant hostility tho I personally thought it would do him & me good that our position was not the blind adorer & the blind adored. You can’t talk to Davies except personal talk. He pretends to understand but doesn’t & goes on his way’ (LGB, 233).

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There is marching and fighting. The young soldier sees a bloody mouth gnawing at the stones ‘Like a rat, with a thin cry’; he is blinded three times with ‘a spatter of human flesh’; he sees a ‘shuddering lump of tattered wounds’, behind which he has sheltered to fire, lift up its head and shoot itself dead. He learns to do as others do: He yelled like a wolf to drown the cry   Of his own soul in pain. To stifle the God in his own breast, He yelled and cursed and struck with the rest, And the blood bubbled over his boots   And greased his hands again.

There are more pictures of horror, and there are things hinted at which are concealed— Lest the soul of Europe rise in thunder   And swords melt in the flame.

Would it not then be better, even for a poet, to make this revelation and rouse the thunder, rather than write a tract in verse, in which the horrors of war, used deliberately to instigate peace, and unrelated to any large philosophy or view of life, have their lowest possible value and a kind of unreality? DC: 18 December

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1914 Arthur Symons, Knave of Hearts, 1894–1908 These hundred and sixty pages contain a very remarkable variety of poems, half of them original, the other half translated from Paul Verlaine and Catullus, with a few from André Chénier1 and Villon. The same tranquil, patient, and loyal art has been spent on both. [. . .] The original poems include some belonging to Mr Symons’s earlier erotic period, several impressions of things seen in Italy and London, an ex­clam­ ation ‘On Reading of Women Rioting for their Rights’, love poems, songs, lyrics, dialogues, and emotional reflections. Very far apart are the erotic poems from the reflections, for they are separated by that fine and impressive confession, ‘The Fool of the World’.2 They show us, these reflections, Mr Symons’s advance from a cloistered aestheticism to a simplicity like that of Mr W. H. Davies, as in this:            When I hear Crying of oxen, that, in deadly fear, Rough men, with cruel dogs about them, drive Into the torture-­house of death alive, How can I sit under a tree and read A happy idle book, and take no heed?3

The descriptions of things seen and the personal lyrics are very sensitive reflections of a spirit suffering from the dethronement of aestheticism, and the imperfect acceptance of a successor. ‘The Windmill’, within its three verses, depicts the desire to enjoy what Keats in one way, and Mr W. H. Davies in another, could enjoy, and the failure: The day is enough for delight; Why, as I lie on the grass, And watch the clouds as they pass, Do I reason of wrong and right? 1 André Marie Chénier (1762–94): proto-Romantic French poet, executed during the Revolution. 2  Title-poem of The Fool of the World, see review [222]. 3  Quotation from section III of ‘The Brother of a Weed’.

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Only to be, and the breath I take is all that I need, Were I but as the flower and weed That live without thought of death. But death and right and wrong, As the windmill turns on the hill Turn like a burden still That I cannot cast out of my song.

It is the central song of one whose days could not be ‘Bound each to each by natural piety’.4 And the poem on the opposite page is the melancholy submission to Wordsworth’s alternative: ‘Or let me die’, a mood far beyond that of Coleridge’s ‘Dejection’: Why is it that my heart is asleep, and no dreams wake, And my thoughts like smoke in the wind are scattered and shake, And there is no pain in my heart where it ought to ache? I have forgotten what it was to weep or carouse; The lamps are lighted, the curtains drawn, in the house; I have forgotten the crying of birds, the shaking of boughs. Be content, my heart; forget these things; they are vain. What dream once dreamed can ever be dreamed again? What is better for a heart than to sleep and be out of pain?5

This is not the end. The last of the poems in this book were written in 1908. It contains, says a poem on a flyleaf, what the poet thought of things before he had ‘begun to live’. B: February *** Mr Arthur Symons’s last volume of new poems, The Fool of the World, appeared in 1906. It was followed in 1908 by, perhaps, his finest book, The Romantic Movement in English Poetry,6 a book of criticism so passive to the 4  Wordsworth’s ‘The Rainbow’ (‘My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky’) ends with three lines, also used as epigraph to his ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’: ‘The Child is Father of the Man; / And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety.’ 5  ET seems to empathize with Symons’s depressive tendencies. The ‘mood’ of this poem, ‘Regret’, parallels that of his own poem ‘Beauty’ (ACP, 58). ‘Or let me die!’ is Wordsworth’s response to the hypothetical circumstance of his heart failing to ‘leap up’. 6  See reviews [387].

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influences of the poets discussed, and yet so penetrating, that it might have been thought impossible for the author ever to be quite himself again, to write original poetry. This new book is a collection from the years 1894–1908, but the most remarkable part of it is what may well have been written after the great effort implied in The Romantic Movement. It could not have been the work of any other man, yet it hardly presents an individual in spite of the pale, delicate cast unifying it. The difficulty usual with all collections of short poems is unusually great in this one. Each separate poem calls for a fresh effort and hardly any one of them aids another. Almost every one is a separate and, as it were, dramatic utterance from some distinct region of the poet’s experience. One set of five, indeed, called ‘The Brother of a Weed’, has qualities in common, the qualities of sad humility in a man who can say—       I have been of all men loneliest, And my chill soul has withered in my breast With pride and no content and loneliness;

but has learnt pity and the impossibility of happiness, and asks— Why are the roses filled with such a heat, And are so gaudy and riotously sweet, When any wind may snap them from the stem Or any little green worm canker them? Why is the dawn-­delivered butterfly So arrogant, knowing he has to die Before another dawn has waked his brother? [. . .]

It is a stage that Keats entered from time to time. Mr Symons has not passed beyond it. All his later singing is troubled or numbed by it, by ‘death and right and wrong’, or by an effort to forget it; and the poems which are free from it are either, I suppose, earlier ones, such as the translations from Verlaine, if not those from Catullus, or echoes of an earlier period. [. . .] The whole book is a delicate reflection, in faint colours and thin lines, of the pathos of literature, of life in general, and of one man’s life. DC: 23 April

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Reviewing: An Unskilled Labour There seem to be four principal kinds of reviews—­the interesting and good; the interesting, but bad; the uninteresting, but good; the uninteresting and bad. Most are of the last kind. They are reading matter, usually grammatical, which probably bears some relation to something passing in the writer’s mind, but keeps it secret. Nothing is revealed by them about the book in hand, except the author’s name and presumed sex, and whether it is in prose or verse; nothing about the reviewer’s feeling, except that he likes or does not like, or is indifferent to the book—­which is not a matter of much importance unless the reviewer has somehow built up a system, or a past, to which his remarks instantly refer the reader. The bad, uninteresting review consists of second-­hand words, and paralysed, inelectric phrases; and the better these are strung together the worse it is, because it means that the wretched man, woman, or child, is deceiving himself, making a virtue of his necessity, his hurry, his obtuseness, his ignorance. Such work is terribly uninteresting to anyone without a superhuman interest in whatever is inhuman. Sometimes it may be read in a comatose condition by readers with a respect for all printed matter, and in a sort of enthusiasm by relatives of the reviewer. But the only thing to be said for it is that it produces money, which produces food and clothing for aged parents, fair wives, innocent children. Against it must be set the fact that it is waste of time and energy, like sending clean things to a laundry,—that it is nothing, masquerading as something,—that the longer it exists the more respectable it is thought by those who do not care, by the majority. Most reviews are of this kind. That is to say that people of all sorts write them. Therefore, probably, it is very easy to fall into the habit, and very hard to see that you have done so. You read a book once or twice, or half read it; various thoughts are awakened as you proceed, about the author, his subjects, his vocabulary, the influences he has felt, and, in addition to these, at the end you have some sort of general impression. When you come to write, you do not inquire into the history of your thoughts, or try to relate them; your object is to write without delay something continuous, and since some of the thoughts protrude too much for continuity you sacrifice them. The result is a piece of prose which only a man possessing a profound knowledge of you can accurately follow. What can anybody else do with your roundabout phrases, brought to birth by the union of unconsidered thoughts with memories of other reviews? The more a man tries who was not born to write—­unless he has an aim clearly before him—­the worse he writes. Most reviewers have no aim clearly before them, except of covering space and putting the name of the book at

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the top. At best they want to get in a striking phrase, relevant or not. God help them. It is not a man’s, certainly not a reviewer’s, task, to better them, or persuade them that they could be bettered. Nor is it necessary here to attempt to throw light upon bad writing. I mention this class only because I believe that they hope to be interesting. They are distant, perhaps unconscious, disciples of Wilde’s ‘Critic as Artist’.1 They are expressing themselves apropos of the book sent them for review: if they succeed, it is in this world a thing to be thankful for. The so-­called review relating to one detail in the book, and then branching off to something which the reviewer has at heart, is justified if well done. Good writing is always justified. But this bad, interesting review is not of importance here. Both kinds are bad, because they are not reviews. What, then, is a review? A review gives an account of an unknown book—­ its substance, aim and achievement; or it discusses a known book, or some point in it or connected with it, in a manner assuming some knowledge of it on the reader’s part. To this second class belong most of the better reviews. Any good writer can write good reviews of this kind. But good reviews of the other kind are seen scarcely ever; for it by no means follows that if a good writer tries to produce them he will succeed. Few try, and perhaps the good writer tries least of all. He has established a scale of values, a system, a metaphysic, for which he is known among the scattered school of followers which at the same time he has created. For the most part he trusts to a few shorthand phrases, indicating to the intelligent that he likes a thing or not, and, to some extent, how and why. This, of course, is valuable in proportion to the merits of the critic. According as he has a wide or peculiar knowledge of men, and things, and words, and holds a vigorous and not stereotyped view which has survived or sprung out of this knowledge, so must he be valued. At present he is not likely to reach very far. He will be read chiefly by literary people. The rest of the world, learned and unlearned, will go on discovering what suits them, unconsciously applying standards based on experience. Too seldom will the critic take trouble over writers who have, as it were, got out of hand—­become popular; his temptation is thereupon to seek the faults which have led, in his opinion, to the popularity. But the most difficult, and at the same time most practicable and useful review, is the one which gives some information about unknown books. To do this fairly with continuous prose books is not easy: with verse it is apparently so difficult that nobody attempts it. Reviewers are either too anxious to give a display of their own talent, or they prefer important-­looking abstractions 1  Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Critic as Artist’ was published in his Intentions (1894). For ET’s admiration of Wilde’s criticism, see [302n.] and Introduction [xlviii].

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and generalities without reflecting on how far these will have any considerable meaning for the reader who has not made the reviewers his study. They are handicapped further by the fact that the tools of their trade are not really on the market at all. Practically no book is of any immediate use to them. To be able to employ Matthew Arnold’s touchstones,2 except pe­dan­tic­al­ly, is really the last test of culture: the man who applies them is usually, and roughly speaking, an ass. It is no common gift to be able to feel the greatness of great lines through and through, even after hearing that they are so from persons you have placed in authority. To feel what new lines have in common with them is what no man has done, so far as I know, while all sorts of men have shown that they can be deceived by superficial resemblances. No doubt the more a man truly knows of older literature, the better will be his judgment of the new. But mere scholarship, or the fact of having read, ’twixt waking and sleeping, only what was approved in older literature, is no qualification: true knowledge should put a man on his guard against imitations and superficial resemblances. The worst of it is that the critic is usually looking out for what is good or bad, along certain lines; whereas it is rather his business to find, like a plain man, ‘something to read’—as intense a pleasure as possible in reading,—not something that would, he imagines, be perfect to a different imagined being, though unreadable to himself. No man is a final judge of what he cannot enjoy, whether eggs, caviare, or castor oil, however brilliant he may be at telling us that what he cannot enjoy is bad. But by taking pains he can give an account of it. A review giving an account of a book of verse is an object not too easy for any proud or accomplished man; nor need any heroic degree of impersonality be sought after. Only the reviewer must seriously consider whether words like ‘striking and unique’, ‘alive’, ‘decadent’, or ‘readable’, coming from his pen, will, without abundant proof and illustration, have any weight outside his family circle; whether it is any use informing us that the right book sometimes gets into the hands of the wrong reviewer, and that he fears this is now the case; whether he or anyone else gains by quoting verses and saying that they show a sense of melody, with a comment that this is the most essential of a poet’s gifts, and the aside that though Whitman thought metre of no importance his best lines happened to be metrical. So long as bad reviewers 2  Matthew Arnold proposed his famous and often-attacked concept of the ‘touchstone’ in ‘The Study of Poetry’ (first published as Introduction to Thomas Humphry Ward’s anthology, The English Poets [London: Macmillan, 1880]): ‘there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent . . . than to have always in one’s mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry’ (xxv).

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are not condemned to a pension and the loss of their fingers and, if ne­ces­ sary, their toes, so long these things will be done. Honesty is a difficult virtue. The reviewer must be airing scraps of knowledge, trying to create an impression among inferiors, pretending to admire things which he does not like—­ which he would not read if he were not compelled—­often for no better reason than that he could not do as well himself. Sometimes I have wished that there were more office boys turned on to reviewing. Better the honest opinion of a smart, pitiless, and unhistorically minded Cockney than all this rambling, hedging and ditching, half and half. As if office boys were more likely than anybody else to be honest and direct! They would be striving to conceal their identity, writing like the ordinary reviewer. But if only re­viewers could aim at honesty! They need not return boring books to the editor; they must live; let them try to understand why they are bored and tell us, confessing also plainly what they most dislike, what they come nearest to liking, and so on. Everyone is declaring belief, or at least disbelief, in modern poetry; no one admits that he does not like poetry or only likes Tennyson. Yet nearly all reviews of verse are either loosely complimentary or have a bantering tone as if the bards were tiny little odd unreal creatures who earn no wages and have no human feelings. When a new book by an accepted verse writer appears, the reviewer’s task is to compass some variation of the ordinary compliments. As to the unaccepted, it is Heads I praise, Tails I laugh. More often it is Heads, because those are the publisher’s orders. No matter: mere praise is better than mere laughter, and the letter of praise does not exclude the spirit of criticism. The reviewer lacks not excuse. In most cases he has no idea whom he is addressing, if anyone. He is writing in an indifferent vacuum. He does not care; his editor does not care; so far as he knows, nobody cares, provided he is not libellous, obscene, or very ungrammatical. Is he to address the author? Is he to address readers who know the book reviewed, or readers who do not? Is he to hold forth simply to his equals who happen not to write for a living? These questions will come up and ought to be answered. A careful answer might help to turn reviewing from unskilled into skilled labour. No one wants to interfere with good writers; I am speaking of the average reviewer. His unsupported opinion is mostly worthless. I believe it would be a useful and pleasant change if he were to cease expressing opinions and take to giving as plain and full account of the book in hand, as time, space, and his own ability permit. The skill required would be of an order which no man need be ashamed to display, and few could achieve without labour. Gradually, efficient chroniclers would be, not born, but made. They might become as efficient as the best of the newspaper staff is held to be; they might form a

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standard which plain, hurried men could reach by moderate efforts, and would not fall short of without disgrace. The pioneers would perhaps have a hard time in getting rid of all those degraded loose phrases caused by uncertainty, or ignorance, or imitation, all the words like the advertiser’s ‘unequalled’ and ‘absolutely pure’. Even the egoistic reviewer, even the egoistic reviewer with a following, might learn from this method. In any case he would not be superseded, while personality and a corresponding metaphysic and literary power are respected, and he would be served by a rank and file of decent workers, instead of being surrounded and confused by a rabble of ridiculous and unlovely muddlers. PD II, 5: March

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, Rupert Brooke, Lascelles Abercrombie, and John Drinkwater, New Numbers, Part I, Vol. I1 We congratulate Messrs Gibson, Abercrombie, Brooke, and Drinkwater on the first instalment of their joint venture. They have made a book, interesting not only in each of its parts, but as a complex whole, representing much that is best and newest in poetry. Mr Rupert Brooke contributes four sonnets, which are brilliant variations upon what he has already done, the most brilliant being the one which ends: Dear, we know only that we sigh, kiss, smile; Each kiss lasts but the kissing; and grief goes over; Love has no habitation but the heart. Poor straws! on the dark flood we catch awhile, Cling, and are borne into the night apart. The laugh dies with the lips, ‘Love’ with the lover. 1  New Numbers, a quarterly anthology designed to showcase these four poets, was based in Ryton, Dymock, where Abercrombie lived, with Gibson nearby (see Appendix [693]). For Drinkwater, see [540n.]. The anthology was originally to be named Gallows Garland after Abercrombie’s house, ‘The Gallows’. Only four parts appeared: the last part brought Rupert Brooke’s war-sonnet sequence, ‘1914’, to public notice. This issue was dated December 1914, but not published until early 1915 because Brooke was still working on the sonnets. His death in April 1915 ended New Numbers, because the other poets could not bear to continue without him. On 8 March 1915, by which time he was writing his own poems, ET had not yet ‘dipped into’ the final issue, although he remarked: ‘Drinkwater is hopeless. Gibson, for me, almost equally so. Abercrombie, I fancy, applies the lash, and I wonder whether he always did. I used to think he was naturally a spirited steed. I am always anxious to like him’ (SL, 106).

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Mr Drinkwater’s four short pieces reveal the purity and aspiration of his spirit, the lucidity and formality of his style at their best. The most important work is the two long dramatic poems in blank verse by Messrs Abercrombie and Gibson.2 Mr Gibson is near being a master in the weird humorous interview on the Scottish border between Daft Dick, a local waif full of border legend, and a cockney burglar who has lost his way tramping. The verse is as plain as Mr Gibson’s always is, but possesses un­usual vigour and variety. In fact, if the poem has a conspicuous weakness, it is that the poet has chosen for the vehicles of his ideas and images characters, especially the tramp, who are not always capable of supporting them. But when the tramp is talking of ‘London, and lights, and crowds, and women’, and of his trade, or Daft Dick talking of the ghosts of reivers, and how As I came down by Girsonsfield, the ghost Of Parcy Reed, with neither hands nor feet, Rode clean through me; the false Halls, and the Croziers, Hard on his heels, though I kept clear of them . . . .

their vividness is appropriate and delightful. Mr Abercrombie’s poem describes the arrival of broken Apollo carrying the dead withered body of Zeus to an old layer-­out of corpses in Crete. The result of the dialogue is to bring before us a new version of the fall of the gods.         In the sleep of the world Gods are dreams;

and ‘man is the sleeping spirit’s brain’. God after god perishes, all but Bacchus, who is Measureless joy and measureless woe . . . The rapture that is not the world, for ever Narrowed into the world and thence escaping.

So says Bacchus himself, who has not fallen; but Apollo prophesies disaster from saving a deity everlasting but formless,       with a scorn of shapely law, Of bounded measured life under the stars . . . At last will you not know his godhead is The vengeance of the uncreated passion 2  ET also focuses on these longer poems, ‘Bloodybush Edge’ and ‘The Olympians’, in another review of New Numbers (DC: 29 April): the same review in which his second review of T. Sturge Moore, The Sea is Kind (see below), appears.

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The poem is a mixture, rather than a satisfactory combination, of metaphysics and of concrete imagery, often vivid, sometimes merely surprising and ingenious. The old woman and her son are good, but the dramatic form is only a form, since the metaphysics of Bacchus and Apollo must have been words, words, to those simple people who, in fact, have nothing to say to them. This, of course, is Mr Abercrombie’s way, and it has given us continuous and intense pleasure; but it produces many beauties and novelties rather than an harmonious artistic whole.3 NW: 21 March

Christina Rossetti,1 Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (Oxford University Press: The World’s Classics) The brothers of great poets are seldom poets: if they are, I believe they are minor poets. But Christina Rossetti, the younger sister of a great poet, became a poet, and not a minor one, and that in spite of the fact that this brother was a very dominating character. It was not that she escaped from the influences surrounding her. She was influenced by the same forces as Swinburne and her brother Dante Gabriel, by Tennyson, by Browning, by the English Bible. Mr W. M. Rossetti has even said that if ‘all those passages which were directly or indirectly dependent upon what can be found in the Bible’ had been cut out of Christina’s books, they would ‘have been reduced to something approaching a vacuum’.2 And a number of her short narratives 3  See ET’s similar view of Abercrombie’s Emblems of Love [507]. 1  Christina Rossetti (1830–94) belonged to a celebrated Anglo-Italian literary and artistic family, and to the Anglo-Catholic movement of the Church of England. Putting religious scruples first, she rejected three suitors. Rossetti’s poetry, popular during her lifetime and always valued by other poets (e.g., Philip Larkin), became a focus for Feminist criticism in the 1970s. This review was reprinted in ET’s posthumous The Last Sheaf (1928). Earlier, he had written of Rossetti’s Family Letters: ‘The book reveals the grave, pious woman of exquisite patience and charity mingled with playfulness and self-abnegation, painfully very often’ (MP: 29 October 1908). 2  Preface to Poems of Christina Rossetti, chosen and edited by William M. Rossetti (London: Macmillan, 1904), xii.

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are little more than duplications of poems by Tennyson, notably ‘The Sisters’.3 Yet she avoided, on the whole, being derivative and second-­rate. She did so, apparently, by reason of her very weakness; if you like, by her femininity. She was content only to do what she alone could do. While Swinburne and her brother forsook the Biblical style, she retained it and made it her own. The poetess who is sometimes regarded as her peer or rival, Mrs Browning, was more ambitious and energetic; she wrote poems which demand comparison with those of men; and she failed. Christina Rossetti competed with no man. She is, I think, the greatest of the women among our poets. Her religious, or rather her purely devotional, poetry has to be considered by those whom it practically concerns. The outsider can see only that it appears to excel in emotion and simplicity the work of other poets, such as Quarles,4 within that field. But in the selection just published, and in Mr  Rossetti’s larger one,5 a good proportion of poems ask no exceptional effort from the outsider of ordinary experience and ordinary acquaintance with literature. He finds himself at once in a region which he may not wish to inhabit, but for which he will find no substitute or equivalent elsewhere, though he will recognise that from it have come colonies not insignificant in later poetry. Had Christina Rossetti never written Long ago and long ago,   And long ago still, There dwelt three merry maidens   Upon a distant hill. One was tall Meggan,   And one was dainty May, But one was fair Margaret,   More fair than I can say, Long ago and long ago . . .

it would have been a double loss, since it would have been a loss to the poetry of Mr Walter de la Mare.6 3  Rossetti’s depiction of two sisters in ‘Goblin Market’ (‘For there is no friend like a sister’) has links with Tennyson’s ‘The Sisters’ (‘No sisters ever prized each other more’), although the poems differ in psycho-dramatic effect. 4  Francis Quarles (1592–1644): poet chiefly known for his Emblemes, Divine and Moral (1635), and for a religious devotion so extreme that Sir John Suckling refers to him in ‘A Session of the Poets’ as ‘he / That makes God speak so big in’s poetry’. 5  See note 2. 6  The poem quoted is ‘Maiden-Song’. ET may be thinking of poems by de la Mare such as ‘Martha’, which begins: ‘ “Once . . . once upon a time . . .” / Over and over again, / Martha would tell us her stories, / In the hazel glen.’

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Christina Rossetti lived a superficially tranquil and uneventful life, a delicate spinster holding a Christian faith ‘of the most absolute and also of the most literal kind’.7 Her work does not bring us in contact with tremendous or conspicuous things outside that life, either in Nature or Art or History. No single poems stand out in exciting contrast of light or gloom. The gradations up from her least to her best are so numerous and slight, her range is so small or her method so subdued, that the effect can be called monotonous, like that of all religious poetry. To get her full value the mind must be dissevered both from the motionless opulence of Keats and the light soaring swiftness of Shelley. Yet she is both light like Shelley and still like Keats, without being vapid or sluggish. And to say that her range is small is not quite fair. The fact is that her scale is reduced. She looks, as it were, already from another world, and sees children of about the same size as goblins and somewhat faintly represented, as on tombstones, by their names, Lettice, Rachel, May, Marian, and so on. By a simple vocabulary, remarkably frugal of adjectives, and by lucid rhythms, she produces many different effects, always of equal firmness and fragility. She refines things into their essences. Her poems are the unearthly essences, echoes, or reflections, of earthly tragedy. It is not short lines and little words only that make ‘The Wind’ seem a translation out of one of our poets by an elf: The wind has such a rainy sound,   Moaning through the town, The sea has such a windy sound,—   Will the ships go down? The apples in the orchard   Tumble from their tree,— Oh, will the ships go down, go down,   In the windy sea?

So her repeated sadness is a pretty thing, a sort of shadowed enjoyment even for the poetess herself, who imagines in death a stillness ‘that is almost Paradise’, and is half in love with the sound of ‘vanity of vanities’.8 She complains, without bitterness or discontent, of irremediable things, turning them to music. Shadow, instead of light, is her nourishment. Her weariness knows no struggle, hardly even impatience. She speaks, and it is music. As for the reader, he may be as much [?charmed] as amused by the Victorianisms in

7  Poems of Christina Rossetti, viii. 8  Quotation from ‘Rest’; the phrase ‘vanity of vanities’ recurs in Rossetti’s poetry.

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‘Her heart was breaking for a little love’ and elsewhere, and in the poem beginning Sleep, let me sleep, for I am sick of care,

he can enjoy without a pang the roses and myrtles which the sad speaker rejects as well as the poppies and ivy and ‘primroses that open to the moon’, which she desires, while he at best receives nothing but delight from When I am dead, my dearest,   Sing no sad songs for me; Plant thou no roses at my head,   Nor shady cypress tree: Be the green grass above me   With showers and dewdrops wet: And if thou wilt, remember,   And if thou wilt, forget. I shall not see the shadows,   I shall not feel the rain; I shall not hear the nightingale   Sing on as if in pain: And dreaming through the twilight   That doth not rise nor set, Haply I may remember,   And haply may forget.9

For hers was an instrument having the power to make out of little words and common things, including a discontent with this earth and life which is not too deep for tears or words and ‘goes not to Lethe’,10 a music more enduring, perhaps not less monotonous or more really sorrowful, than that of a larch tree sighing in the wind.11 DN: 26 March

9  Quotations from ‘L. E. L. “Whose heart was breaking for a little love” ’, ‘Looking Forward’, ‘Song’. 10  Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’ begins: ‘No, no, go not to Lethe . . .’. 11  See ET’s earlier comparison of ‘the myriad-minded lyric, with its intricacies of form’ to ‘a birch-tree in the wind’ [16], and his self-identification as poet with ‘The whisper of the aspens’ (ACP, 97).

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T. Sturge Moore, The Sea is Kind; etc. Mr Sturge Moore neither accepts a conventional fiction nor falls into a moderate, impersonal substitute. In method and intention he ranks with original stylists like Milton and Messrs Doughty and Bridges. His language is nicely adapted to his own ear and theory and spirit, sustained from beginning to end of every poem. Some of these poems are from The Vinedresser of 1899 and The Little School of 1905; others are his latest work, for they include one to Rabindranath Tagore, one suggested by the dancing of M. Nijinsky and Mlle Karsavina in ‘Le Spectre de la Rose’, and one in memory of Miss Edith Cooper, long unknown as a partner in the firm of ‘Michael Field’.1 It would not be easy to distinguish early from late. For in 1899 Mr Moore was already a builder of lofty and difficult rhyme,2 elaborate and unpopular, lacking both the boldness and the awkwardness of youth. [. . .] No poet is less a singer. He does not carry you lightly away, nor permit you to luxuriate in comfort. With something of Browning’s subtlety, something of Meredith’s contempt for explanation and connecting-­link, his nature lacks that energy which helps their readers to the goal. His is not the fluent jargon of a minor poet, nor the more initial obscurity of a new poet with a style that has to be studied and can be mastered. Mr Sturge Moore can be studied, but never mastered. He is no easier now than he was twelve years ago. Though he knows well ‘the sorcery in well-­loved words’, he does not possess it. He is one of the wise          whose pains unlatch In Nature traps, and hold them wide, While they with shrewd description match The secret toil that throbs inside.3

How interested he is in words may be judged from the fact that he makes a sea-­nymph listening to a nightingale say to her lover:— There is a sorcery in well-­loved words: But unintelligible music still Probes to the buried Titan in the heart,

1 Fokine’s ballet was premiered with Nijinsky and the Russian prima ballerina, Tamara Karsavina, in 1911; for ‘Michael Field’, see Appendix [701]. 2 In 1913–14 ET seems given to quoting ‘build the lofty rhyme’ (a phrase from Milton’s ‘Lycidas’): see first paragraph of review of Laurence Binyon’s Auguries, below. His closeness to RF may have made him less tolerant of ‘loftiness’, less patient with Moore’s stylistic idiosyncrasies. 3  Quotation from ‘The Phantom of a Rose’.

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Whose strength, the vastness of forgotten life, Suffers but is not dead; Tune stirs him as no thought of ours, nor aught Mere comprehension grasps, can him disquiet.4

The result of this interest is sometimes a line like that in ‘The Panther’:— Then all is glowing, like deep-­treasured glee,

usually a closeness to the subject which wins admiration in proportion to the reader’s skill and patience. Rarely do we find a line like the second one here:— Her fear seeks havens in the mould, Delves in directions manifold.5

which seems to contain words necessary solely to the rhyme. Yet he is old-­ fashioned enough to address Leopardi as ‘O stricken son of Italy’, and to keep up the form of an address by saying, ‘thine odes’.6 He also permits himself to repeat the comparison of coral to ‘blood some wounded god shed in salt water’. Add to this that Mr Moore loves difficult things. He attempts to depict a youth in the act of emanating from a rose, and the phantom of a young girl emerging ‘Steam-­like from her nerveless frame’ in a dream. In another recent poem he attempts to depict Daphne turning into a laurel. In a third he makes a sea-­nymph’s ‘phantom’ detach itself from under the sea, and mount up to take the Greek side at Salamis.7 Yet again this same sea-­nymph describes a god emerging out of a wooden idol. A passage in ‘The Vinedresser’ seems to suggest that Vision of Aphrodite sunk to sleep, Or of some sailor let down from a ship,

might affect the sea-­water and the wine made from it. His Cheiron speaks of the ‘music, though unenjoyed’, in the order of the stars.8 It must be noticed, however, that almost all the poems in The Little School, as well as several later ones, are clear and direct, though always massive, and liable to be grotesquely unfamiliar. This simplicity Mr Moore has sacrificed in the pursuit of other aims. But pains taken to follow the more complex poems are richly rewarded, both by the way and in the end. The reader finds 4  From ‘The Sea is Kind’.    5  From ‘Noon Vision’. 6  From ‘To Giacomo Leopardi’; Leopardi (1798–1837): Italian poet and philosopher. 7  Quotations from ‘The Sea is Kind’, ‘The Phantom of a Rose’, ‘The Sea is Kind’ again. 8  From ‘The Song of Cheiron’ (Chiron), voiced by the centaur.

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that the most difficult poem at last is as pure and shapely as a brief passionate lyric. The poems on a panther and a serpent shed their laboriousness, and leave heavily brilliant paintings of those creatures as they are seen, and as they are fancied, half mythological, yet wholly natural, beings, splendid, like Blake’s ‘Tiger’. The poem on ‘Le Spectre de la Rose’ becomes a poem, not a word-­for-­word translation from a visible dance. The reader, in fact, who will do something more drastic than scratching will discover in Mr Sturge Moore one of the most substantial, sincere, and original of living poets. NW: 4 April *** If poetry were the producing of effects by mysterious means, like life itself, which it were not necessary to inquire into, which only the curious would inquire into, Mr Sturge Moore’s verses would not be poetry. For he never produces effects without first having compelled us to see and to try to understand his means. We are never left wondering how it was done, but we share with him, to the best of our ability, the process of creation and then its result. His words are nearly always to be seen laboriously, exquisitely, following after something observed or thought. Here, for example, we see him doing what we could never do with sea shells: Like shovels white of porcelain In pyramids of spices deep, Are shells half scooped into brown sand Which ebbing waves drew on a heap, Like blush by smooth nail overlain Are others; five for either hand, Nay, plenty for both hands and feet Of Venus when she walks the strand, Escaped from perfumed temple’s heat.9

His words are often like a slow, dogged tracing of the beautiful curves of an original under the tracing paper. We are enabled to see not only very exactly what the original was, but how hard it was to copy with short faltering strokes, bit by bit, instead of by the vast, generous, less accurate lines of other poets. [. . .] DC: 29 April

9  From ‘To Slow Music’.

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Laurence Binyon, Auguries Other poets fluctuate, surprise, or disappoint us. Mr Binyon never surprises or disappoints us. It may be said only of him and of the Poet Laureate that they ‘build the lofty rhyme’. His method is always patient building. The result is always lofty rhyme.1 And his new poems are excellent specimens of his passionate, cool art. They include love poems, meditations ‘On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life’,2 reflections and even songs connected with children; but in all of them the intellect and the imagination toil as equal brothers rather than as indivisible lovers. The intellect is the elder brother, the master builder, vigilant, unerring. It leaves nothing to surprise or disappoint. As the verse is never permitted to fall, so it can soar only with due weight and provision. More often what might have become soaring in another poet becomes a safer motion in Mr Binyon. There is an example in the poem ‘One Year Old’, to a child: Lo, our desires have gone Like ships to a future far, And vanished in mist alone By no befriending star. But all to you is a wonder Fresh as the sky, whereunder Life moves to pledge delight; You need no hope to bear The day through the day’s care; Your joys are all in sight.

The choicest things are never blared forth, but fall into their places insinuatingly like the sea sound, of which he says: That sound comes immemorial like sleep Fresh, with the morning in dark softness hid.

If there is eloquence it never swells more loudly than in the lines: And trumpets sound across the sand To sunset in a conquered land.3

The one weakness, in fact, is that the tranquillity overpowers the remembered emotion. There is too little rise and fall, either in the metre or in the 1  See [577n.] and [614n.]. 2  A passage in Wordsworth’s The Excursion, a ‘prospectus’ for his never-completed poem, The Recluse, begins: ‘On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life, / Musing in solitude . . .’. 3  Quotations from ‘Vigil’, ‘The Tiger-Lily’.

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thought; and in the longer poems a suspicion sometimes begins to grow that the poet has lost discrimination through excess of deliberation, and that only his careful, slow workmanship prevents him from turning into verse everything that has occupied his intellect in tranquillity. DC: 24 April

Evelyn Lewes, Life and Poems of Dafydd ab Gwylim,1 with Preface by Sir Edward Anwyl One of the best chapters of Wild Wales2 is the eighty-­sixth. It is a life of the poet Dafydd ap Gwylim, whose poems Borrow read in preference to any other book when he was articled to a solicitor. Altogether, Borrow’s references to ap Gwilym and his masterly inactivity in quoting have built up in many Englishmen’s minds a legend of the poet, very distinct and pleasant, the corner-­stone being the words: A strange songster was that who, pretending to be captivated by every woman he saw, was, in reality, in love with nature alone—­wild, beautiful, solitary nature—­her mountains and cascades, her forests and streams, her birds, fishes and wild animals.

But it is not hard to invent a great bard if the proofs or disproofs of his greatness are kept in dark mystery. Many must have wondered whether Dafydd was more real than the man who used Wordsworth’s poems as a sleeping-­ draught. And truly it is odd that this triune Welsh Ovid, Horace, Martial, should remain to the Englishman a legend, except for a translation in the well-­known style of 1836. Since Borrow’s day it has been a ceremony to call Dafydd the Welsh Ovid, Horace, or Martial. Sir Edward Anwyl, in the volume before me, says: ‘He has the fine feeling of Catullus, for his own love, too, was not of beauty alone, while he is far richer in imagery than the greatest of the Roman poets of 1  Dafydd ap [usual version] Gwilym (c.1320–c.1360): important poet of medieval Europe, schooled in Welsh bardic conventions, innovative author of love poems and Nature poems, pioneer of ‘cywyddau’: the Welsh mode of rhymed couplets. See Gwyn Thomas (ed.), Dafydd ap Gwilym: His Poems (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001). 2  George Borrow, Wild Wales: Its People, Language, and Scenery (1862). ET’s George Borrow: The Man and his Books and (ed.), The Pocket George Borrow had been published in 1912.

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love’; also: ‘Probably no poet, not excepting Homer, has ever been able to impress the imagination with a more vivd sense of colour . . .’ Miss Lewes herself refers to him (Dafydd), as a matter of course, as the ‘Cambrian Petrarch’. It is too late in the day to do this sort of thing. We do not want another Petrarch or believe that there could be one. Yet it is one of Miss Lewes’s few arguments in Dafydd’s favour. In addition to this poor phrase the book contains nearly everything that has been alleged or discovered about Dafydd, and even a description of his ‘generally accepted birthplace’, a ruined farmhouse in Cardiganshire between a brook and a furzy and stony hill. Virtually here is Borrow’s chapter; less vivid, with more names, dates, and omitting altogether the tale that Dafydd made assignations with four different girls at the same tree and watched and heard them from among the branches, etc. We know not the date or place of his birth or his death and burial. All that has been preserved is his poetry, and that under lock and key. Except for his poetry what would it matter that Dafydd had yellow ringlets and loved women? It is well known that there have been many such men among the dead who were not bards. But there seem to be two strong reasons for the lack of good translations from Dafydd’s poems both in this volume and outside it. Firstly, it happens very rarely that a Welsh-­speaking and Welsh-­reading man or woman can write more than fair English. Secondly, people like talk about a poet more than they like poetry. As a rule, Miss Lewes employs verse. Now, she is no poet: neither is she a skilled versifier, and she presents us with several hundred rhyming lines like the following, ‘which’, she says, ‘is so difficult to translate, and so graceful in the original’, and ‘suggests that he often watched the skylark rising at break of day’: The Lark with joyous wings unfurled— The early riser of the world— Dauntless at prayer-­time day by day His dwelling leaves, to make his way High and still higher; e’en to fly To Heaven, and cast upon the sky His golden song.

To do essentially worse is impossible, because the lines are not poetry and do not faintly suggest poetry in the original. What is amazing is that on this rare occasion of a book on the celebrated and unknown poet, Dafydd ap Gwilym, neither Miss Lewes nor anyone who saw her book in manuscript could have seen the inferiority of that sort of stuff to this prose, which is also hers:—it is the poet’s reply to a grey friar,—

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God is not so cruel as old men affirm, but priests create lies by reading old sheepskins. God will not let the soul of man be lost for loving wife or maid. There are three things which shall ever be loved in this world, a woman, fair weather, and health. From Heaven came all joy, from Hell came all sorrow. Song bringeth joy to young and old, to the sick and to the healthy. It is as right for me to poetise as for thee to preach, and it is as right for me to wander as for thee to beg. . . . The prophet David’s psalms are but odes to the good God. God does not feed every man on the same food. There is a time set to eat, and a time for rhyming and a time for preaching. There must be song at every feast to cheer the ladies, and paternosters in church for those seeking Paradise. [. . .]

Better proof in English cannot, I believe, be found of the nature of Dafydd’s genius, though the words ‘fair weather’ have to represent that wild delicacy of nature which pervades his poems. Why, then, with this kind of material, as unlike Petrarch as Ovid, lying lost in Welsh, why trouble to expose your own inability to do what hardly anybody ever does—­translate poetry into verse and leave it poetry? Why waste time in asserting and reasserting that Dafydd (who makes a blackbird ‘seek a city tower’s height from whence instruction to pour down’) was a particularly keen ‘observer’ of birds! [. . .] That there is not a volume of translations from Dafydd and the other half-­ dozen Welsh poets which is worth mentioning in the same breath with Kuno Meyer’s Ancient Irish Poetry3 is a reproach either to the devotion or to the ability of Welsh scholars. Some years ago a more or less complete translation was whispered about. It was by a professor in North Wales, but it was said to have been withheld in dread of criticism from a younger generation. It is time the younger generation repaired the loss, if there was anything to lose. I can only hope that they will stick to prose, undecorated prose with either a prose rhythm or no rhythm at all. Verse or poetic prose will translate us to a theatrical outfitter’s or a rag and bone shop instead of to the birch groves and white palaces of Glamorgan. DN: 24 April

3  See ET’s review of Meyer [500]. In a briefer notice of Life and Poems, ET says: ‘Most of the translations are in the worst possible translator’s verse’ (PD II, 7: December 1914).

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Des Imagistes: An Anthology1 There are in this book sixty-­three pages, many of them only half-­filled; yet it sticks out of the crowd like a tall marble monument. Whether it is real m ­ arble is unimportant except to posterity; the point is that it is conspicuous. Only Mr Ford Madox Hueffer, Miss Amy Lowell, and Mr James Joyce contribute pieces resembling ordinary poems.2 The rest, though divided into lines just like ordinary poems, are for the most part very different. A few are banterings of a private nature which hardly concern us. The majority fall into two classes. Either they are translations or paraphrases, or they are written in the manner of translations. The best of the first class are Mr Allen Upward’s3 ‘Scented Leaves from a Chinese Jar’, of which this is an example:— 1 Like Georgian Poetry, Des Imagistes was published by Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop—­ without which this flurry of anthologies might not have occurred. No editor or introduction is given, but Ezra Pound is the ‘commanding personality’ to whom ET refers. Pound and F. S. Flint (1885–1960), an influential writer on French poetry, had formulated a theory of ‘Imagism’. In the March 1913 issue of Poetry, the Chicago magazine edited by Harriet Monroe, Pound defines the ‘Image’ as ‘that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’; and Flint sets out three rules for ‘Imagisme’: ‘1. Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.’ These principles were designed to back up their own poetic practice and that of the other two coreImagists: Richard Aldington and H.  D.  (Hilda Doolittle). Aldington (1892–1962) remained a conscious Imagist, as in Images of War (1919), based on his war-service. The American H. D. (1886– 1961) would move away from Imagism (and from Aldington, whom she married in 1913), but is often considered to have written the best Imagist poems. After a rift with Flint, Pound conceived a new theoretical model: ‘Vorticism’. Pound is absent from three subsequent annual anthologies, Some Imagist Poets (1915–17), in which the same six poets appear: Aldington, H. D., Flint, Amy Lowell (see below), John Gould Fletcher (see [579ff.]) and D. H. Lawrence: the single cross-over with Georgian Poetry. Pound saw these anthologies as blurring Imagism’s ‘hard light, clear edges’. He blamed Lowell as well as Flint for what he dismissively termed ‘Amy-gism’. The visual tendency of Imagism contrasts with ET’s and RF’s emphasis on speech and rhythm: ‘The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader’ (LRF I, 176). In a letter of 22 May, ET exclaimed to GB: ‘What imbeciles the Imagistes are’ (LGB, 233). Yet his briefer poems suggest that he may have taken some aesthetic note. Donald Davie writes of ET’s ‘Cock-Crow’ (ACP, 101): ‘if Imagism means anything, it surely means a small impersonal masterpiece like this’ (TLS, 23 November 1979). 2  Ford Madox Hueffer [Ford]: see Introduction [xxxv]. Amy Lowell (1874–1925): American poet, member of wealthy Boston family, related to poets James Russell Lowell (1819–91) and Robert Lowell (1917–77). James Joyce’s poem in Des Imagistes is ‘I Hear an Army’. ET had briefly reviewed Joyce’s Chamber Music: ‘In most of his thirty-six short poems Mr Joyce . . . has only the negative merits of purity and lucidity, so that it is all the more pleasant to come upon the two or three where the purity and lucidity have something positive to support [Chamber Music XVIII quoted]. If he can do as well as that in every thirty-six poems the more he writes the better’ (DC: 31 August 1907). 3 Allen Upward (1863–1926): lawyer, novelist, and poet, who committed suicide, perhaps because disappointed by his literary career.

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  My mother taught me that every night a procession of junks carrying lanterns moves silently across the sky, and the water sprinkled from their paddles falls to the earth in the form of dew. I no longer believe that the stars are junks carrying lanterns, no longer that the dew is shaken from their oars.

Mr John Cournos has a page, and ‘after K.  Tetmaier’, suggesting a poetic original.4 The second class forms the larger and more novel part of the book. The writers are Messrs Richard Aldington, Skipwith Cannell, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and ‘H. D.’,5 yet, as a rule, their work is not distinguishable, so much are they under one influence. Partly, no doubt, the influence is that of a common aim; partly, it may be, of some commanding personality. But the chief influence appears to have been the ordinary prose translation of the classics—­in short, the crib. Burlesqued this had been already by Mr A. E. Housman and others.6 The Imagiste poets must have the credit of being the first to go to it for serious inspiration. On the whole, Mr Richard Aldington is most successful, and this is the more remarkable when we learn from poems like ‘Beauty Thou Hast Hurt Me Overmuch’ that he has been endowed with exquisite sensibility. His ‘Argyria’ might be a prose translation, lacking all adornment except division into lines:— O you, O you most fair, Swayer of reeds, whisperer Among the flowering rushes, You have hidden your hands Beneath the poplar leaves, You have given them to the white waters. Swallow-­fleet, Sea-­child cold from waves, Slight reed that sang so blithely in the wind, White cloud the white sun kissed into the air; Pan mourns for you. 4  John Cournos, originally Ivan Korshun (1881–1966): Russian-Jewish writer who became an exile, mainly known as a translator. An affair with Dorothy L. Sayers, which did not end well, led her to portray him negatively in Strong Poison (1930). Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer (1865–1940): Polish poet, author, and journalist. 5 Like Hueffer/Ford, Joyce, Upward, and Cournos, the American poets Skipwith Cannell (1887–1957) and William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) did not figure in any other ‘Imagist’ anthology of the period; although Williams remained aligned with aspects of Imagist aesthetics. 6 Housman’s parody-translation, ‘Fragment of a Greek Tragedy’, begins with a Chorus enquiring: ‘O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots / Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom / Whence by what way how purposed art thou come / To this well-nightingaled vicinity?’

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White limbs, white song, Pan mourns for you.

Others of his poems must thrill anyone not wholly forgetful or disdainful of Bohn’s first charm.7 ‘H. D.’ is equally good in the same way. It will be better, however, to quote one of Mr Skipworth Cannell’s nocturnes written in the same style, but without a particularly Greek tinge:— Thy feet are white Upon the foam of the sea; Hold me fast, thou bright Swan, Lest I stumble, And into deep waters.

Probably it is simply out of a dislike for Tennyson, as well as contempt for natural history, that this swan has white feet, not ‘swarthy webs’.8 Mr Pound, again, has seldom done better than here under the restraint imposed by Chinese originals or models. ‘Ts’ai Chi’h’ is very austere:— The petals fall in the fountain,      the orange coloured rose-­leaves, Their ochre clings to the stone.

Here, also, is ‘Δωρια’, the most impressive-­looking poem in the whole book:— Be in me as the eternal moods      of the bleak wind, and not As transient things are—       gaiety of flowers. Have me in the strong loneliness       of sunless cliffs And of grey waters.      Let the gods speak softly of us In days hereafter.      The shadowy flowers of Orcus Remember Thee.

7  Bohn’s Libraries, established in 1846 by Henry George Bohn (1796–1884), was a pioneering educational series for the mass-market, which featured translations, editions, and guides. 8  Tennyson’s poem ‘Morte d’Arthur’ likens Arthur’s death-barge to a dying swan that ‘takes the flood / With swarthy webs’.

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I do not see the meaning. I even doubt whether the words mean anything, and suspect a serious omission in the make-­up of a writer who can slap in ‘gaiety of flowers’ like that; but it is an impressive-­looking poem. The most attractive, on the other hand, are Mr F. S. Flint’s pieces.9 They record a sincere and sensitive attempt to write poetry without admitting any commonplaces of verse, in form, language, or sentiment. They will interest readers as theorists, and touch them as men. They are the green ivy beginning to climb the tall marble monument, and may well outlast it. NW: 9 May

John Clare: Poet and Agricultural Labourer1 [. . .] It is hard to imagine a combination with more possibilities for wretchedness than that of poet and agricultural labourer. I mean a poet of any known breed. Of course, it is easy to invent a poet suddenly making poetry of all that dignity and beauty in the labourer’s life which we are so ready to believe in. But such a one has not yet appeared. It is doubtful if he ever will, or if we ought to complain of the lack, since what we want to see in some perhaps impossible peasant poetry has always been an element in great poetry. If we knew their pedigrees, we should find more than one peasant among the ancestors of the poets. In fact, every man, poet or not, is a more or less harmonious combination of the peasant and the adventurer. In no man have these two parts been more curiously combined than in John Clare, a real poet, however small, and actually an agricultural labourer 9  Reviewing Flint’s collection In the Net of the Stars, ET had praised his ‘genuineness both as artist and as man’, but with the reservation: ‘So far he has not found himself and his language is a mixture of styles that hardly ever become one and produce a clear, unqualified effect’ (DC: 29 December 1909). In fact, Flint ceased to publish poems after 1920; although, while pursuing a career in the Civil Service, he remained a noted critic and translator. 1  ET reprinted this article as the ‘John Clare’ chapter of LPE (224–35). His quotations from Clare’s poetry are chiefly taken from Arthur Symons’s selection, Poems by John Clare (1908): see review [342]. See also the passage on Clare from FIP [418ff.]. ET’s writings on Clare alternate between underestimating him, as measured by Clare’s reputation today, and a deeper appreciation which points to their poetic affinities.

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out and out. He was far from being the kind of peasant poet who would be invented in an armchair. Mortal man could hardly be milder, more timid and drifting, than Clare. He heard voices from the grave, not of rustic wisdom and endurance, but Murmuring o’er one’s weary woe, Such as once ’twas theirs to know, They whisper to such slaves as me, A buried tale of misery:— ‘We once had life, ere life’s decline, Flesh, blood, and bones, the same as thine; We knew its pains, and shar’d its grief, Till death, long-­wish’d for, brought relief . . .’ [. . .]

He looked back to childhood, asking: When shall I see such rest again?

Contact with the town— In crowded streets flowers never grew, But many there hath died away2

—sharpened his nerves for natural beauty. The poet consumed the labourer in him, or left only the dregs of one, while the conditions of the labourer’s life were as a millstone about his neck as poet. [. . .] For a short time he was a minor celebrity, meeting some of the great men of his day, such as Coleridge and Lamb, after the publication of Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820. But he was then no more fitted for the literary life than at birth he was fitted for the life of the fields. Delicate and passionate, he was early broken by under-­feeding and over-­drinking, so that he could love only the incidents of the country, the birds, the flowers, the young girl like a flower: nor could I pull The blossoms that I thought divine As hurting beauty like to thine.3

Unlike Burns, he had practically no help from the poetry and music of his class. He was a peasant writing poetry, yet cannot be called a peasant poet, because he had behind him no tradition of peasant literature, but had to do what he could with the current forms of polite literature. 2  Quotations from ‘Solitude’, ‘Home Yearnings’, ‘The Flitting’. 3  From ‘The Progress of Rhyme’.

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The mastering of these forms absorbed much of his energy, so that for so singular a man he added little of his own, and the result was only thinly tinged with his personality, hardly at all with the general characteristics of his class. His work is founded chiefly on literary models. Yet he lacked the intellect and power of study to live by the pen as he lacked the grit to live by hoe and pitchfork. A small income was subscribed for him, but he failed to found even a moderately sound productive life on it. Never, except in fancy rhyme, had he the Plenty which he desired, or the cottage of his verses, ‘After Reading in a Letter Proposals for Building a Cottage’.4 His only lasting pleasure was in remembering happier things, with the reflection:   Ah! sweet is all which I’m denied to share: Want’s painful hindrance sticks me to her stall.

He said truly: No, not a friend on earth had I But my own kin and poesy.5 [. . .]

But it was in his power to do for his native district something like what Jefferies did for his. He possessed a similar fresh, sweet spirituality to that of Jefferies, a similar grasp and love of detail. Some of his plain descriptions anticipate and at least equal the ‘Nature article’ of today. His was a pedestrian Muse who sits her down   Upon the molehill’s little lap, Who feels no fear to stain her gown,   And pauses by the hedgerow gap.

And he often wrote long formless pieces full of place-­names and of field-­lore charmingly expressed, songs uttering his love and his pathetic joy in retrospection, poems mingling the two elements. A thousand things which the ordinary country child, ‘Tracking wild searches through the meadow grass’, has to forget in order to live, Clare observed and noted—­as, for example, how in July’s drought

4  This poem, under the title ‘Clare’s Desire’, begins the ‘Village and Inn’ section in PBPS. ET’s own poem ‘For These’ similarly desires (but doubts) an ideal earthly dwelling: ‘An acre of land between the shore and the hills . . . // A house that shall love me as I love it’ (ACP, 99). 5  Quotations from ‘Approach of Spring’, ‘The Progress of Rhyme’.

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E’en the dew is parched up From the teasel’s jointed cup.

In putting down some of these things with a lowly fidelity, he often achieves a more rustic truth than other poets, as in— And rambling bramble-­berries, pulpy and sweet,   Arching their prickly trails   Half o’er the narrow lane.

Sometimes he attains almost to magic, as in— For when the world first saw the sun, These little flowers beheld him too; And when his love for earth begun They were the first his smiles to woo. There little lambtoe bunches springs In red-­tinged and begolden dye, For ever, and like China kings They come but never seem to die.

He was something more and less than a peasant become articulate. For example, he had an unexpected love, not only of the wild, but of the waste places, the ‘commons left free in the rude rags of nature’, ‘the old molehills of glad neglected pastures’. Though he did call the henbane ‘stinking’, he half loved it for the places, like Cowper Green, where he found it, with bramble, thistle, nettle, hemlock, And full many a nameless weed, Neglected, left to run to seed, Seen but with disgust by those Who judge a blossom by the nose. Wildness is my suiting scene, So I seek thee, Cowper Green!6

To enumerate the flowers was a pleasure to him, and he did so in a manner which preserves them still dewy, or with summer dust,7 perhaps, on an ‘antique mullein’s flannel-­leaves’. Can he ever have cultivated his garden? If he did, and then wrote— 6  From ‘The Flitting’, ‘Summer’, ‘Noon’, ‘Autumn’, ‘The Flitting’ again, ‘Song’, ‘Greensward’, ‘Cowper Green’. 7  ET’s attention/attraction to Clare’s ‘waste places’ and ‘summer dust’ is a link with his own poem ‘Tall Nettles’, which ends: ‘I like the dust on the nettles, never lost / Except to prove the sweetness of a shower’ (ACP, 119).

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he must have been a kind of saint; and, indeed, he had such a love for wild things as some saints have had, which he shows in the verses: I left the little birds, And sweet lowing of the herds, And couldn’t find out words,   Do you see, To say to them good-­bye, Where the yellowcups do lie; So heaving a deep sigh,   Took to sea.

When he lamented leaving his old home, he did not mention the building itself, but the neighbouring heath, its yellow furze, Molehills and rabbit tracks that lead Through beesom, ling, and teasel burrs . . .

the trees, the lanes, the stiles, the brook, the flowers, the shepherd’s-­purse that grew in the old as well as the new garden; the very crow Croaked music in my native fields.8

One of his Asylum Poems, first printed by Mr Arthur Symons, is full of place-­names that were music to him, and become so to us—‘Langley Bush’, ‘Eastwell’s boiling spring’, ‘old Lee Close oak’, ‘old Crossberry Way’, ‘pleasant Swordy Well’ again, ‘Round Oak’, ‘Sneap Green’, ‘Puddock’s Nook’, ‘Hilly Snow’—as he mourns: And Crossberry Way and old Round Oak’s narrow lane With its hollow trees like pulpits I shall never see again. Enclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain, It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill And hung the moles for traitors, though the brook is running still It runs a naked stream cold and chill.9

But he had the farm life also by heart, and, along with blackbird and robin and magpie, drew the dog chasing the cat, the cows tossing the molehills in 8  From ‘July’ (‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’), ‘Adieu’, ‘The Flitting’ (twice). 9  This poem is ‘Remembrances’, also quoted by ET in his review of Symons’s selection.

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their play, the shepherd’s dog daunted by the rolled-­up hedgehog, the maids singing ballads at milking or hanging out linen around the elder-­skirted croft, while The gladden’d swine bolt from the sty,   And round the yard in freedom run, Or stretching in their slumbers lie   Beside the cottage in the sun. The young horse whinneys to his mate,   And, sickening from the thresher’s door, Rubs at the straw-­yard’s banded gate,   Longing for freedom on the moor.10

No man ever came so near to putting the life of the farm, as it is lived, not as it is seen over a five-­barred gate, into poetry. He gives no broad impressions—­he saw the kite, but not the kite’s landscape—­yet his details accumulate in the end, so that a loving reader, and no one reads him but loves him, can grasp them, and see the lowlands of Northamptonshire as they were when the kite still soared over them. T.P.’s Weekly:11 5 June

Robert Frost, North of Boston This is one of the most revolutionary books of modern times, but one of the quietest and least aggressive. It speaks, and it is poetry.1 It consists of fifteen 10  Quotation from ‘February’ (‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’). 11  T.  P.’s Weekly (1902–16): paper founded by the journalist, editor, and Irish Nationalist politician, T.  P.  O’Connor (1848–1929): the only Irish Nationalist to represent an English constituency (Liverpool Scotland). In 1914 T. P.’s Weekly also published critical essays by ET on Stephen Duck (reprinted in IPS), W. H. Hudson (reprinted in LPE), and Charles Dalmon; as well as two original pieces: ‘The Cuckoo’ and ‘Midsummer’. In 1913 the Weekly had published ET’s ‘How I Began’ and ‘Glamorgan’. The Dalmon essay (‘A Modern Herrick’) and all the original writings appear in The Last Sheaf (1928). 1  ET’s bold opening sentences show his eagerness to promote Frost’s poetry. In March 1915, when Edward Garnett wanted to write about North of Boston for the Atlantic Monthly, ET outlined the book’s UK reception, and issued a warning: ‘The reviews he got here were one by Abercrombie in the Nation, one by Hueffer in the Outlook, and a number by me in the New Weekly etc. In America he got only an echo or two of these. He had been at American editors ten years in vain. But may I suggest it might damage him there if you rubbed the Americans’ noses

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poems, from fifty to three hundred lines long, depicting scenes from life, chiefly in the country, in New Hampshire. Two neighbour farmers go along the opposite sides of their boundary wall, mending it and speaking of walls and of boundaries. A husband and wife discuss an old vagabond farm ser­ vant who has come home to them, as it falls out, to die. Two travellers sit outside a deserted cottage, talking of those who once lived in it, talking until bees in the wall boards drive them away. A man who has lost his feet in a saw-­mill talks with a friend, a child, and the lawyer comes from Boston about compensation. The poet himself describes the dreams of his eyes after a long day on a ladder picking apples, and the impression left on him by a neglected wood-­pile in the snow on an evening walk. All but these last two are dialogue mainly; nearly all are in blank verse.2 These poems are revolutionary because they lack the exaggeration of rhet­oric, and even at first sight appear to lack the poetic intensity of which in their own dirt? I know he thought so. Most English reviewers were blinded by theories they had as to what poetry should look like. They did not see how true he was, and how pure in his own style’ (SL, 107). The Monthly published Garnett’s article, ‘A New American Poet’, in August 1915. It pleased Frost, and ET called it ‘absolutely right’ (Helen Smith, The Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett [London: Jonathan Cape, 2017], 254–5). English resistance to Frost’s ‘style’ can be gauged from ET’s correspondence with GB, who had reservations. ET conceded (7 July 1914): ‘For my part [Frost] does so much that I have perhaps overlooked what he doesn’t do. And I like him more & more. Which is as it should be if I am to till New Hampshire at his side which appears more & more likely’ (LGB, 236). Subsequently GB reported (and probably supported) T. Sturge Moore’s condemnation of Frost for writing ‘in accordance with a theory’. Provoked by this, ET spelled out his sense of Frost’s ‘revolution’ (30 June 1915): ‘I still think that [Moore] had been misled into supposing that Frost wanted poetry to be colloquial. All he insists on is what he believes he finds in all poets—­absolute fidelity to the postures which the voice assumes in the most expressive intimate speech. So long as these tones & postures are there he has not the least objection to any vocabulary whatever or any inversion or variation from the customary grammatical forms of talk. In fact I think he would agree that if these tones & postures survive in a complicated & learned or subtle vocabulary & structure the result is likely to be better than if they survive in the easiest form, that is in the very words & structures of common speech, though that is not easy or prose would be better than it is & survive more often. . . . His theory is only an attempt to explain & justify observed facts in Shakespeare for example & in his own earliest efforts.’ Earlier (18 June) ET had ironically welcomed ‘the satisfaction of knowing that if a man like S. M. misses Frost so completely I can stand being missed myself in turn’ (LGB, 249–51). Years later, GB confessed to Claude Colleer Abbott: ‘I was recalcitrant about Frost; but E. was very anxious and persistent that I should like him, and dealt with me faithfully until I admitted his merits. But I am never really cordial about singers who talk their songs or choose pedestrian subjects’ (ETFN 59, 40). In August 1914, when two of these reviews appeared, ET and his family were holidaying close to the Frosts’ rented house in Ledington, Gloucestershire: scene of ‘The sun used to shine’, ET’s poem celebrating the poets’ friendship (ACP, 122). The talk of ‘men or poetry’, to which the poem alludes, may have covered responses to North of Boston. 2  The poems mentioned are: ‘Mending Wall’, ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘The Black Cottage’, ‘The Self-Seeker’, ‘After Apple-Picking’, ‘The Wood-Pile’.

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rhet­oric is an imitation. Their language is free from the poetical words and forms that are the chief material of secondary poets. The metre avoids not only the old-­fashioned pomp and sweetness, but the later fashion also of discord and fuss. In fact, the medium is common speech and common decasyllables, and Mr Frost is at no pains to exclude blank verse lines resembling those employed, I think, by Andrew Lang in a leading article printed as prose. Yet almost all these poems are beautiful. They depend not at all on objects commonly admitted to be beautiful; neither have they merely a homely beauty, but are often grand, sometimes magical. Many, if not most, of the separate lines and separate sentences are plain and, in themselves, nothing. But they are bound together and made elements of beauty by a calm eagerness of emotion. What the poet might have done, could he have permitted himself egoistic rhetoric, we have a glimpse of once or twice where one of his characters tastes a fanciful mood to the full: as where one of the men by the deserted cottage, who has been describing an old-­style inhabitant, says: ‘As I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish I could be monarch of a desert land I could devote and dedicate forever To the truths we keep coming back and back to. So desert it would have to be, so walled By mountain ranges half in summer snow, No one would covet it or think it worth The pains of conquering to force change on. Scattered oases where men dwelt, but mostly Sand dunes held loosely in tamarisk Blown over and over themselves in idleness. Sand grains should sugar in the natal dew The babe born to the desert, the sand storm Retard mid-­waste my cowering caravans— There are bees in this wall.’ He struck the clapboards, Fierce heads looked out; small bodies pivoted. We rose to go. Sunset blazed on the windows.

This passage stands alone. But it is a solitary emotion also that gives him another which I feel obliged to quote in order to hint at the poetry elsewhere spread evenly over whole poems. It is the end of ‘The Wood-­Pile’: I thought that only Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks Could so forget his handiwork on which

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 He spent himself, the labour of his axe, And leave it there far from a useful fireplace To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay.3

The more dramatic pieces have the same beauty in solution, the beauty of life seen by one in whom mystery and tenderness together just outstrip humour and curiosity. This beauty grows like grass over the whole, and blossoms with simple flowers which the reader gradually sets a greater and greater value on, in lines such as these about the dying labourer: She put out her hand Among the harp-­like morning-­glory strings, Taut with the dew from garden bed to eaves, As if she played unheard some tenderness That wrought on him beside her in the night. ‘Warren,’ she said, ‘he has come home to die: You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.’ ‘Home,’ he mocked gently. ‘Yes, what else but home? It all depends on what you mean by home. Of course he’s nothing to us, any more Than was the hound that came a stranger to us Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.’ ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.’ ‘I should have called it Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’

The book is not without failures. Mystery falls into obscurity. In some lines I cannot hit upon the required accents. But his successes, like ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, put Mr Frost above all other writers of verse in America. He will be accused of keeping monotonously at a low level, because his characters are quiet people, and he has chosen the unresisting medium of blank verse. I will only remark that he would lose far less than most modern w ­ riters by being printed as prose. If his work were so printed, it would have little in common with the kind of prose that runs to blank verse: in fact, it would

3  ET’s poem ‘Fifty Faggots’ (ACP, 90), which connects the uncertain future of some firewood with uncertainty about the war, may be in dialogue with ‘The Wood-Pile’.

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turn out to be closer knit and more intimate than the finest prose is except in its finest passages. It is poetry because it is better than prose. DN: 22 July *** This is a collection of dramatic narratives in verse. Some are almost entirely written in dialogue: in only three is the poet a chief character, telling a story, for the most part, in his own words. Thus he has got free from the habit of personal lyric as was, perhaps, foretold by his first book, A Boy’s Will. Already there he had refused the ‘glory of words’ which is the modern poet’s embarrassing heritage, yet succeeded in being plain though not mean, in reminding us of poetry without being ‘poetical’. The new volume marks more than the beginning of an experiment like Wordsworth’s, but with this difference, that Mr Frost knows the life of which he writes rather as Dorothy Wordsworth did. That is to say, he sympathises where Wordsworth contemplates. The result is a unique type of eclogue, homely, racy, and touched by a spirit that might, under other circumstances, have made pure lyric on the one hand or drama on the other. Within the space of a hundred lines or so of blank verse it would be hard to compress more rural character and relevant scenery; impossible, perhaps, to do so with less sense of compression and more lightness, unity, and breadth. The language ranges from a never vulgar colloquialism to brief moments of heightened and intense simplicity. There are moments when the plain language and lack of violence make the un­affect­ed verses look like prose, except that the sentences, if spoken aloud, are most felicitously true in rhythm to the emotion. Only at the end of the best pieces, such as ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘Home Burial’, ‘The Black Cottage’, and ‘The Wood-­Pile’, do we realise that they are masterpieces of deep and mysterious tenderness. ER: August *** This is an original book which will raise the thrilling question, What is poetry? and will be read and re-­read for pleasure as well as curiosity, even by those who decide that, at any rate, it is not poetry. At first sight, some will pronounce simply that anyone can write this kind of blank verse, with all its tame common words, straightforward constructions, and innumerable perfectly normal lines. Few that read it through will have been as much astonished by any American since Whitman. Mr Frost owes nothing to Whitman, though had Whitman not helped to sanctify plain labour and ordinary men,

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Mr Frost might have been different. The colloquialisms, the predominance of conversation (though not one out of fifteen pieces has been printed in dramatic style), and the phrase ‘by your leave’ (which is an excrescence),4 may hint at Browning. But I have not met a living poet with a less obvious or more complicated ancestry. Nor is there any brag or challenge about this. Mr Frost has, in fact, gone back, as Whitman and as Wordsworth went back, through the paraphernalia of poetry into poetry again. With a confidence like genius, he has trusted his conviction that a man will not easily write better than he speaks when some matter has touched him deeply, and he has turned it over until he has no doubt what it means to him, when he has no purpose to serve beyond expressing it, when he has no audience to be bullied or flattered, when he is free, and speech takes one form and no other. Whatever discipline further was necessary, he has got from the use of the good old English medium of blank verse. Mr Frost, the reader should be reminded, writes of what he or some country neighbour in New Hampshire has seen or done. Extraordinary things have not been sought for. There is but one death, one case of a man coming home to find the woman flown. There is a story of a doctor who has to share an inn bedroom with a stranger, and enters scared, and is at last terrified almost out of his wits, though the stranger is merely a talkative traveller offering him a hundred collars which he has grown out of. Two farmers talk as they repair the boundary wall between them. A husband and wife talk on the staircase about the child lying buried over there in sight of the house. An old woman discusses her daughter’s running away from the man they kept house for.5 Here is no ‘Lucy Gray’, no ‘Thorn’, no ‘Idiot Boy’. Yet it might be said that Mr Frost sometimes combines an effect resembling Wordsworth’s, while he shows us directly less of his own feelings, and more of other people’s, than Wordsworth did. It is drama with a lyric intensity which often borders on magic. A line now and then can be quoted to prove Mr Frost capable of doing what other poets do, as in this description:— Part of a moon was falling down the west, Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills . . .

or ‘There are bees in this wall.’ He struck the clapboards, Fierce heads looked out; small bodies pivoted. We rose to go. Sunset blazed on the windows. 4  This phrase occurs in ‘Good Hours’. 5  The poems mentioned are ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘The Housekeeper’, ‘A Hundred Collars’, ‘Mending Wall’, ‘Home Burial’, ‘The Housekeeper’ again.

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or cottages in a row Up to their shining eyes in snow.6

The pieces without dialogue rise up more than once to passages like this about a deserted wood-­pile in the snow of a swamp:— No runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it. And it was older sure than this year’s cutting, Or even last year’s or the year’s before. The wood was grey and the bark warping off it, And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle. What held it though on one side was a tree Still growing, and on one a stake and prop, These latter about to fall. I thought that only Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks Could so forget his handiwork on which He spent himself, the labour of his axe, And leave it there far from a useful fireplace To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

But the effect of each poem is one and indivisible. You can hardly pick out a single line more than a single word. There are no show words or lines. The concentration has been upon the whole, not the parts. Decoration has been forgotten, perhaps for lack of the right kind of vanity and obsession. In his first book, A Boy’s Will, when he was still a comparatively isolated, egotistic poet, eagerly considering his own sensations more than what prod­ uced them, he did things far more easily quotable, and among them this piece, entitled ‘Mowing’:— There was never a sound beside the wood but one, And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself; Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun, Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound— And that was why it whispered and did not speak. It was no dream of the gift of idle hours, Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf: Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows, 6  Quotations from ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘The Black Cottage’, ‘Good Hours’.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 Not without feeble-­pointed spikes of flowers (Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake. The fact is the sweetest dream that labour knows. My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

Those last six lines do more to define Mr Frost than anything I can say. He never will have ‘easy gold at the hand of fay or elf ’: he can make fact ‘the sweetest dream’. Naturally, then, when his writing crystallises, it is often in a terse, plain phrase, such as the proverb, ‘Good fences make good neighbours,’ or:— Three foggy mornings and one rainy day Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.

or from the time when one is sick to death, One is alone, and he dies more alone.

or Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.7

But even this kind of characteristic detail is very much less important than the main result, which is a richly homely thing beyond the grasp of any power except poetry. It is a beautiful achievement, and I think a unique one, as perfectly Mr Frost’s own as his vocabulary, the ordinary English speech of a man accustomed to poetry and philosophy, more colloquial and idiomatic than the ordinary man dares to use even in a letter, almost entirely lacking the emphatic hackneyed forms of journalists and other rhetoricians, and possessing a kind of healthy, natural delicacy like Wordsworth’s, or at least Shelley’s, rather than that of Keats. NW: 8 August

John Masefield, Philip the King and Other Poems; Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, Thoroughfares and Borderlands Mr Masefield and Mr Gibson are, I believe, often connected: I have heard it said that Mr Gibson’s later manner was founded on Mr Masefield, and I have 7  From ‘Mending Wall, ‘Home Burial’ (twice), ‘The Self-Seeker’.

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heard it credibly said that there is no truth in this whatever. Both write about ‘working men’, and make use of words or actions which are supposed to look odd in poetry. Yet neither of them is exactly a ‘working man’, or seems to write of ‘working men’ except in complete detachment, however admiring. Both, perhaps in consequence, have to make up for some lack of reality in the whole by intense and often violent reality in detail. Both are fond of describing the dreams or visions of minds in some kind of ecstasy. But the men themselves must be very different. Mr Masefield hardly ever fails to depict a thing at its best or worst. He loves a ‘ship [that] made sparkling for the shore’, or one seen on a Christmas Day:   untouched by Time Resting a beauty that no seas could tire Sparkling as though the midnight’s rain were rime Like a man’s thought transfigured into fire.

And he likes to sink such a ship, as he does in ‘The River’, as he did in A Mainsail Haul long ago.1 Extremes of calm and storm he loves. Perhaps he is least like Mr Gibson when he is describing action. That he has no constant sense of drama ‘Philip the King’ makes certain, but physical action is drink to him. The boat-­race in ‘Biography’, for example, is all action. Many times he brings before us brief moments of great movement, as in ‘The “Wanderer” ’:   I heard the sea Roar past in white procession filled with wreck; Intense bright frosty stars burned over me, And the Greek brig beside us dipped and dipped, While to the muzzle like a half-­tide rock, Drowned to the mainmast with the seas she shipped; Her cable-­swivels clanged at every shock.

Compared with some writing, this, of course, must be said to show rather appreciation of movement than movement itself; but compared with Mr  Gibson’s its spirit is vigorous action. Besides, Mr Masefield is himself always intensely, personally interested in his tale and moral; his violent or extreme words depict him invariably, whether they do the sea and wind. Mr Gibson also admires vigorous activity, but by comparison with Mr Masefield he possesses none. They are both spectators, to some extent 1 The poems quoted are ‘The River’ and ‘The “Wanderer” ’, and ET alludes to ‘From the Spanish’: a tale of shipwreck in A Mainsail Haul. He had praised the style of this collection of ‘stories and essays’, rating Masefield’s prose above his poetry thus far (A: 5 August 1905).

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connoisseurs, but Mr Gibson chiefly so.2 He never for a moment seems to be or to resemble the thing presented. His style, except in ‘Bloodybush Edge’,3 lacks movement and even the words of movement, which Mr Masefield never leaves idle. Where Mr Gibson seems to be most purely natural is in the lyric: Youth that goes woolgathering, Mooning and stargazing Always finding everything Full of fresh amazing, Best will meet the moment’s need When the dream brings forth the deed. [. . .]

It seems likely that with him ‘the dream brings forth the deed’. [. . .] B: November

War Poetry If they also serve who only sit and write, poets are doing their work well.1 Several of them, it seems to me, with names known and unknown, have been turned into poets by the war, printing verse now for the first time. Whatever 2  ET’s judgement here has links with his poem ‘The Watchers’ (ACP, 119): an oblique critique of ‘spectatorship’ in life and art. Someone who ‘watches’ a carter and his horse represents literary distance from sensory experience. The poem (April 1916) may look back on ET’s decision to enlist; just as this review—­seemingly the first he wrote after the war began—­may prefigure it. 3  A poem also singled out by ET in his review of the poetry magazine New Numbers, edited by Gibson and others: see [608]. 1  Perhaps ET felt compelled (and was uniquely qualified) to examine this phenomenon. On 19 September 1914 he wrote to Harold Monro, editor of PD: ‘would you care for [an article] on War poetry & incidentally on poetry dealing with current events, how it is sometimes good & why so often bad?’ (He also said: ‘I am still looking for work I can do better perhaps than soldiering.’) Evidently Monro accepted his proposal. On 9 October ET wrote: ‘Then I will do the War Poetry for you & leave the length to be decided by you & events, but if I don’t hear further I will keep it to 5pp. If you give me longer I shall be glad.’ And later (undated, October/November): ‘Have you fixed on 2000 words as my maximum for the War Poetry article?’; (14 November): ‘Here you are. There was nothing I could say in the space about the war poems. They seem particularly wretched on the whole except those done quite deliberately like Begbie’s & they are even more hateful.’ It seems that Monro found some fault with the article, since ET wrote (15 December): ‘You are probably right about the war article. The thing never was quite whole in my mind & then at last I had less time than I expected for it in the same week as I was doing a thing for the English Review & that was pure notebook & put me out, I dare say. At the same time the germ of what might have been a whole is there in a sentence or two that I think sound’ (‘ “A Writing Animal”:

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other virtues they show, courage at least is not lacking—­the courage to write for oblivion. No other class of poetry vanishes so rapidly, has so little chosen from it for posterity. One tiny volume would hold all the patriotic poems surviving in European languages, and originally written, as most of these are today, under the direct pressure of public patriotic motives. Where are the poems of Marlborough’s wars?2 Where are the songs sung by the troops for Quebec while Wolfe was reading Gray’s ‘Elegy’?3 But for the wars against Napoleon English poetry would have been different, but how many poems directly concerning them, addressed to Englishmen at that moment, do we read now? One of the earliest, I believe, was Coleridge’s ‘Fears in Solitude: written in April 1798, during the alarm of an invasion’. But no newspaper or magazine, then or now, would print such a poem, since a large part of it is humble. He admits that abroad we have offended, and at home All individual dignity and power Engulf ’d in courts, committees, institutions, Associations and societies, A vain, speech-­mouthing, speech-­reporting guild, One benefit-­club for mutual flattery, We have drunk up, demure as at a grace, Pollutions from the brimming cup of wealth. . . .

He believes that (Stuffed out with big preamble, holy names, And adjurations of the God in Heaven,) We send our mandates for the certain death Letters from Edward Thomas to Harold Monro’, Poetry Wales 13, 4 [Spring 1978], 59–62). In fact, ‘Tipperary’ and ‘It’s a Long, Long Way’, the articles by ET in the October and December issues of ER, are not ‘pure notebook’: see Introduction [xxxiv]. They reflect, as well as report, on attitudes to the war, and intersect with ET’s thinking about war and poetry—­perhaps in the genesis of his own poetry too. 2  John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough (1650–1722), is known for his victories over the French in the European power-struggle known as The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). In the martial climate of early 1915 ET would accept an unlikely commission to write The Life of the Duke of Marlborough (1915). He told GB (6 May 1915): ‘I am buried under a book on the Duke of Marlborough. It is the only chance of earning anything. It is by far the worst job I ever undertook’ (LGB, 246). The job left its mark on ET’s poem ‘Digging’, in which he identifies with a participant in ‘Marlborough’s wars’: ‘What matter makes my spade for tears or mirth, / Letting down two clay pipes into the earth? / The one I smoked, the other a soldier / Of Blenheim, Ramillies, and Malplaquet / Perhaps’ (ACP, 99). 3  It’s said that James Wolfe (1727–59), the British general who defeated the French (and died) in the battle for Quebec (1759), recited Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751) on the night before the battle; telling his troops that he would prefer to have written the poem than to take Quebec.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 Of thousands and ten thousands! Boys and girls, And women, that would groan to see a child Pull off an insect’s leg, all read of war, The best amusement for our morning meal!

When he wrote this at Stowey, Coleridge was a solitary man who, if at all, only felt the national emotions weakly or spasmodically. He was writing poetry, and the chances against the reading as against the writing of poetry early in a great war were overwhelming. The poem, one of the noblest of patriotic poems, has been omitted from most of the anthologies.4 Another odd thing is that a poem included in several anthologies, and perhaps the finest of English martial songs—­I mean Blake’s ‘War Song to Englishmen’— was written in or before 1783, by one who became a red-­capped Revolutionary and cared nothing for Pitt’s England.5 What inspired him? The war with the American colonies? More likely, the history of England as he felt it when he saw the Kings in Westminster Abbey and Shakespeare’s plays. He wrote from a settled mystic patriotism, which wars could not disturb. Another poet, touched by the outbreak of war, will be disturbed for some time: he will be more fit for taking up work from the past, if only for relief, though it is possible for a mature man who has seen other wars and is not shaken from his balance to seize the new occasion firmly. Mr Charles M. Doughty might have done so: Mr Hardy has done.6 The period of gestation varies, but few younger men who had been moved to any purpose could be expected to crystallise their thoughts with speed. Supposing they did, who would want their poems? The demand is for the crude, for what everybody is saying or thinking, or is ready to begin saying or thinking. I need hardly say that by becoming ripe for poetry the poet’s thoughts may recede far from their original resemblance to all the world’s, and may seem to have little to do with daily events. They may retain hardly any colour from 1798 or 1914, and the crowd, deploring it, will naturally not read the poems.

4  ‘Fears in Solitude’ appears in TE (see [647]). This poem influenced the spirit of ET’s own ‘war poetry’, and provided a more direct model for ‘This is no case of petty right or wrong’, which voices similar home truths as part of its patriotism: ‘Beside my hate for one fat patriot / My hatred of the Kaiser is love true’ (ACP, 104). The patriot in question was Horatio Bottomley. 5  Blake’s ‘War Song’ (also included in TE) begins ‘Prepare, prepare the iron helm of war’, has the refrain ‘Prepare, prepare!’ and asserts: ‘Our cause is Heaven’s cause’. William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806), a ‘new Tory’, became Prime Minister in 1783 when he was 24. Pitt proved successful in war against post-revolutionary France. 6  Under the title ‘Song of the Soldiers’, Hardy’s ‘Men Who March Away’ had been published in The Times on 9 September.

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It is a fact that in the past but a small number of poems destined to endure are directly or entirely concerned with the public triumphs, calamities, or trepidations, that helped to beget them. The public, crammed with mighty facts and ideas it will never digest, must look coldly on poetry where already those mighty things have sunk away far into ‘The still sad music of humanity’.7 For his insults to their feelings, the newspapers, history, they might call the poet a pro-­Boer. They want something raw and solid, or vague and lofty or sentimental. They must have Mr Begbie to express their thoughts, or ‘Tipperary’ to drown them.8 A patriotic poem pure and simple hardly exists, as a man who was a patriot pure and simple could not live outside a madhouse. Very seldom are poems written for occasions, great or small, more seldom for great than for small. But verses are, and they may be excellent. Virtually all hymns are occasional verses. They are written for certain people or a certain class. The writer of hymns or patriotic verses appears to be a man who feels himself always or at the time at one with the class, perhaps the whole nation, or he is a smart fellow who can simulate or exaggerate this sympathy. Experience, reality, truth, unless suffused or submerged by popular sentiment, are out of place. What we like is Mr  J.  A.  Nicklin’s city clerk (“And they went to the War”) singing: When the air with hurtling shrapnel’s all a-­quiver   And the smoke of battle through the valley swirls, It’s better than our Sundays up the river,   And the rifle’s hug is closer than a girl’s.

Mr Arthur K. Sabin’s sonnet called ‘Harvest Moon at Midnight’, and dated September 8th (War Harvest 1914), is equally the thing, though nearer truth—­it ends: Ah, underneath this Moon, in fields of France, How many of our old companionship Snatch hurried rest, with hearts that burn and glow, 7  This sentence anticipates ironical lines in ET’s poem ‘The Word’: ‘I have forgot, too, names of the mighty men / That fought and lost or won in the old wars’ (ACP, 93). 8  In probably his first poetry review for DC, ET had reviewed Harold Begbie’s Kiplingesque The Handy Man And Other Verses [7]. Begbie would later defend conscientious objectors; but his recruiting poem ‘Fall In’, published in DC (31 August), was widely circulated on postcards and posters, and set to music. The rhetoric of ‘Fall In’ sought to shame young men into volunteering: ‘Where will you look, sonny, where will you look, / When your children yet to be / Clamour to learn of the part you took / In the War that kept men free?’ Although ET disparages the popular wartime song, ‘It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary’, it gave him the titles for his ER articles (see note 1 above).

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 Longing to hear the bugles sound Advance! To seize their weapons with unfaltering grip, And for old England strike another blow.

It reminds us all of what we thought or heard said during that moon.9 Here and there I have met a poem that I liked more than others, such as Mr Justin Huntly McCarthy’s ‘Ghosts at Boulogne’: One dreamer, when our English soldiers trod But yesterday the welcoming fields of France, Saw war-­gaunt shadows gathering stare askance Upon those levies and that alien sod— Saw Churchill’s smile, and Wellington’s curt nod, Saw Harry with his Crispins, Chandos’ lance, And the Edwards on whose breasts the leopards dance: Then heard a gust of ghostly thanks to God That the most famous quarrel of all time In the most famous friendship ends at last; Such flame of friendship as God fans to forge A sword to strike the Dragon of the Slime, Bidding St Denis with St George stand fast Against the Worm. St Denis and St George!10

But this is not great poetry, nor is it what is wanted. It is the hour of the writer who picks up popular views or phrases, or coins them, and has the power to turn them into downright stanzas. Most newspapers have one or more of these gentlemen. They could take the easy words of a statesman, such as ‘No price is too high when honour and freedom are at stake’, and dish them up so that the world next morning, ready to be thrilled by anything lofty and 9  Sabin’s moon-image has links with ET’s essay This England (N: 7 November) and his poem, ‘The sun used to shine’; both of which, to quote a letter to RF, originated in ‘the new moon of August 26 & you & me strolling about in the sun while our brave soldiers etc.’ (RFET, 26). ‘The sun used to shine’ ends: ‘And other men through other flowers / In those fields under the same moon / Go talking and have easy hours’ (ACP, 122). 10  Justin Huntly McCarthy (1860–1936): prolific author in several genres and, despite the ‘Englishness’ of this sonnet (published in DC on 30 August), an Irish Nationalist politician. ‘Harry with his Crispins, Chandos’ lance’ alludes to Shakespeare, Henry V, IV.iii, and to Sir John Chandos (?1320–70), medieval knight and military strategist, who served under Edward, the Black Prince, during the Hundred Years War between England and France. St Denis: martyred third-century Bishop of Paris, patron saint of France. ‘Edwards . . . leopards’: the Plantagenet kings, three of whom were ‘Edward’, had lions (heraldically termed ‘leopards’) on their Royal Arms. ET may have recalled McCarthy’s historical riff when he represented ‘Lob’ as an English spirit who, ‘Although he was seen dying at Waterloo, / Hastings, Agincourt, and Sedgemoor too,— / Lives yet’ (ACP, 79).

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noble-­looking, is thrilled. These poems are not to be attacked any more than hymns. Like hymns, they play with common ideas, with words and names which most people have in their heads at the time. Most seem to me bombastic, hypocritical, or senseless; but either they go straight to the heart of the great public which does not read poetry, or editors expect them to, and accordingly supply the articles. There is a smaller class of better or more honest work which can hardly last longer. I mean the work of true poets which has been occasioned by the war. A few men are in an exceptional position: Messrs Newbolt and Kipling belong to a professional class apart, and may be supposed to suffer less drastic modifications from the war. It was their hour, and they have not been silent. They have written as well as in times of peace. The one silence which can be felt is Mr Charles M. Doughty’s. But it might easily have been forecast. He has lived through this time long ago, and The Cliffs (reissue) and The Clouds show that modern warfare and German politics had no surprises for him.11 Other men who stood on old foundations of character and tradition were not suddenly transported out of themselves. Mr Bridges, Mr de la Mare, Mr Binyon, among others, remained themselves. Years before this they had proved themselves English poets. They have not done more now. Their private and social emotion does them credit, but with few exceptions, such as Messrs Binyon, Chesterton, and John Freeman, they have fallen various distances below their natural level.12 Nor am I surprised. I should have expected the shock to silence them, had it not been counterbalanced by a powerful social sense genuinely aroused. I have not liked any of these poems, but fancy tells me that they do for persons with more social sense than I, what the noisy stuff does for the man who normally lives without poetry. They are suddenly made old-­fashioned: Mr Chesterton’s ‘Hymn of War’, for example (Lord God of Battles: A War Anthology, compiled by A. E. Manning Foster), is archaic and Hebraic, after this fashion: O God of earth and altar,   Bow down and hear our cry, Our earthly rulers falter,   Our people drift and die; 11  These works by Doughty warn against the German threat: see reviews [374], [522]. 12  Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’, the fourth verse of which, ending ‘We will remember them’, is read at Remembrance Day ceremonies, had appeared in The Times on 21 September. In 1914, besides ‘Hymn of War’, G.  K.  Chesterton published ‘The Wife of Flanders’: a poem spoken by a grieving Belgian woman who accuses a German soldier. ‘Happy is England Now’, by ET’s friend John Freeman (1880–1929), was also published early in the war. It begins: ‘There is not anything more wonderful / Than a great people moving towards the deep / Of an unguessed and unfeared future’.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 The walls of gold entomb us,   The swords of scorn divide, Take not the thunder from us,   But take away our pride.

They revert, and they may be right, though I cannot follow them if I would. They seem excellent only by comparison with ‘C. W.’, a serious and well-­read but ungifted versifier, who tells us (1914) that ‘his offer of active service for his country being rejected on account of his advanced years, and not being able to turn his thoughts away from the tragic events of the day, he has put, in a more or less poetic form, his own thoughts on the circumstances which led to this war, and the consequences it may and ought to have’. At the same time the poets of whom I speak have done things not inferior to the similar work of men more famous. Of six Patriotic Poems by Tennyson not one is worthy of him or would have survived without his name.13 They have one distinction, that they are the work of one who had the right, and felt it, to address his countrymen as from an eminence. Two living men besides Mr Doughty might do the same, Messrs Hardy and Kipling. Mr Kipling has hardly done more than speak in echoes of himself. Mr Hardy has written an impersonal song14 which seems to me the best of the time, as it is the least particular and occasional. He may write even better yet. I should also expect the work of other real poets to improve as the war advances, perhaps after it is over, as they understand it and themselves more completely. PD II, 8: December

Anthologies and Reprints1 The worst of the poetry being written today is that it is too deliberately, and not inevitably, English. It is for an audience: there is more in it of the shouting of rhetorician, reciter, or politician than of the talk of friends and lovers. Some ears would not be pierced except by this kind of noise, and even 13  The six poems are: ‘A Call to Arms’, ‘Hands All Round’, ‘Britons, Guard Your Own’, ‘Riflemen Form!’, ‘The Empire’, ‘The Fleet’. 14  The ‘song’ is ‘Men Who March Away’: see note 6 above. ET’s poem ‘The Trumpet’ similarly links rising at dawn with a summons to war (ACP, 133). 1  In all four issues of PD II (1914) ET reviewed ‘Anthologies and Reprints’ or ‘Reprints and Anthologies’.

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excluding this bad class altogether it is apparently not easy to make a good book of patriotic poems. E.  Nesbit, in compiling her Battle Songs, has to include rather a lot of E. Nesbit and of Dibdin.2 Nor is she strict in deciding what is a song, though she shows a preference for what is song-­like. The living men represented are Messrs Kipling, Newbolt, and A. E. Housman. But the best things of all are Blake’s ‘War Song to Englishmen’, and some passages from Whitman, ‘Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!’ and ‘Would you hear of an old-­time sea-­fight?’3 These, Marryat’s ‘The Old Navy’, ‘Here’s a health unto his Majesty’, ‘Bonnie Dundee’, and the usual Cowper, Campbell, Collins, and Macaulay, make up a book many will want to have.4 It does not pretend to be choice or exhaustive, and was admittedly done quickly. English Patriotic Poetry (selected by L.  Godwin Salt) is choicer. It is chrono­logic­al. The three poets most represented are Shakespeare, Words­ worth, and Tennyson, and from Tennyson only one of the poor thin poems— ‘Hands All Round’—has been taken. The represented authors living when the selection was made were Alfred Austin, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Messrs Newbolt and Kipling. The compiler has not overlooked Coleridge’s ‘Fears in Solitude’,5 but has robbed it of all its particular character and most of its force by cutting out only twenty-­two lines from the middle. Drayton’s ‘To the Cambrio (sic) Britons’ is here,6 and two of Milton’s sonnets, and some ineffective extracts from Spenser and Peele. But the book is far better than its title, and includes practically nothing that is merely patriotic. 2  Besides children’s fiction, E. Nesbit (1858–1924) wrote verse for children and adults: see [151]. Charles Dibdin (1745–1814): composer of operas, dramatist, actor, and song-writer, who specialized in songs of the sea, e.g., ‘Tom Bowling’, ‘The Lass that Loves a Sailor’. His songs were popular with the Royal Navy when fighting the French. 3  First line of Whitman’s anti-war poem ‘Beat! Beat! Drums!’ Rupert Brooke’s sonnet ‘The Dead’ begins: ‘Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!’ and its sestet begins: ‘Blow, bugles, blow!’ In ‘No one cares less than I’ ET fits ironical ‘words’ to a ‘bugle call’ (ACP, 123). ‘Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight?’ is the first line of Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself ’: 35. 4  ‘The Old Navy’: song by Captain Frederick Marryat (1792–1848), distinguished naval officer, author of sea-stories and children’s books such as The Children of the New Forest (1847); ‘Here’s a health unto his Majesty’: song composed by Jeremiah Savile after the Restoration; ‘Bonnie Dundee’: poem by Sir Walter Scott, based on a Scottish folksong, which celebrates John Grahame, first Viscount Dundee. The anthology contains William Cowper’s ‘On the Loss of the Royal George’; three poems by Thomas Campbell, including ‘Ye Mariners of England’; and two poems by Thomas Babington (Lord) Macaulay: ‘Ivry’ and ‘The Battle of Naseby’. There is no poem by William Collins: ET may refer to his much-anthologized ‘How Sleep the Brave’. ET made very different choices from Cowper in TE: ‘Yardley Oak’; two extracts from The Task, to which he gives his own headings: ‘Tea’ (IV.36–41) and ‘The Woodman’ (V.41–57). 5  See [639]. 6  Michael Drayton’s ‘Ode to the Cambro-Britons and their Harp, His Ballad of Agincourt’ begins: ‘Fair stood the wind for France’.

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The Country’s Call (chosen and edited by E. B. and Marie Sargant) presents an interesting variety of work within thirty-­two pages, and contrives to include not only Shakespeare, Isaiah, Burns, Dibdin, Browning, Wordsworth, Rossetti, Stevenson, Bret Harte, and Swinburne, but also Messrs Hardy, Newbolt, Kipling, Dobson, Binyon, and Flecker.7 But here, as in the two other books, nothing gives the book any living quality, or makes it something like the sum of its often noble parts. [. . .] PD II, 8: December 7  Bret Harte (1836–1902): American author, known for his short fiction, who (like Whitman) wrote Civil War poems. Austin Dobson (1840–1921): author of Boer War poem, ‘Rank and File’, beginning: ‘O undistinguished Dead!’

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1915 [In December 1914 Edward Thomas had become a poet. In July 1915 he would join the Artists Rifles and become a soldier. His critical writings in 1915, their number much reduced, seem variously marked by his changing ­circumstances, and his anthology This England is an act of criticism.]

This England: An Anthology from her Writers NOTE This is an anthology from the work of English writers rather strictly so called. Building round a few most English poems like ‘When icicles hang by the wall’,—excluding professedly patriotic writing because it is generally bad and because indirect praise is sweeter and more profound,—never aiming at what a committee from Great Britain and Ireland might call complete,— I wished to make a book as full of English character and country as an egg is of meat. If I have reminded others, as I did myself continually, of some of the echoes called up by the name of England, I am satisfied.1

1  ET’s ‘Note’ follows his original blueprint for the anthology. Writing to GB on 30 January 1915, he said: ‘My latest job is to be an English anthology of prose & verse to give as various an impression as possible of English life, landscape, thought, ambition & glory. The thing is to arrange it so that it will be as simple & rich as a plum pudding. Can you suggest any plums or sixpenny bits to be found in it? I am not going mainly for the explicitly patriotic. It is for the Oxford Press & is to be done quickly of course [publication was in November]. It is to cover the whole of time from the landing of Brutus to the Zeppelins’ (LGB, 242–3). ET also asked other friends for suggestions, telling Eleanor Farjeon (9 February): ‘It isn’t what Dickens “says of England” that I want. Anything that makes us feel England particularly or which we could imagine making a stranger feel it is what I want—­e.g., I am using Hotspur’s ridicule of Glendower (and of all Celts) and also “When icicles hang by the wall” from “Love’s Labour’s Lost”—George Herbert’s hymn called “The British Church”—Keats’s “Autumn”. Does that make it clearer’ (EF, 116). This England, like PBPS, is divided into sections (e.g., ‘Her Sweet Three Corners’, ‘London’, ‘The Vital Commoners’); and ET evidently saw poetry as its core: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats. The living poets included are Hardy, Doughty, de la Mare, and Bottomley, and he smuggled in two poems by Edward Eastaway (his pseudonym when he began as a poet): ‘Haymaking’ and ‘The Manor Farm’. This England, which represents English literature

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Rupert Brooke On April 23rd the poet Rupert Brooke died of sunstroke at Lemnos in his twenty-­eighth year.1 He was a second lieutenant in the Royal Naval Division, on his way to the fighting in the Dardanelles. No poet of his age was so much esteemed and admired, or was watched more hopefully. His work could not be taken soberly, whether you liked it or not. It was full of the thought, the aspiration, the indignation of youth; full of the praise of youth. Many people as the ground of wartime cultural defence, is ET’s riposte to the anthologies of ‘war poetry’ he had reviewed in 1914. His poems of early 1915 sometimes reflect his work on the anthology. In ‘Lob’ (3–4 April) material from it contributes to a further distillation of ‘English character and country’. 1  See Appendix [696]. In fact, Brooke died of septicaemia from a mosquito-bite when en route for Lemnos: the Greek island used as the main Allied naval base during the Dardanelles/Gallipoli campaign (February 1915–January 1916). Earlier, he had contracted sunstroke at Port Said. Just before his death (which occurred two days before the Gallipoli landings), Brooke had heard about his sonnet ‘The Soldier’ being quoted in St Paul’s Cathedral. Brooke was buried on the island of Skyros. This memorial article was a difficult assignment for ET. He told RF (3 May): ‘I find I can’t write. Re-reading Rupert Brooke & putting a few things together about him have rather messed me up’. He also says that an American journal, The Bellman, wants contributions from him: ‘beginning with a remark on Rupert Brooke . . . . All the papers are full of his “beauty” & an eloquent last sonnet beginning “If I should die”. He was eloquent. Men never spoke ill of him’ (RFET, 51–2). The Bellman for 9 October 1915 contains a brief anonymous item about Brooke, which does not seem quite in ET’s style: ‘He was so avid of life and love and, yet, always so conscious of death. He hurried from one experience to another—­from university to the feverish delights of London town; from the world-centre to the dream-languor of the South Sea Islands; from those faery lands of the lotos-eaters to the strenuous, terrible scenes of the world war.’ Writing to RF on 13 June 1915, once again seeming ‘messed up’ by Brooke, ET mentions an untraced (or unpublished) review of 1914 and Other Poems, distinct from his ER article: ‘I had to spoil the effect of your letter by writing 1000 words about Rupert Brooke’s posthumous book—­ not daring to say that those sonnets about him enlisting are probably not very personal but a nervous attempt to connect with himself the very widespread idea that self sacrifice is the highest self indulgence. You know. And I don’t dispute it. Only I doubt if he knew it or would he have troubled to drag in the fact that enlisting cleared him of “all the little emptiness of love”? Well, I daren’t say so, not having enlisted or fought the keeper’ (RFET, 61). A gamekeeper, with a wartime suspicion of strangers, had threatened ET and RF when they were walking in Gloucestershire. ET felt that he had reacted less bravely than RF, which perhaps fed a need to prove himself in war. In October 1916, RF asked ET ‘what I think of Rupert’. While admitting to being unsure about him, ET replied: ‘I think he succeeded in being youthful & yet intelligible & interesting (not only pathologically) more than most poets since Shelley. But thought gave him (and me) indigestion. He couldn’t mix his thought or the result of it with his feeling. He could only think about his feeling. Radically, I think he lacked power of expression. He was a rhetorician, dressing things up better than they needed. And I suspect he knew too well both what he was after & what he achieves’ (RFET, 153–4). Being obliged to write on Brooke, for an issue of ER that contained other material on the war (including some stark reportage), may have had a catalytic role in ET’s decision to enlist.

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knew the man or the reputation of his personal charm. Wherever he went he made friends, well-­wishers, admirers, adorers. He was himself a friendly man, with humour and good humour added. Successful in many fields—­he played in the eleven and the fifteen for Rugby school; he won a fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge; he was celebrated as a golden young Apollo, in Mrs Cornford’s phrase2— Magnificently unprepared For the long littleness of life,—

his attractiveness included modesty and simplicity. He stretched himself out, drew his fingers through his waved, fair hair, laughed, talked indolently, and admired as much as he was admired. No one that knew him could easily separate him from his poetry: not that they were they same, but that the two inextricably mingled and helped one another. He was tall, broad, and easy in his movements. Either he stooped, or he thrust his head forward unusually much to look at you with his steady, blue eyes. His clear, rosy skin helped to give him the look of a great girl. The papers nearly all said something about his ‘beauty’, his good looks, his ‘glamour’; one said that he was one of the handsomest Englishmen of our time. And just before he died it happened that one of his last-­published sonnets3 was quoted in St Paul’s Cathedral by the Dean:— If I should die, think only this of me:   That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be   In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,   Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England’s, breathing English air,   Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away,   A pulse in the eternal mind, no less    Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;   And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,    In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. 2  Frances Cornford’s poem, ‘On Rupert Brooke’, is a single quatrain: ‘A young Apollo, goldenhaired, / Stands dreaming on the verge of strife, / Magnificently unprepared / For the long littleness of life.’ ET cites the poem again at the end of his article. 3  Brooke’s ‘1914’ sonnet-sequence, ending with ‘V.  The Soldier’, was first published in New Numbers: see [608n.].

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So, instantly he took his share of the fame that comes to young poets dying conspicuously and unexpectedly, but not unprophesied by themselves. In his lifetime he was not widely known for his one book, Poems (1911),4 the essays on Donne and John Webster published in Poetry and Drama, and the poems published in the same quarterly, in Georgian Poetry, in the four parts of New Numbers, and here and there in the newspapers. His poems had referred a good deal to death, long before the war began. He was so eager for enjoyment and performance worthy of a very lofty conception of life and youth, that death, and old age, and the end of love, could not but confront him prodigiously. He varied between a Shelleyan eagerness and a Shelleyan despair. It was characteristic of him to apply the Shelleyan epithet ‘swift’ to a girl’s hair. Sometimes it seemed to him he could not love; sometimes that so great was his love it would endure in his dust and haunt the mean lovers of later years:—      in that instant they shall learn The shattering ecstasy of our fire,   And the weak passionless hearts will burn And faint in that amazing glow,   Until the darkness close above; And they will know—­poor fools, they’ll know!—   One moment, what it is to love.5

He wrote a threnody for the ‘Funeral of Youth’, where ‘fussy Joy’, ‘Passion, grown portly, something middle-­aged’, and ‘Ardour, the sunlight on his greying hair’, were among the mourners; but not Love—‘Love had died long ago.’ Like Shelley, he was metaphysical. One of his poems was the result of an effort to look at the world, another to see God, like a fish; while a third spoke of the cold life of the herring, but ended:— He has his hour, he has his hour.6

The ‘eternal instant’, the ‘immortal moment’, troubled his mind. He was discontented with its rareness, and even in the midst of one such moment, before exclaiming— ‘Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!’ 4  See review [521]. 5  These lines and the ‘swift’ hair belong to Brooke’s poem ‘Dust’. There may be a link with ET’s unusually transcendental poem ‘Celandine’, which concerns the flame-like apparition, for ‘a short swift eternity’, of a beloved woman with long ‘locks’ (ACP, 113). 6  Several poems by Brooke represent ‘an effort to look at the world’; ‘Heaven’ sees God ‘like a fish’; his ‘herring’ poem has not been traced.

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he must yet remember—       ‘Through glory and ecstasy we pass; Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still, When we are old, are old . . . .’7

Yet he would turn from metaphysical Platonising to very substantial enumeration of the things he loved:— So, for their sakes I loved, ere I go hence, And the high cause of Love’s magnificence, And to keep loyalties young, I’ll write those names Golden for ever, eagles, crying flames, And set them as a banner, that men may know, To dare the generations, burn, and blow Out on the wind of Time, shining and streaming . . . .8

The list includes tea-­cups and peeled sticks as well as rainbows. He celebrated the beauty and quiet of Grantchester, near Cambridge, and in a Berlin café thought of the honey for tea there. He was not going to stop short at youth any more than at vegetarianism, or walking barefoot in the dust, or bathing in the winter in the Cam. He was beginning not only to enjoy things as mortals do, but perhaps to be content to do so. It had long been true of him what he said of Donne: that ‘humour was always at his command. It was part of his realism; especially in the bulk of his work, his poems dealing with love’.9 He turned to—    lips that fade, and human laughter, And faces individual, Well this side of Paradise! . . .

and remarked— There’s little comfort in the wise.10

He did not attain the ‘Shelleyan altitude where words have various radiance rather than meaning’,11 but perhaps no poet better expressed the aspiration towards it and all the unfulfilled eagerness of ambitious self-­conscious youth. 7  ET quotes phrases from ‘The Goddess in the Wood’ and ‘Dining-Room Tea’, and dialogue from ‘The Hill’, in which the speaker’s lover speaks first. 8  From ‘The Great Lover’. 9  From ‘John Donne’ (PD: I, 2 [June 1914], 187): Brooke’s review-article on H. J. C. Grierson’s influential edition of Donne’s Poetical Works. 10  From ‘Tiare Tahiti’. 11  Phrase from last sentence of Brooke’s article ‘A Note on John Webster’ (PD I, 1 [March 1914], 32).

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His promise is more generally spoken of, but it was a rare and considerable achievement to have expressed and suggested in so many ways the promise of youth. When the war came to Europe, apparently a minor peace came to his heart, not with imagined ‘Love’s magnificence’, but ridding him of ‘all the little emptiness of love’, in a new life of which he wrote:— Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,   Where there’s no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,    Naught broken save this body, lost but breath; Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there   But only agony, and that has ending;    And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

He felt safe, ‘And if these poor limbs die, safest of all’.12 His reputation is safe: it was never greater than now, when he stands out clearly against that immense, dark background, an Apollo not afraid of the worst of life. ER: June

Collected Works of William Morris: ‘Signs of Change’, ‘Lectures on Socialism’ (Vol. XXIII); ‘Scenes from the Fall of Troy’ and Other Poems (Vol. XXIV)1 These two last volumes of the Collected Works of William Morris are among the most interesting of the twenty-­four; the twenty-­fourth, containing chiefly unpublished verses of the early and middle periods, will be for some quite the most interesting of all. [. . .] Everyone who cares will be glad to see the work now printed from manuscript. Nearly everyone will admire Morris’s judgment in rejecting it. Those 12  ET has quoted from these sonnets: ‘I. Peace’, ‘II. Safety’. His own poem ‘No one cares less than I’ is a critique of ‘III. The Dead’ and ‘V. The Soldier’. But ‘There was a time’ (written in June 1916 as he applied for the Royal Artillery and likely service at the Front), which represents his going to war as mysteriously or paradoxically motivated, involves a more intricate dialogue with Brooke’s war-sonnets (ACP, 123, 128). 1 Morris’s Collected Works, edited by his daughter May Morris, had begun to be published in 1910. ET reviewed five sets of them in B. See his review-article on the first four volumes [486]. His review of Vols XXI and XXII had appeared in February 1915; when (as a letter to GB suggests) he may also have worked on this review (LGB, 243).

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portions that are as good as the published work of their period would have added to it no more than bulk. Some, undoubtedly, are inferior. The Prologue to The Earthly Paradise can be read now chiefly with the feeling, how good this is, how like Morris that is, but how slight is the sum of it! ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’, which actually went to the printers as part of The Earthly Paradise, is worse. Look at this sentence: With none of these our story dealeth now But with a stranger who went to and fro Amid the dwellings that stood round about The wood, and hearkened tales of dark and doubt Men told thereof, silent himself, distraught Amid the wondering men with bitter thought With grief untold to these, which yet our tale Shall tell of somewhat.

It has no more principle of progressive movement than a dog has that turns round and round on a mat before lying down; and this lack is pernicious to a narrative. Look at this clause in ‘Swanhild’:          a man of might Whose fortune midst all trouble did prevail.

It is equal to one moderate adjective. In ‘In Arthur’s House’, again, we may say that two lines, like And with a sword was girt about Such as few folk will see, I doubt,

are equal to one adjective. The earlier pieces are better. Morris’s method was less applicable to Greek story, with its clear, hard-­cut lines and plain psychology, than to Arthurian story. Helen seems the wrong person to indulge in thinking about how she will look backward, with Troy still untaken. Arthurians, not Hecuba and Paris, should have spoken these words: Hec. I pray you Paris, do not speak to me As if you would shriek presently, nor look With such fierce eyes as if you hated me. Par. Mother, see now why I go not to fight: It is no use, I tell you; yea, see now Why I cannot see Helen. I loved her And do not wish to drive her mad with fear. If she should weep I think I should kill her.

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(Nobody has troubled to find out where, if not from himself, Morris got this kind of psychology from.) The cruelty of Pyrrhus, as he comes out of the wooden horse:            in yonder house They dream no doubt of walking quietly In the sweet meads again. Shall we slay them? I long to begin killing.

seems a bookish cruelty—­or is it a fisherman’s? It reminds me of the Compleat Angler. What I enjoy is Morris freshening the Greek story with what he knew well, not what he could come at by Arthurian broodings. I like to hear Paris say: Look, Helen, hence upon our walls of stone, Our great wet ditches where the carp and tench In spite of arblasts and petrariae Suck at the floating lilies all day long.

Hecuba, speaking of   some great lord with his outlandish men Come to our aid with many wains of corn.

and reminding Paris of When ’twixt the sunny houses and the sun2 You rode with Helen through the streets of Troy.

Helen, putting her arm out of the window to feel the rain, and saying: Three hours after midnight, I should think, And I hear nothing but the quiet rain. The Greeks are gone.3

And then Helen’s song, which ends: Kiss me sweet, for who knoweth What thing cometh after death.

2  ET’s poem ‘Two Houses’ (written on 22 July), which encompasses his road to war, begins: ‘Between a sunny bank and the sun / The farmhouse smiles’ (ACP, 100). 3  ET’s poem ‘Rain’ (7 January 1916) begins: ‘Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain’ (ACP, 105).

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It finds an echo in the last page of the book, in the poem ‘For the bed at Kelmscott’,4 ending: I am old and have seen Many things that have been; Both grief and peace And wane and increase. No tale I tell Of ill or well, But this I say: Night treadeth on day, And for worst or best Right good is rest.

Morris was a strong man, and knew what rest was. He admired strength, but his best writing expresses, better than action, rest, as at the end of ‘The Message of the March Wind’, or the action, fevered or heroic, which a man can dream of when he is at rest. His narratives fail because they show ad­mir­ ation for action more than the sense of action itself. No date is given to the Bed poem, but it is one of his best, being not wholly his, but the folk’s. B: June

Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Poems of Optimism; Stephen Phillips, Armageddon: A modern epic drama; Emile Cammaerts, Belgian Poems: chants patriotiques et autres poèmes, English translations by Tita Brand-­Cammaerts1 What does Ella Wheeler Wilcox say about the war? She is ‘the most widely-­read poet of the day’, yet the numbers who do not read her being still considerable, 4  Morris’s bed-poem contains the lines: ‘But kind and dear / Is the old house here’. In ET’s poem ‘Gone, gone again’ (3 September 1916) the speaker compares himself to an ‘untenanted’ ‘old house’, of which it is said: ‘In its beds have lain / Youth, love, age and pain’ (ACP, 132). ET’s quatrains, some of which are in rhymed couplets, seem to have absorbed the imagery, rhythm, and ‘folk’ quality of Morris’s poem. Morris restored and decorated a sixteenth-century Cotswolds house, Kelmscott Manor, after which he named his house in London and his Press. 1  For ET on Ella Wheeler Wilcox, see [550]; on Stephen Phillips, see [16n.]. Emile (Ėmile) Cammaerts (1878–1953): Belgian poet and playwright who wrote in both French and English. In 1908 Cammaerts had come to live in England. This review, published a week after ET had enlisted, was headed: Poems in Wartime.

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the question is of some interest. It is easily answered. She says what is being said, as she always does. She says, for example, that women are knitting. Her own particular contribution is rhyme:            

At the concert and the play Everywhere you see them knitting, Knitting, knitting, Women who the other day Thought of nothing but their frocks, Or their jewels or their locks.

It is simply an amplification of what a plain man would express thus: ‘During this war all sorts of women knitted socks and mufflers for the soldiers.’ She cannot ever stir an inch beyond what is being said. Thus in a poem called ‘Justice’ she says that though the hard-­working man often remains poor,   Yet justice sways the universe of God.

She adds, as one who has been told by the voice of God, that eventually the illumined soul will wonder that it ever doubted the fact. Even so in ‘My Flower Room’ she informs us that in her ‘flower room’:   I have met God; yea, many a radiant hour   Have talked with Him, the All-­Embracing Cause,   About His laws.

I can only say it is improbable. What Mr Stephen Phillips does is not very different, except that he has taste and literary knowledge. There are few pages in his play where I do not find something which I remember seeing in the newspapers lately. An Abbé, for example, comes to a German General to plead for Rheims Cathedral:   If Rheims Cathedral you must batter down,   You batter no mere mass of masonry:   You burn the body of an eternal soul. [. . .]

He has done more neatly and with more dignity something like what a very large number of men would do if they had this same task to perform. Like Ella Wheeler Wilcox he echoes, but in his own graceful way, what is being said at a moment when people hardly know what to think but must say something. Both say what oft was thought but has seldom so far been better expressed. Mr Phillips is the more refined and careful of the two. He will consequently have a smaller circulation.

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Neither of these two writers is in any sense national, though both have deliberately become spokesmen of common feelings, and rarely, if ever, betray any privacy. M. Cammaerts is at once more national and more in­tim­ ate. He is based not on the crowd and the newspapers, but on the people and their traditions. Some of his poems that are not connected with the war reveal his sympathy, a more clear and literary sympathy, with folk song and the folk attitude. [. . .] Apparently he does not give us literary echoes of folk song, but is a poet who really has his roots in it. This stands him in good stead when he comes to write specially patriotic poems. For all his work is naturally patriotic, derived from the religion, the past, the soil of his country. He, too, says what is being said, but not like Mr  Phillips and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. They give an abstracted echo. M. Cammaerts speaks like a single plain man, not very much loftier or cleverer than any other, but clearer and sturdier. He is an individual, not the less remarkable because     not too bright or good   For human nature’s daily food.2

When he says that grass and flowers will grow over the dead in Belgium it is real grass and flowers that we see, and not the somewhat spectral ‘violet of his native land’ that poets cause to spring from human ashes: But ’tis the grass, the grass which will be fair, Thicker, richer, deeper than before, The Yser’s grass, the green immortal grass Where soon our cows will wade and thrive, The dazzling grass, the splendid grass Where the souls of the dead will revive, Where upon each noble breast The grace of golden flowers will rest.

A poor translation does not blur that grass and those cows. There is Belgium. And this sobriety and reality lends its value to the loftier strain, for example, of ‘The New Year’s Wishes to the German Army’, which ends with this Christian equivalent to German hate: I wish that you may live to feel All we have suffered of late, So that God may spare you the punishment supreme – His eternal vengeance and hate. 2  Quotation from Wordsworth’s poem, ‘She Was a Phantom of Delight’.

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Ella Wheeler Wilcox says of Belgium: Ruined? Destroyed? Ah, no; though blood in rivers ran Down all her ancient streets; though treasures manifold, Love-­wrought, time-­mellowed, and beyond the price of gold, Are lost, yet Belgium’s star shines still in God’s vast plan.

But her words are empty. She says only what is a possible thing, for a mind with no grasp on reality, to say. M. Cammaerts knows, and makes us feel, that it is a fact. He is a Belgian poet, not a cosmic nonentity. DN: 22 July

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1916 Keats Keats was published in 1916, but its conception and writing belong to 1913. Thomas was commissioned to write this brief book in September/October 1913. Charles Cazenove, his literary agent, told him that the Edinburgh publishers T.  C.  and E.  C.  Jack had offered ‘£25 for twenty thousand words’.1 Thomas asked Eleanor Farjeon: ‘did I tell you I had accepted rotten terms to do a rotten little book on Keats’.2 He worked on Keats in November and December, while mostly staying at Selsfield House, East Grinstead, home of his friend Vivian Locke Ellis. On 5 November, he updated Farjeon: I have begun to write an abridgement of what I have been reading about Keats’ life & character. It is difficult & slow & unrewarding & my head’s thick with it & I am furthermore anxious as to whether I shall do anything but abridge— ­e.g. say something about the poems that I really think. However, it is begun.

A week later, Thomas reported: ‘I am still deep in Keats, & getting on as well as I could have hoped & better than I expected, but only by filling my days & latterly my nights with it, to the neglect of everything else.’3 The print-­date of Keats is given as July 1914, but publication was delayed until March 1916: presumably owing to the war, although another factor may have been the acquisition of T. C. and E. C. Jack by Thomas Nelson in 1915. The Jack imprint, now located in London and Edinburgh, was retained, and the book’s American publisher was the Dodge Publishing Co., New York. Keats is number 126 in a series of pocket-­sized handbooks, ‘The People’s Books’, which ran from 1912 to 1925. As a peak-­print phenomenon, with an educational mission and market, the series resembles Everyman’s Library, but comprises newly written guides rather than reprints. Like other volumes, Keats carries this encomium from the Sunday Times: ‘With the “People’s Books” in hand there should be nobody of average intelligence unable to secure self-­education.’ The list of titles includes Bacteriology, Youth and 1  ABL, 95 (11 September). ET would also receive a ‘royalty of £1 per thousand copies’, if sales exceeded 20,000 copies, ABL, 96 (18 September). 2  EF, 13.   3  EF, 43, 45.

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Sex—­ Dangers and Safeguards for Boys and Girls, Women’s Suffrage (by Millicent Fawcett), Aviation, Pond Life, Aristotle. Thomas found the format demanding: ‘It would have been easier to write 50 than 20 [thousand words].’ Yet the discipline of précis may have sharpened his critical focus: sending Keats to Cazenove, ‘in as satisfactory a state as I can bring it to’, he said: ‘If I do another such book I shall do it the better for having done this.’4 Perhaps thanks to the working-­space and breathing-­space afforded by Ellis, Thomas had also then begun to write the autobiography published posthumously as The Childhood of Edward Thomas (1938). The release of memory in Childhood prepared for the release of Thomas’s poetry a year later. But being ‘deep in Keats’ may have intersected with memoir as an in­spir­ation­al matrix. In ‘Keats and Edward Thomas’ John Burrow argues that ‘the particular strength of [Thomas’s] poems testifies as much to an intelligent reading of Keats as to the acknowledged friendship and advice of Robert Frost’.5 Besides Keats’s broader influence on the vision, forms, and textures of Thomas’s poetry, several poems directly engage with Keats’s odes: ‘Melancholy’, ‘October’, ‘There’s nothing like the sun’, ‘The Thrush’, and ‘Liberty’.6 ‘Melancholy’ (April 1915) belongs to Thomas’s period of decision-­making about the war; the other poems to Autumn 1915 and his first ex­peri­ence of army camp. Thomas’s admiration for Keats spans his critical career. In 1901, discussing poets’ dealings with ‘Nature’, he judged that ‘Keats, almost alone, entirely lacks inartistic intention’; and in 1902 Keats figures among the ‘few books or passages in books . . . which quite overcome my intelligence, because (I think) I am so much in sympathy with them that they seem to belong to my own experience’.7 One book listed in the brief bibliography for Keats is Ernest de Sélincourt’s edition of The Poems of John Keats, about which Thomas had enthused in 1905, and from which he takes the text of Keats’s poems; another is A. C. Bradley’s Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909). Reviewing Bradley, Thomas stresses his enlightened advocacy of Keats.8 Whereas Shelley retained Thomas’s primary devotion as a Platonic ideal of poetry, Keatsian ‘intensity’ may have provided a more immediate aesthetic (and perhaps psychological) model. Thomas self-­revealingly suggests that Keats’s ‘morbidity of temperament’ was inseparably kin to the sensitive passive qualities without which his poetry would have been nothing. I do not mean that his poetry sprang from his 4  ABL, 537 (10 November); ABL, 541 (16 December). 5  John Burrow, ‘Keats and Edward Thomas’, Essays in Criticism 7, 4 (October 1957), 404–15 (404). 6  ACP, 85, 101–4. 7 Review of George Bourne’s The Bettesworth Book (DC: 25 November 1901); letter, 10 November 1902 (LGB, 40). 8  See [122], [366].

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morbidity simply, but that both had to do with the brooding intensity of his receptiveness, that they inhabited the same enchanted treasure-­caves.9

Keats’s morbidity, or sense of mortality, evidently took on new meaning for Thomas as he went to war. Two other ‘war poets’ read Thomas’s Keats. The Keats-­obsessed Wilfred Owen annotated his copy: ‘June 1916, Witley Camp’. In 1918 Edmund Blunden found the book in a hole in the wall beside his bed, when he was billeted at a ruined house in Arras (Thomas had been killed at Arras on 9 April 1917). Blunden liked to think that this was Thomas’s own copy.10 In the following extracts from Keats, the chief omissions are some primarily biographical sections: the first chapter (‘Keats and his Friends’) and most of the last chapter. Chapters II and IV are printed in full. Chapter II: The First Book of Poems and Other Early Poems Keats began to write poetry with the inevitable imitation of the forms and tones which he admired in his contemporaries and the older poets, but with an exceptional fidelity to his own thought, feeling, and observation. Of his friends, his personal tastes, his admirations and aspirations, his first book, published in 1817, when he was twenty-­one, tells quite directly far more than any book of a contemporary. Very few pieces are mere exercises in sentiment. In the great majority he is curiously and deliberately true to the facts of outward form and inward feeling. The poem, for example, addressed to the girl who was afterwards his sister-­in-­law,11 while indulging in the fancy Hadst thou liv’d when chivalry Lifted up her lance on high . . .

is also a detailed flattery of what the poet admired in her, from the eyelashes that were like    the feathers from a crow, Fallen on a bed of snow,

to the neat ankles, and especially     those beauties, scarce discern’d, Kept with such sweet privacy,

9  ‘I have a horrid Morbidity of Temperament’: Keats, letter to Benjamin Haydon (10–11 May 1817); Keats, 11. 10  Barry Webb, Edmund Blunden: A Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 56. 11  The poem is ‘To ****’: Keats’s prospective sister-in-law was Georgiana Augusta Wylie.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 That they seldom meet the eye Of the little loves that fly Round about with eager pry. Saving when, with freshening lave, Thou dipp’st them in the taintless wave, Like twin water lillies, born In the coolness of the morn.

And so, in other classes of poems, he reveals The brain, new-­stuff ’d, in youth, with triumphs gay Of old romance.12

But not only this, the things seen in books and Nature are also revealed, often together, as when he pictures the nymphs                 wiping Cherishingly Diana’s timorous limbs

and her mantle at the bath’s edge moving With the subsiding crystal: as when ocean Heaves calmly its broad swelling smoothness o’er Its rocky marge, and balances once more The patient weeds; that now unshent by foam Feel all about their undulating home.13

Whole sonnets are given to his extreme delight in Chapman’s Homer and the Elgin Marbles. He glances at his social pleasures, at his dislikes, as for The scarlet coats that pester human-­kind.14

Deepest of all, he went into his own poetic beliefs, his scorn for the age of Pope, his acknowledgement of the ‘fairer season’ that had come—        fine sounds are floating wild About the earth;

his enjoyment of visible, tangible, audible, beauty; his forward looking towards the time when he must bear the ‘burden and the mystery of all this unintelligible world’, and perhaps help To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man,

12  Quotation from ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, stanza V. 13  ‘Sleep and Poetry’, 372–80.    14  Keats’s Epistle ‘To my Brother George’, 130.

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or be one of the poet kings Who simply tell the most heart-­easing things;

his awe and fear of the task.15 Therefore hardly a page of this imperfect book lacks some substantial excuse for pleasure as well as interest. The very quality which made an approach to perfection seldom possible is what also gave them substance, i.e. Keats’s fidelity to the observation or feeling of the hour. His early poems are an in­tim­ate poetic journal. The verse form was the complimentary crown placed, out of gratitude, upon the pleasures of his life. That he really hoped for poetry to spring direct from these pleasures is shown by the sonnet ‘On leaving some Friends at an early Hour’: Give me a golden pen, and let me lean   On heap’d up flowers, in regions clear, and far;   Bring me a tablet whiter than a star, Or hand of hymning angel, when ’tis seen The silver strings of heavenly harp atween:   And let there glide by many a pearly car,   Pink robes, and wavy hair, and diamond jar, [?tiar] And half discovered wings, and glances keen. The while let music wander round my ears,   And as it reaches each delicious ending,    Let me write down a line of glorious tone, And full of many wonders of the spheres:   For what a height my spirit is contending!    ’Tis not content so soon to be alone.

A verse beginning I had a dove and the sweet dove died16

he actually wrote ‘to some Music as it was playing’ late in 1818; and we know that he wrote sonnets in Burns’s cottage, on Ben Nevis, and in sight of Ailsa Craig, straight from his first shock of emotion. And these last two and several other sonnets, like that on Chapman’s Homer and the second of the two on the Elgin Marbles, prove that the brief disciplinary form of the sonnet, with an emotion strong enough to crush mere fancy and observation, could 15 ‘Sleep and Poetry’, 228–9; ‘the burthen of the mystery . . . / Of all this unintelligible world’: Wordsworth, ‘Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey’; ‘Sleep and Poetry’, 247, 268. 16  This poem is ‘Song’.

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combine rapidly to fine though sometimes broken results.17 But more often than not, at the beginning, he was content with ‘a line of glorious tone’, with close and lovely details like      the sweet buds which with a modest pride Pull droopingly, in slanting curve aside, Their scantly leaved, and finely tapering stems, Had not yet lost those starry diadems Caught from the early sobbing of the morn.18

They were observed as he walked, or even as he lay writing, for he says once:           These things I thought While, in my face, the freshest breeze I caught. E’en now I’m pillow’d on a bed of flowers.

The beauty of Nature immediately suggested the beauty of poetry and the translation of one into the other: as he says, No sooner had I stepp’d into these pleasures Than I began to think of rhymes and measures: The air that floated by me seem’d to say ‘Write! thou wilt never have a better day.’ And so I did.19

Perhaps with a misgiving that many of these lovely things were not sufficiently made his own he sowed very thick among them words expressive of his own delight in them—­words like ‘soft’, ‘tender’, ‘pleasant’, ‘sweet’, ‘tremulous’, ‘tremble’, ‘nestle’, ‘luxury’, ‘languishment’, ‘trance’. Catalogues of beautiful objects came to him easily. It was all very well to give his brothers a catalogue of things seen from the coach as he rode to Southampton—‘dusty Hedges—­sometimes Ponds—­then nothing—­then a little Wood with trees look you like Launce’s Sister “as white as a Lily and as small as a Wand”—then came houses which died away into a few straggling Barns—­then came hedge trees aforesaid again. As the Lamplight crept along the following things were discovered—“long heath broom furze”—Hurdles here and there half a Mile—­Park palings when the Windows of a House were 17  ET usually attacks the sonnet as a formal straitjacket (see [219], [518]); but here he recognizes its possible ‘disciplinary’ role: a role it may have in the deep structures of his own poetry. 18  John Burrow suggests that these lines from ‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’ (3–7) influenced ET’s poem ‘It rains’ (ACP, 121), in which Keats’s ‘starry diadems’ become ‘great diamonds / Of rain on the grassblades’, and ‘the parsley flower’ has a ‘fine stalk’ (Burrow, ‘Keats and Edward Thomas’, 409). 19  Epistle ‘To my Brother George’, 121–3; Epistle ‘To Charles Cowden Clarke’, 97–100.

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always discovered by reflection—­one Nymph of Fountain—­N.B. Stone [? the nymph was stone]—lopped Trees—­Cow ruminating—­ditto Donkey—­Man and Woman going gingerly along—­William seeing his Sisters over the Heath—­John waiting with a Lanthorn for his Mistress—­Barber’s Pole—­ Doctor’s Shop:’20 it was not so well to attempt ramming such things into verse. He had not yet learned, or set himself the lesson, that a gradual ripening, a natural overflowing, was perhaps necessary to poetry. It was therefore to be expected that a disconnected rhyming of his pleasures and hopes should gain attention only from his friends and his natural kindred. To like, or to be capable of, watching minnow and goldfinch is not obligatory to a lover of poetry, but it is almost so to one who is to enjoy many of these poems. By writing them Keats discovered his power to fit ‘aptest words to things’21—if not its inadequacy for poetry—­and proved himself, and began to train himself, to be, though a lover of the moon, a most sub­lun­ ary poet, earthly, substantial, and precise, a man, but for his intensity, singularly like his fellow-­men, and more like them than any other great poet since Shakespeare. Chapter III: Endymion Two months after the Poems were published, Keats began to write Endymion, either in April or May, 1817, at Carisbrooke. He continued it at Margate and Oxford—­once at the rate of a thousand lines in three weeks—­and finished it in November at Burford Bridge. By the time he had revised it and came to write a preface for it in April 1818, he saw it as showing ‘great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished’, but beyond revision; for ‘the foundations are too sandy’. Fancies of the poet-­lover who ‘gave meek Cynthia her Endymion’ had formed part of ‘I stood tip-­toe’. Endymion was, in fact, built on the same foundations as the Poems of 1817. To make a long narrative poem seemed to him, a great lover of The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, and The Excursion, to be a right and high thing. It became also a sort of allegory of the spiritual development which he forecast for himself. Narrative and allegory alike are buried deep in the beautiful flowers scattered over them profusely and confusedly. The whole is not a meal, but a week’s rations, of claret and ratafia cakes, apart

20  Letter to George and Thomas Keats (15 April 1817). Launce’s Sister: in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, II.iii, Launce says: ‘this staff is my sister, for, look you, she is as white as a lily and as small as a wand’. 21  Phrase from Tennyson, ‘In Memoriam’, LXXV.

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from certain too loosely connected passages of difficult thinking, for which prayer and fasting are the only preparation. No poem of the same length is so crammed with loveliness and love of loveliness. No English poem is so impossible to read through with a sense of anything in it before and after the lines immediately under the eye. The parts, so far from aiding one another, are rivals. Moreover, each part is broken up by the multitude of details which in any case would have been difficult of connection, and also by a lack of continuity in construction, no doubt fostered by the habit of dealing with separate beauties instead of organic ideas; while a trick of style, which puts a full stop anywhere but at the end of a line, only exaggerates this discontinuity.22 Add to these objections, that as thick as the beauties are the expressions of incontinent, soft feeling, the languors and luxuries, which might almost have been spread over the beauties, in the absence of one sustained imaginative impulse and emotion, to give them life. Imagine the masque in The Tempest, imagine the opening words of Iris and Ceres, multiplied fifty times: the four thousand lines, even from Shakespeare’s hand, could hardly have been much more sumptuous and fresh at once than Endymion, though they would have been less luscious. Wherever Keats has an opportunity, as in the chorus of Pan’s worshippers, of knitting his choice things together, he does so, with a country basket like this:           O thou, to whom Broad leaved fig trees even now foredoom Their ripen’d fruitage; yellow girted bees Their golden honeycombs; our village leas Their fairest blossom’d beans and poppied corn; The chuckling linnet its five young unborn, To sing for thee; low creeping strawberries Their summer coolness; pent up butterflies Their freckled wings;

still more in this loftier strain:   O Hearkener to the loud clapping shears, While ever and anon to his shorn peers A ram goes bleating: Winder of the horn, When snouted wild-­boars routing tender corn Anger our huntsmen: Breather round our farms, 22  ET himself wrote over a dozen poems in couplet-form. His consciousness of Keats’s couplets may have influenced his varied use of them in poems such as ‘Man and Dog’, ‘House and Man’, ‘Lob’, ‘The Brook’ (ACP, 56, 60, 76, 96).

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To keep off mildews, and all weather harms: Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds, That come a swooning over hollow grounds, And wither drearily on barren moors: Dread opener of the mysterious doors Leading to universal knowledge—­see, Great son of Dryope, The many that are come to pay their vows With leaves about their brows!23

This is the thoroughly and rustically English, ‘Greek’ style of the Elizabethans, and but for those ‘undescribed sounds’ and ‘mysterious doors’ might have come from the same hand as You nymphs, called Naiads, of the wandering brooks, With your sedged crowns and ever harmless looks . . .24

But he had a sense of other things, such as brought ‘round the heart an in­des­ crib­able feud’ and ‘dizzy pain’, on beholding the Elgin Marbles’. In Lemprière’s classical dictionary he would have read how Orion rid Chios of wild beasts in order to gain the king’s daughter, Hero, and how the king made him drunk and put out his eyes as he lay asleep on the seashore, and how Orion, putting a man on his back to guide him, went to where he could turn his eyes towards the east, and how the rising sun gave him back his sight. Keats, merely for a comparison, made the lines, Like old Deucalion mountain’d o’er the flood, Or blind Orion hungry for the morn.25

It is not the Shakespearian sublime, nor quite the Miltonic, but sublime it is. In the first of these two styles some of the most satisfying things in Endymion are written, and particularly the Indian maiden’s description of Bacchus and his crew, merry beyond the dreams of Titian, high fantastical too, and magic­al when the Satyrs answer the questioners: For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree; For wine we left our heath, and yellow brooms,   And cold mushrooms . . .26

There is also a third style, the style of Cupid’s invitation to Endymion, where Shakespeare and Milton blend with Keats: 23  Endymion, I.251–9, 279–92.    24  From the masque in The Tempest, IV.i. 25  Endymion, II.197–8.   26  Endymion, IV.232–4.   

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         Here is wine, Alive with sparkles—­never, I aver, Since Ariadne was a vintager, So cool a purple: taste these juicy pears, Sent me by sad Vertumnus, when his fears Were high about Pomona: here is cream, Deepening to richness from a snowy gleam; Sweeter than that nurse Amalthea skimm’d For the boy Jupiter: and here, undimm’d By any touch, a bunch of blooming plums Ready to melt between an infant’s gums: And here is manna pick’d from Syrian trees, In starlight, by the three Hesperides.27

There is a fourth, an almost French, witty, and decorated style, foreshadowing that of ‘Lamia’, as in the speech of Venus: Visit thou my Cythera: thou wilt find Cupid well-­natured, my Adonis kind,

and the picture of      courteous fountains to all cups outreach’d; And plunder’d vines, teeming exhaustless, pleach’d New growth about each shell and pendent lyre;28

which is like the ceiling of the Opera house in Paris, and at the opposite extreme from the magic which Keats exhibited for the first time in Endymion. The prevailing beauty is twofold. It is composed first of natural things of every order between the vast and the small, the vast often attaining the grand­eur of that    one fair palace, that far far surpass’d, Even for common bulk, those olden three, Memphis, and Babylon, and Nineveh:

the small, often to the magic sweetness of Honey from out the gnarled hive I’ll bring, And apples, wan with sweetness, gather thee,— Cresses that grow where no man may them see, And sorrel untorn by the dew-­claw’d stag.29

27  Endymion, II.441–53.   28  Endymion, III.918–19, 926–8.    29  Endymion, III.847–9, IV.682–5.

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The second element is the human, usually blent with the other, but distinguished by utterances of philosophic solemnity that are really Keats’s own, and by pictorial, statuesque, slender, and faintly unreal figures, who mingle divinity now with tragedy, now with arch comedy. Where this beauty has sway the verse disencumbers itself, running fresh as well as full, either ­massive or light and clear, with pauses of natural fitness whether at the end of a line or not, and possessing that frequent combination and interchange of vowels, as in Let me have music dying, and I seek No more delight—­I bid adieu to all,30

which had its source in his luxuriousness, aided no doubt, but never overmastered, by theory. It is hardly necessary to dwell on the faults. The story has to be dug for with a determination which the conduct of it does not foster. In what obscures it lies the charm of the poem. That charm is itself modified by the lack of a harmonising unity and continuity, not merely in the narrative, but in the spirit. [. . .] Chapter IV: ‘Isabella’, ‘Lamia’, ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, and the Odes Immediately on finishing Endymion, Keats wrote ‘Isabella’. He was then ­disturbed by the sailing of his brother and sister-­in-­law to America. The walking tour followed, and he wrote a few sonnets, some pedestrian verses, and ‘Meg Merrilies’. When he had been a month back in Hampstead Endymion was attacked by the Quarterly Review.31 A month later he met Fanny Brawne. Then his brother Tom died. So passed the year 1818. That winter he began ‘Hyperion’ and within a year it had been abandoned and most of the poems written which were published with it in July 1820, together with ‘La Belle 30  Endymion, IV.140–1. 31  The anonymous reviewer, now thought to be John Wilson Croker, declared, for instance: ‘This author is a copyist of [Leigh] Hunt; but he is more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd than his prototype . . . . There is hardly a complete couplet inclosing a complete idea in the whole book. He wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas but of sounds . . .’ (Quarterly Review 19 [April 1818], 204–8). In ‘Adonais’, XXXVI Shelley calls the reviewer a ‘deaf and viperous murderer’. Byron less sympathetically remarks in Don Juan, XI.lx: ‘’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, / Should let itself be snuff ’d out by an article’; although the opening lines of the stanza phrase this (false) idea rather more positively: ‘John Keats, who was kill’d off by one critique, / Just as he really promis’d something great’.

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Dame sans Merci’ and more of the finest work which remained unpublished at his death. ‘Isabella’, so soon after Endymion, was already a masterpiece. It was the first long poem in which Keats put all his luxury, all his pitifulness, in perfect order and combination, and the more effective for being subordinated to the clear telling of a story which was in itself sufficiently interesting. It has some excess of explicit pallor and tenderness, but, for the rest, the poet’s pity blends with the happiness, then the sorrow, of his characters, with the richness and splendour of things mentioned—­the broidery, the hyacinth and musk, June, the ‘warm Indian clove’, ‘roses amorous of the moon’, the ‘mid days of Autumn’, the ‘spangly gloom’, ‘the ancient harps’, ‘Araby’, ‘sad Melpomene’, and the like—­and with the still greater richness and splendour in the sound of the verses. The stanza form helped in two ways. It was a discipline that forbade loose running on: it exhibited the poet’s choiceness of detail better than the couplets of Endymion, and, at the same time, each stanza being complete in itself gave more excuse for it. There had been no such layer upon layer of richness, corporeal and incorporeal, since Spenser. It was reserved for Keats to make tragedy a luxury that had its own fit company of luxurious things appealing to sight, hearing, touch, and scent, in art and nature; and although a story was involved, ‘Isabella’ became, with the help of the adagio stanza,32 a very still poem, as if all that takes place in its ‘quiet glooms’ were seen as Isabella saw Lorenzo’s spirit: As when of healthful midnight sleep bereft,   Thinking on rugged hours and fruitless toil, We put our eyes into a pillowy cleft,   And see the spangly gloom froth up and boil . . .

as if the poet was somehow sequestered, like the dead Lorenzo who saw his mistress ‘distant in Humanity’.33 The inactive pity, the unreluctant and even complacent melancholy, that see in the increasing sorrow of their heroine or victim a richer zest, were new then to poetry, though the nineteenth century staled them. For the moment of this passage: Great bliss was with them, and great happiness Grew, like a lusty flower in June’s caress.

32  ET may think that the eight-line stanza of ‘Isabella’ is also slowed by its rhyme-scheme: ABABABCC. 33  Quotations from stanzas XIX, XLI, XXXIX.

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Parting they seem’d to tread upon the air,   Twin roses by the zephyr blown apart Only to meet again more close, and share   The inward fragrance of each other’s heart. She, to her chamber gone, a ditty fair   Sang, of delicious love and honey’d dart; He with light steps went up a western hill, And bade the sun farewell, and joy’d his fill;34

for one moment the sun strikes across the mouth of this dim, melodious cave, making its dimness thicker and more opulent. For, says the poet, ‘there is richest juice in poison-­flowers’.35 Thus all Keats’s vivacity and judgment, and clear, determined thinking about man and nature, seem to have weighed less than that sense of the miseries of the world which came upon him when he reflected that he was to die, and that ‘women have cancers’.36 Keats seldom, after ‘Isabella’, wrote a poem where this sense does not prevail, however quietly. Even ‘Fancy’ is a kind of incantation or receipt against it: Let the winged Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home.

It was in the measure of the two earlier poems on the Mermaid Tavern and Robin Hood. Written while Endymion was being finished, these were among the last done in the social spirit of the epistles and other poems of 1817, yet they were cheerful mainly in retrospect, upon a groundwork of regret: Silent is the ivory shrill Past the heath and up the hill; There is no mid-­forest laugh, Where lone Echo gives the half To some wight, amaz’d to hear Jesting, deep in forest drear.37

There is yet another, contained in a letter to Reynolds, of February 1818; it is a translation of a thrush’s song that told him he was ‘right to have no idea but of the morning’: O fret not after knowledge! I have none,   And yet my song comes native with the warmth.

34  From stanzas IX–­X. 35  Stanza XIII ends: ‘Even bees, the little almsmen of spring-bowers, / Know there is richest juice in poison-flowers’. 36  Letter to Benjamin Bailey (10 June 1818).    37  Quotation from ‘Robin Hood’.

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The great odes, the poem to Autumn, and ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, could never have been translated out of a thrush’s song.38 Love for vanished, inaccessible, inhuman things, almost for death itself—­ regret—­ and the consolations offered by the intensity which makes pleasure and pain so much alike—­are the principal moods of these poems.39 Such action as there is in ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ is far more subdued than that in ‘Isabella’: it is no more than is necessary to bring a man and woman together alone, luxuriously, in perfect love, in a soft chamber, islanded in the midst of noisy, ribald enemies and a wild winter night—‘Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed’ to poet and ­lovers. It ends: And they are gone: aye, ages long ago These lovers fled away into the storm.

More richly and more completely than in ‘Isabella’ are all possible choice, lovely, and sweet things mingled, expressed in words with sounds and associations equalling them for choiceness, loveliness, sweetness. ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ is the most perfect thing of its kind written by Keats or any other poet. Though long, it is not too long: it can be browsed on, but not skipped. In fact it is impossible to suppose that poetry of this immobile, sumptuous, antiquarian kind can go beyond it. Among Keats’s poems it equals the best odes and ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, but is likely at times to be placed above them. The ‘Ode to Psyche’ has an element of narrative and dialogue. It was ‘the first and the only one’, said Keats as he copied it for his brother in April 1819, with which he had taken ‘even moderate pains’: ‘St. Agnes Eve’ was then awaiting the revision given to it, as we know, with more than moderate pains. He was, he said, ‘more orthodox than to let a heathen Goddess be so neglected’ as Psyche had been in classical times. The narrative

38  This response to Keats’s sonnet, ‘O Thou whose face has felt the Winter’s wind’, has links with ET’s own poem, ‘The Thrush’: one of his ‘Keatsian’ group in Autumn 1915. The thrush is asked: ‘Is it more that you know / Than that, even as in April, / So in November, / Winter is gone that must go?’ (ACP, 102). 39  ET’s ‘Liberty’, written shortly after ‘The Thrush’, contains the lines: ‘And yet I still am half in love with pain, / With what is imperfect, with both tears and mirth, / With things that have an end, with life and earth’ (ACP, 104).

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passages are like the best in Endymion. The poem rises from ‘delicious moan’ to where dark-­cluster’d trees Fledge the wild-­ridged mountains steep by steep,

only to place there a sanctuary, with A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,   To let the warm Love in;

and so ends—­ having touched every mood of Endymion swiftly and exquisitely—­with a dramatic archness. ‘To Autumn’, also, it would be perverse to class with ‘Isabella’ mainly on account of the customary sadness of Autumn, the use of ‘soft-­dying’, ‘wailful’, ‘mourn’, and ‘dies’, in the last verse, and in the last line, And gathering swallows twitter in the skies—

something light, thin, cold, and vanishing, especially by comparison with the mellowness and slowness of the other verses, with all their long ‘oo’ and ‘ou’ and ‘aw’ and ‘z’ sounds, as in the line, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

The ‘Ode on Melancholy’ is one of the central poems of this period, admitting, as it does so fully, and celebrating, the relationship between melancholy and certain still pleasures. Nowhere is the connoisseurship of the quiet, withdrawn spectator so extremely and remorselessly put.40 The ‘rich anger’ of the mistress is to be a precious, delicious object; her ‘peerless eyes’ are to be devoured as roses. Richer juice could not be extracted from poison-­ flowers. Miss Mary Suddard, one of his best critics, says that ‘Keats, like Jaques, spent his whole life chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy and, still more, of sweet and bitter sensation’; and the poem, taken literally, seems to say that the bitter with the sweet is worth while—­is the necessary woof of life—­and makes for the fulness of the banquet, which is so gorgeous that death seems its solemn closing music, and it is ‘rich to die’. In short, he flatters life and the bitterness of it, and men that have to drink it. Since the Greeks called the Furies the Blessed Ones there has been no choicer flattery

40  As in his critiques of Walter Pater, ET increasingly attacked ‘spectatorship’—partly, because he understood its temptations. His own Keats-inflected poem, ‘Melancholy’, at once indulges and questions a mood of withdrawal from life: ‘if I feared the solitude / Far more I feared all company’ (ACP, 85).

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of life. Like the other odes, but above them, this one on Melancholy touches the summit of expression for what Miss Suddard called the ‘ruminant’ nature.41 ‘To a Nightingale’ is in the same tone, except that it has an outdoor setting, and is tinged with action, and comes to an end with a slow restoration of every-­day light and with a question. Nor does it pretend to content. There is a pain in the numbness, a desire of escape from the ‘embalmed darkness’, an impatience of any end to the banquet saving death. Yet the variety in the richness of the poem is made by that very pain, desire, and impatience. To complain of the opening, My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains   My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

is useless. For England does not send poets into exile with crowns; our civ­il­ isa­tion is by no means assured what is good and what is evil, and whether the evil is to be rejected, since, after all, men are lower than the angels. Only a very bold man, outside a pulpit, would pronounce that such poetry infects life and literature. What is most excellent in its kind establishes that kind. You cannot prove that this poem hastens the decay of those who incline towards such things in life and in literature; still less, that to take it away is to arrest their falling. Many that admire it have no such inclination, and will suffer from a vision of these things at best no more than men in the old days suffered by thinking of Paradise. Instead of corrupting them it will deepen their taste of life, and perhaps also their understanding. They will enjoy it; their enjoyment of very different things, like Pindar’s or Shelley’s poetry, will be increased. But I am not attempting to answer the man who should say that after boiling the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, he found only peevishness at the bottom of it. I do think, however, that melancholy (in spite of the ode) is too disparaging a name for this mood, and that we have been deceived into suspecting evil of the poem because it is beautiful and attributes divinity to what we think a weakness. None today would complain if the thought had remained in this lyrical form:

41  ET is quoting from S[arah] J[ulie] Mary Suddard, Keats, Shelley and Shakespeare: Studies & Essays in English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 74–5. Suddard (1888– 1909), bilingual in English and French, was a critical prodigy who died just after her twenty-first birthday. Reviewing Suddard’s book, ET had praised her ‘combination of cool and logical reasonableness and of extreme sensitiveness’, and said: ‘She had learnt, and that thoroughly, more of what constitutes an organic style than most critics dimly apprehend after half a lifetime’ (DC: 15 November 1912).

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Welcome joy, and welcome sorrow,   Lethe’s weed and Hermes’ feather; Come today, and come tomorrow;   I do love you both together!

we should begin to talk earnestly of the gospel of pain.42 I shall not set about a demonstration from the beginning that the ode truly is one of the things that are most excellent. I will, however, mention one indication of its excellence. It and the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ are of a texture so consummate and consistent that the simple line, The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-­tree wild,

in one of them, and an equally simple line in the other, With forest branches and the trodden weed,

both gain from their environment an astonishing beauty, profound and touching. The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is preferred, by some people and some moods, to the ‘Nightingale’ and the rest, because it is the most universal and intellectual, the calmest as well as the stillest, of all. Its personality is submerged, and the more intense for that. The poet flatters the figures on the urn because they are dead and fixed in attitudes of desire, so that they will never suffer like living men,       a heart high-­sorrowful and cloy’d, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue,

and forasmuch as they have the intensity of beauty which can ‘tease us out of thought’ into their own marble blessedness. The poem has two doubtful blemishes, the suggestion of a pun in ‘O Attic shape! Fair attitude!’ and the odd break in the last line but one which compels us to attribute ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’

to the Urn, and —that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,

42  The problematics of the term ‘melancholy’ resurface at the climax of ET’s poem ‘October’: ‘And this mood by the name of melancholy / Shall no more blackened and obscured be’ (ACP, 101). The quotation is from Keats’s ‘Fragment’.

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to the poet. But this last may be an accidental typographical error, and these things rarely, as a matter of fact, modify in the least degree the impression left. The poem also is free from all but the lightest touch of the morbidity of ‘Melancholy’ and the ‘Nightingale’, if indeed ‘A burning forehead, and a parching tongue’ and ‘For ever panting’ are felt as morbid—­I incline to think they are universal as the rest, as the whole is. Thus in the odes the poet made for himself a form in which the essence of all his thought, feeling, and observation, could be stored without overflowing or disorder; of its sources in his daily life there was no more shown than made his poems quick instead of dead. Their perfection is like that of a few of Milton’s and Spenser’s poems. They are among the unquestionable mortal achievements. ‘On Indolence’ would have been another, could it have had Keats’s final revision: as it is, the line, A pet lamb in a sentimental farce,

and not that alone, confronts us with the writer’s daily life, restoring the atmosphere of the letter where he speaks of that ‘delightful sensation, about three degrees on this side of faintness’, in which apparently the ode was ­conceived.43 ‘Lamia’, written in July and September 1819, is a narrative poem almost as different as possible from ‘Isabella’. The story, clear, well-­balanced, and essential, gives form to the substantial beauty of the whole. The masculine side of Keats, supported by a study of John Dryden, has the upper hand in it. The nymph, indeed, is timorous and faint to excess at the approach of Hermes, but the poet’s comment, Into the green-­recessed woods they flew; Nor grew they pale, as mortal lovers do,

has an adult cynic humour, and but for There is not such a treat among them all, Haunters of cavern, lake, and waterfall, As a real woman . . .

his attitude is firm as well as masculine throughout. He was in the mood of his sonnet on Fame, where he bids poets ‘repay her scorn for scorn’—a little below the masculine loftiness of the sonnet. Even where Keats is obviously speaking it is in a more intellectual and assured tone, almost as much unlike himself as Dryden was unlike Shakespeare: 43  Letter (Journal) to George and Georgiana Keats (19 March 1819).

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There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings . . .44

Everything is hard and clear, many things splendid. It would have satisfied the age of Dryden almost as well as it does our own. And that is not quite perfectly. To some extent the poem was a tour de force in an external, ‘classical’ style. There were approaches to it in Endymion, while ‘Cap and Bells’ is a further development, where the decadence is plain. I think ‘Lamia’ contains the symptoms of the decadence. It tastes somewhat of metal, not, like ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, written a little before it, of ‘honey wild’. The ballad form, also, of ‘La Belle Dame’ was slightly foreign to Keats: it helped his lighter, freer, less congested style—­the style of ‘Robin Hood’ and of ‘O sorrow, sorrow’, the one purely lyric song in Endymion—­to meet the style of the odes, to a result only equalled among the odes. More than in them his thought and experience were subdued; they were suppressed; yet they were not destroyed, for it is one of the wisest poems of the world. Beauty, transiency, and dissatisfied desire, speak through it, and that in a narrative which is quintessential, yet as light as a lyric. It is the lightest of all Keats’s poems. Almost equally different from ‘Lamia’, yet of that period, is the fragment of ‘The Eve of Saint Mark’. The contrasted richness is like that of ‘St. Agnes’ Eve’, which was being written during the same months of 1819, but with a tone and metre domestic rather than stately, by comparison. But so far as the poet went, he seems to have become entangled in visible things not sufficiently under control as to be effective, except separately and one by one. It anticipates the pre-­Raphaelites, but with a fresh early savour. It might have grown to a poem as much like ‘Christabel’ as another poem could be. Some of the false impressiveness of a torso that never was a whole clings about it. But the ‘unmatur’d green valleys cold’, the ‘Azure saints in silver rays’, and the solitary maiden, Bertha,        with bright drooping hair And slant book, full against the glare. Her shadow, in uneasy guise, Hover’d about, a giant size, On ceiling-­beam and old oak chair, The parrot’s cage, and panel square; And the warm angled winter screen, 44  ‘Lamia’, I.144–5, 330–1; II.231–4.

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these were, in spite of Chatterton, practically new things, and better than all of the same kind that came after them. Finally, Keats must have the credit of abandoning the poem. Why he did so is unknown. Perhaps ‘Cap and Bells’, where several Berthas and St. Mark’s Eve are mentioned, crossed the path of the poem and scared it and its ‘spirit of town quietude’. Or it may be simply that he felt it tapering off too slenderly to give more than ‘the sensation of walking about an old country town in a coolish evening’; so he spoke of it in September 1819 at Winchester.45 Chapter V: ‘Hyperion’ and the Last Sonnet It was at this time that Keats was planning to live at Westminster and turn journalist. He had finished ‘Lamia’ and ‘St. Agnes Eve’ and that social task, ‘Otho the Great’, performed with the stage directly in view, but destined to disappointment. The great fertile concentration of a year was breaking up. Fanny Brawne was gaining upon him. In that same September ‘Hyperion’ was put aside. With the fragment of it, the volume of 1820 ended. Keats himself said that he put it aside because of the Miltonisms of style in it. Possibly the spirit that finished ‘Lamia’ was incompatible with ‘Hyperion’. The poet was towering in ‘Hyperion’. The divine theme had lured him, like Endymion, into what he might have felt too open and direct a declaration of his own thought, as when Oceanus says: We fall by course of Nature’s law, not force Of thunder, or of Jove . . .

and         ’tis the eternal law That first in beauty should be first in might.46

He had not dimmed the brightness of the gods, but the pale cast of thought had touched them. One of his powers is used, and perfectly, to paint the Titans in their ‘covert drear’: Scarce images of life, one here, one there, Lay vast and edgeways; like a dismal cirque

45  Letter to George Keats (20 September).   

46  ‘Hyperion’, II.181–2, 228–9.

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Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor, When the chill rain begins at shut of eve . . .47

But this still life could not be stirred into speech and action without a dangerous transition of styles. These giant figures in repose, like ‘Druid stones’, with ‘Druid locks’, seem not meant for the same poem as when they are debating. The result of these differences and of the long human-­thoughtful speeches is that the action is not greatly more epic than in Endymion. Sometimes the speeches are of epic majesty, worthy of a poem that might have been second only to Paradise Lost. Sometimes they are of a human softness and regretfulness, as in Saturn’s      and I am smother’d up, And buried from all godlike exercise Of influence benign on planets pale, Of admonitions to the winds and seas, Of peaceful sway above man’s harvesting, And all those acts which Deity supreme Doth ease its heart of love in,48

which goes better with the ‘Druid’ atmosphere and suggests a Celtic narrative. This double character pervades the whole. There are godlike figures, attitudes, and utterances, but the poet’s language and philosophy and grasp of life do not build up around them a world of suitable scale or atmosphere that is harmonious. Milton’s immortals are Miltonic; they move in a Miltonic world. Keats’s immortals are something not quite Keatsian, if less than Miltonic; they move in a Keatsian world. Not Miltonism of style, but an attempt at the Miltonic scale provoked by the style or suggested to the reader by it—­that was Keats’s danger. ‘Hyperion’, abounding in great things, lacks consistent greatness. It seldom quite matches even where it equals the opening lines, Deep in the shady sadness of a vale Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star, Sat gray-­hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair; Forest on forest hung about his head Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer’s day 47  ‘Hyperion’, II.33–6. ET evidently liked this passage, which he quotes when comparing Keats with Shelley [110]. 48  ‘Hyperion’, I.106–12.

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Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more By reason of his fallen divinity Spreading a shade: the Naiad ’mid her reeds Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips,49

which are pure Keats, though even farther than the odes from the sumptuousness of ‘St. Agnes’, perfect were it not for the rhymes, and ‘shady’, ‘healthy’, ‘fiery’, in successive lines. Justly did Keats say to his Muse at the beginning of the third book: A solitary sorrow best befits Thy lips, and antheming a lonely grief.50

Yet it is so near greatness that again and again it seems to have been achieved. It cannot but have meant an overpowering effort of ambition and im­agin­ ation alike, to strive out of the world in which Keats could dwell so easily—­ the world of the picture of Saturn and Thea: One moon, with alteration slow, had shed Her silver seasons four upon the night, And still these two were postured motionless, Like natural sculpture in cathedral cavern . . .

into the world of angered Enceladus: Or shall we listen to the over-­wise, Or to the over-­foolish giant, Gods? . . .

from the scene of Apollo’s wandering forth in Delos Beside the osiers of a rivulet, Full ankle-­deep in lillies of the vale. The nightingale had ceas’d, and a few stars Were lingering in the heavens, while the thrush Began calm-­throated . . .

to that palace bright,

49  ET’s special feeling for these lines influenced effects of stillness and silence in his own poetry, as in ‘Lights Out’ and ‘October’: ‘The tall forest towers; / Its cloudy foliage lowers / Ahead . . . / Its silence I hear and obey’; ‘the wind travels too light / To shake the fallen birch leaves from the fern’ (ACP, 136, 101). 50  ‘Hyperion’, III.5–6.

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Bastion’d with pyramids of glowing gold, And touch’d with shade of bronzed obelisks . . .51

It was one thing to weep, in a sonnet,   That I have not the cloudy winds to keep Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye;

another to paint the sun-­giant sorrowing as      all along a dismal rack of clouds, Upon the boundaries of day and night, He stretch’d himself in grief and radiance faint.52

The effort brought forth things mighty enough to have commanded Byron’s respect, whether he meant what he said in Don Juan or not.53 But for ‘shady sadness’, the opening scene, and the divine figures, and the first speeches, to where Thea leads away Saturn, are most noble and in a manner entirely Keats’s own. The scale, in spite of the statement, Her face was large as that of Memphian sphinx,54

is human. Saturn is a venerable, antique king, of Lear’s stature. The landscape is of the earth, with that blending of the ‘Celtic’ and ‘Greek’, as Arnold called them, which is Keats; and the consummate style makes of these thirteen words,       the Naiad ’mid her reeds Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips,

something more visible and alive than all ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ and ‘The Eve of Saint Mark’. [. . .] Before the end of 1819 Keats set about re-­writing ‘Hyperion’, and from what he did it is clear that something more than its Miltonism had displeased him in the first draft. The new version was in the form of a dream. It was to contain, apparently, much the same events, speeches, and scenery, as the old. In this way, the lack of concrete active qualities of style, and the corresponding dearth of action and progress, might have ceased to disable the poem. Not enough was done to fortify the new form. It suffers from a general thinning of style. It is infirm with thoughts, at times openly didactic, like Wordsworth; at others, touched too closely with general and personal sadness: so that really there is something more than sick modesty in the lines; 51  ‘Hyperion’, I.83–6, II.309–10, III.34–8, I.177–8. 52  Quotation from sonnet, ‘On seeing the Elgin Marbles for the first time’; ‘Hyperion’, I.302–4. 53  See note 31.    54  ‘Hyperion’, I.31.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 Whether the dream now purpos’d to rehearse Be poet’s or fanatic’s will be known When this warm scribe, my hand, is in the grave.55

For Keats, now back at Hampstead, ill, and near the beginning of his fatal illness, was, for the moment at least, fanatically one of those who alone, in the Dream, might ascend to Moneta’s shrine,    those to whom the miseries of the world Are misery, and will not let them rest.56

The man who declared fine writing, next to fine doing, ‘the top thing in the world’, knelt to a lecturess, saying: What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe, To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing, A fever of thyself: think of the earth; What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee? What haven? every creature hath its home, Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, Whether his labours be sublime or low— The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct: Only the dreamer venoms all his days, Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.57

His pitifulness was grown incontinent. Saturn now appeared to him, not a Druid, or a Lear, at least; but complains like         some old man of the earth Bewailing earthly loss.58

More than once appears a strange timorousness. Moneta inspires the dreamer with ‘a terror of her robes’; the pallor of her cheeks when she unveils them passed ‘the lilly and the snow’, but he says:            beyond these I must not think now, though I saw that face.59

Then, as Saturn and Thea depart, and Moneta goes on to speak, the dreamer adds:

55  ‘The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream’, I.16–18.    56  ‘Fall of Hyperion’, I.148–9. 57  ‘I am convinced more and more, every day, that fine writing is, next to fine doing, the top thing in the world’ (letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 25 August 1819); ‘Fall of Hyperion’, I.167–76. 58  ‘Fall of Hyperion’, I.440–1.    59  See ‘Fall of Hyperion’, I.251–63.

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As ye may read who can unwearied pass Onward from the antechamber of this dream, Where, even at the open doors, awhile I must delay, and glean my memory Of her high phrase—­perhaps no further dare.60

Whether a real dread, or a pretended or exaggerated one, was the occasion of the last four words, they seem to spring from some serious weakness. Keats’s decline is more painful in the jaunty mock-­heroics of ‘Cap and Bells’ than in the sadness of the revised ‘Hyperion’. ‘Cap and Bells’ was being written at the same time. Onward through that last spring at Brown’s house he was thinking with pleasure of the fun of the thing, but intending to revise it and to leave nothing to reproach himself with. It is a vile failure. Keats, with all his intellectual humour and his sound sense, could not, when it came to poetry, do anything like ‘The Witch of Atlas’ or ‘Peter Bell the Third’.61 He exposed the same weakness of taste as, on the serious side, he did in Endymion; he became jaunty and worse, but meant to sign himself ‘Lucy Vaughan Lloyd’. Thereafter Keats wrote frantic personal pieces incapable of being finished, with Fanny Brawne before him, Death behind him.62 This was executioner Death or doctor Death, the ‘great divorcer’, not Death the ‘luxury’ which was ‘Life’s high meed’,63 as he used to think in his days of nature. But one great poem was stored up for him to write, in this posture between Death and his mistress, in September of that year: Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art—   Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart,   Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task   Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-­fallen mask   Of snow upon the mountains and the moors— 60  ‘Fall of Hyperion’, I.464–8. 61  Satirical poems by Shelley: in ‘The Witch of Atlas’, the Witch plays tricks on humanity to expose its personal and social failings; ‘Peter Bell the Third’ is a critique of Wordsworth. 62  As at the beginning of this chapter, ET seems to accept the then-prevailing view that Fanny Brawne was unworthy of Keats: a view changed, or at least complicated, by the publication of her letters to his sister (also Fanny) in 1937. 63  ‘Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever’ (letter to Charles Armitage Brown, 28 September 1820). In ‘Sleep and Poetry’ the would-be poet aspires ‘to die a death / Of luxury’ (58–9). Keats’s sonnet ‘Why did I laugh tonight?’ ends: ‘Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed, / But Death intenser—­Death is Life’s high meed’.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 No—­yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,   Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,   Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-­taken breath, And so live ever—­or else swoon to death.

The sublimity of the opening lends itself to the conclusion. The earth becomes his pillow, the air his winding-­sheet, the sea ‘a mighty minstrel’ that can hush ‘the tempest cares of life’,64 and death, yet once more ‘easeful’ death, a twin luxury to his mistress’s beauty. For in his heyday of poetry, thirteen months before at Winchester, he had told his mistress that he had two luxuries to brood over in his walks, her loveliness and the hour of his death, and exclaimed, ‘O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.’ And now, at the beginning of his ‘posthumous life’, thinking the same, the sonnet was written.65 It is the hymn of stillness, equalising the steadfast watching star, and the poet that saw likewise, and the lover with assuaged passion, less than ‘three parts this side of faintness’, and the dead body which some also envy for the tranquillity of the skin. The snow spreads like winter’s grave-­cloth over the earth. The star hangs vigilant and regardless.66 Keats was not [just] talking when he told Fanny Brawne that Love was his religion.67 This is the hymn of stillness, of voluptuous rest, mystically praising love and death together. It is one of Keats’s greatest poems, but distinguished from the others—‘St. Agnes’, the Odes, and ‘La Belle Dame’—by the break in the rhythm and the voice in the last line, as if life intruded—­or, rather, death. This end of his poetry was fitting. Perfect language, endowed with a more sweeping rhythmic energy than was usual in his work, builds up a vision of sky and earth, immense in its grandeur and its calm; and in the midst of it a 64  ET alludes to Keats saying: ‘the great Elements . . . are no mean comforters . . . the Air is our robe of state—­the Earth is our throne, and the Sea a mighty minstrel playing before it—­able, like David’s harp, to make such a one as you forget almost the tempest cares of life’ (letter to Jane Reynolds, 14 September 1817). 65  ‘I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute’ (Letter to Fanny Brawne, 25 July 1819). ‘I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence’ (letter to Charles Armitage Brown, 30 November 1820). 66  ET’s poem ‘Out in the dark’ (24 December 1916), written shortly before his embarkation for France, shares some images (star, snow, night) with Keats’s sonnet, and seems to parallel its ‘posthumous’ location (ACP, 138). 67  ‘Just’ or ‘only’ or ‘merely’ must have been omitted before ‘talking’. ‘I could be martyr’d for my Religion—­Love is my religion—­I could die for that. I could die for you. My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet’ (Letter to Fanny Brawne, 13 October 1819).

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man troubled by the principal unrest of life cries out for that same calm, for the oblivion of ‘melting out his essence fine Into the winds’, for ‘soothest Sleep’ that saves ‘from curious conscience’,68 for the happiness of the seeming immortal nightingale, of the ‘marble men and maidens’ carved on the urn, the dead poets ‘on Elysian lawns’ who know not satiety,69 for the intensity of great art. Oppressed by disease and misfortune, the poet seems to choose death rather than life. ‘To make beauty’, says Dr A. C. Bradley, ‘is his philanthropy’.70 The poem, for living men, adds a beauty to life and a new ground for desiring it. Chapter VI: Character These last months of dissolution coupled with the most obvious qualities of his earlier poems have given colour to a belief that Keats was an invertebrate, one to be ‘snuffed out by an article’. He was himself the first discoverer of that ‘morbidity of temperament’.71 That he did discover it, that he had a wonderful self-­knowledge—­not mere self-­analysis—­calm and penetrating, never coldly submissive, is a proof that it was not the whole truth. The morbidity was the occasional overbalancing of his intense sympathy, his greatest passive power. He thought that men of genius in general had no individuality; they were ‘everything and nothing’; they were theatres where others’ tra­ged­ ies and comedies were enacted; they were distinguished by what he called Negative Capability—‘that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. ‘Let us’, he said to Reynolds, ‘be passive and receptive’, like a flower, ‘budding patiently under the eye of Apollo, and taking hints from every noble mind that pays us a visit.’ He was for a ‘delicious diligent Indolence’, for a passiveness allowing the intellectual powers to come very gradually to ripeness. When he was in a room with people, unless he was following a definite thought, he was so open to their influence that the identity of everyone pressed on him and annihilated him: the identity of his sick brother pressed on him until he was obliged to go out or to ‘plunge into abstract images’ to save himself; while the deep impression made on him by the identity of his brother George and his sister-­in-­law helped him to a ‘direct communication of Spirit’ with them across the Atlantic. When he was alone the shapes of

68 Quotations: Endymion, I.99–100; from Sonnet XII: ‘To Sleep’. 69  From Keats’s ‘Ode’ beginning: ‘Bards of Passion and of Mirth’. 70 A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1909), 237. 71  See [660–1] and note.

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poetry came to him, and, according to his state of mind, he was with Achilles or Theocritus; repeating the words of Troilus,       I stalk about her door Like a strange soul upon the Stygian banks Staying for waftage,

he melted into the air ‘with a voluptuousness so delicate’ that he was content to be alone. Life-­like, but more lasting than life, was his imagining of ‘Alcibiades leaning on his Crimson Couch in his Galley, his broad shoulders imperceptibly heaving with the Sea’, or of the scene, See how the surly Warwick mans the Wall.

If these things were too persistent they became ‘day-­nightmares’. So he could lie awake listening to the night rain ‘with a sense of being drowned and rotted like a grain of wheat’; if a sparrow came before his window he could ‘take part in its existence and pick about the gravel’;72 and he has said that the poet is one        who with a bird, Wren or Eagle, finds his way to All its instincts . . .73

So also he entered into the serpent’s brain with Satan and suffocated in the confinement. No wonder that the return of a friend, when he had had two days’ luxuriating in solitude and silence, broke on him ‘like a Thunderbolt’,74 or that the images during the intensity of composition could keep Fanny Brawne at a distance, or that he could see his need for a sound heart and the lungs of an ox ‘to bear unhurt the shock of extreme thought and sensation without weariness’, and, thus equipped, could contemplate living very nearly alone for a long life.75 At one time he left off animal food, as he said, that his 72  Collage of quotations from Keats’s letters: to Benjamin Bailey (22 November 1817); Richard Woodhouse (27 October 1818); George and Thomas Keats (22 December 1817); John Hamilton Reynolds (19 February 1818) [Keats actually wrote: ‘every insect that favours us with a visit’]; Charles Wentworth Dilke (21 September 1818); George and Georgiana Keats (c. December 1818); George and Georgiana Keats (October 1818); Benjamin Haydon (8 April 1818); John Hamilton Reynolds (25 August 1819); John Hamilton Reynolds (27 April 1818); Benjamin Bailey (22 November 1817). The Shakespearean quotations are from Troilus and Cressida, III.ii; Henry VI, Part 3, V.i. 73  From Keats’s ‘The Poet: A Fragment’, which begins: ‘Where’s the Poet? show him! show him, / Muses nine! that I may know him!’ 74  Letter to Fanny Brawne (postmark 9 August 1819). In ET’s poem ‘Melancholy’, the speaker who fears ‘company’ more than ‘solitude’ (see note 40) says: ‘too sharp, too rude, / Had been the wisest or the dearest human voice’ (ACP, 85). 75  Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds (25 August 1819).

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‘teeming brain’ might not be in a greater mist than was natural to it. And there seems no doubt that this intense life of the mind often reached a point either of aching or of languor. The word ‘ache’ is one of his constant, significant words. He ached to be near Fanny Brawne and to be with her; his arms ached to be round her waist; his senses ached at the haunting vision of her in a shepherdess dress, as they did at that passage in Paradise Lost. In the ode ‘On Melancholy’ Pleasure is ‘aching Pleasure’; ‘To a Nightingale’ opens with ‘My heart aches’; he ‘ached for wings’ in ‘On Indolence’; Hyperion ached with horrors; the Titans’ exile was an ‘aching time’ to Thea; Apollo, as yet realmless and imperfectly divine, was idle ‘in aching ignorance’; at thought of how the sculptured dead ached in his frosty chapel the old Beadsman’s spirit failed, in ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’; the earth trodden on by his Auranthe is ‘the amorous-­aching earth’ to Ludolph; and Theodore ‘ached to think’ of the horrors that were to come.76 The recurrence of this word, ‘ache’, suggests that the state which it describes was familiar to Keats, perhaps in the extremes of intense sensation and im­agin­ation—­in such times as when the thousand images passing through his brain helped to spread the veil between him and Fanny Brawne, when he was ‘in complete cue—­in the fever’.77 Thus, to attain a poem, he went through something like the pains necessary to life, to what he thought the world’s great task of making souls. Nothing that could foster intensity was alien to him. King Lear, he knew, was the richer for its tears. The greater the truth, the greater the beauty, provided it was beauty—­provided, that is to say, that it was handled with the intensity of imagination which makes ‘all disagreeables evaporate’. Hence, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’, and his saying that ‘the excellence of every art is its intensity’.78 Thought he respected, but not old clothes. He asked,        What sea-­ bird o’er the sea Is a philosopher the while he goes Winging along where the great water throes?79

and he wished poetry to be as unencumbered as that, having no ‘palpable design’ upon the reader—­as a tiger moth, clean and clear of the chrysalis. The ‘egotistical sublime’ of Wordsworth and the philanthropy of Shelley were distasteful to him as an artist because, and in so far as, they endangered that 76  Auranthe, Ludolph, Theodore: characters in Keats’s tragedy ‘Otho the Great’. 77  Letter to Fanny Brawne (postmark 16 August 1819). 78  Letter to George and Thomas Keats (22 December 1817). 79  Quotation from ‘To—’ (‘What can I do to drive away’).

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rich, lucid, unprejudiced perfection which he himself desired. The poetry that reached this perfection wrung him to the point of believing that ‘fine writing is, next to fine doing, the top thing in the world’.80 [. . .]

Charles M. Doughty, The Titans1 Mr Charles  M.  Doughty is the vates, the prophet-­priest, among English poets. In more than one or two of his poems appears the figure of a poet who reminds me of himself, a man With high insight endued and numbers sweet

as he sings in The Titans. He bears a singular piety towards the beginnings of national and human life. When he narrates the origins of Britain in The Dawn in Britain, he does something like what Virgil did in the Aeneid, and with at least an equal piety. Religion and patriotism make one in him more than they did in Wordsworth, and reading his Cliffs and Clouds, beautiful poems that have begun to astonish people because of their foreboding of this war, I wonder whether any poet ever had so rich and yet so simple a patriotism.2 His reverence is no greater than his knowledge, which is universal and humane. England, the ground, the men, the idea, appear in his as no other single author’s work. Yet I understand that nobody cares a brass button, and I read his new book chiefly with the double feeling of admiration and regret that it must wait till the England he so reverences returns, or, if it has not disappeared, wakes to consciousness. His is a solitary voice, clear as a trumpet, but very distant.

80  Quotations from letter to John Hamilton Reynolds (3 February 1818); letter to Richard Woodhouse (27 October 1818); and see note 57. 1  ET had been persuaded by his friend J. W. Haines ‘to review Doughty’s last’ (RFET, 133): for T. S. Eliot’s contrasting opinion of The Titans, see Appendix [700]. Since ET was now preoccupied with his own poems and with soldiering (it was in June 1916 that he applied for a commission in the artillery), it must have taken special circumstances, such as his long-standing admiration for Doughty, to elicit a review from him. Perhaps similar loyalty to W. H. Davies prompted his final review below. B was among the few literary journals to continue publication throughout the war. Katherine Tynan had become ET’s main successor as a reviewer of poetry. In her review of An Annual of New Poetry, which contains eighteen poems by ET, she said: ‘In Edward Thomas alone is to be found the thrill, the surprise’ (B: June 1917). 2  See reviews of The Cliffs [374] and The Clouds [522].

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The Titans has no direct connection with England. It is a poem of the beginnings of the human race. The Titans contend with the gods and are beaten. Man survives, tragic, beautiful, ingenious, in a world of foes. Mr Doughty’s epic tenderness is an extraordinary thing. He shows the same love for humankind and its origins as he does for England and its origins. If The Dawn in Britain very remotely resembles Virgil, The Titans in places resembles Lucretius; above all in the passages describing ‘Ishtar, bright Goddess of the sacred hearth’, the ‘Mother of all Grace’, whose ‘favour solace is, To mortal breasts, in midst of worldly smarts’, whose feet ‘the purple flowers’ kiss, as she walks or sits combing ‘Her sunbright locks, down-­blissful hanging loost’. This servant of the heavenly muse it is who sees and sings for us the dawn of the living earth, through fire and ‘Rain, rushing streams, waves driven on iron cliffs’, the grass beginning to grow, the birds to sing, the monsters to perish, the cattle to low, and men beginning to speak and dig and build. Perhaps he knew better where to begin than where to leave off. The end is somewhere far on in primitive culture. It is not disappointing, but it is not absolute, like Through Eden took their solitary way.

The substance of the six books is partly mythical, partly anthropological. It is founded on the Northern version of the making of the world, but borrows magnificently from Eastern and Greek versions. Mr Doughty loves the Northern stories, but he knows Arabia, and he has blended mountain, fog, sea and desert in one grand background. Befriended by God and the sun, man shines forth gradually as the noble but pathetic ‘pilgrim of eternity’.3 The earth grows in beauty as man strengthens his nest on it. Nothing could be lovelier than Mr Doughty’s flowers when Once more the gracious blossom of the thorn Is in Earth’s thicket-­strewed wild upland seen; Where blows the bee-­suckt thyme and honey-­whin; And withwind pale wreathes her lithe arms among: With primrose under briar, and the key-­flower. [. . .]

Man, on the whole, appears pathetic from the time when Two-­footed long, loose-­lockt, with wildered looks; Training his feeble limbs, that first man goeth: Gathering, gainst ebb, as his wont is, longs strand; (Where Sea’s eternal Flood against herself 3  In ‘Adonais’ XXX Shelley calls Byron the ‘Pilgrim of Eternity’.

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Hath heaped long sliding shelves of pebble-­stones;) What-­so wild meat his indigent hand might find; Whelks, cockles, wrack . . .

on to the time when After the Sun, neath heaven’s still sliding stars; A Sun-­beat People, lacking meat and drink, Lie without succour, waiting on their Gods,

and to the last lines of the poem: Howbeit still, in much ignorance, wanting Light; With clouded countenance, shall Man walk Earth’s dust; Shut up, in darkness of frail womb-­born flesh: (This mortal, yet unweaned, untaught, unworth.)

Everything is against him even after the Titans have been thrust down. All the winds are against him, except the South. The monsters are very monstrous, as much so as they were to Jefferies.4 Man is represented again and again by a weak old man or child or an unchilded mother, a tender anxious figure, erect, but born as it were too soon, escaping destruction in the battle of gods and Titans only as the reed survives when the oak falls. But escape he does, and by the end of the poem he appears with all his powers fledged for the end, as we see him now. B: June

William H. Davies, Child Lovers, and other Poems These poems are chiefly songs of joy tasted, missed, or desired. I think Mr Davies enjoys the owl though he is thinking about the moon and a skeleton lover. He enjoys the woman ‘big with laughter’, though he does cry: Oh God, that I were far from here,   Or lying fast asleep! 4  ET writes of Richard Jefferies’s The Story of my Heart: ‘There follows a passage in which he finds “nothing human in nature” . . . . Such a view may be monstrous; but let us not forget that, like other monsters, it was earth-born, and born in the open air . . . . He has been in hell, and dreamed more terrible dreams than when De Quincey lay down with crocodiles’ (RJ, 173–4).

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He enjoys the robin’s song as he would those tunes to which he compares it: those sad tunes In homes where grief ’s not known.1

In fact, his sad tunes are of the same kind: or is it that they are not for the fashion of these times and are so clear and simple in their sadness that they may be mistaken for their opposites? It is the same with his anger at the Zeppelin. The thing is out of place: An ugly, boneless thing all back and belly, Among the peaceful stars—­that should have been A mile deep in the sea, and never seen: A big, fat, lazy slug that, even then, Killed women, children, and defenceless men.2

It is as a spoiler of joy that he hates it, so different from the stars ‘That never did the earth a moment’s harm’. The only other reference to war is a verse of ‘Child Lovers’: Then in a while they to a green park came. A captain owned it, and they knew his name; And what think you those happy children saw? The big, black horse that once was in a war. [. . .]

Three of his better pieces are a complaint that he has ‘nothing in his mind to sing’ though it is May; a request that wonder should come to him:      sweet Wonder, by whose power We more or less enjoy our years;

and this ambition: Thinking of my caged birds indoors,   My books, whose music serves my will; Which, when I bid them sing, will sing,   And when I sing myself are still; And that my scent is drops of ink,   Which, were my song as great as I, Would sweeten man till he was dust,   And make the world one Araby;

1  Allusion to ‘This Night’; quotations from ‘The Visitor’, ‘The One Singer’. 2  Davies’s Zeppelin poem is called ‘The White Monster’.

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Writings on Poetry 1899–1916 Thinking how my hot passions make   Strong floods of shallows that run cold— Oh how I burn to make my dreams   Lighten and thunder, through the world!3

If his ambition is to be satisfied it is because we feel so often what he says in ‘April’s Charms’ that he can taste joy: When I go forth on such a pleasant day, One breath outdoors takes all my care away; It goes like heavy smoke, when flames take hold Of wood that’s green and fill a grate with gold.

He fills this grate with gold. B: August 3  The three poems are ‘Thou Comest, May’, ‘Come, thou sweet Wonder’, ‘The Inexpressible’.

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APPENDIX

Contemporary Poets Reviewed by Edward Thomas An asterisk indicates books of which reviews appear in the present volume. Abercrombie, Lascelles (1881–1938): Despite his literary and artistic interests, Abercrombie studied science at college in Manchester. He became a quantity surveyor, then a journalist. In 1911 he moved to The Gallows: two conjoined cottages in Ryton, Gloucestershire, near the village of Dymock. In 1914 Wilfrid Wilson Gibson came to live in the area. This poetic nucleus was enriched by links with Rupert Brooke, Robert Frost, and ET. All these poets have been attached to the post hoc category ‘Dymock poets’. ET’s relations with Abercrombie could be difficult: ‘Mrs Abercrombie is a little hostile because I sometimes criticise Lascelles’ (LGB, 241). In May 1914 Frost rented Little Iddens in nearby Ledington, and the Frosts lodged at  The Gallows for five months before returning to America in February 1915. Abercrombie, Gibson, and Brooke appeared in the Georgian Poetry anthologies (1912–22), edited by Edward Marsh. In 1914 all three were involved in a similar anthology, New Numbers: see [608]. During the Great War, being unfit for military service, and unable to seek ambulance-­work abroad owing to his wife’s illness, Abercrombie worked as a munitions-­examiner in Liverpool. After the war, he held chairs of English at Leeds University and Bedford College, London. Abercrombie wrote lyrics, verse-­drama, dramatic poems, criticism. His publications include Interludes and Poems (1908)*, Emblems of Love (1912)*, Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study (1912), Speculative Dialogues (1913), Deborah: A Play in Three Acts (1913)*, The Idea of Great Poetry (1925), Principles of Literary Criticism (1932). In the preface to his collected poems and plays (1930) Abercrombie refers to his poetry as ‘chiefly representing unrealised ambition’. A.E. (Æ), pseudonym of George William Russell (1867–1935): Russell was born in Ulster, but his family moved to Dublin when he was 11. As poet, painter, editor, critic, and cultural thinker, he took a leading role in the Irish Literary Revival. Russell fostered young writers, and maintained a complicated relationship with W. B. Yeats. His Greek pen-­name ‘Aeon’ (life-­force, being), shortened to A.E., reflects his intense involvement with Spiritualism and the occult: initially, with Theosophy. Russell was also a political activist. From 1905 he edited The Irish Homestead, journal of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society. The Homestead was amalgamated with The Irish Statesman, which Russell also edited (1923–30). As a pacifist and visionary cultural

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nationalist, Russell regretted the 1916 Easter Rising. In 1932, disillusioned by the Catholic Church’s influence on post-­Independence Ireland, he moved to England. His prose-­works include The National Being: Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity (1916) and The Candle of Vision (1918). His collections of poetry include Homeward Songs by the Way (1894), The Earth Breath and Other Poems (1897), The Nuts of Knowledge (1903), The Divine Vision and Other Poems (1904)*, Collected Poems (1913)*. Belloc, Hilaire (1870–1953): A prolific author and polemicist, the Anglo-­French Belloc had a high status, alongside G.  K.  Chesterton, H.  G.  Wells, and George Bernard Shaw, as a public intellectual in the early twentieth century. He served in the French army; was briefly a British Liberal MP (1906–10); founded a political weekly, The Eye-­Witness; and became a prominent Catholic apologist. Belloc was aligned with Chesterton (see below) on religious questions and in espousing idiosyncratic rightwing politics tinged with anti-­semitism, as in his book The Jews (1922). Shaw dubbed them the ‘Chesterbelloc’. ET got to know Belloc at Oxford; and Belloc, as literary editor of the Morning Post (from 1906), gave him his second opportunity to review regularly for a daily newspaper. ET’s The South Country (1909) takes its title from a poem by Belloc. ET valued Belloc’s prose, as well as the poetry of Verses and Sonnets (1896)*, admitting that his own prose might contain ‘Bellocisms’ (LGB, 117). He calls the style of Belloc’s The Path to Rome (1902) ‘Gargantuan’ (DC: 29 April 1902); but praises the Cobbett-­like ‘bodily vigour’ of his essays in On Everything (1909): ‘the writing is wonderfully near to speech in effect, though not in form’ (DC: 11 December 1909). Belloc’s historical feeling for roads and landscapes may have influenced ET, as may the ‘pilgrimage’ structure of his travel books. He says of Belloc’s The Old Road (1904): ‘in his treatment of past times or distant places he combines the true historic spirit with a vigorous imagination’ (W: 22 November 1904); and of The Historic Thames (1907): ‘We know no writer who so truly sees and is always trying to see history in landscape, and for whom England is really old and as full of the past as language is’ (DC: 18 June 1907). ET’s chapter on Belloc in LPE (155–60) ends: ‘He is such a geographer as I wish many historians were, such a poet as all geographers ought to be, and hardly any other has been.’ ET also relished the ‘dauntless, reeling absurdities’ of Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children (1907), his best-­known work today (DC: 4 December 1907). Binyon, Laurence (1869–1943): Binyon, a Londoner, studied Classics at Oxford. In 1893 he began a forty-­year career at the British Museum, becoming an expert on British, Dutch, and far-­eastern art. In 1913, now Keeper of Oriental Prints and Drawings, Binyon assembled a ground-­breaking catalogue of the works he curated, thereby stimulating interest in Chinese and Japanese poetry too. Interested poets included Ezra Pound and the translator Arthur Waley: Binyon’s Assistant Keeper at the museum. Also an authority on William Blake, Binyon wrote the introduction to Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job (1906)*. His collections of poetry include Lyric Poems (1894), London Visions (1895, 1898, 1908)*, The Death of Adam and Other Poems (1904)*, the verse-­drama Paris and Oenone (1906), England and Other Poems

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(1909)*. Binyon’s best-­known poem, ‘For the Fallen’, was published in The Times on 21 September 1914. Its fourth quatrain, ending ‘We will remember them’, is read on Remembrance Sunday in Whitehall and elsewhere. During the war Binyon worked as a medical orderly in France (at the ‘English Hospital’ for French soldiers), and later for the Red Cross. Hence his powerful poem ‘Fetching the Wounded’ and For Dauntless France (1918): a memoir commissioned by the Red Cross. A two-­volume Collected Poems was published in 1931. After leaving the museum in 1933, Binyon succeeded T. S. Eliot as Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. He also wrote some poems of the Second World War. See Laurence Binyon, Poems of Two Wars, ed. Paul O’Prey (2016). Bottomley, Gordon (1874–1948): Bottomley was one of ET’s closest friends, if mainly a pen-­friend. Invalided by lung-­haemorrhages, he lived on the Lancashire/ Cumbria border: first near Cartmel, then in Silverdale. Most of ET’s side of their correspondence, which began in September 1902, is collected in Letters from Edward Thomas to Gordon Bottomley, ed. R. George Thomas (1968). Bottomley’s few surviving letters to ET indicate the constraints of his illness, which meant that the friends could only meet infrequently. His physical disability mirrored ET’s psychological problems. As ET remarked to Bottomley’s wife Emily: ‘It is a pity [Gordon] is not better fitted for the world & the world not better fitted for me’ (LGB, 218). See William Cooke, Edward Thomas and Gordon Bottomley: Comrades in Letters (Petersfield: Edward Thomas Fellowship, 2021). ET, who called Bottomley ‘Comforter’, confided in him about his mental, creative, and economic troubles. Bottomley also proofread ET’s books, and (as the footnotes to this volume show) became a literary lifeline and whetstone for literary argument. ET’s valedictory poem ‘The Sheiling’ (November 1916), named for Bottomley’s house, celebrates Bottomley’s therapeutic ‘kindliness’ and his devotion to literature and art. Bottomley assembled an important collection (now in Carlisle) of nineteenth- and twentieth-­century British visual art, and supported young painters. The letters between him Paul Nash were published in 1953. Another correspondent was Isaac Rosenberg, whom Bottomley encouraged, and whose poems he edited (1922; 1937). Bottomley’s work, which appeared in Georgian Poetry, includes the lyrics of Poems at White-­Nights (1899) and Chambers of Imagery (1907)*; verse-­plays such as The Crier by Night (1902)*, Midsummer Eve (1905)*, and King Lear’s Wife (1915; published 1916): a play in which ET considered the cruelty ‘thought out’ and lacking ‘passion behind it’ (RFET, 132). Bridges, Robert (1844–1930): Although always dedicated to poetry, Bridges practised as a doctor until 1882; when, after pneumonia had weakened his lungs, he retired to rural Berkshire. A devout Christian, Bridges wrote hymns as well as poems and verse-­plays. That he used a quill, rather than a pen, marked his social and political conservatism. But, partly influenced by the ‘sprung rhythm’ of his friend Gerard Manley Hopkins, Bridges based his work on a quantitative theory of English metre, which ET and Frost questioned: ‘The living part of a poem is the intonation entangled somehow in the syntax idiom and meaning of a sentence . . . not for us in any

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Greek or Latin poem’ (LRF I, 167). In 1913 Bridges succeeded Alfred Austin as Poet Laureate. His publications include the sonnets of The Growth of Love (1876, 1889, 1898), Milton’s Prosody (1893; reprinted in 1921 with a chapter on Accentual Verse), Demeter: A Mask (1905)*, several volumes and editions of Poetical Works*, a long philosophical poem The Testament of Beauty (1929). In September 1914 Bridges was recruited for the government’s secret War Propaganda Bureau. He edited a loftily patriotic anthology of poetry and philosophy, The Spirit of Man (1916): ‘Britons have ever fought well for their country, and their country’s Cause is the high Cause of Freedom and Honour.’ But, after the war, Bridges advocated the restoration of intellectual contact with Germany, and supported the founding of the League of Nations. In 1918 he oversaw the posthumous publication of Hopkins’s virtually unknown poems. Brooke, Rupert (1887–1915): Famous for his good looks, Brooke was educated at Rugby School and King’s College Cambridge. At King’s he belonged to the elite intellectual club, the Apostles. His other literary and social connections included the Bloomsbury Group, the ‘Georgian’ poets, the ‘Dymock’ poets. Brooke wrote poems, reviews, essays on Renaissance drama, travel-­articles about North America and the South Seas. His sexual (sometimes bisexual) life was complicated. When the war began in August 1914, Brooke immediately enlisted. Having first joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, he sailed for Gallipoli with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force in February 1915. His sonnet-­sequence ‘1914’ contributed to patriotic fervour after William Inge, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, read Sonnet V: ‘The Soldier’ (originally ‘The Recruit’) in a sermon on Easter Sunday 1915 (4 April). Inge’s sermon, on ‘the spirit of the martyr-­patriot’, was reported in The Times next day. It’s just possible that ET’s rather different elegiac poem, ‘In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)’, written on 6 April, involves a response to Brooke and Inge. On 23 April Brooke died at sea, from sepsis caused by a mosquito-­bite. He was buried on the Greek island of Skyros. In a Times obituary that fed Brooke’s legend, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty (and responsible for the Gallipoli disaster), called him a voice ‘able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms’. Brooke’s Collected Poems (1918) contains a substantial memoir by Edward Marsh, Churchill’s secretary as well as editor of Georgian Poetry—­which owed its existence to Marsh’s friendship with Brooke: see [539n.]. Brooke published two collections of poetry: Poems (1911)* and 1914 & other Poems (1915). ET met (and liked) Brooke in 1909. Brooke visited him at Steep, and Wilfrid Wilson Gibson juxtaposes them in ‘The Golden Room’, a poem which recalls a ‘Dymock’ gathering: ‘now, / A murmured dry half-­heard aside from Thomas; / Now, a clear laughing word from Brooke’. ET had reservations about Brooke’s war-­ sonnets; but his own decision to enlist may have been influenced by Brooke’s challenging example and by rivalry with his claim to speak for England. ET’s obituary for Brooke [648] belongs to the period of that decision. Chesterton, G. K. (1874–1936): As prolific an author as his ideological mentor and ally, Hilaire Belloc (see above), some of whose books he illustrated, Gilbert Keith

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Chesterton began as a poet. He also wrote fiction, essays, newspaper-­columns, reviews, critical studies of art and literature, works of philosophy and theology. In 1922 ‘G.  K.  C.’ completed his conversion from high-­church Anglicanism to Catholicism, for which, like Belloc, he became an ardent advocate. Chesterton’s publications include The Wild Knight and Other Poems (1900), The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), Heretics (essays, 1905)*, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), The Ballad of the White Horse (1911)*, The Everlasting Man (1925). The Ballad of the White Horse, an epic poem which concerns King Alfred’s defeat of the invading Danes, and hence the struggle of Christianity against paganism, had some popular appeal during both world wars. Today Chesterton is best known for his Father Brown detective stories (now a TV series), in which he combines Catholic doctrine with a love of paradox. Coleridge, Mary E[lizabeth] (1861–1907): Coleridge’s family belonged to the highest literary, artistic, and intellectual circles in London. She knew Tennyson and Browning, being especially influenced by the latter and also by Christina Rossetti. Coleridge wrote poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, critical articles, and a biography of Holman Hunt. She can be seen as both a New Woman and a pioneering woman of letters: that is, ‘in her choosing not to marry and cultivating her most meaningful relationships with other women, in her dedication to education and teaching, and in her commitment to establishing herself as a professional writer within the literary networks of late-­Victorian London’ (Simon Avery [ed.], Selected Poems of Mary Coleridge [Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2010], 13–14). Her poem ‘A Clever Woman’ attacks the notion that educating women would turn them into men: ‘woman’s woman, even when / She reads her Ethics in the Greek’. Coleridge read Greek and Latin, and spoke several languages. From 1895 she taught literature and history at the  London Working Women’s College, and every week she and several other ­literary  women met as a group: ‘The Settee’. Unwilling to exploit her ancestral name, Coleridge stated: ‘I have no fairy god-­mother, but lay claim to a fairy great-­ great-­uncle, which is perhaps the reason that I am condemned to wander restlessly around the Gates of Fairyland, although I have never yet passed them’ (quoted by Avery, 26). Thus she published her poems, although not her other writings, under the Greek pseudonym ‘Anodos’: ‘on no road’, ‘wanderer’. This word, which represents the way to enlightenment or transcendence in Plato’s Republic, is the protagonist’s name in George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858), a novel admired by Coleridge. Coleridge also held back from publishing new poems: her collections Fancy’s Following (1896) and Fancy’s Guerdon (1897) overlap. She became better known after her premature death from complications of appendicitis. Henry Newbolt, who had been admitted to The Settee, gathered up her work in Poems (1908)*. In the later twentieth century, Coleridge’s poetry was rediscovered, and its secretive, homoerotic, gothic qualities explored. The psychology of poems such as ‘The Other Side of a Mirror’, where a woman confronts the ‘hard, unsanctified distress’ of a wild ‘Other’, has been widely read in Feminist terms. ET’s sensitivity to her poetry may have left a trace on his own poem ‘The Other’.

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Cornford, Frances (1886–1960): Cornford, née Darwin, was a grand-­daughter of Charles Darwin. She grew up in Cambridge, where she lived thereafter, amidst the intellectual and artistic milieu richly evoked by her cousin Gwen Raverat in Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood (1952). Both her parents lectured at Cambridge University, as did her classicist husband Francis Cornford (1874–1943), who also wrote poetry. She was a close friend of Rupert Brooke, for whom she wrote a much-­ quoted elegy: see [649n.]. Cornford’s collections of poetry include Poems (1910)*, Spring Morning (1915), Autumn Midnight (1923), Different Days (1928). Her eldest son, the poet and communist [Rupert] John Cornford (1915–36), died fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Davidson, John (1857–1909): Davidson grew up in Barrhead, Renfrewshire. He mainly worked as a school-­teacher before moving to London and its literary world in 1889. He joined the Rhymers’ Club: the poetic coterie which met at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub in Fleet Street (1891–4), and whose members included W.  B.  Yeats, Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, and Arthur Symons. A Nietzschean atheist and scientific materialist, whose poetry was explicitly occupied with philosophical, scientific, and social progress, Davidson found himself at odds with the Symbolist aesthetic promoted by Yeats and Symons. In his memoir ‘The Tragic Generation’ Yeats disparages Davidson’s contrary ‘delight in all that seemed healthy, popular, and bustling’. Davidson’s best-­known poems are ‘A Runnable Stag’ and ‘Thirty Bob a Week’ (which influenced T. S. Eliot), spoken in the voice of an impoverished clerk. He wrote prose as well as poetry: A Rosary (1903)* contains both. His poetic works include In a Music-­Hall and Other Poems (1891), Ballads and Songs (1894), The Testament of a Prime Minister (1904)*, Holiday and Other Poems (1906)* The Triumph of Mammon (1907)*, Mammon and his Message (1908)*, The Testament of John Davidson (1908)*, Fleet Street and Other Poems (1909)*. In 1909, afflicted by cancer, mental illness, and money-­troubles, Davidson drowned himself off the Cornish coast. Davidson is now seen as a begetter of modern Scottish poetry. Hugh MacDiarmid, who admired his work and ideas, wrote a moving elegy ‘Of John Davidson’: ‘something in me has always stood / Since then looking down the sandslope / On your small black shape by the edge of the sea’. See Three Poets of the Rhymers’ Club (1974), ed. Derek Stanford. Davies, W.  H. (1871–1940): William Henry Davies grew up in Newport, Monmouthshire. Sometimes in trouble with the law as a schoolboy, he then became apprenticed to a picture-­framer. But in 1893 Davies sailed to America, where he took seasonal jobs or begged. He later worked on transatlantic cattle-­ships. In 1899 Davies lost half a leg after failing to jump a train when trying to join the Klondike gold-­rush. His active life thus curbed, Davies began to write. Having returned permanently to Britain, he slept in London doss-­houses and hostels, or left London to earn money as a pedlar. ET sought Davies out in 1905, when preparing to review his self-­published first collection, The Soul’s Destroyer and Other Poems (1905)*. The title refers to alcohol. ET praised this collection and its successors; gave Davies financial and practical

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support; and introduced the ‘tramp-­poet’ (a label Davies disliked) to literary circles. George Bernard Shaw wrote a preface for Davies’s memoir The Autobiography of a Super-­Tramp (1908)*: a popular hit, which boosted his reputation as a poet. Other memoirs followed, such as Beggars (1909) and The True Traveller (1912). Davies was a regular contributor to Georgian Poetry. ET did more for Davies than did any other patron—­promoting his poetry, finding him accommodation, introducing him to his literary agent, lobbying for him to get a Civil List pension; but their relationship could be difficult, owing to Davies’s mix of naivety and egotism: ‘we are not born for one another’, ET told Bottomley (LGB, 105). Davies’s elegy for ET, ‘Killed in Action’, refers to their helping ‘a bird to hide her nest, / For fear of other hands less kind’. During the war, Davies gave readings on behalf of war charities. He eventually married (1923) and settled in Gloucestershire. His collections of poetry include New Poems (1907)*, Nature Poems And Others (1908)*, Farewell to Poesy And Other Pieces (1910)*, Songs of Joy and Others (1911)*, Foliage: Various Poems (1913)*, Child Lovers, and other Poems (1916)*. Various editions of Collected Poems have been published. See W. H. Davies, The True Traveller: A Reader, ed. Rory Waterman (2015). [D]e la Mare, Walter (1873–1956): de la Mare mostly lived in greater London. From 1890 to 1908 he worked as a clerk for Anglo-­American Oil (later ESSO, Exxon). From 1908, a Civil List pension enabled him to concentrate on writing. In 1906, when compiling his anthology The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air (1907), ET wrote to de la Mare for permission to include poems by him. They met in March 1907, and became friends. ET introduced de la Mare to editors and publishers; commented on his poems-­in-­progress; helped him to obtain his pension. In December 1910 he profiled de la Mare for B [458]. ET could resent his friend’s greater success in the literary market-­place: see Introduction [xxix]. But he confided in de la Mare, as in Bottomley, about his psychological problems and suicidal impulses; and he showed him his own first poems. See Poet to Poet: Edward Thomas’s Letters to Walter de la Mare, ed. Judy Kendall (2012). De la Mare says in his loving Foreword to ET’s Collected Poems (1920): ‘This is not a poetry that will drug or ­intoxicate, civicise or edify—­in the usual meaning of the word, though it rebuilds reality.’ De la Mare’s poem ‘Sotto Voce’ recalls ET introducing him to the nightingale’s fainter daytime song: ‘a heart caught up to hear / That inmost pondering / Of bird-­like self with self ’. De la Mare also wrote short stories and novels, and became a renowned children’s author. He contributed to Georgian Poetry, and his poetry collections include Songs of Childhood (1902, under pseudonym Walter Ramal), Poems (1906)*, The Listeners and Other Poems (1912)*, Peacock Pie (1913)*, The Veil and Other Poems (1921), Memory and Other Poems (1938). De la Mare’s Complete Poems was published in 1969; the most recent Selected Poems, ed. Matthew Sweeney, in 2006. See William Wootten, Reading Walter de la Mare (London: Faber, 2021). Doughty, Charles M[ontagu] (1843–1926): Celebrated as a traveller and explorer, Doughty was born in Leiston near Saxmundham, Suffolk. He studied natural sciences at Cambridge. Doughty’s best-­known work, Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888),

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is a unique thousand-­page record of a westerner living among (and interacting with) Bedouin nomads, written in a quasi-­biblical style with elements of Arabic. ET reviewed an abridged version, Wanderings in Arabia (1908): ‘He has the wild fresh vision of an Elizabethan seaman coupled, as it never was before, with the reflective judgment and poet’s heart of a man of exquisite culture, breeding, and character’ (MP: 6 February 1908). Doughty’s passion for the past spanned geology, archaeology, anthropology, philology, and poetry. His main poetic models were Chaucer, Langland, and Spenser. He worked for years on a six-­volume epic poem, The Dawn in Britain (1906–7)*, greatly praised by ET. In another epic vein, Doughty wrote the neo-­Miltonic Adam Cast Forth (1908)*. His dramatic poems, The Cliffs (1909)* and The Clouds (1912)*, involve dystopian forebodings about a German invasion of Britain and the fall of the British Empire. ET’s high opinion of Doughty’s poetry remains unusual. Reviewing The Titans (1916)*, which concerns human origins, T.  S.  Eliot condemned his ‘eccentric’ diction, and said: ‘Mr Doughty’s mythology lacks outline, it lacks tradition, and it lacks concreteness’. But in ‘Charles Doughty and the Need for Heroic Poetry’ (1936) Hugh MacDiarmid praised Doughty’s ‘close fitting of word to sense’, as well as his epic ambition. Other admirers of his approach to language were Laura (Riding) Jackson and Schuyler B. Jackson, in their Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words (written 1940s; ­published 1997). Dowson, Ernest (1867–1900): Dowson was born in London, where his father, who had literary and artistic interests, managed a dry-­docking business. He left Oxford University without taking his degree, and began a career as poet, novelist, critic, translator of French literature, and shocker of the bourgeoisie. He contributed to the Yellow Book and the Savoy. Appropriately, Dowson was the first English translator of Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. He had conceived a hopeless passion for Adelaide Foltinowicz (first-­met when she was 12), whose Polish parents ran a Soho restaurant. Adelaide became a mystical ideal, of which the obverse side was Dowson’s later attraction to prostitutes and absinthe. In 1891 Dowson converted to Catholicism, which briefly provided an antidote to frustrated desire, chronic depression, and intellectual pessimism. His parents, who suffered from TB, committed suicide in the mid-­1890s. From 1895 Dowson mostly lived in Paris and Brittany. His increasingly careless lifestyle hastened his own death from TB. A member of the Rhymers’ Club, Dowson is central to W.  B.  Yeats’s recollection or myth of its poets as comprising a self-­destructive ‘Tragic Generation’: doomed by their dedication to intense experience and artistic intensity. Dowson’s most famous lines are: ‘They are not long, the days of wine and roses’ and ‘I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion’. Dowson was influenced by French symbolist poetry, especially by the verbal music of Paul Verlaine. He is among the few Anglophone poets who can write villanelles. Dowson’s main works are: Verses (1896), dedicated to Adelaide; The Pierrot of the Minute: A Dramatic Phantasy in One Act (1897); Decorations in Verse and Prose (1899). ET’s review of The Poems of Ernest Dowson (1905)* suggests a degree of psychological

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identification with Dowson. This collected edition contains an inaccurate memoir by Arthur Symons, which fed Dowson’s poète maudit legend. Overusing the adjective ‘exquisite’, Symons portrays ‘a life which had . . . so much of the swift, disastrous, and suicidal impetus of genius’; and says of Dowson: ‘He had the pure lyric gift, unweighted or unballasted by any other quality of mind or emotion’. See Three Poets of the Rhymers’ Club (1974), ed. Derek Stanford. Field, Michael: pseudonym of Katherine Bradley (1846–1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862–1913), who were lesbian ‘poets and lovers’ (‘Prologue’). Bradley and Cooper (known as ‘the Michaels’ after the secret of their authorship leaked out) co-­wrote poems and verse-­plays; although the method and degree of collaboration varied. They had private means and, from the late 1870s, lived together: first in Bristol, where they attended lectures at University College, then in Reigate and Richmond. In 1907, having successively embraced Anglicanism, atheism, and paganism, Bradley and Cooper converted to Catholicism. Friendly with Browning, Ruskin, Wilde, Meredith, Lionel Johnson, and the painter Charles Ricketts, aesthetically influenced by Walter Pater, they belonged to a wide literary and artistic circle. Their many plays, generally mythic or historical, include Callirrhoë and Fair Rosamund (1884) and Borgia: A Period Play (1905). Their collections of poetry include Long Ago (1889), in which every poem is based on a line by Sappho, Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses (1893), Wild Honey from Various Thyme (1908)*, Mystic Trees (1913). Works and Days, expurgated extracts from their voluminous joint journal, appeared in 1933. See Emma Donoghue, We Are Michael Field (1998). Flecker, James Elroy (1884–1915): ‘Roy’ Flecker was born in London. His parents were ethnically Jewish, from a Polish background, but his father became an Anglican clergyman and headmaster of an Anglican school. At Oxford, where he studied Classics and was known for his brilliance, Flecker encountered John Addington Symonds and the last phase of the Aesthetic movement. A third-­class degree blighted his job-­prospects, but in 1908 he entered the Levant Consular Service, which covered the Ottoman Empire. In 1910 he was posted to Constantinople; and in 1911 appointed British Vice-­Consul in Beirut. Although Flecker did not always take his diplomatic career seriously, the necessity to learn Arabic, Persian, and Turkish made him far better acquainted with the literature of the Middle East, including its poetic conventions, than were most ‘Orientalist’ poets of the period. Having developed TB, he ended his life in sanatoriums. Flecker published two novels and four collections of poetry: The Bridge of Fire (1907), Thirty Six Poems (1910)*, The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913)*, The Old Ships (1915). His Collected Poems was published in 1916. ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’ also concludes Flecker’s five-­act play Hassan: The Story of Hassan of Baghdad and how he came to make the Golden Journey to Samarkand (staged in 1923 with music by Delius and choreography by Fokine). Flecker’s other well-­known poem is ‘To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence’: ‘Read out my words at night, alone: / I was a poet, I was young’.

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Fletcher, John Gould (1886–1950): Born into a wealthy American family, Fletcher grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. He dropped out of Harvard. Influenced by French Symbolists and English aesthetes, Fletcher was obsessed with poetry and interested in modern art (in 1921 he published a study of Paul Gauguin). He left the US for Europe, living first in Italy, then in London. In 1913 Fletcher self-­published five books of poems: The Dominant City, Fool’s Gold, The Book of Nature, Visions of the Evening, Fire and Wine*. These works he soon repudiated. After meeting Ezra Pound, he adopted an ‘Imagist’ aesthetic; but defected to Amy Lowell’s brand of Imagism, scornfully dubbed ‘Amy-­gism’ by Pound. In three anthologies of Some Imagist Poets (1915–17) Fletcher was represented along with Lowell, Richard Aldington, H.  D., F. S. Flint, and D. H. Lawrence. Experiments in rhythm and ‘polyphonic prose’ characterize his collections Irradiations: Sand and Spray (1915) and Goblins and Pagodas (1916). He then quarrelled with Lowell too. The Great War obliged Fletcher to return to America, and he eventually went home to Arkansas. His later collections, such as The Black Rock (1928), reverted to more traditional forms, and aligned him with consciously ‘rooted’ poets of the American South: the ‘Fugitives’ or ‘Agrarians’. Despite publishing an autobiography entitled Life is My Song (1937), Fletcher suffered from depression, aggravated by chronic arthritis and ­detestation of modern life. In 1950 he drowned himself. Frost, Robert (1874–1963): Frost was born in San Francisco. After his father’s death, the family moved to New England (1885). Frost studied briefly at Dartmouth College, worked as a teacher and reporter, and attended Harvard College (1897–9). He married Elinor White in 1895. The death of their first child was the first of several family tragedies: their daughter Marjorie died after childbirth, their son Carol committed suicide. Frost himself (like ET) suffered from depression. In 1900 the Frosts moved to Derry, New Hampshire, where Frost farmed, taught, and wrote poetry. He began to think about the relation between speech and poetry: ‘the sentence-­sound’, ‘the sound of sense’. In 1912 Frost decided that leaving America might help him to become a full-­time writer. He brought his family to England, eventually to Ledington near Dymock (see under Abercrombie above). Frost’s first collection, A Boy’s Will, was published in London (1913). Ezra Pound had introduced Frost to literary London, but they soon fell out. Frost called Pound ‘An arrivist from the word go’, adding: ‘He can’t teach me anything I really care to know’ (LRF I, 116). Himself an American ‘arrivist’, Frost suspected that he was being co-­opted to advance Pound’s own agenda: ‘The fact that he discovered me gives him the right to see that I live up to his good opinion of me. He says I must write something much more like vers libre or he will let me perish of neglect. He really threatens’ (LRF I, 132). Friendship with ET, whom he met in October 1913, gave Frost an aesthetic ally against Pound. This was the most important literary relationship in both poets’ lives. After ET’s death, Frost called him ‘the only brother I ever had’, and said: ‘I hadn’t a plan for the future that didn’t include him’ (LRF I, 552). ET wrote three laudatory reviews of Frost’s North of Boston (1914)*. Frost’s encouragement and example, together with their shared ideas about speech and poetry, contributed to ET starting to write poems in December 1914. He

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c­ elebrates his friendship with Frost in ‘The sun used to shine’: a poem that evokes their walks and talks in August 1914, when ET and family holidayed near Ledington. Frost’s reciprocal poem is ‘Iris by Night’. These poems also imply their joint legacy to later poets. In February 1915, literary England having shut down, the Frosts returned to the US; where (partly thanks to ET’s reviews) Frost’s reputation grew rapidly. In 1916 he published Mountain Interval. His grief over ET’s death enters the poems of New Hampshire (1923). The most popular American poet of the mid-­twentieth century, Frost lived by teaching in colleges and by giving readings and lectures. His later collections include West-­Running Brook (1928), A Further Range (1936), In the Clearing (1962). In 1961 Frost recited his poem ‘The Gift Outright’ at the ­inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. Gibson, Wilfrid Wilson (1878–1962): Gibson was born in Hexham, Northumberland, and wrote poetry from an early age. In 1912 he moved to London, where he lodged at Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop. In 1913 he married Monro’s secretary, Geraldine Townshend, and they left London for The Old Nail-­Shop: a house near Dymock, Gloucestershire (see under Abercrombie above). Gibson befriended and promoted Robert Frost, but Frost and ET could be critical of him as man and poet. Gibson helped Edward Marsh to establish the Georgian anthologies, and his own poems appeared in all five. He also co-­edited New Numbers* (see [608]), which published Rupert Brooke’s ‘1914’ sonnet sequence. Gibson’s pre-­war collections include The Queen’s Vigil and Other Song (1902)*, The Golden Helm, and Other Verse (1903)*, The Nets of Love (1905)*, The Web of Life (1908)*, Fires: Books I*, II and III* (1912). His poetry first became noted for its landscapes and folk-­motifs (as in the ballad-­like ‘Flannan Isle’); then for its social conscience and portrayal of rural and industrial workers. Daily Bread, a sequence of brief verse-­plays with titles like ‘The Garret’ and ‘The Night-­shift’, was staged in 1910. Gibson tried to enlist four times, but his poor eyesight prevented this. Even so, drawing on newspaper reports and soldiers’ accounts, he pioneered the ‘trench-­sketch’ poem. ‘Breakfast’ begins and ends with these lines: ‘We ate our breakfast lying on our backs, / Because the shells were screeching overhead’. Battle (1915) contains thirty-­two ‘war poems’. Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, and Isaac Rosenberg would acknowledge Gibson’s influence. In 1917 the Army Service Corps accepted Gibson for clerical work. His Collected Poems 1905–1925 was published in 1926; The Golden Room and Other Poems in 1928. Gibson’s popularity (in 1917 he toured the US) waned during his lifetime. In 1939 he lamented to Frost: ‘I am one of those unlucky writers whose books have predeceased him.’ Hardy, Thomas (1840–1928): Hardy always wrote poems alongside fiction, but his first collection, Wessex Poems and Other Verses, did not appear until 1898. In the twentieth century he published only poetry, including: Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), The Dynasts: An Epic-­Drama of the War with Napoleon (1904–8), Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909)*, Satires of Circumstance: Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces (1914), Late Lyrics and Earlier, with Many Other

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Verses (1922), Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928). Several Collected Poems have appeared. ET attacked documentary approaches to Hardy’s work, as by Bertram Windle in The Wessex of Thomas Hardy (1902)*, and was unusual in valuing Hardy’s poetry above his fiction. His review-­article ‘Thomas Hardy of Dorchester’ [563] shows his comprehensive knowledge of the poetry, and in ‘War Poetry’ he praises Hardy as a war poet. Hardy’s poetry influenced ET, as well as Lawrence, Frost, and Sassoon. There is a significant generational dialogue between Hardy’s ‘In Time of “the Breaking of Nations” ’ and ET’s ‘As the team’s head-­brass’ (ACP, 123). ET’s poetry also involves other dialogues with Hardy, who would read and admire his poems. Reciprocally, Hardy’s ‘The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House’ may respond to ET’s ‘Out in the dark’ (ACP, 138). Hewlett, Maurice (1861–1923): Principally known as the author of historical romances, although he wished to be thought a poet, Hewlett was born in Weybridge, Surrey. He trained as a lawyer, but became a full-­time writer after the success of his novel The Forest Lovers (1898). He published some poems in the 1890s, and returned to poetry with Artemision: Idylls and Songs (1909)* and Helen Redeemed and Other Poems (1913). His under-­rated terza rima epic ‘The English Chronicle’ appeared in successive issues of PD (March-­June-­September 1914). The poem’s premise is that, since Norman times, ‘the governing and the governed classes [have been] two s­ eparate nations’. As Hewlett’s preface notes, this representation of English history-­from-­below might have been called The Hodgiad. In 1916 he published the poem as The Song of the Plow: Being the English Chronicle, with a wartime ‘Dedication to England, long divided, now made one’. With its ideal-­type of the rural labourer, Hewlett’s verse-­history may have influenced ET’s poem ‘Lob’. Besides ‘Hodge’, it features ‘Hob and Lob’, as in: ‘Hob and Lob gone out with the reeve / To sweat and grunt in battle’s mouth’. Early in the war, Hewlett wrote a poem with the bellicose title, ‘To England: To Strike Quickly’; but a later poem, ‘In the Trenches’, links English and German soldiers through similar feeling for their home landscapes. Hodgson, Ralph (1871–1962): Hodgson grew up in Darlington. Noted for his love of boxing, billiards, and bull-­terriers, he worked in London as a writer, cartoonist, and creator of comic strips. Hodgson’s main collections of poems are The Last Blackbird and Other Lines (1907)*, Eve and Other Poems (1913)*, Poems (1917). He contributed to Georgian Poetry. During the war, despite his age and some ill-­health, Hodgson served in coastal defence. In the 1920s and 1930s he taught English literature in Japan; and, having virtually ceased to write poems himself, became an important translator of classical Japanese poetry. Hodgson then moved to the US. A Volume of selected poems, The Skylark and Other Poems, was published in 1959; his Collected Poems in 1961. Today, his best-­known poem is ‘The Bull’. ET met Hodgson in 1910, and was attracted to his colourful personality, his physicality, and independent views: ‘such a vigorous & simple nature, careless generous’ (LGB, 208). But they quarrelled spectacularly in November 1914, when Hodgson called ET ‘pro-­German’ for implying

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that British, as well as German, soldiers might fear ‘cold steel’. They agreed not to meet until after the war, ET commenting drily: ‘I am not patriotic enough for his exuberant taste’ (LGB, 243). This quarrel with Hodgson may have influenced ET’s decision to enlist. Johnson, Lionel (1867–1902): Born in Broadstairs, Kent, Johnson was educated at Winchester College and at Oxford, where he was tutored by Walter Pater. Johnson became a critic as well as a poet. He wrote regularly for the Academy and other journals; published a well-­received critical study, The Art of Thomas Hardy (1894); and preceded ET as poetry reviewer for the Daily Chronicle. Fascinated by religion, ­ceremony, and hierarchy—­a mark of his Aestheticism—­Johnson converted from high Anglicanism to Catholicism (1891). He also converted to Irishness. During the 1890s he visited Ireland, lectured on Irish writers, supported Irish nationalism, and assumed a ‘Celtic’ literary identity. A member of the Rhymers’ Club, he was close to W. B. Yeats, who aligns Johnson with Ernest Dowson (see above) in his memoir ‘The Tragic Generation’. Yeats celebrates both poets in his poem ‘The Grey Rock’ for having ‘kept the Muses’ sterner laws’. Johnson’s despairing poem ‘The Dark Angel’ implicates his repressed homosexuality and the alcoholism that would help to kill him: ‘Malicious Angel, who still dost / My soul such subtile violence!’ His poems assume extreme postures of personal and cultural loss: ‘Go from me: I am one of those, who fall’ (‘Mystic and Cavalier’); ‘Desolate and forlorn, / We hunger against hope for that lost heritage’ (‘The Age of a Dream’). Johnson published two collections: Poems (1895), Ireland, with Other Poems (1897). Selections from the Poems of Lionel Johnson* appeared in 1908, with a Prefatory Memoir by Clement Shorter, who stressed Johnson’s learning, ‘brilliant intellect’, ‘remarkable intuitive power as to the best in literature’ and devotion to Ireland. Post Liminium: Essays and Critical Papers (1911) is a selection from Johnson’s prose-­writings. See Three Poets of the Rhymers’ Club (1974), ed. Derek Stanford. Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936): Kipling was born in Mumbai. His parents sent him to England, where his life with guardians and at school was often unhappy. On returning to India (Lahore) in 1882, he became a journalist, and began to write poems, as well as fiction for adults and children. Departmental Ditties, which s­ atirizes Anglo-­Indian officialdom, was published in 1886; Barrack-­Room Ballads and Other Verses in 1892. In 1889 Kipling left India for England and undertook further travels. In 1902 he settled permanently in Burwash, East Sussex. An immensely popular writer, he was awarded the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature. He refused other honours, and ruled himself out for the Poet-­Laureateship. Kipling often framed his short stories with poems, as in Actions and Reactions (1909)* and Rewards and Fairies (1910)*. ET disliked Kipling’s poetry (which he saw as verse) and imperialist mind-­ set. His review-­article ‘War Poetry’ is effectively a critique of Kipling. Kipling’s ­politics became more complex after his son John was killed at the Battle of Loos (1915). His collection The Years Between (1919) contains ‘Epitaphs’ (later, ‘Epitaphs of the War’): a sequence of ‘sepulchral unchristian epigrams’, in which he attacks

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­ oliticians for betraying British troops: ‘If any question why we died, / Tell them, p because our fathers lied.’ Kipling, who had a large role in the Imperial [later, Commonwealth] War Graves Commission, conceived the phrase ‘known unto God’ for the headstones of unidentified casualties. Craig Raine, editor of Selected Poetry by Kipling (1992), attempts to restore Kipling’s poetic reputation by highlighting his use of dialect; his closeness to social underdogs and gritty modern life; and (less ­plausibly) his links to literary ‘modernism’. Lawrence, D. H. (1885–1930): Lawrence grew up in Eastwood, near Nottingham. From the outset, he wrote poetry, short stories, and novels; but did not publish his first collection of poems, Love Poems and Others*, until 1913: the year when Sons and Lovers also appeared. He had already published two novels, The White Peacock (1911) and The Trespasser (1912). Lawrence contributed to Georgian Poetry and to Imagist anthologies. His later collections include Look! We Have Come Through! (1917), Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), Pansies (1929), Last Poems (1932). Last Poems contains Lawrence’s great poem ‘The Ship of Death’, which anticipates his death from TB. Several editions of his Complete Poems have been published. After the war, which he intensely hated, Lawrence left England permanently. He and his German wife, Frieda, had been persecuted because they were suspected of spying. ET’s two reviews of Love Poems and Others almost equal in enthusiasm his reception of Frost’s North of Boston. He never met Lawrence, but they had a common patron in Edward Garnett (see Introduction [xxii]), and Lawrence visited Helen Thomas after ET’s death: see Helen Thomas, Time & Again: Memoirs and Letters (1978). ET might have sympathized with Lawrence’s distinction in ‘The Poetry of the Present’, his preface to the American edition of New Poems (1920), between truly ‘free’ verse (Whitman’s and his own), which is ‘instantaneous like plasm’, and the work of poets who ‘break the lovely form of metrical verse, and . . . dish up the fragments as a new substance, called vers libre’. Macleod, Fiona, pseudonym of William Sharp (1855–1905): Born in Paisley, Sharp attended Glasgow University, but left without taking his degree. He worked in a Glasgow law-­office and a London bank before becoming a full-­time writer. A member of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s circle, Sharp wrote a study of Rossetti, followed by biographies of Shelley, Heinrich Heine, and Browning (1882–9). In 1896 he edited, with his wife Elizabeth, Lyra Celtica: An Anthology of Representative Celtic Poetry. From the mid-­1890s, Sharp wrote poems, plays, fiction, and essays in the voice of a ‘Celtic’ female persona: either following a fashionable trend or sublimating some psychic complication or both. During Sharp’s lifetime, few people knew Fiona Macleod’s real identity. Yeats, who eventually guessed, had a tense relationship with Sharp/Macleod over their channelling of his own Celtic Twilight mode; and, more broadly, over Scottish piggy-­backing on the Irish Literary Revival. ET diagnoses fakery in From the Hills of Dream: Threnodies, Songs and Later Poems (1901, 1907)* and The Dominion of Dreams (1899, 1909)*, a prose-­work which includes some verse. The library-­catalogue entry ‘Fiona Macleod [pseud]’ may be apposite.

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Maeterlinck, Maurice (1862–1949): See introduction to extract from ET’s Maurice Maeterlinck [466]. Masefield, John (1878–1967): Born in Ledbury, on the Herefordshire side of the county border with Gloucestershire, Masefield has best claim to be termed a ‘Dymock’ poet (see under Abercrombie above). His narrative poem The Daffodil Fields (1913)* is largely set in the surrounding countryside. After three unhappy years at boarding-­school (1888–91), Masefield trained to be an officer in the Merchant Navy. He eventually abandoned ship, becoming a vagrant, barman, and factory-­ worker in the US. Meanwhile, he developed a passion for reading. In 1897 Masefield returned to England, and began to use his experiences as material for poetry, fiction, and plays. ET praised his early prose-­works such as A Mainsail Haul (1905) and A Tarpaulin Muster (1907). Masefield’s first book of poems, Salt-­Water Ballads (1902), was followed by Ballads (1903)*, Ballads and Poems (1910)*, and a series of narrative poems: The Everlasting Mercy (1911), The Widow in the Bye Street (1912)*, Dauber (1913), The Daffodil Fields. The Everlasting Mercy, which involves swearing, sex, and alcoholism, caused public controversy, even though its protagonist is a repentant sinner. ET was always interested in Masefield’s work; and, when praising The Tragedy of Nan and Other Plays (1909) as ‘beautiful natural prose dialogue & full of poetry’, he also calls him ‘a wonderful man’ (LGB, 195). Masefield contributed to Georgian Poetry, becoming that popular anthology’s most popular poet. His Collected Poems (first published in 1923) had sold 200,000 copies by the time he died. Early in the war, Masefield worked as a hospital orderly in France and on a hospital ship at Gallipoli. A member of the War Propaganda Bureau, he gave lectures on the war to American audiences, and wrote three war-­books: Gallipoli (1916), The Old Front Line (1917)—about the Somme battlefield on the first day—­and The Battle of the Somme (1919). Always prolific, he published twelve novels, including children’s fiction, between the wars. In 1930 he succeeded Robert Bridges as Poet Laureate. See Sea-­ Fever: Selected Poems of John Masefield, ed. Philip W. Errington (2005). Meredith, George (1828–1909): Meredith was born in Portsmouth, but his family claimed descent from Welsh chieftains, and he favoured a ‘Celtic’ identity. As a ­teenager, he spent nearly two years in Germany being educated by the Moravian Brotherhood: an experience to which he ascribed his intellectual development, humanist philosophy, and progressive views. Meredith’s thought involves tensions between a post-­Darwinian regard for the power of natural forces, an optimistic belief in reason and social progress, and the desire to realize ‘a larger self ’: see George Meredith, Selected Poems, ed. Keith Hanley (1983). Meredith abandoned a legal apprenticeship in London to write poetry and fiction. He earned a living (with difficulty) as a journalist and publisher’s reader. From the mid-­1860s, now more financially secure, he lived with his second wife in a cottage at Box Hill, Surrey. Meredith gradually achieved a high literary reputation, but little popular success until he published Diana of the Crossways (1885). Other notable novels are The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), Beauchamp’s Career (1876), The Egoist (1879). Meredith believed in the

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‘civilising’ power of comedy, and his novels are primarily romantic comedies with a tragic edge. Their psychological inwardness and depiction of strong women (Meredith always advocated women’s rights) influenced the fiction of Henry James, Hardy, and Lawrence. In his old age, the ‘Sage of Box Hill’ was lauded by the great and good, enshrined as a public intellectual. But, writing in Meredith’s centenary year, Virginia Woolf saw his fame as already ‘under a cloud’. While praising Meredith’s ‘intermittent brilliancy’ and willingness to experiment, she condemned his didacticism and failure to make the hybrid qualities of a novelist-­philosopher or novelist-­ poet consistently cohere (Woolf, The Common Reader, Second Series [London: Hogarth Press, 1932], 226–36). ET was drawn to Meredith’s energetic ‘earthliness’, perhaps to his situation between prose and poetry. Meredith’s collections of poems include Poems (1851), Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads (1862), Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth (1883), Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life (1887), A Reading of Life with Other Poems (1901)*, Poems Written in Early Youth, etc. (1909)*. Modern Love is now seen as Meredith’s most important poetic work. This sequence of fifty sonnets fuses lyric with narrative, and, like Richard Feverel, reflects Meredith’s anguish after his first wife left him. The poetry’s dark sexual content caused critical outrage. Less scandalously innovative was the ‘Meredithian sonnet’: a sixteen-­line block, rhymed ABBA, CDDC, EFFE, GHHG. ET’s four-­ quatrain poem ‘For These’ (ACP, 99) has this rhyme-­scheme. Meynell, Alice (1847–1922): Meynell (née Thompson) was born in London, and mainly grew up in Italy. Like her parents, she converted to Catholicism (in 1868): she had a hopeless romance with the Jesuit priest who inducted her into the Church. Her faith became central to her life and work. In 1877 she married the Catholic publisher and magazine-­editor Wilfrid Meynell (1852–1948), in whose enterprises, such as the monthly journal Merry England, she shared. The Meynells’ ‘at-­homes’ became a literary salon. The couple had seven surviving children. Twice-­considered for the Poet-­ Laureateship, Meynell was the most prominent woman poet of the day. Also a well-­known critic and commentator, she contributed to periodicals such as the Tablet, Spectator, and Saturday Review; had a weekly column in the Pall Mall Gazette (1893–8); and published several collections of essays. Meynell apparently preferred her prose to her poetry—­as ET did not: reviewing Ceres’ Runaway and Other Essays (1909), he attributes ‘the inhumanity of Mrs Meynell’s style’, its remoteness from lived experience, to the influence of Walter Pater (MP: 16 December 1909). Meynell’s first collection Preludes (1875) was reprinted as Poems (1893). Later Poems (1902) and Poems (1913)* followed. A Complete Edition of her poetry was published in 1923. Meynell wrote a moving poem about the outbreak of war: ‘Summer in England, 1914’: ‘Love, hide thy face / From man’s unpardonable race’. Reticent and seemingly mysterious, Alice Meynell was adored by George Meredith, Coventry Patmore, and Francis Thompson. With Wilfrid, she organized the publication of Thompson’s Poems in 1893. Patmore, whose obsession with her she eventually had to discourage, gave Meynell the manuscript of his popular narrative poem The Angel in the House (1854–62). For Virginia Woolf, Meynell conformed to the Victorian idealization/ oppression of women as exemplified by Patmore’s poem. Yet Meynell, active in the

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Women Writers’ Suffrage League, was progressive as well as pious, poet as well as Muse. It has been argued that, contra her public image, she was not an angelic spirit but a working mother (hence the gaps in her poetic career); a complex, conflicted woman of letters; even a literary prototype of Woolf herself. ET never met Meynell, but Eleanor Farjeon secured her agreement to support his case for a Civil List pension—­which he never obtained (EF, 195). Monro, Harold (1879–1932): Born in Brussels of London-­Scottish parents, Monro was educated at Radley College (until expelled for a homosexual incident) and Cambridge University. He became involved with the Samurai Press (1907–9): organ of a short-­lived utopian movement, influenced by H.  G.  Wells, which combined socialist, libertarian, and spiritual ideals. The Press published his book The Evolution of the Soul (1907). Another soulful work was The Chronicle of a Pilgrimage: Paris to Milan on Foot (1909). Having lived abroad for three years, and transferred his idealism to poetry, Monro became first editor of the monthly Poetry Review (1912), but discovered he had little control. In 1913 he founded the quarterly Poetry and Drama: see Introduction [xxxix]; and, after the war, the monthly Chapbook (1919–25). In December 1912 Monro used a legacy to establish the Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire [now Boswell] Street, Bloomsbury. The Bookshop quickly became a hub where poets met, gave readings—­over seventy in 1913—and sometimes lodged. Monro helped and advised poets, including Wilfred Owen. He also published them. Among Poetry Bookshop publications are the Georgian Poetry anthologies and Des Imagistes; first collections by Richard Aldington, Robert Graves, and Charlotte Mew; pamphlets and broadsides. In June 1916, as conscription loomed, Monro joined the Royal Garrison Artillery (which ET joined in the same year), and received various home postings. He later worked for the War Office. The war ended Poetry and Drama, along with Monro’s idealistic hopes, and he never recaptured his pre-­war literary momentum. Depression and alcoholism may have accelerated his death from TB. Monro’s collections of poetry include Before Dawn (Poems and Impressions) (1911)*, Strange Meetings (1917), The Earth for Sale (1928). In 1914 he wrote ‘Youth in Arms’: an anti-­war quartet, which, with its attack on ‘greybeards’ and its homoerotic element, may have influenced Owen. Another poem, ‘The Poets are Waiting’, has the refrain: ‘To what God / Shall we chant / Our songs of Battle?’ ET became friendly with Monro, ‘a nice fellow in sympathy with advanced thought’, in 1910 (LGB, 218). But their relations were complicated. While ET gave Poetry and Drama a critical spine, Monro hurt him by (twice) rejecting his poems: ‘I am sorry because I feel utterly sure they are me. I expect obstacles and I get them . . . . I assume the verses expressed nothing clearly that you cared about’ (SL, 104). After ET’s death, Monro offered to publish his poetry. Helen Thomas thanked him for admitting his mistake, but said that the offer had come ‘too late’ (see Poetry Wales 13, 4 [Spring 1978], 67). Moore, T[homas] Sturge (1870–1944): Moore was born in Hastings. His younger brother was the influential philosopher G. E. Moore. Moore studied art in London, and became a wood-­engraver, illustrator, book-­designer, and art-­historian (as in Albert Durer [1905]). He designed book-­covers for Yeats and other poets. For his

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long friendship with Yeats, see W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence 1901–1937, ed. Ursula Bridge (1953). Yeats included six poems by Moore in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936). In the early twentieth century, Moore published a number of slim volumes, belonged to the Literary Theatre Club in London, and wrote Yeats-­influenced poetic drama as well as poems. His works, which often draw on classical mythology, include The Vinedresser, and Other Poems (1899), The Centaur’s Booty (1903)*, Pan’s Prophecy (1904)*, The Gazelles and Other Poems (1904)*, To Leda and Other Odes (1904)*, The Little School: A Posy of Rhymes (1905)*, Mariamne (1911)*, A Sicilian Idyll and Judith (1911)*, The Sea is Kind (1914)*, Judas (1923). A  four-­volume Collected Edition of Moore’s poems appeared in 1931–3. ET took Moore seriously as a poet, and followed his career closely; yet with reservations which posterity has confirmed. He faults the prose of Moore’s critical book, Art and Life, as he can fault his poetry, for over-­worked style: ‘Even where his writing is certainly clear and good we seem to detect too laborious (or not sufficiently laborious) a use of words after Pater’s manner’ (DC: 30 March 1910). In turn, Moore remembers ET’s early critical incarnation as an ‘opinionated savage youngster’ (unfair to ET’s thoughtful reviews of his own work), and finds in some of his poems ‘a greater ­preoccupation with manner than with matter’; but ultimately calls him ‘a considerable poet with complex and subtle moods’ (Some Soldier Poets [London: Grant Richards, 1919], 77–85). Newbolt, Henry (1862–1938): Newbolt attended the Bristol public school, Clifton College: primary setting for his best-­known poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’ [‘The Torch of Life’], with its rousing refrain ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’ Taking his title from a sporting metaphor in Lucretius, Newbolt transfers the scene from a cricket-­ match to colonial conflict in Sudan, and thus identifies (public-­school) sport with war. He later called the poem a ‘Frankenstein’s Monster that I created’. After graduating from Oxford University, Newbolt worked as a lawyer (1885–99). He then edited the Monthly Review (1900–4), becoming prominent in literary and artistic circles. Contra his conventional image, he lived in a ménage à trois with his wife and her (female) cousin. During the war, Newbolt worked for the government: first for the War Propaganda Bureau, then for the Admiralty and the Foreign Office. He was knighted in 1915. ‘Vitaï Lampada’ appeared in Newbolt’s best-­selling (20,000 copies) first collection Admirals All and Other Verses (1897), as did two other ballad-­like poems that appealed to popular patriotism: ‘The Fighting Téméraire’ and ‘Drake’s Drum’. His other collections include The Sailing of the Long-­Ships and Other Poems (1902)*, Clifton Chapel and Other School Poems (1908), Poems: New and Old (1912)*. Newbolt also wrote prose-­histories concerning the British navy and army. In 1923 he was commissioned to complete the official History of the Great War: Naval Operations. Newbolt chaired an influential report on The Teaching of English in England (1921), and became General Editor for a series of anthologies to be used in classrooms. In later life, Newbolt wrote little poetry. He influenced his admirer, John Betjeman. Noyes, Alfred (1880–1958): At school in Aberystwyth, Noyes learned to love the sea and boats, and became devoted to Tennyson’s poetry. He skipped his finals at Oxford

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University to meet the publisher of his first collection The Loom of Years (1902)*. Other collections include The Flower of Old Japan (1903), The Forest of Wild Thyme (1905), Drake: An English Epic (1906; 1908)*, Forty Singing Seamen And Other Poems (1907)*, The Wine-­Press: A Tale of War (1913)*, The Book of Earth (1925). A popular and prolific poet, Noyes also wrote fiction and criticism, and could make a living from writing. He published a short biography of William Morris (1908)*. The war interrupted the arrangement whereby Noyes spent half the year at Princeton University, lecturing on modern English literature (1914–23). It also tested Noyes’s pacifism, for which The Wine-­Press had been a manifesto. He tried to enlist, but his eyesight let him down. He then worked in propaganda at the Foreign Office. Noyes later became a Catholic convert, and wrote on religious themes, as in The Unknown God (1934). He is now mainly known for his much-­anthologized poem ‘The Highwayman’. Pound, Ezra (1885–1972): Pound’s later history as pruner of ‘The Waste Land’, author of the immense Cantos, scourge of ‘usury’, fan of Mussolini, is better known than are his contexts and reception in pre-­war England; where he published Personae (1909)*, Exultations (1909)*, and The Spirit of Romance (1910)*, and engendered Des Imagistes (1914)*. In 1908 Pound had left the US for Europe (Venice), published his first book (A Lume Spento), and travelled to London. He wanted to make his literary name, to stir things up, to promote poetry ‘austere, direct, free from emotional slither’ (‘A Retrospect’). He soon began what would prove a long and fraught relationship with W. B. Yeats. Pound’s relationship with Robert Frost was more immediately fraught (see under Frost above). In their emphasis on speech, on the primacy of the ear, Frost and ET opposed Poundian aesthetic doctrines (such as ‘Imagism’ and ‘Vorticism’), which associated poetry with the visual arts. ET’s reviews of Pound mark a significant moment in the history and aesthetic dialectics of ‘modern poetry’. Robinson, A[gnes] Mary F[rances] (1857–1944): Robinson, who also wrote as Madame or Mary Duclaux, was educated in Brussels and at University College London. Her parents’ London house was a hub for the Pre-­Raphaelite circle. In 1883 Robinson published the first full-­length biography of Emily Brontë. During the 1880s she had a close relationship with the writer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), and they travelled together between England, France, and Italy. A shared mentor was John Addington Symonds: advocate of new attitudes to homosexuality, an associate of Havelock Ellis. Lee was upset by Robinson’s marriage (1888) to James Darmesteter (1849–94), Professor of Iranian studies at the Collège de France in Paris, who translated her work into French. Robinson subsequently married Émile Duclaux (1840– 1904), Director of the Pasteur Institute. (Both marriages were celibate.) Her salon in Paris included Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan. By then Robinson was writing biographies, fiction, criticism, and poetry in French as well as English. She also became a prolific reviewer, particularly of French books, for the Times Literary Supplement. Robinson’s collections of poetry include A Handful of Honeysuckle (1878), The New Arcadia and Other Poems (1884)—dedicated to Lee, Retrospect and Other Poems (1893), Collected Poems, Lyrical and Narrative (1902)*, Images and

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Meditations (1923). See Patricia Rigg, A.  Mary  F.  Robinson: Victorian Poet and Modern Woman of Letters (2021). Russell, George (see A.E.) Sharp, William (see Macleod, Fiona) Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1837–1909): Poet, dramatist, novelist, and critic, Swinburne was educated at Eton and at Oxford University (but did not take his degree). His political views, in keeping with other intense elements in his life, were revolutionary and republican. Swinburne’s verse drama Atalanta in Calydon (1865) established his considerable literary reputation, which survived his apparent attraction to forms of sexual ‘deviance’. Also an alcoholic, Swinburne spent his last thirty years in the care of his friend Theodore Watts-­Dunton, thus becoming a less controversial (and perhaps less interesting) figure. Francis O’Gorman notes that ET, in Algernon Charles Swinburne (1912), ‘is unusual in admitting the poet’s fondness for flagellation [although he] does avoid the other awkward biographical topic: Swinburne’s drinking’ (ETPW V, xli). Writing Swinburne helped ET to crystallize his own contrasting attitude to the language of poetry. Although he admired Swinburne’s influential William Blake: A Critical Essay (1868; 1906), he could also be tough on Swinburne’s prose and on his critical practice. He says of Swinburne’s Shakespeare: ‘the oration is all upon the same level of declamation . . . superlative heaped upon superlative’; ‘It may well prove that Mr Swinburne’s prose is due to an unforgettable amount of Latin prose composition at an age when it was praiseworthy to write, not well, but in a dignified manner, upon a broomstick’ (MP: 9 September 1909). Swinburne’s publications of poetry include three series of Poems and Ballads (1866; 1878; 1889), Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), A Channel Passage and Other Poems (1904)*. Several editions of selected poems were published during his lifetime. Symons, Arthur (1865–1945): Symons was born in Milford Haven, Wales, son of a Methodist minister. Owing to his father’s changes of parish, he had an unsettled childhood, but valued the family’s Cornish roots. Largely self-­taught, Symons precociously became an all-­round man of letters: author of poems, plays, fiction, memoirs, and criticism. He also reviewed books and theatre. In the 1890s Symons worked for the Academy and Saturday Review; contributed to the Yellow Book; and edited the Savoy (1896). A close friend of W. B. Yeats, he belonged to the Rhymers’ Club. Thus positioned at the heart of fin-­de-­siècle literary culture, Symons can be seen as an ‘aesthetic critic’ in the line of Walter Pater. His influential critical study, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899)*, both encompassed and inspired Yeats, to whom it was dedicated. The book stemmed from Symons’s devotion to the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Stéphane Mallarmé. His own poems of the 1890s owe much to French poetry, especially its erotic aspect, and to French Impressionist painting. Symons’s persona of urban flâneur, his images of demi-­monde Paris and London, would influence T.  S.  Eliot. In 1908 Symons suffered a severe mental

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­ reakdown (probably an episode of manic-­depressive psychosis), from which he b never wholly recovered. Thereafter he mostly lived quietly in Kent, or in the past, reworking earlier writings. In 1930 he published a memoir: Confessions: A Study in Pathology. Symons’s collections of poetry include Days and Nights (1889), Silhouettes (1892; 1896), London Nights (1895; 1897), Amoris Victima (1897), The Fool of the World and Other Poems (1906)*, Knave of Hearts: 1894–1908 (1913)*. His critical works include Studies in Seven Arts (1906)*, William Blake (1907)*, The Romantic Movement in English Poetry (1909)*. He edited Poems by John Clare (1908)*. ET took Symons very seriously as a critic, less so as a poet. He was conscious of their generational difference: of Symons remaining an ‘aesthetic critic’, while ET had revoked his youthful allegiance to Walter Pater (see Introduction [xlix]). But he anticipates Yeats’s praise of Symons’s exceptional capacity to ‘slip as it were into the mind of another’ (Autobiographies). See Arthur Symons, Selected Writings, ed. Roger Holdsworth (1974, 2006); Arthur Symons, Selected Early Poems, ed. Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick (2017). Synge, John Millington (1871–1909): Better known as a dramatist than a poet, Synge grew up near and in Dublin. His family had links with the evangelical wing of the Church of Ireland. From 1888 to 1892 Synge attended Trinity College Dublin, where the Irish language was one of his subjects. He spent much of the next decade travelling and studying in Germany and France. Having first wanted to be a professional musician, he opted for literature instead, and became central to the Irish Literary Revival. In 1898 he acted on W.  B.  Yeats’s suggestion that he might find material in the Aran Islands. Other visits followed, as did Synge’s book The Aran Islands (1907) and plays based on the islanders’ folklore and Hiberno-­English speech: Riders to the Sea (1903), The Playboy of the Western World (1907)*. Synge based other plays, such as In the Shadow of the Glen (1904), on his experience of rural Wicklow. With Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, Synge became a director of the Abbey Theatre (founded in 1904). The theatre’s production of The Playboy provoked riots, owing to the play’s alleged slur on Irish morals. Always in poor health, owing to Hodgkin’s disease, Synge died before he could complete his last play Deirdre of the Sorrows. Synge influenced stylistic change in Yeats’s poetry and drama, and his work has ­continued to influence Irish playwrights, including Samuel Beckett and Martin McDonagh. ET was deeply impressed by the poetic speech of Synge’s plays as well as by his posthumous Poems and Translations (1909)*. Tagore, Rabindranath (1861–1941): Tagore, polymathic culture-­hero of the Bengal Renaissance, belonged to a wealthy family in Calcutta. He was the prolific author of poems, songs, plays, fiction, and essays. Tagore came to London in 1912: a visit that kick-­started his international literary fame. W. B. Yeats wrote an enthusiastic preface to Tagore’s Gitanjali (Song Offerings) (1913)*: short poems translated into English prose by Tagore himself. Yeats celebrates the book as stemming from ‘a tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing’. Another self-­translated book, The

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Gardener, mainly consisting of earlier poems, appeared in the same year. These poems concern love, whereas Gitanjali has a religious focus. Yeats’s support advanced Tagore’s reputation, although he did not approve the poems that Tagore had started to write in English. In 1913, too, Tagore became the first non-­European to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Tagore, much of whose writing remains untranslated, was also an Indian patriot, educational thinker, and public intellectual. He established his own school and university. Tagore’s internationalism and universalist ­philosophy, together with his hatred of Hindu-­Moslem sectarianism, often complicated his attitude to Mahatma Ghandi and Indian nationalism. But in 1919, after the Amritsar massacre, he renounced the knighthood he had received in 1915. The national anthems of India and Bangladesh are songs by Tagore. Thompson, Francis (1859–1907): Thompson was born in Preston, but his family moved to Ashton-­under-­Lyne. Influenced by Cardinal Newman, his parents had become Catholic converts. Thompson attended St Cuthbert’s College, a Catholic seminary near Durham. But, although his faith remained strong, he decided not to be a priest; and, later, not to be a doctor (like his father), despite studying medicine for six years in Manchester. He became addicted to opium, and (from 1885) lived on the streets in London. He was rescued from a suicidal situation, first by a compassionate prostitute, then by the Catholic publishers Alice and Wilfrid Meynell (see under Alice Meynell above). In 1887 Thompson had sent poems to the Meynells’ magazine Merry England, which led them to seek him out. In 1888, in an effort to overcome his addiction, he went to stay at the Premonstratensian Priory, Storrington, West Sussex. There he wrote his best-­known work: the religious poem, ‘The Hound of Heaven’. The Meynells continued to look after the erratic Thompson, whose health was ruined by addiction, and to publish his poetry. They also published his criticism and his essays on social issues like homelessness. From 1892, Thompson spent four years at a Franciscan friary in Flintshire, where the Welsh mountains accentuated his (somewhat heretical) sense of God’s presence in natural phenomena. Thompson’s collections of poetry include Poems (1893), Sister-­Songs (1895), New Poems (1897), a posthumous Selected Poems (1908)*. His prose works include Health and Holiness (1905) and Shelley (1909)*. Wilfrid Meynell edited a three-­volume Works of Francis Thompson (1913)*, but took liberties with the text. Tynan, Katharine (1859–1931): Tynan mainly grew up in Clondalkin, Co. Dublin. Her father was a wealthy Catholic farmer and cattle-­trader, with literary interests. Despite bad eyesight, Tynan became dedicated to reading and writing. Her family remained loyal to the Irish nationalist leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, after an affair ended his political career. She herself wrote for a Parnellite newspaper, and joined the Ladies’ Land League. Tynan admired Alice Meynell (see above), whose at-­homes she attended; and she called herself the ‘disciple’ of another English Catholic poet: Christina Rossetti. Devotional Catholicism pervades Tynan’s poetry. Wilfrid Meynell arranged for her first collection Louise de la Vallière and Other Poems to be published (1885). In the same year, Tynan met W. B. Yeats, with whom she began an important

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literary friendship and correspondence. Yeats wrote to her in April 1887: ‘I feel more and more that we shall have a school of Irish poetry—­founded on Irish myth and History—­a neo-­romantic movement.’ They encouraged one another to take up Irish themes, and collaborated on the anthology Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland (1888). Yeats frequented Tynan’s Clondalkin salon, as did other young Irish writers. He later edited a selection from her work, Twenty One Poems (1907); although in 1898 he had called her ‘uncritical and unspeculative’, except in poems that express ‘an impassioned and instinctive Catholicism [and are] a permanent part of our literature’ (Uncollected Prose II, 116–17). In 1893 Tynan married Henry Hinkson: a Protestant classicist, barrister, and author. Since Hinkson never earned much money, she wrote pot-­boiling fiction, alongside poems, essays, and reviews (usually calling herself Katharine Tynan Hinkson). Her vast output includes ninety-­four novels and twenty-­three books of short stories, as well as twenty-­seven poetry collections. Having lived in London for fifteen years, the couple returned to Ireland in 1911. Their two sons fought with the Royal Irish Regiment in the Great War, and Tynan’s war poems, such as ‘Joining the Colours’ (‘singing they go / Into the dark’), had some popular currency. Tynan’s complex cultural affiliations are noteworthy. Her best-­ known poems are ‘Any Woman’ (‘I am the pillars of the house’) and ‘Sheep and Lambs’: ‘All in the April evening, / April airs were abroad . . .’ . Among Tynan’s collections of poems are Shamrocks (1887), Ballads and Lyrics (1891), The Wind in the Trees (1898), Experiences (1908)*, Irish Poems (1913), Flower of Youth: Poems in War Time (1915), Collected Poems (1930). Watson, William (1858–1935): Born in Yorkshire, Watson grew up in Liverpool. His verse became popular in the late nineteenth century. Watson’s attitude to poetry was highly traditionalist: the title-­poem of Wordsworth’s Grave and other Poems (1890) attacks the ‘misbegotten’ new poets of the day. A later title was The Muse in Exile (1913). Watson’s politics were less orthodox. After Oscar Wilde became notorious, he campaigned to have Aubrey Beardsley sacked as art-­editor of The Yellow Book. But his sonnet sequence The Purple East (1896) attacked ‘England’s Desertion of Armenia’, and he applauded the Boers for their ‘valour in a desperate field’ (‘The Enemy’). As a result, Watson’s book-­sales declined between 1899 and 1902. Later, married to an Irishwoman, he supported Irish independence. Despite his popularity, Watson was twice passed over (after the deaths of Tennyson and Alfred Austin) for the Poet-­ Laureateship, perhaps owing to his political vagaries. But he was knighted in 1917: no doubt because he had eulogized David Lloyd George in the title-­poem of The Man Who Saw and Other Poems Arising out of the War (1917). After the war, Watson, who had once made £500 a year from his verse, became forgotten, impoverished, and embittered. His collections include Odes and Other Poems (1894), Ode on the Day of the Coronation of King Edward VII (1902)*, For England: Poems Written During Estrangement (1903)*, New Poems (1909)*, Sable and Purple with Other Poems (1910). Yeats, W.  B. (1865–1939): ET’s writings on Yeats represent him as the dominant presence in English-­language poetry during the early twentieth century. They also

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suggest how Yeats influenced his own poetry and his thinking about poetry. All ET’s reviews of Yeats’s books are reprinted here, almost all in full, and they cover every genre in which Yeats wrote: The Celtic Twilight (1893; 1902)*, The Tables of the Law and The Adoration of the Magi (1897; 1904)*, Stories of Red Hanrahan (1905)*, Plays for an Irish Theatre, Vols II & III (1904)*, Poems, 1899–1905 (1906)*, Discoveries: A Volume of Essays (1907)*, Plays for an Irish Theatre, Vol. V: Deirdre (1907)*, The Collected Works of William Butler Yeats (1908)*, Poems, New Edition (1912)*.

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Chronology 1878

1883–93

1894 1895

1896

1897

1898

1899 1900

1901

Philip Edward Thomas born in Lambeth, London, on 3 March, eldest son of Philip Henry and Mary Elizabeth Thomas. ET had five brothers. His family later lived in Wandsworth, Clapham, and Balham. ET attends several London schools, including Battersea Grammar School. He spends holidays in Wiltshire, where he gets to know ‘Dad’ Uzzell and starts to write prose in the manner of Richard Jefferies. He also visits relations in Wales. ET starts at St Paul’s School, London, in January. He meets James Ashcroft Noble, and becomes a regular visitor at his house. ET leaves St Paul’s at Easter. Some of his essays are published in journals. He becomes friendly with Helen, daughter of James Ashcroft Noble. James Ashcroft Noble dies. Mrs Noble and ET’s parents oppose his relationship with Helen, but Helen leaves home and the relationship strengthens. ET works for entry to Oxford University. ET’s first book, The Woodland Life published, and he matriculates as a non-­collegiate student at Oxford. He lodges at 113 Cowley Road. In March ET wins a scholarship to read History at Lincoln College, Oxford. Thomas spends two years at Lincoln, 1898–1900. Oxford friends include E. S. P. Haynes (Balliol College), Ian MacAlister (Merton), and J. H. Morgan (Balliol). Helen Noble becomes pregnant. On 20 June, they are married at Fulham Registry Office, London. Helen and ET’s son Merfyn is born in January. In the summer, ET graduates with a Second Class degree in History. From August, he lives at Atheldene Road, Earlsfield, and then at 7 Nightingale Parade, Balham, London. In January, ET applies unsuccessfully for a secretaryship with the National Trust. In September, the Thomas family moves to Rose Acre Cottage, Bearsted, near Maidstone, Kent. ET starts reviewing for The Daily Chronicle.

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1903

1904

1905

1906

1907

1908

1909

Chronology Horae Solitariae published at the end of May. In October, ET’s elder daughter Bronwen is born. ET writes to Gordon Bottomley for the first time. The Poems of John Dyer and Oxford published. In July the family move to a cottage on Bearsted Green. In September ET consults a specialist about his poor health. In May the family move to Elses Farm, The Weald, near Sevenoaks in Kent. ET continues reviewing and works on Beautiful Wales. He meets Arthur Ransome. Rose Acre Papers (in the Lanthorn Series) published. Beautiful Wales published on 31 May. ET is physically and mentally exhausted during the summer. In October he meets and befriends the ‘tramp-­poet’ W. H. Davies, inviting him to share his small study cottage. The Heart of England published, and also The Bible in Spain, introduced by ET. ET’s friendships with W. H. Hudson and Walter de la Mare begin. In October the family receives notice to quit Elses Farm. ET stays in London. In November he becomes a regular reviewer with The Morning Post. In December the family move to Berryfield Cottage, Ashford, Petersfield, in Hampshire, near to Bedales School, where Helen becomes a teacher. In April ET visits a specialist about his depression; and in August he and Helen go on a walking tour in ‘Jefferies Country’. The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air published. The Book of the Open Air is published in 1907 and 1908. In January and February, ET completes the first draft of Richard Jefferies at Minsmere near Dunwich in Suffolk. Here he meets and becomes friendly with teenager Hope Webb. During August to December he works as Assistant Secretary to a Royal Commission on Welsh Monuments, living in London. He contemplates suicide. He resigns from the Royal Commission for health reasons. Some British Birds and British Butterflies and other Insects reprinted from The Book of the Open Air. In January ET returns to Ashford, where a new house is planned; and in April he moves into his new study at the top of Ashford Hanger. Richard Jefferies: His Life and Work is published, as is Jefferies’s The Hills and the Vales, introduced by ET. Work begins on the new house at Wick Green, Petersfield, where the family move before Christmas; but ET dislikes the house. The South Country is published in December.

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Chronology 1910

1911

1912

1913

719

Rest and Unrest published in February, and Windsor Castle in June. Feminine Influence on the Poets and Rose Acre Papers are also published this year. ET continues to write books and to review for The Daily Chronicle, The Morning Post, The Saturday Review, and The Bookman. In August, his second daughter, Myfanwy, is born. In September he goes on a walking tour with Merfyn and visits Joseph Conrad, Hilaire Belloc, Ralph Hodgson, and Rupert Brooke. Light and Twilight, Maurice Maeterlinck, The Tenth Muse, Celtic Stories, The Isle of Wight, and Isaac Taylor’s Words and Places (with an introduction by ET) are all published this year. ET is unwell from January till early spring, and he tries a strict vegetarian diet. From April he is at work on six books—­overwork and financial worry causing a severe breakdown in September. He accepts money from his Oxford friend E.  S.  P.  Haynes. During September to December he visits Wales, especially Laugharne, writing George Borrow. Lafcadio Hearn, Norse Tales, The Pocket George Borrow, Algernon Swinburne: A Critical Study, and George Borrow: The Man and His Books are all published this year. ET develops friendships with Clifford Bax and Eleanor Farjeon. He is treated by their friend Godwin Baynes, a nerve specialist, in the spring. In July ET begins writing for The English Review and The Nation. In August he cycles with Merfyn in Somerset and Kent, and takes long walks with Baynes. In September, Rural Rides, introduced by ET, is published. In November the family leave Wick Green. He stays as a  paying guest with Vivian Locke Ellis at Selsfield House, East Grinstead, where he works on Walter Pater. ET begins The Happy-­ Go-­Lucky Morgans. ET attends the official opening of Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in January. ET’s health becomes much worse in January, and he is at times suicidal. ‘How I Began’ is published in January. He travels in Wiltshire and Somerset, preparing In Pursuit of Spring. The Country is published in the spring. The Icknield Way, Walter Pater: A Critical Study, and The Happy-­Go-­Lucky Morgans are all published this year. In August the family move to Yew Tree Cottage in Steep village, near Petersfield; Thomas retains his hill-­ top study. In October ET is introduced to Robert Frost by Ralph Hodgson and in December he began writing his autobiography, The Childhood of Edward Thomas, while at Selsfield House, East Grinstead, Sussex.

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1915

1916

Chronology At the start of the year, ET is chiefly in London, working on his autobiography and then on his ‘Fiction’. He is granted £100 by the Royal Literary Fund. In March he is in Steep, reviewing, proof-­ reading, and writing articles. In April he travels to Wales and then to Frost in Herefordshire, where he stops writing his ‘Fiction’. In Pursuit of Spring is published in the spring; and in the summer ET reviews Frost’s North of Boston three times, enthusiastically. In August the Thomases are on holiday with the Frosts at Ledington. In the autumn ET makes cycling tours to the Midlands and later to Wales, then back to Ledington. After returning to Steep, he begins writing poems. The Everyman edition of Borrow’s The Zincali, introduced by ET, is published this year. During January ET is confined to Steep with a severely sprained ankle, and writing poems. In the first half of the year he writes The Life of the Duke of Marlborough while also preparing his anthology This England for Oxford University Press. Both books are published this year, with two of his poems appearing in This England. ET sends some poems to editors, unsuccessfully; and has adopted the pseudonym Edward Eastaway for his verse. In February, Merfyn leaves for the US with the Frosts. ET considers joining Frost in the US, but in July he enlists in the Artists Rifles. ET sends some poems to Gordon Bottomley for inclusion in An Annual of New Poetry. He is billeted with his parents in Balham in August-­ September, then in October he moves to High Beech near Loughton, Essex; and later to Hare Hall Camp, Gidea Park, Romford. Here he  is promoted to Lance-­Corporal, and acts as a map-­reading instructor. In December, Merfyn returns from the US. Four-­and-­ Twenty Blackbirds is published in October. In February, ET takes convalescent leave at Steep; and in March he is promoted to Corporal. He continues to write verse, and six of his poems are published by the Pear Tree Press. Keats and The Flowers I Love are published this year. He applies for a commission in the Royal Artillery, and is accepted in July. In September he is an officer cadet with the RA in London, and moves his family to High Beech in Essex. In October he moves to firing camp near Trowbridge in Wiltshire. In November he is commissioned Second Lieutenant and posted to 244 Siege Battery, RGA, Lydd, Kent. He visits Cartmel and Gloucester before returning to High Beech. In December he volunteers for service overseas. Selwyn and Blount accept Poems for publication. He spends Christmas with his wife and children.

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Chronology 1917

1918 1922 1926 1928 1938 1948 1967

721

In January, ET is on embarkation leave then firing practice at Codford, near Warminster. On 29 January he embarks for France, and on 11 February he is near Arras. He is killed by a shell or shell-­ blast as the Arras offensive begins on 9 April—­his watch records the time of his death as 7:36 am. ET is buried in the military ­cemetery in the village of Agny. A Literary Pilgrim in England and Poems published posthumously. Last Poems published. Cloud Castle and Other Papers published. Chosen Essays, selected by Ernest Rhys, published by the Gregynog Press. The Last Sheaf published. The Childhood of Edward Thomas published for the first time. The Prose of Edward Thomas published. Helen Thomas dies at the age of 89, three days after the fiftieth anniversary of her husband’s death.

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Select Bibliography Books By Edward Thomas Algernon Charles Swinburne: A Critical Study (London: Martin Secker, 1912) Beautiful Wales (London: A. & C. Black, 1905) Celtic Stories (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911) The Childhood of Edward Thomas: A Fragment of Autobiography (London: Faber and Faber, 1938) Cloud Castle and Other Papers (London: Duckworth, 1922) Collected Poems (London: Selwyn and Blount, 1920) The Country (London: B. T. Batsford, 1913) Feminine Influence on the Poets (London: Martin Secker, 1910) Four-­and-­Twenty Blackbirds (London: Duckworth, 1915) George Borrow: The Man and his Books (London: Chapman and Hall, 1912) The Happy-­Go-­Lucky Morgans (London: Duckworth, 1913) The Heart of England (London: J. M. Dent, 1906) Horae Solitariae (London: Duckworth, 1902) The Icknield Way (London: Constable, 1913) In Pursuit of Spring (London: Thomas Nelson, 1914) The Isle of Wight (London: Blackie, 1911) Keats (London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1916) Lafcadio Hearn (London: Constable, 1912) Last Poems (London: Selwyn and Blount, 1918) The Last Sheaf (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928) The Life of the Duke of Marlborough (London: Chapman and Hall, 1915) Light and Twilight (London: Duckworth, 1911) A Literary Pilgrim in England (London: Methuen, 1917) Maurice Maeterlinck (London: Methuen, 1911) Norse Tales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912) Oxford (London: A. & C. Black, 1903); ed. Lucy Newlyn (Oxford: Signal Books, 2005) Poems [by Edward Eastaway] (London: Selwyn and Blount, 1917) Rest and Unrest (London: Duckworth, 1910) Richard Jefferies: His Life and Work (London: Hutchinson, 1909; London: Faber and Faber, 1978) Rose Acre Papers (London: S. C. Brown, Langham, 1904) Six Poems [by Edward Eastaway] (Flansham, Sussex: The Pear Tree Press, 1916) The South Country (London: J. M. Dent, 1909) The Tenth Muse (London: Martin Secker, 1911)

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724

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Walter Pater: A Critical Study (London: Martin Secker, 1913) Windsor Castle (London: Blackie, 1910) The Woodland Life (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1897) EDITIONS, SELECTIONS, AND LETTERS OF EDWARD THOMAS Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems, ed. Edna Longley (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2008) The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas, ed. R. George Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) Edward Thomas on the Georgians, ed. Richard Emeny (Cheltenham: The Cyder Press, 2004) Edward Thomas on Thomas Hardy, ed. Trevor Johnson (Cheltenham: The Cyder Press, 2002) Elected Friends: Robert Frost & Edward Thomas to One Another, ed. Matthew Spencer (New York: Handsel Books, 2003) A Language Not to be Betrayed: Selected Prose of Edward Thomas, ed. Edna Longley (Manchester: Carcanet, 1981) Letters from Edward Thomas to Gordon Bottomley, ed. R. George Thomas (London: Oxford University Press, 1968) The Letters of Edward Thomas to Jesse Berridge, ed. Anthony Berridge (London: Enitharmon, 1983) Letters to Helen, ed. R. George Thomas (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000) A Pilgrim and Other Tales, ed. R. George Thomas (London: J. M. Dent, 1991) Poet to Poet: Edward Thomas’s Letters to Walter de la Mare, ed. Judy Kendall (Bridgend: Seren, 2012) Selected Letters, ed. R. George Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) A Selection of Letters to Edward Garnett (Edinburgh: Tragara Press, 1981) The Ship of Swallows, ed. Jeremy Hooker (London: Enitharmon, 2005) BOOKS EDITED AND INTRODUCED BY EDWARD THOMAS Edward Thomas (ed.), The Book of the Open Air (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1907–8) Edward Thomas (ed.), The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air (London: Grant Richards, 1907) Edward Thomas (ed.), The Pocket George Borrow (London: Chatto and Windus, 1912) Edward Thomas (ed.), The Poems of John Dyer (T. Fisher Unwin, 1903) Edward Thomas (ed.), This England: An Anthology from her Writers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1915) Edward Thomas (intro.), George Borrow, The Bible in Spain (Everyman’s Library, London: J. M. Dent, 1906) Edward Thomas (intro.), George Borrow, The Zincali: An Account of the Gipsies of Spain (Everyman’s Library, London: J. M. Dent, 1914)

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725

Edward Thomas (intro.), William Cobbett, Rural Rides (Everyman’s Library, London: J. M. Dent, 1912) Edward Thomas (intro.), George Herbert, The Temple and A Priest to the Temple (Everyman’s Library, London: J. M. Dent, 1908) Edward Thomas (intro.), Richard Jefferies, The Hills and the Vale (London: Duckworth, 1909) Edward Thomas (intro.), The Plays and Poems of Christopher Marlowe (Everyman’s Library, London: J. M. Dent, 1909) Edward Thomas (intro.), Isaac Taylor, Words and Places: Illustrations of History, Ethnology and Geography (Everyman’s Library, London: J. M. Dent, 1911) BOOKS ABOUT EDWARD THOMAS Jonathan Barker (ed.), The Art of Edward Thomas (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1987) William Cooke, Edward Thomas: A Critical Biography 1878–1917 (London: Faber and Faber, 1970) William Cooke, Edward Thomas and Gordon Bottomley: Comrades in Letters (Petersfield: The Edward Thomas Fellowship, 2021) H. Coombes, Edward Thomas (London: Chatto and Windus, 1956) Guy Cuthbertson and Lucy Newlyn (eds), Branch-Lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry (London: Enitharmon, 2007) Robert P. Eckert, Edward Thomas: A Biography and a Bibliography (London: J. M. Dent, 1937) Richard Emeny and Jeff Cooper, Edward Thomas 1878–1917: Towards a complete checklist of his publications (Blackburn: White Sheep Press, 2004) Eleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958) David Gervais, Literary Englands: Versions of ‘Englishness’ in Modern Writing (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) Anne Harvey (ed.), Adlestrop Revisited: An Anthology Inspired by Edward Thomas’s Poem (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999) Matthew Hollis, Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (London: Faber and Faber, 2011) Michael Kirkham, The Imagination of Edward Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) Edna Longley, Under the Same Moon: Edward Thomas and the English Lyric (London: Enitharmon, 2017) John Moore, The Life and Letters of Edward Thomas (London: William Heinemann, 1939) Andrew Motion, The Poetry of Edward Thomas (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) Stan Smith, Edward Thomas (London: Faber, 1986) Sean Street, The Dymock Poets (Bridgend: Seren, 1994) Helen Thomas, As it Was (London: William Heinemann, 1926) Helen Thomas, World Without End (London: William Heinemann, 1931) R. George Thomas, Edward Thomas: A Portrait (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985)

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726

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J. P. Ward (ed.), Poetry Wales 13, 4 (Spring 1978): Edward Thomas Centenary Andrew Webb, Edward Thomas and World Literary Studies (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013) Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Edward Thomas From Adlestrop to Arras: A Biography (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) OTHER BOOKS John Attenborough, A Living Memory: Hodder and Stoughton Publishers 1868–1975 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975) Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931) George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891; London: Penguin, 1968) Joy Grant, Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967) John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of English Literary Life since 1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969) Jason Harding (ed.), Ford Madox Ford, Modernist Magazines and Editing (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010) Dominic Hibberd, Harold Monro: Poet of the New Age (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) Wilfrid Hindle, The Morning Post 1772–1937: Portrait of a Newspaper (London: George Routledge, 1937) Letters from W. H. Hudson to Edward Garnett (London: J. M. Dent, 1925) H. J. Massingham (ed.), A Selection from the Writings of H. W. Massingham (London: Jonathan Cape, 1925) James Milne, The Memoirs of a Bookman (London: John Murray, 1934) Henry W. Nevinson, Changes and Chances (London: Nisbet, 1923) Helen Smith, The Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett (London: Jonathan Cape, 2017) Alvin Sullivan, British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913 (Westport, Connecticut: The Greenwood Press, 1984) Martha  S.  Vogeler, Austin Harrison and the English Review (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2008) Philip Waller, Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) Rory Waterman (ed.), W.  H.  Davies The True Traveller: A Reader (Manchester: Carcanet, 2015)

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Index Abbott, Claude Colleer  630n Abercrombie, Lascelles  293–5, 507–9 An Annual of New Poetry (ed with Trevelyan) 76n Deborah: A Play in Three Acts 544–6 Emblems of Love 507–9 Interludes and Poems  293–5, 507, 509n Mary and the Bramble 507 New Numbers (with Gibson, Brooke, and Drinkwater), Part I, Vol I  608–10 The Sale of Saint Thomas 507 Speculative Dialogues 509n ‘The Trance’  294 Academy (journal)  xxx, xliii, xliv Adamnan (St)  66 Adcock, Arthur St John  xxxviii Addison, Joseph  430n ‘The Spacious Firmament on High’  206–7 A. E.  88–90, 590–2 Collected Poems 590–2 The Divine Vision and Other Poems 88–90 Homeward: Songs by the Way 88 The Nuts of Knowledge 89 Aestheticism  xlix, 467 Akenside, Mark, The Pleasures of Imagination 152 Aldington, Richard  621n ‘Argyria’ 622–3 Alexander, Mrs Cecil Frances, ‘The Burial of Moses’ 207 alliteration  512, 519n, 564 ‘Alysoun’ (fourteenth century)  270 Annales Cambriae 165 Anodos see Coleridge, Mary (‘Anodos’) Anstey, F. (Thomas Anstey Guthrie), ‘Burglar Bill’ 207 Anwyl, Sir Edward  618–19 Apocryphal Books of Esdras  469 Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 147 Apuleius, Lucius  444 Archer, William  xxxii Arnold, Matthew  xxx, xliii, xliv–xlv, 5, 44, 62, 305, 353 Brooke’s study of  312–13

Essays in Criticism: Second Series  70n, 110 ‘The Forsaken Merman’  207 ‘Haworth Churchyard’  480 ‘Maurice de Guérin’  109, 110, 141 More’s critique of  140 On the Study of Celtic Literature 109–10, 337 On Translating Homer 42 ‘Philomela’ 13 ‘Shelley’  141, 144 ‘The Strayed Reveller’  101 ‘The Study of Poetry’  41–2, 381, 606 Artists Rifles  xxvii Ashbery, John  257n Aubrey, John, Brief Lives  167, 454 Aucassin et Nicolette 267 audiences for poetry  77, 92–3, 282–3 Aulus Plautius  209 Austin, Alfred  132 ‘A Country Nosegay’  207 Australian poetry  79–82, 380 Avery, Simon, Selected Poems of Mary Coleridge 289n Babbitt, Irving  xliv, xlviii, 121n Democracy and Leadership 447n The New Laokoon  xlviii, 447–50 Bailey, J. C., The Poems of William Cowper (ed)  180–3 ballades 220n ballads  162–5, 271–7 Barker, Jonathan The Art of Edward Thomas (ed)  271n ‘Edward Thomas and the Folk Tradition’ 271n Barlow, Jane  xxi Barnes, William  333–6 ‘The Gre’t Woak Tree that’s in the Dell’  336 ‘The Lilac’  336n ‘The Morning Moon’  334–5 An Outline of English Speech-Craft 333n Select Poems of William Barnes (ed Hardy) 333–6 Barrie, J. M.  xxxvii–xxxviii

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728 Baudelaire, Charles  170–2 ‘Litany to Satan’ (translated by Flecker) 440 Poems in Prose 170–2 Bax, Clifford  563n Beddoes, Thomas Lovell  257–60 The Brides’ Tragedy  258, 259–60 Death’s Jest-Book (ed Bradshaw)  257n, 258, 260 ‘Lines Written in Switzerland’  259 The Poems of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (ed Colles) 257–60 The Second Brother 259 Selected Poetry (ed Higgens and Bradshaw) 257n Torrismond 259 Beerbohm, Max  xxxvii, xxxix Begbie, Harold ‘Fall In’  641n The Handy Man And Other Verses  7, 641 Behmen, Jakob  187 Behn, Aphra, ‘On Her Loving Two Equally’ 413 Belloc, Hilaire  xxv, xxxiv, 211–14 Avril: Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance 213 Lambkin’s Remains  213, 214 The Path to Rome 213 ‘The South Country’  211n Verses and Sonnets  211, 213 Bentham, Jeremy  3n Beowulf  38, 43, 266, 269–70 Berridge, Jesse  220n, 404 Binyon, Laurence  74–5, 330–1, 382–3, 425–6, 617–18 Auguries 617–18 The Death of Adam and Other Poems 72, 74–5 England and Other Poems 425–6 ‘For the Fallen’  643n Illustrations of the Book of Job (Introduction) 228–30 London Visions  330–1, 382–3 biographies of poets  169–70 Blair, Hugh, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian 153 Blake, William  lii, 77–9, 186–9, 228–30, 262–4, 266, 327, 354–6, 385–6 ‘The Angel’  186–7 ‘Auguries of Innocence’  77–8, 188–9 critique by de Selincourt  354–6

Index critique by Symons  262–4 edited compilations of works  186–9, 228, 354n Illustrations of the Book of Job 228–30 Jerusalem (edited by Maclagan and Russell)  77–9, 186, 189, 228, 263 ‘Laughing Song’  188 ‘The Little Vagabond’  189 ‘My silks and fine array’  187 ‘The Tiger’  616 ‘To my Dearest Friend John Flaxman’  187 ‘War Song to Englishmen’  640, 645 blank verse  41, 91–2, 157n, 158, 232, 325, 631 ‘Blow, Northern Wind’ (fourteenth century) 270 Blunden, Edmund  661 Boer War  7n, 50n, 72n, 535n Bohn, Henry George  623 Bookman (journal)  xxv, xxvi, xxxi, xxxvii–xxxix A Book of English Sonnets 219–22 Book of Taliesin 67n Borrow, George  171, 488 Lavengro: The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest 446 Wild Wales: Its People, Language, and Scenery 618–19 Boswell, James, Life of Samuel Johnson 346 Bottomley, Gordon  xvii–xviii, 50–1, 176–7, 252, Notes passim Chambers of Imagery 252 The Crier by Night  50n, 51 The Gate of Smaragdus lii Midsummer Eve 176–7 Poems at White-Nights 50–1 Bradley, A. C.  xliv Oxford Lectures on Poetry  35n, 367–9, 660, 685 Poetry for Poetry’s Sake  xlvii, 35–7 Shakespearean Tragedy  35n, 367 Bradley, Katherine see Field, Michael Bradshaw, Michael Beddoes’s Death’s Jest-Book (ed)  257n see also Beddoes, Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s Selected Poetry (ed with Higgens) 257n Brawne, Fanny  683–4, 686–7 Brennus 184 Brett, Cyril, Minor Poems of Michael Drayton (ed)  291–3 Bridges, Robert  18, 128–9, 157–9, 286, 575–7 Demeter: A Mask  128–9, 576

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Index Eros and Psyche 576 The Feast of Bacchus 157 The Growth of Love 576 Nero, Part 2  157, 158 Poetical Works of Robert Bridges  544, 575–7 Vol. VI  157–9 as Poet Laureate  575n Prometheus 576 Shorter Poems 576 Sonnet 51  576 Bright, John  144 British Weekly: A Journal of Social and Christian Progress xxxvii–xxxviii Britomart 184 Britten, Benjamin, Peter Grimes (opera)  194n Brocken spectre effect  56 Brontë, Branwell, ‘Sleep, mourner, sleep!’  485 Brontë, Charlotte  480, 481, 483 Brontë, Emily  xxxviii, li, 480–6 ‘Alone I sat’  485 ‘And like myself lone, wholly lone’  484 The Complete Poems of Emily Brontë (ed Shorter)  480–6 Gondal poems  483, 484 ‘High waving heather’  483–4 ‘How still, how happy!’  480 ‘I know that tonight the wind it is sighing’ 480–1 ‘In memory of a happy day in February’ 484 ‘I see around me piteous tombstones grey’ 485 ‘It’s over now; I’ve known it all’  480 ‘A little while’  484 ‘Mild the mist upon the hill’  481 ‘Redbreast, early in the morning’  485 ‘A thousand sounds of happiness’  481–2 Wuthering Heights  481n, 482 Brooke, Rupert  xxxvi, xli, 521–2, 648–52 (obituary) ‘1914’  649, 652 1914 and Other Poems 648n ‘Choriambics–I’ 522 ‘Choriambics–II’ 522 ‘The Dead’  645 death 648 ‘Dining-Room Tea’  650 ‘Dust’ 650 ‘The Fish’  545, 587n friendship with Edward Marsh  539n ‘The Goddess in the Wood’  650

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‘The Great Lover’  651 ‘Heaven’ 650 ‘The Hill’  651 ‘I said I splendidly loved you’  521–2 ‘John Donne’  651 ‘The Jolly Company’  522 ‘Kindliness’ 522 New Numbers (with Gibson, Abercrombie, and Drinkwater), Part I, Vol I  608–10 ‘A Note on John Webster’  651 ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’  542 Poems  521–2, 650 ‘The Soldier’  648n, 649 ‘Tiare Tahiti’  651 Brooke, Stopford A.  237n English Literature 238 Introduction in A Treasury of English Literature (Warren)  238 Studies in Poetry 312n A Study of Clough, Arnold, Rossetti and Morris 312–14 Brownell, W. C., Victorian Prose Masters xliv–xlv Browne, Sir Thomas  2, 170 Religio Medici  2n, 62, 283, 349 Browne, William  205 ‘The Sirens’ Song’  224 Browning, Robert  244, 492–6 ‘By the Fire-side’  494, 495 ‘Caliban upon Setebos’  494 ‘Dis Aliter Visum’  494 edited compilations of works  492–6 Fifine at the Fair 495 ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’  493 ‘Gold Hair’  494–5 ‘Love among the Ruins’  494 ‘Memorabilia’ 492 ‘Parting at Morning’  547–8 The Pied Piper of Hamelin 493 The Ring and the Book  69, 495 Saul 494 ‘Song’ 494 Sordello 495 Buckton, Alice  15n, 16 Through Human Eyes  17, 18 Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful 368 Burne-Jones, Edward  99 ‘Love Among the Ruins’ (paintings)  74

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Index

Burns, Robert  99 ‘My love is like a red, red rose’  421 ‘O saw ye bonie Lesley’  474 ‘The Vision’  32 Burroughs, John ‘Criticism and the Man’  61 Far and Near 61n Literary Values and Other Papers  61–3, 146 Ways of Nature 61n Burrow, John, ‘Keats and Edward Thomas’  660, 664n Burton, Robert The Anatomy of Melancholy  124, 143, 177–80, 346 Burton, Sir Richard Francis  514 Butler, Samuel, Hudibras: Written in the Time of the Late Wars 137–9 Butterworth, George  274n Byron, Lord  xlviii, 4, 112, 172–5, 488 The Age of Bronze 174 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage  173, 175, 497 comparison with Emily Brontë  481–2 Courthope’s opinion of  435 The Deformed Transformed 174 Don Juan  161n, 175, 527, 669n, 681 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers 174 Hours of Idleness 175n Mazeppa  174, 483 ‘Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte’  173–4 The Poetical Works of Lord Byron 172–5 Caldecott, Randolph, The Three Jovial Huntsmen 589 Callanan, Jeremiah Joseph, ‘Outlaw of Loch Lene’ 424 Callimachus 137 The Cambridge History of English Literature  xlvi, 194n Vol. I: From the Beginnings to the Cycles of Romance  268–71 Cammaerts, Émile  655n Belgian Poems 657–8 ‘The New Year’s Wishes to the German Army’ 657 Camoens (Luís Vaz de Camões)  443 Campbell, R. J., The New Theology 317n Campbell, Thomas  434 Gertrude of Wyoming 434 Cannell, Skipworth  623 Canning, George  435

‘The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-Grinder’ 433 Capern, Edward, ‘The Lion Flag of England’ 233n Caracalla, Emperor of Rome  153 Caractacus  209, 375 Cardano, Gerolamo  179 Carew, Thomas  138 Carlyle, Thomas  62, 216 The French Revolution: A History 237 Carnegie, Andrew  144 Carpenter, Edward, Days with Walt Whitman 190–4 Carswell, Douglas, The Venusiad and Other Poems 94n Cartimandua 410 Castiglione, Count Baldassare, Il Libro del Cortegiano/The Book of the Courtier 141 Catullus, Gaius Valerius Carmina  86, 267, 497 translated works  85–7 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of NewcastleUpon-Tyne 30 Cazenove, Charles Francis (‘Frank’)  xxii, xxv–xxvi, 659–60 Thomas’s letters to  xxviii, 333n, 511n Cellini, Benvenuto  56n Celtic literature  63–8, 104, 279–81, 336–41 Chalkhill, John  327 Chapbook, The (magazine)  xl Chapman, George, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron  28, 267 Chapone, Hester, ‘The Bullfinch in Town’  415 Chateaubriand, François-René  4, 110 Chatterton, Thomas  151, 384 Chaucer, Geoffrey  1, 115–18, 270, 387 Canterbury Tales  12, 117, 210, 486 ‘The Clerk’s Tale’  117 compared with William Cowper  487–8 compared with William Morris  486–7 The Legend of Good Women 116–17 ‘The Monk’s Tale’  117 ‘Nun’s Priest’s Prologue’  117 Romaunt of the Rose 117 Troilus and Criseyde  117, 526, 594n The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Others 115–18 Chénier, André  601 Chesterton, G. K.  78, 82, 129–31, 353, 504–6

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Index Alarms and Discursions 131n The Ballad of the White Horse  130n, 504–6 ‘The Donkey’  545 Heretics 129–31 ‘Hymn of War’  643–4 ‘The Wife of Flanders’  643n The Wild Knight and Other Poems 78n, 130n ‘Childe Maurice’  469 Child, Francis James English and Scottish Popular Ballads (ed)  162–5, 271n, 406 ‘The False Lover Won Back’  165 ‘The Hunting of the Cheviot’  164 ‘King Estmere’  164 ‘The Water is Wide’  406–7 ‘Willie and Earl Richard’s Daughter’ 164 children’s poetry  148–51 choriambics 522 Churchill, Charles  180 Rosciad 152–3 Churchill, John, Duke of Marlborough  639 Cille, Colum, ‘Greeting to Ireland’  502 Cino da Pistoia  360n Clare, John  327, 342–4, 418–21, 624–9 (‘John Clare: Poet and Agricultural Labourer’: article by ET) ‘Adieu’ 628 ‘Approach of Spring’  626 ‘Autumn’ 627 ‘Bonny Lassie O!’  419–20 ‘Clare’s Desire’  626 ‘Cowper Green’  627 ‘The Cross Roads’  343 ‘Death of Beauty’  418 ‘Evening’ 419 ‘February’  343, 629 ‘The Flitting’  625, 626, 627, 628 ‘The Gipsy Lass’  419 ‘Greensward’ 627 ‘Home Yearnings’  625 ‘The Invitation’  419 ‘July’ 628 ‘Love lives beyond the tomb’  420, 421 ‘The March Nosegay’  419 ‘The Morning Walk’  419 ‘Noon’ 627 Poems by John Clare (ed Symons)  342–4, 386

731

Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery 625 ‘The Progress of Rhyme’  625, 626 ‘Remembrances’  342–3, 628 ‘Solitude’ 625 ‘Song’ 627 ‘Summer’ 626 ‘The Tell-tale Flowers’  418 Clark, Andrew, The Shirburn Ballads 1585–1616 (ed)  272 Claudian Carmina Minora  204n, 224n ‘In Sirenas’  224 Clifford, Dr John  104 Clough, Arthur Hugh, Brooke’s study of 312–13 Cobbett, William  497 Rural Rides 43n Cobden, Richard  139–40 Coleridge, Ernest Hartley The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (ed)  559–63 The Poetical Works of Lord Byron (ed)  172–5 Coleridge, Mary (‘Anodos’)  li, 286–90, 295 ‘Affection’ 287 ‘Awake’ 287 ‘Burial’ 287 ‘Deep are thy waters’  288 Fancy’s Following 286 Fancy’s Guerdon 286 The Garland 286 Gathered Leaves 289n ‘The King’  287 ‘A Mother to a Baby’  287 ‘O let me be in loving nice’  290 Poems (ed Newbolt)  286–90 ‘Some in a child would live’  290 ‘Street Lanterns’  286 ‘True to myself am I’  289–90 ‘Two’  286–7, 289 ‘The Witch’  287 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  5, 310–12, 559–63 Anima Poetae 3–4 ‘The Ballad of the Dark Ladie’  17 Biographia Literaria  302n, 310–12 ‘Christabel’  248, 503, 562, 677 The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 559–63 ‘Constancy to an Ideal Object’  56n ‘Dejection: An Ode’  112, 562–3, 602

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Index

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (cont.) ‘The Destiny of Nations: A Vision’  560, 561 ‘Easter Holidays’  560 ‘Fears in Solitude’  639–40, 645 ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter: A War Eclogue’ 561 ‘Frost at Midnight’  563 ‘Happiness’ 560 ‘Kubla Khan’  386, 392 Lyrical Ballads (with Wordsworth)  2–3, 182n, 250, 311 ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’  561 ‘Ode to the Departing Year’  561 ‘On Poesy or Art’  411 ‘On the Principles of Genial Criticism’  366 ‘Pantisocracy’ 561 ‘A Plaintive Movement’  560 Poems 3 ‘Religious Musings’  562 ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’  xxxvii, 149, 244, 562 ‘To the Rev. W. J. Hort’  561 ‘A Wish’  560 Colles, Ramsay, The Poems of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (ed)  257–60 Collins, John Churton  In Memoriam, The Princess, and Maud (ed), 54–6 Posthumous Essays 54n The Study of English Literature 54n Collins, Wilkie, The Woman in White 62 Collins, William  151 Colum, Padraic, Wild Earth 282n Confucius 141 Conrad, Joseph  xxxv, xxxvi Cooke, John, The Dublin Book of Irish Verse (ed) 423–5 Cooke, Thomas, translation of Hesiod’s Theogony 144n Cooper, Edith see Field, Michael Coquelin, Jean  44 Corbet, Richard ‘The Faeries’ Farewell’  454–5 Corelli, Marie  xxxviii The Master Christian 209 Cornford, Frances  li, 439–40, 442–3 ‘Autumn Morning at Cambridge’  439, 442 ‘On Rupert Brooke’  649 Poems  439–40, 442–3 ‘To a Fat Lady seen from the Train’  439, 443

‘To a Lady in Mourning’  442 ‘The Ragwort’  439 ‘The Two Armies’  442 ‘The Watch’  439–40 Cornish, Francis Warre, The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus (trans)  85–7 ‘country books’  xvii Cournos, John  622 Courthope, W. J.  xlvii A History of English Poetry, Vol VI  430–6 Life in Poetry: Law in Taste 430n Cowley, Abraham  xxvii, 12, 167–9, 254n ‘The Chronicle’  168 ‘Of Agriculture’  19–20 ‘Of Wit’  168 ‘On the Death of Mr William Hervey’  167–8 Pindarique Odes 168 Poems (ed Waller)  167–9 A Sacred Poem of the Troubles of David 143, 169 ‘The Soul’  168 ‘The Tree’  168 Cowper, William  180–3 compared with Geoffrey Chaucer  487–8 Correspondence 181n ‘An Epistle to Robert Lloyd’  182 ‘The Garden’  182, 319 The Poems of William Cowper (ed Bailey) 180–3 ‘The Sofa’  182–3 The Task 183n Crabbe, George  45, 194–8, 344 The Borough  194n, 195–7 The Candidate 195 Inebriety 194 The Library 195 ‘Midnight’ 194 The Parish Register  196, 197 Poems (ed Ward) Vol I and II  194–8 Vol III  194n ‘Sir Eustace Grey’  194 ‘Solitude’ 194 The Village 194n Crabb Robinson, Henry  263 Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence 229 Craig, Edward Gordon  226 Cranmer-Byng, L. A Lute of Jade 470 ‘Tears in the Spring’  470

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Index Crashaw, Richard  254–7 ‘Description of a Religious House’  257 ‘The Flaming Heart upon the Book and Picture of the Seraphicall Saint Teresa’ 256 ‘A Hymn to the Name and Honour of the Admirable Saint Teresa’  256 ‘Mary Magdelene, or the Weeper’  255 ‘Musicks Duell’  255–6, 332 Steps to the Temple, Delights of the Muses and Other Poems (ed Waller)  252n, 254–7 ‘Wishes to his (supposed) Mistresse’  256 Croce, Benedetto  452 Croker, John Wilson  161n, 669n Cromwell, Oliver  146n Crosby, Ernest Howard, Swords and Ploughshares  72, 73–4 Crouch, Edward Heath, A Treasury of South African Poetry and Verse (ed) 380–2 Crowley, Aleister  15n The Mother’s Tragedy and Other Poems  17–18 Daily Chronicle (newspaper)  xvi–xvii, xxiv, xxvi, xxxi–xxxiv letters from Oscar Wilde  302 Daily News (newspaper)  xxvi, xxxi, 130 Dalmon, Charles  580 Dandridge, Danske (Caroline Beringer)  7n Joy and Other Poems 8 Daniel, Arnaut  443n Daniel, Samuel  576 The Civil Wars 237 Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy 147, Inferno 79 Darley, George, Complete Poetical Works 424 Darwin, Erasmus  332, 434 Davidson, John  li, 102–4, 200–2, 245–7, 314–18, 331–3, 370–2, 440 ‘The Crystal Palace’  370–1 death 370n ‘Dedication’ 332n Fleet Street and Other Poems 370–2 Fleet Street Eclogues 246 Holiday and Other Poems 200–2, 318, 370 ‘The Ides of March’  201–2 Mammon and his Message 314–18 ‘On Poetry’  202

733

A Queen’s Romance 136 A Random Itinerary  70, 103, 371 A Rosary  68–71, 103, 245 ‘A Runnable Stag’  200–1, 246, 318, 331 The Testament of a Prime Minister 102–4, 200, 246 The Testament of John Davidson 331–3 The Theatrocrat: A Tragic Play of Church and Stage 200 The Triumph of Mammon  245–7, 317 ‘Two Dogs’  372 Davie, Donald  621n Davies, William H.  xxiv, lii, 159–62, 232–6, 307–8, 326–9, 426–30, 514–17, 545, 596–8, 690–2 ‘Ale’  234, 235 The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp  307–8, 328 Beggars 307n ‘The Child and the Mariner’  515, 517, 541 Child Lovers, and other Poems 690–2 compared with Arthur Symons  601 ‘Fancy’s Home’  514–15, 516 Farewell to Poesy and Other Pieces  426–30 Foliage: Various Poems 596–8 ‘The Kingfisher’  429, 541 ‘The Likeness’  233–4 ‘Lines to a Sparrow’  161–2 ‘Lodging House Fire’  159, 233 Nature Poems and Others  326–9, 428 New Poems  232–6, 326 ‘The Owl’  515–16 ‘Parted’ 236 Songs of Joy and others 514–17 ‘The Soul’s Destroyer’  160–1 The Soul’s Destroyer and Other Poems  159–62, 232–3, 235, 326 ‘Sweet Stay-at-Home’  596 ‘Thunderstorms’ 596 ‘To Sparrows Fighting’  516–17 The True Traveller 307n Davis, Thomas, ‘My Grave’  425 de Guérin, Maurice  76, 101–2 ‘Deirdre and the Sons of Uisneach’  64 de la Mare, Walter  xx, xxix, xxxv, xxxvi, lii, 218–19, 458–64, 528–31, 586–90 ‘The Bindweed’  530 ‘England’ 459 ‘Epitaph’ 530 Henry Brocken  218, 463

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734

Index

de la Mare, Walter (cont.) ‘The Horseman’  587 ‘The Listeners’  530 The Listeners and Other Poems 528–31, 544, 588 ‘Martha’  529, 611 ‘Miss Loo’  463, 529 ‘Miss T’  586 ‘Myself ’ 461 ‘Nobody Knows’  587 Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes 586–90 Poems  218–19, 460, 461–2, 463, 528n The Return 459 ‘Reverie’ 218 review of Feminine Influence on the Poets 404 Songs of Childhood  218, 461, 462–3, 528n, 588 ‘Tartary’ 464 ‘The Three Cherry Trees’  460, 529 The Three Mulla-Mulgars  459, 460, 462, 588 ‘The Window’  589 Della Cruscan group  433n, 434n de Nerval, Gérard  306, 468 Denham, Sir John, Cooper’s Hill 29n Dent, J. M., Everyman’s Library  xxv, xxvii, 43n De Quincey, Thomas  4–5 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater 2n, 155, 283, 388n de Ronsard, Pierre  2, 351n de Selincourt, Basil, William Blake  xlv, 354–6 de Sélincourt, Ernest, The Poems of John Keats (ed)  122–4, 660 Des Imagistes  xl, lii–iii, 540n, 621–4 de St Victor, Adam  475 Deucalion 474 de Vega Carpio, Lope Félix  443 Dibdin, Charles  645 Dimnet, Ernest, Les Soeurs Brontë 483–6 Dobell, Bertram, The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne (ed)  58–60, 215 Dobson, Austin  646 Donne, John  244, 650–1 ‘The Flea’  564 Doughty, Charles M.  183–6, 208–11, 240–5, 297–301, 374–8, 522–6, 688–90 Adam Cast Forth  297–301, 376, 377 The Cliffs  374–8, 459, 523, 524, 643, 688 The Clouds  522–6, 643, 688

The Dawn in Britain  li, 242, 297, 298, 299, 376–7, 504n, 524, 688 Vols I and II  183–6 Vols III and IV  208–11 Vols V and VI  240–5 The Titans 688–90 Travels in Arabia Deserta  209, 298n, 376 Wanderings in Arabia 297 Douglas, Lord Alfred  302n Dowden, Edward Essays Modern and Elizabethan xlvi Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley 305n Dowson, Ernest  124–8 ‘Impenitentia Ultima’  127 ‘In Tempore Senectutis’  185 ‘My Lady April’  127 The Pierrot of the Minute 127 ‘Sapientia Lunae’  126 ‘Spleen’ 127 ‘To One in Bedlam’  127, 230 ‘Vain Resolves’  127 ‘Vesperal’ 125–6 Drayton, Michael  118–20, 291–3 ‘Amour’ 291 ‘Ballad of Agincourt’  119, 292, 645 ‘Ballad of Dowsabell’  120, 293 ‘The Cryer’  292 ‘Elegy to Henery (Henry) Reynolds’ on ‘Poets & Poesie’  119, 168n, 292 ‘Hymne To His Ladies Birth-Place’  292 Minor Poems of Michael Drayton (ed Brett)  291–3 Pastorals: Eclogue IX  120 Poems of Michael Drayton 118–20 Poly-Olbion  118n, 496–7, 523 ‘The Quest of Cynthia’  120 ‘The Sacrifice to Apollo’  291 ‘Since there’s no hope’  291 ‘To His Rivall’ 291–2 dreadnoughts  374–5, 524 Drinkwater, John ‘The Fires of God’  542 New Numbers (with Gibson, Brooke, and Abercrombie), Part I, Vol I  608–10 Poems of Men and Hours 540n Drummond, William of Hawthornden  412–13 A Cypress Grove  2, 349 Dryden, John  2, 29n, 676–7 Du Bellay, Joachim  2, 351n

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/08/23, SPi

Index Dublin Review (journal)  349 Ducis, Jean-François  4 Duignan, W. H., Notes on Staffordshire Place Names xvii Dumas, Alexandre  99 Duse, Eleonora  226 Dyce, Alexander, Specimens of British Poetesses  404, 412n Dyer, John The Fleece: A Poem in Four Books 370 ‘Grongar Hill’  212 Earle, John, English Prose: Its Elements, History, and Usage 539 Eccles, Francis Yvon, A Century of French Poets 469–70 Edinburgh Review (journal)  xxx, 174n, 456–7 Edwards, Sir Owen Morgan  212n ‘Eileen Aroon’ (Irish traditional song)  35 Eliot, T. S.  xlviii, 121n influence of Arthur Symons  305n influence of Irving Babbitt  447n ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’  xli The Sacred Wood 514 ‘Swinburne as Poet’  511n Ellis, Edwin J. Blake’s Poetical Works (ed)  228 The Works of William Blake (ed with Yeats)  228n, 354n Ellis, Vivian Locke  659–60 England’s Helicon  72, 542 English Review (journal)  xxvi, xxxiv–xxxvii Everyman’s Library (Dent)  xxv, xxvii, 43n Faraday, Michael  144 Farjeon, Eleanor  647n, 659 Ferguson, Sir Samuel, ‘The Pretty Girl of Lough Dan’  425 Fielding, Henry, Introduction to Tom Jones 105 Field, Michael  295–7 Borgia: A Period Play (anon.)  282n Mystic Trees 297n Wild Honey from Various Thyme 295–7 Finch, Anne  (Countess of Winchilsea)  li, 27–30 ‘All is Vanity’  29 ‘An Invitation to Dafnis’  29 ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’  28n, 29–30, 414 ‘Tree’ 29 ‘The Unequal Fetters’  29n

735

Finch, Colonel Heneage  27n, 29n Firdausi/Ferdowsi, Shahnameh  185, 243 FitzGerald, Edward  172, 352n Flecker, James Elroy  440–1, 577–9 ‘Areiya’ 578 The Golden Journey to Samarkand 577–9 ‘Hialmar speaks to the Raven’ (translation from Leconte de Lisle)  441 ‘Litany to Satan’ (translation from Baudelaire) 440 Thirty Six Poems 440–1 ‘To a Poet a thousand years hence’  440 Fletcher, John  128, 205, 579–80, 581–4, 621n The Book of Nature 581–4 The Dominant City  579–80, 583 Fire and Wine  579–80, 581–4 Fool’s Gold 583 Visions of the Evening  579–80, 581–4 Fletcher, Phineas, The Purple Island; or, The Isle of Man 215 Flint, F. S.  621n In the Net of the Stars 624 folksong 271–7 Ford, Ford Madox  xxxv–xxxvii, 621 London Rhymes xxxvi Parade’s End xxxvi Forman, Harry Buxton, Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in Verse and Prose (ed) 108 Freeman, A. Martin  403 Freeman, John  539n ‘Happy is England Now’  643n Frere, John Hookham  434, 435 ‘The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-Grinder’ 433n Frost, Robert  xxxvi, lii, 629–36 ‘After Apple-Picking’  630 ‘The Black Cottage’  630, 633, 634 A Boy’s Will  106n, 633, 635 ‘The Death of the Hired Man’  630, 632, 633, 634 ‘Good Hours’  634, 635 ‘Home Burial’  633, 634, 636 ‘The Housekeeper’  634 ‘A Hundred Collars’  634 ‘Iris by Night’  56n ‘Mending Wall’  630, 634, 636 ‘Mowing’ 635–6 North of Boston  xxiv, xxvi, liii, 629–36 ‘The Self-Seeker’  630, 636 ‘The Wood-Pile’  630, 631–2, 633

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736

Index

Galsworthy, John  xxxv Gardner, John  504n Garnett, Constance  xxxv Garnett, Edward  xxii–xxiii, xxv, xxvii, xxx, 209n, 629–30n ‘A New American Poet’  630n Garnett, Richard, De Flagello Myrteo 215–16, 288 Gaultier, Philip  179 Gautier, Théophile  51n Gawain and the Green Knight 270 ‘Georgianism’ lii Georgian Poetry 1911–1912 539–46 Gibbon, Perceval African Items 381n ‘Koodoo Outspan’  381 Gibson, Ashley  xxiii–xxiv Gibson, Wilfrid Wilson  50n, 52–3, 75, 147–8, 304–5, 519–21, 531–3, 636–8 Akra the Slave 520n ‘Bloodybush Edge’  609–10, 638 Daily Bread 520 Fires xli Book I  519–21 Books II and III  531–3 The Golden Helm and Other Verse 75 ‘The Lighthouse’  532 The Nets of Love 147–8 New Numbers (with Brooke, Abercrombie, and Drinkwater), Part I, Vol I  608–10 On the Threshold 304n The Queen’s Vigil and Other Song 52–3 ‘The Snow’  532 The Stonefolds 304n Thoroughfares and Borderlands 636–8 The Web of Life 304–5 Gifford, William The Baviad 433n The Maeviad 433n ‘Gil Brenton’  276 Gilchrist, Alexander, The Life of William Blake  228, 229–30, 263 Gildas the Wise  66 Gillman, James, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 3 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ 15n Gissing, George, New Grub Street xxviii–xxix Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  477 The Sorrows of Young Werther 16 Goldsmith, Oliver  116

The Deserted Village 194n The Vicar of Wakefield 62 ‘Goodbye Dolly Gray’ (music-hall song)  164 Gordon, Adam Lindsay  82 Gosse, Edmund  xliv, 54n French Profiles  xlv, 351 Gossip in a Library 28 Gourmont, Remy de, ‘French Literature and the War’  xl Gower, John  11–14, 138 Complete Works, Vols II and III (ed Macaulay) 11–14 Grahame, Kenneth, The Wind in the Willows 20n Graham, Gabriela Cunninghame, Rhymes from a World Unknown 330 Grant, Joy  xl Graves, Robert, ‘The Reader Over My Shoulder’ li Gray, Father John  515 Gray, Thomas  151, 434 ‘The Bard: A Pindaric Ode’  153 ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ 639 ‘The Progress of Poesy’  353 Gregory, Lady Augusta  339n Cuchulain of Muirthemne  64, 121 The Pot of Broth (with Yeats)  91, 251 Greg, Walter W., Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama  xlvi, 203–5 Greville, Frances, ‘A Prayer for Indifference’ 449 Griffin, W. Hall, The Life of Robert Browning 492–6 Grigson, Geoffrey  xli Grosart, Alexander Balloch  59, 254 Gross, John  xx, xxxviii, xliii–xliv Guest, Lady Charlotte, Mabinogion  64, 65, 67, 275, 348 Gummere, Francis B. Beowulf (translation)  271n Democracy and Poetry 271n The Popular Ballad  162n, 271–7, 574n Guthrie, James J.  177, 451n Gwylim, Dafydd ap  66, 67n Life and Poems of Dafydd ab Gwilym (ed Evelyn Lewes)  67n, 618–20 Hadow, G. E. and W. H., Oxford Treasury of English Literature (ed)  238 Haines, J. W.  688n

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Index Hamilton, Ian  xli Hardy, Thomas  xxxv, lii, 19–21, 394–401, 496n, 498–9, 563–9 (‘Thomas Hardy of Dorchester’) ‘1967’  395, 564 ‘After the Last Breath’  399, 566 ‘An August Midnight’  568 ‘Autumn in the Park’  396 ‘Before Life and After’  396 ‘The Bridge of Lodi’  563 ‘The Christening’  397 ‘A Christmas Ghost-Story’  568 ‘Confession of a Friend in Trouble’  499 critique by F. A. Hedgecock  498–9 ‘The Curate’s Kindness: A Workhouse Irony’ 567 ‘The Dance at the Phoenix’  565 ‘The Dark-eyed Gentleman’  397 ‘The Dawn after the Dance’  569 ‘The Division’  398 The Dynasts  498, 563, 567 Far From the Madding Crowd 20 ‘The Flirt’s Tragedy’  399, 567 ‘George Meredith’  395 ‘God-Forgotten’ 566 ‘Hap’ 566 ‘The Homecoming’  398 ‘In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury’  565 ‘ “In the Night She Came” ’  398, 400 ‘Julie-Jane’  398, 568 ‘Lausanne: In Gibbon’s Old Garden: 11–12 pm’  568 ‘Leipzig’ 499 ‘Let me Enjoy’  401 ‘Men Who March Away’  640, 644 ‘The Minute before Meeting’  400 ‘The Mother Mourns’  567 ‘My Cicely’  564, 565 ‘Nature’s Questioning’  566 ‘New Year’s Eve’  399, 566 ‘The Noble Lady’s Tale’  394 ‘On an Invitation to the United States’ 569 ‘One We Knew (M. H. 1772–1857)’  394 ‘On the Departure Platform’  396 ‘The Peasant’s Confession’  565 ‘The Pine Planters’  399, 498–9, 565, 566 ‘The Rejected Member’s Wife’  396 ‘The Respectable Burgher on “the Higher Criticism” ’  567 ‘The Revisitation’  564

737

‘Rome: At the Pyramid of Cestius: near the Graves of Shelley and Keats’ 568 Select Poems of William Barnes (ed)  333–6 ‘The Sergeant’s Song’  565 ‘Shelley’s Skylark’  568 ‘She, to Him’  566 ‘The Sick God’  565 ‘To Sincerity’  396, 401 ‘The Spring Call’  397 Tess of the d’Urbervilles 398 Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses  394–401, 564n Two on a Tower 398 Under the Greenwood Tree 20 ‘The Voice of the Thorn’  398 ‘V.R. 1819–1901: A Reverie’  565 The Woodlanders 499n Harker, Dave, Fakesong: The Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’ 1700 to the Present Day 271n Harrison, Austin  xxxiv, xxxv–xxxvi Harry, Gérard, Maurice Maeterlinck 469 Harte, Bret  646 Hawthorne, Nathaniel  142 Haydon, Benjamin  661n Hazlitt, William, ‘On Going a Journey’  497 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)  621n, 623 Hearn, Lafcadio  142 Hedgcock, F. A., Thomas Hardy: Penseur et Artiste, étude dans les Romans du Wessex 498–9 Henley, William Ernest  113 ‘Invictus’ 113n Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation: Art 113n Heraclitus 478 Herbert, George  1, 83–5, 256 ‘The British Church’  647n ‘Church Musick’  84 ‘The Church Porch’  84–5 ‘Grief ’ 85 ‘My God’  83–4 ‘The Odour’  84, 475 A Priest to the Temple 1n The Temple 83–5 Herbert, Lord Edward  1n Herrick, Robert, ‘Upon the Death of His Sparrow: An Elegy’  516 Hesiod 338 Theogony 144n

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738

Index

Hewlett, Maurice  362–4 The Agonists 358n Artemision: Idylls and Songs 362–4 Helen Redeemed and Other Poems 358–9n Songs and Verses 362 Hibberd, Dominic  xl, xli Higgens, Judith, Beddoes’s Selected Poetry (ed with Bradshaw)  257n Hill, Reginald, Death’s Jest-Book 257n Hilton, Walter, ‘The Song of Angels’  475–6 Hodgson, Ralph  247–8, 580–1, 584–6 ‘Eve’  584, 585 Eve and Other Poems  580–1, 584–6 ‘The Hammers’  248 The Last Blackbird and Other Lines  247–8, 584 ‘Time, you old Gipsy Man’  584–5 Holden, E. M.  15n, 16 The Songs of Christine 18 Holst, Gustav  274n Homberger, Eric  xxxvi Homer  265, 266, 326 Iliad  147, 209, 309 Odyssey  146, 243, 309, 469 translation by Mackail  352 Hood, Thomas, ‘The Song of the Shirt’  69 Hooker, Sir Joseph Dalton, Handbook of the British Flora 144 Horace, Ars Poetica  43n, 448n Housman, A. E., ‘Fragment of a Greek Tragedy’ 622 Housman, Laurence  ln, 570 Howard, Newman Constantine the Great 136n Savonarola: A City’s Tragedy 136 Hudson, W. H.  xix, xxiii, xxxv Afoot in England 378 Hampshire Days 237 A Shepherd’s Life 237n Hugo, Victor  5, 351 Ruy Blas 136n Husband, T. F. and M. F. A., Punctuation: its Principles and Practice 154–7 Hutchinson, Thomas, The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (ed)  108–12, 143–6, 417 Hyde, Edward, First Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England 346 Hynes, Mary  31–2 Ibsen, Henrik  140 Iolo MSS  66, 67n

Irish Literature  423–5 Irving, Washington  141 Isaacson, Henry, Chronologie 255 Jackson, Holbrook, ‘The Ideas of William Morris’ 486n Jackson, Vincent, English Melodies (ed)  272n Jack, T. C. and E. C. (publishers)  659 James, Henry  xxxv James I, King of Scotland, The Kingis Quair/The King’s Book 497 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience 475 Jarry, Alfred, Ubu Roi 226 Jeffares, A. Norman  339n Jefferies, Richard  xxxix, 265–6, 316n ‘My Old Village’  343 Red Deer 331 The Story of my Heart  60n, 294, 690 ‘Wild Flowers’  529n Jeffrey, Francis, Jeffrey’s Literary Criticism (ed Nichol Smith)  456–8 Jerrold, Walter, The Book of Living Poets (ed)  xli–xlii, 281–4 Joachim of Flora  95, 96–7 Johnson, Harrold Ellan Vannin: Ballads and Verses of the Isle of Man 147 The Road Makers and Other Poems 147 Johnson, Lionel  xxiv, 122, 383–4 ‘The Age of a Dream’  383–4 The Art of Thomas Hardy  156–7, 499 ‘The Church of a Dream’  383 ‘Hawker of Morwenstow’  383 ‘Oxford Nights’  383 Selections from the Poems of Lionel Johnson 383–4 Johnson, Samuel  153 Lives of the Poets 167 Joseph of Arimathea  209 Joubert, Joseph, Pensées 43 Joyce, James Chamber Music 621n ‘I Hear an Army’  621 Judith (eighth century)  269 Jusserand, Jean Jules, A Literary History of the English People  236–7n, 237–9 Kant, Immanuel  311 Kean, Edmund  44 Kearney, Anthony  54n Keating, Geoffrey  66

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/08/23, SPi

Index Keats, John  liii, 122–4, 265, 659–88 Bradley’s critique of  369 ‘Cap and Bells’  677, 683 compared with Shelley  110–12 Courthope’s opinion of  432–3 death 161n edited compilations of works  122–4 Endymion  46, 161n, 244, 384n, 458, 472–3, 665–9, 685 ‘The Eve of Saint Mark’  677–8 ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’  74, 662, 672, 677, 687 ‘The Fall of Hyperion’  187, 682–3 ‘Fancy’  112, 671 ‘Hyperion’  74, 110, 111, 123, 669, 678–81 ‘Isabella’  110–11, 124, 527, 669–71 ‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’  664 ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’  669–70, 672, 677 ‘Lamia’  491, 577, 668, 676–7 ‘Meg Merrilies’  669 ‘Ode on Indolence’  111, 169 ‘Ode on Melancholy’  613, 673–4, 687 ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’  675–6 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’  123, 674–5, 687 ‘Ode to Psyche’  111, 672 ‘On Indolence’  676, 687 ‘On leaving some Friends at an early Hour’ 663 ‘On seeing the Elgin Marbles for the first time’ 681 ‘On sitting down to read King Lear once again’ 411n ‘On the Sea’  474 ‘O sorrow, sorrow’  677 ‘Otho the Great’  678 ‘O Thou whose face has felt the Winter’s wind’ 672 ‘The Poet: A Fragment’  675, 686 ‘Robin Hood’  671, 677 ‘Sleep and Poetry’  48, 432, 450, 662–3 ‘Song’ 663 ‘To ****’  661–2, 687 ‘To Autumn’  647n, 673 ‘To Charles Cowden Clarke’  664 ‘To my Brother George’  662, 664 ‘To Sleep’  685 ‘Why did I laugh tonight?’  683 Kellett, E. E., A Book of Cambridge Verse (ed) 496–8 Ker, W. P., Essays on Medieval Literature  xlvi–xlvii

739

Kickham, Charles Joseph, ‘The Irish Peasant Girl’ 425 Killigrew, Anne, ‘The Complaint of a Lover’ 412 Kipling, Rudyard  xxxiv, xliii, xliv, 134, 375, 389–91, 454–6, 643 Actions and Reactions 389–91 Barrack-Room Ballads 81n influence on ‘Banjo’ Paterson  80–2 influence on Harold Begbie  7 influence on war poetry  643 Puck of Pook’s Hill 455 Rewards and Fairies 454–6 Kittredge, George Lyman, English and Scottish Popular Ballads (ed with Sargent)  162–5, 406 Knight, Henrietta, Lady Luxborough  415 Kyle, Galloway  xl ‘The Lady of the Fountain’  65 ‘Lake Poets’  456–7n Lamartine, Alphonse de, Graziella: A Story of Italian Love 418 Lamb, Charles  142, 170 ‘On the Poetical Works of George Wither’ 57 ‘The Lament of the Border Widow’  407 Landor, Walter Savage  258 Lang, Andrew  xxxviii, 273, 631 Poets’ Country (ed)  496n La Pléiade  351 Latin pastoral  204 Lawes, Henry  534 Lawrence, D. H.  xxxv, xxxvi, lii, 545, 546–9, 621n ‘Aware’ 549 ‘Corot’ 549 ‘Dog-Tired’ 548 ‘End of Another Home Holiday’  549 influence of Edward Carpenter  190n Love Poems and Others  359n, 546–9 ‘Morning Work’  547 ‘Renascence’ 549 ‘Repulsed’ 548 ‘Snap-Dragon’  543, 547 The Trespasser 546 The White Peacock 546 Leapor, Mary ‘An Essay on Woman’  415n ‘The Month of August’  415 ‘The Temple of Love, A Dream’  415

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740

Index

Leconte de Lisle, Charles-Marie-René  351n, 579 ‘Hialmar speaks to the Raven’ (translated by Flecker)  441 Ledwidge, Francis  540n Legge, Arthur E. J., The Pilgrim Jester 282n Leighton, Sir Frederic  493 Leopardi, Giacomo  615 Lepelletier, Edmond, Paul Verlaine: His Life—­His Work (trans Lang)  350–2 Leslie, Bishop John  273 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim  447–8 Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie 447–8n Lessius, Leonardus  255 Lewes, Evelyn, Life and Poems of Dafydd ab Gwilym  67n, 618–20 Lewis, Wyndham  xxxv, xxxvi Liddell, Mark H.  37n An Introduction to the Scientific Study of English Poetry  xlvii, 37–45, 269n Linton, Eliza Lynn  99 Literary Agency of London  xxii literary supplements  xxxii Literature (journal)  xxi, xliv ‘Little Musgrave and the Lady Barnard’  408 Livy 242–3 History of Rome 185–6 Llywarch Hên  66, 67n, 280 Locker-Lampson, Frederick ‘To My Mistress’  360n Locock, C. D.  143 The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (ed) 108n Lodge, Thomas, ‘Love is a sickness full of woes’ 292 Lombroso, Cesare  229 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth  77, 104–6, 163 ‘The Children’s Hour’  105 ‘Haunted Houses’  105 ‘My Lost Youth’  106 ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’  104n The Poetical Works of Longfellow 104 The Song of Hiawatha 104n Tales of a Wayside Inn 106n ‘Three Friends of Mine’  106 ‘The Warden of the Cinque Ports’  105 Lorenzo de Medici  204 Loring, Andrew, The Rhymers’ Lexicon 131–3 Loth, Joseph  67

Lovat Fraser, Claud  580, 584 love poetry  405–6, 416–17 Lowell, Amy  621 Lucas, E. V., The Open Road: A Little Book for Wayfarers (ed)  239 Lucretius 689 De Rerum Natura, Book II  204 Lyall, Sir Alfred, Tennyson 45–9 lyric poetry  15–19 Lysaght, Sidney Royse, Poems of the Unknown Way  216, 282n Macaulay, G. C. The Complete Works of John Gower (ed)  11–14 Life of John Gower 55 MacColl, Dugald Sutherland, Nineteenth Century Art  226, 227 Machen, Arthur, Hieroglyphics 201 Mackail, J. W.  xlvii The Life of William Morris  345, 486, 489–90 The Springs of Helicon  xlvii, 352–4 translation of Homer’s Odyssey 352 Maclagan, E. R. D., The Prophetic Books of William Blake: Jerusalem (ed with Russell)  77–9, 186, 189, 228, 263 Maclean, Magnus, The Literature of the Celts  63–8, 279 Macleod, Fiona see Sharp, William Macpherson, James, The Works of Ossian 67, 151–4 Maeterlinck, Maurice  246, 465–79 ‘Ame’ 478 ‘Après-midi’ 479 The Buried Temple 472 ‘Chasses Lasses’  471–2 ‘Cloche à Plongeur’  478 ‘Critique on Iwan Gilkin’s “Damnation de l’artiste” ’  469 ‘Ennui’  470–1, 479 ‘Fauves Las’  471 ‘Feuillage du Coeur’  476–7 ‘Hôpital’ 478 La Vie des Abeilles/The Life of the Bee 466–7 Les Sept Princesses 478 Le Trésor des Humbles/The Treasure of the Humble 466 Life and Flowers 466

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/08/23, SPi

Index L’Oiseau Bleu/The Blue Bird 466 ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’  472 Pelléas et Mélisande  154, 466 ‘Serre Chaude’  473, 478 Serres Chaudes/Hothouses  466, 468–79 ‘The Unhappy One’  468–9 Mallarmé, Stéphane  306 Malory, Thomas  12 Morte d’Arthur  216, 346–8 Mangan, James Clarence, ‘The Nameless One’ 424 Marjoram, J. (Mottram) New Poems 247n Repose and Other Verses 247 Marlowe, Christopher  xxvn Tamburlaine  315, 507 Marriott Watson, Rosamund After Sunset 75 Marryat, Captain Frederick, ‘The Old Navy’ 645 Marsh, Edward (E. M.)  539n Georgian Poetry anthologies (ed)  xl, 621n 1911–1912  xli, lii, 539–43, 544 1913–1915 540n 1920–1922 540n Marston, John, Antonio’s Revenge 28 Marvell, Andrew, ‘The Garden’  46 Masefield, John  198, 445–7, 526–8, 594–5 Ballads  76, 445 Ballads and Poems 445–7 ‘Cargoes’ 445 The Daffodil Fields  447n, 594–5 Dauber 594 The Everlasting Mercy  xxxv, 526n, 527 A Mainsail Haul  447n, 637 Philip the King and Other Poems 636–8 Salt-Water Ballads 76 ‘Sea Fever’  446 The Street of Today 528n A Tarpaulin Muster 447n The Tragedy of Nan 445n The Tragedy of Pompey the Great 447n The Widow in the Bye Street 447n, 526–8, 594 Mason, William  434 Massingham, H. W.  xxxi–xxxii Masterman, Lucy, Poems 546 Mathews, Elkin  xlii, 286n Mathias, Thomas James  434 Mazzini, Giuseppe  62 McArthur, Irene and Hugh  465

741

McCarthy, Justin Huntly, ‘Ghosts at Boulogne’ 642 McCullers, Carson, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter 281n McGann, Jerome J., The Romantic Ideology  xlviii, 447n Meilyr, Gwalchmai ap  66, 67n Meredith, George  lii, 9–11, 142, 437–9 ‘Daphne’ 437 The Egoist 140–1 Hardy’s poem on  395 ‘London by Lamplight’  438 ‘Love in the Valley’  439 Modern Love  14, 217 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel 141 ‘Pastoral’ 439 Poems Written in Early Youth (1851), Poems from ‘Modern Love’ (first edition) and Scattered Poems 437–9 A Reading of Life with Other Poems 9–11 ‘South-West Wind in the Woodland’  437–8 Merry, Robert  433n Meyer, Kuno Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry (trans)  500–2, 620 Meynell, Alice  li, 571–3 Ceres’ Runaway and Other Essays 572n ‘Cradle-Song at Twilight’  572 ‘Letter from a Girl to her own Old Age’  572–3 ‘Messina 1908’  573 Poems 571–3 ‘To Any Poet’ 572 Meynell, Wilfrid  319n Middleton, Thomas, The Witch 28 Mifflin, Lloyd  219 Castalian Days 82–3 Collected Sonnets  82n, 170n Miles, Alfred H., The Poets and the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century: Christina G. Rossetti to Katharine Tynan (ed)  281–4 Mill, John Stuart  3 Milne, James  xviii, xxv, xxxiii–xxxiv Milton, John  2, 153, 298–9, 326, 354 Areopagitica 314 compared with John Keats  679 Comus 534n ‘Lycidas’  469, 577n, 614 ‘On the Late Massacre in Piedmont’  83 Paradise Lost  49–50, 124, 147, 244, 311, 433 politics 26

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742

Index

Milton Memorial Lectures xlvii minor poets  23, 53–4, 93–4 Mitchell, George H., Ballads in Blue 233n Mitchell, Silas Weir Collected Poems 15n ‘Ode on a Lycian Tomb’  16–17 Mitford, Mary Russell  116 Mond, Sir Alfred  xxxv Monk, Mary  414 Monroe, Harriet  621n Monro, Harold  xxvi, xxx, xl–xlii, 304n Before Dawn  502–3, 504 ET’s letters to about ‘War Poetry’  638n see also Poetry Bookshop Mont Blanc restaurant  xxiii Monthly Review (journal)  435 ‘The Month of May’ (tenth century)  270 Moore, Thomas  434–5 Moore, Thomas Sturge  li, 87–8, 101–2, 107–8, 149–51, 503–4, 517–18, 614–16 Absalom: A Chronicle Play in Three Acts 150 The Centaur’s Booty  76, 100n, 101–2 ‘The Gazelles’  87–8, 101 The Gazelles and Other Poems 87–8, 100n The Little School: A Posy of Rhymes 149–51, 614, 615 ‘Lubber Breeze’  149 Mariamne  502, 503–4 opinion of Robert Frost  630n Pan’s Prophecy  88n, 100n, 101–2 ‘The Phantom of a Rose’  614, 615, 616 The Rout of the Amazons  101–2, 265 The Sea is Kind 614–16 A Sicilian Idyll and Judith 517–18 Theseus, Medea, and Lyrics 150 To Leda and Other Odes 107–8 The Vinedresser and Other Poems  100, 614 Moreau, Gustave  226 More, Paul Elmer  xlviii, 216, 447n Shelburne Essays  121–2, 139 Fourth Series  139n Second Series  139–43, 147n Morning Post (newspaper)  xxv, xxxiii Morris, May, Introduction to The Collected Works of William Morris  486, 491 Morris, William  xxxvi, 99, 345–8, 486–92, 652–5 ‘Art and its Producers’  489 Brooke’s study of  312–14

The Collected Works of William Morris  486–92, 652–5 ‘The Defence of Guenevere’  216, 254, 313, 345, 347 The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems 490 The Earthly Paradise  33, 486–7, 490, 491, 653 edited compilations of works  345–8 ‘For the bed at Kelmscott’  655 ‘The Half of Life Gone’  313–14 ‘In Arthur’s House’  653 The Life and Death of Jason  486, 490, 491 Love is Enough; or, the Freeing of Pharamond 492 ‘The Man Born to be King’  491 ‘The Message of the March Wind’  313, 314, 489, 491, 655 News from Nowhere  489–90, 492 ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End’  254 socialism  313n, 489 The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs 486n The Story of the Glittering Plain 490 ‘Swanhild’ 653 ‘Thunder in the Garden’  314, 491 ‘Two Red Roses’  345 The Wood Beyond the World 178n Mottram, Ralph Hale see Marjoram, J. Mulso, John  415n Murray, Gilbert  85n Four Stages of Greek Religion 476 National Observer (journal: previously Scots Observer) 113n Nation (journal)  xxxi, xxxiv ‘natural magic’  337–8 nature poetry  27–30, 146 Nennius 66 Nesbit, Edith  148n Battle Songs (ed)  645 The Rainbow and the Rose 151 Nevinson, Henry  xxiv, xxxi–xxxii Books and Personalities xxxii Essays in Freedom xxxii–xxxiii Newbolt, Henry  xli, 49–50, 533–6, 643 ‘Admirals All’  533 ‘Hope the Hornblower’  533 Mary Coleridge’s Poems (ed)  286–90 Poems: New and Old 533–6 The Sailing of the Long-Ships, and Other Poems 49–50

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/08/23, SPi

Index Songs of Memory and Hope 536n and war poetry  49–50, 434–6, 643 ‘New Humanism’  xlviii, 121n, 447n News Chronicle (newspaper)  xxxi New Statesman (journal)  xxxi, xxxiv New Theology  317 New Thought movement  550n New Weekly (journal)  xxvi, xxxiv, 467 Nichol Smith, D., Jeffrey’s Literary Criticism (ed) 456–8 Nicklin, J. A., ‘And they went to the War’  641 Nicoll, Sir William Robertson  xxxvii–xxxviii Introduction to The Complete Poems of Emily Brontë 480 The Round of the Clock xxxviii Nietzsche, Friedrich Beyond Good and Evil 543 The Gay Science 316 On the Genealogy of Morals 316 Thus Spoke Zarathustra 316 Noble, James Ashcroft  xxi ‘Living Critics’  xxxviii Nordau, Max Simon  229 Noyes, Alfred  51–2, 198–200, 284–5, 324–6, 345–8, 598–9 Drake: An English Epic  284, 504n Books I–III  198–200 Books IV–XII  198n, 324–6 The Flower of Old Japan 284 The Forest of Wild Thyme  284, 324 Forty Singing Seamen and Other Poems  281n, 284–5 The Loom of Years  51–2, 198, 284 William Morris 345–8 The Wine-Press: A Tale of War 598–9 nursery rhymes  439 ‘O Bessie Bell and Mary Gray’  409–10 O’Connor, T. P.  629n O’Donnell, Frank Hugh  15 The Message of the Masters 18–19 Oedipus Coloneus 444 O’Gorman, Francis  xvi Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyát  172n, 352n Omond, T. S., A Study of Metre 37n Orpheus (magazine)  563 Orr, Alexandra, Life and Letters of Robert Browning 493n Orwell, George, Keep the Aspidistra Flying xxviii O’Shaughnessy, Arthur  284

743

Ossian  65–6, 279–80, 444 The Works of Ossian (ed Macpherson)  67, 151–4 Overbury, Sir Thomas, Overbury’s Characters 138 Ovid 444 Metamorphoses  13, 124 Owen, Wilfred  661 Oxlie, Mary, ‘To William Drummond of Hawthornden’ 412–13 Paracelsus 187 Parnassians  351, 441n, 577, 579 Paterson, A. B. ‘Banjo’  xliii, 79–82 ‘The First Surveyor’  81 The Man from Snowy River 79n The Old Bush Songs (ed)  79n, 380 Rio Grande’s Last Race and Other Verses 79–82 ‘Song of the Artesian Water’  81 ‘Song of the Future’  80 ‘Waltzing Matilda’  79n Pater, Walter  xxxix, xlviii, xlix, 112, 378, 448n, 537–9 ‘Aesthetic Poetry’  xlix, 141 Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures 538 ‘Sandro Botticelli’  257–8 ‘The School of Giorgione’  574 Studies in the History of the Renaissance 226 ‘Style’  217, 537n peak print  xxi, xxii, xxvii, xxix, xxx, xlii Pennington, Elizabeth, ‘Ode to Morning’  415 Penn, William  141 People’s Books  659–60 Percy, Thomas, Bishop of Dromore, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry  57, 274, 341, 407 Pertwee, Ernest English History in Verse (ed)  205–8 Lyra Britannica (ed)  xlii–xliii, 205–8 Pervigilium Veneris  204, 205n Phillips, John, ‘The Splendid Shilling’  371 Phillips, Stephen  xl, 16n, 304, 375 Armageddon 656–7 Nero 221 New Poems 16n Philostratus 170 ‘Phoenix’ (eighth century)  270 Pierpont Morgan, John  230 Pindarics 359

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/08/23, SPi

744 Pinero, Arthur Wing, The Second Mrs Tanqueray 51 Pitt, William, the Younger  640 place names in poetry  496–8 Plato, The Republic 140 Plumer, Herbert  7n Poe, Edgar Allan  451–4 ‘The City in the Sea’  453 critical study by Arthur Ransome  451–4 ‘Eulalie—­A Song’  453 Eureka: A Prose Poem 452 ‘The Poetic Principle’  306, 387, 451n, 575 ‘The Purloined Letter’  451–2 ‘The Raven’  451n, 452 Some Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (ed Wright) 451n ‘Ulalume’ 483 poetry vs. prose  1–5, 14, 44, 170–2, 394–401 vs. verse  xlii Poetry and Drama (magazine)  xxvi–xxvii, xxxix–xlii Poetry Bookshop  xl, 539n, 540, 621n Poetry (magazine)  621n ‘The Poetry of Today’ (article by ET)  134–7 Poetry Review (magazine)  xl, xli, 520 Poetry Society  xl Pollard, A. T.  206 Pope, Alexander  27, 430n Courthope’s opinion of  436 Dunciad 433n Essay on Man  391, 553 Windsor Forest  28, 423 Porphyry 31 Pound, Ezra  xxxv, xxxvi, li, 358–62, 364–7, 392–4, 443–5, 621–4 ‘And Thus in Nineveh’  361–2, 367 ‘Aux Belles de Londres’  393 ‘Ballad for Gloom’  367 Cantos liii ‘Cino’ 360 Des Imagistes  xl, lii, liii, 540n, 621–4 Exultations  lii, liii, 392–4, 443n ‘From Syria’  361 ‘From the Saddle’  361 ‘Idyl for Glaucus’  361, 367, 393 ‘In Durance’  366 ‘In Tempore Senectutis’  360, 366 Personae  lii–liii, 358–62, 364–7, 392n, 443n ‘Pierre Vidal Old’  393

Index ‘Planh’ 393 ‘Praise of Ysolt’  360–1, 367 ‘Scriptor Ignotus: Ferrara 1715’  360 The Spirit of Romance  xlix, liii, 443–5 ‘Ts’ai Chi’h’  623 ‘A Villonaud: Ballad of the Gibbet’  360 ‘The White Stag’  362, 364 ‘Δωρια’ 623 Pringle, Thomas, ‘Afar in the Desert’  381–2 Prior, Matthew  xlvi, 181–2, 252–4 ‘Solomon on the Vanity of the World’  253 The Writings of Matthew Prior, Vols I and II (ed Waller)  252–4 prosody  37–45, 268–9 Provençal (Occitan) poetry  443 Przerwa-Tetmajer, Kazimierz  622 Quarles, Francis  611 Emblemes, Divine and Moral 138 Quarterly Review (journal)  xxx, 669 Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur (‘Q’) Oxford Book of English Verse (ed)  237n The Pilgrims’ Way: A Little Scrip of Good Counsel for Travellers (ed)  239 Rabelais, François Gargantua 164 Pantagruel 62 Raftery, Anthony  31–2 Raleigh, Walter  186, 228 Ramal, Walter see de la Mare, Walter Ransome, Arthur  xxix, xxxix, 451n Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Study 451–4 Rawnsley, Canon Hardwicke Drummond  219 Recreations and Reflections (Saturday Review anthology) xliv René of Anjou  204, 205n ‘Reviewing: An Unskilled Labour’ (article by ET) 604–8 Reynolds, Henry  119n, 292 Reynolds, Myra, The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea (ed)  27–30 Rhymers’ Club  104n Rhys, Ernest  xxv Richter, Jean Paul  4 Roberts, Frederick ‘Bobs’  7n Roberts, Morley, The Wingless Psyche 281–2n Robertson, Graham  228 Robinson, Mary F. (Madame Duclaux)  23–6 ‘Aubade Triste’  24 ‘Celia’s Home Coming’  25

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/08/23, SPi

Index The Collected Poems, Lyrical and Narrative 23–6 The Return to Nature 26n ‘Souvenir’ 24–5 Rodenbach, Georges  82 Rodin, Auguste  226 Rogers, Samuel  434 Roland, Martin  31 Romantics  xvii, lii, 351, 384–9 Rossetti, Christina  li, 610–13 ‘Goblin Market’  611 Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems 610–13 ‘L. E. L. “Whose heart was breaking for a little love” ’  613 ‘Looking Forward’  613 ‘Maiden-Song’ 611 ‘Rest’ 612 ‘Song’ 613 ‘The Wind’  612 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel  xlvi, 113–15, 411–12n, 496n, 518–19 ‘The Blessed Damozel’  114 ‘The Bride’s Prelude’  115 Brooke’s study of  312–13 ‘The Burden of Nineveh’  518 ‘Chimes’ 519 ‘The Dark Glass’  221 ‘The Day-Dream’  114 ‘Death-in-Love’ 519 edited compilations of works  113–15, 518–19 ‘The House of Life’  221, 519 ‘On Refusal of Aid between Nations’  518 ‘The Portrait’  114–15 ‘Proserpina’ 114 ‘The Sonnet’  400 ‘Stillborn Love’  221 ‘The Stream’s Secret’  519 ‘A Superscription’  221 ‘Willowwood’ sonnets  519 Rossetti, William Michael The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (ed)  108 Poems of Christina Rossetti (ed)  610, 611 The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (ed) 113–15 The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (ed) 518–19 Ross, Robert Baldwin (‘Robbie’), Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (ed)  301–3 Ross, Ronald  540

745

Roud, Steve, The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (ed with Julia Bishop)  271–2n roundels 220n Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  4, 447n, 448 Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse 497 Royal Literary Fund  xxix Ruskin, John  5, 311 The Crown of Wild Olive 69 Fors Clavigera 68–9 Modern Painters 368 Munera Pulveris: Six Essays on the Elements of Political Economy 476 ‘Of Imagination Penetrative’  512 The Stones of Venice 348 Russell, A. G. B. The Letters of William Blake together with a Life by Frederick Tatham (ed)  228, 263 The Prophetic Books of William Blake: Jerusalem (ed with Maclagan)  77–9, 186, 189, 228, 263 Russell, George William see A. E. Rymer, Thomas  xlviii Sabin, Arthur K., ‘Harvest Moon at Midnight’ 641–2 Sackville, Lady Margaret, Lyrics 579 Sackville-West, Vita  546n Saffi, Aurelio  99 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin  62 Saintsbury, George  xlv, xlvii Essays in English Literature 37n The Later Nineteenth Century 264–8 Sallustius 476 Salt, L. Godwin, English Patriotic Poetry (ed) 645 Samhain (journal)  339, 340 Sampson, George, The Temple of George Herbert (ed)  83–5 Sampson, John  264 The Lyrical Poems of William Blake (ed)  186–9, 228 The Poetical Works of William Blake (ed) 186–9 Samurai Press  304 Sandys, George, translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses 124 Sappho 1 Sargant, Edmund Beale  540 The Country’s Call (ed with Marie Sargant) 646 ‘The Cuckoo Wood’  543

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746

Index

Sargant, Marie, The Country’s Call (ed with E. B. Sargant) 646 Sargent, Helen Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads (ed with Kittredge)  162–5, 406 Sargent, John Singer  573 Saturday Review (journal)  xxv, xxx, xxxiv, xliii–xliv, 584 Savile, Jeremiah, ‘Here’s a health unto his Majesty’ 645 Sayers, Dorothy L., Strong Poison 622n Schelling, Felix Emmanuel, The English Lyric 574–5 Schelling, Friedrich  311 Schlegel, Friedrich  448n Scollard, Clinton, Odes and Elegies 170n Scots Observer (journal: later National Observer) 113n Scott, Walter ‘Bonnie Dundee’  645 Guy Mannering 4 The Lady of the Lake 4 Marmion  4, 185 ‘The Seafarer’ (eighth century)  270 Secker, Martin  403, 404, 511n, 537n Sedley, Sir Charles  215 Senancour, Étienne Pivert de  110 Sergeaunt, John  29n Seward, Anna  415–16 Shakespeare, William  2–3, 12, 554 As You Like It 421n Cymbeline 376 Hamlet  16, 62, 86, 158, 422–3, 495, 512, 564 Henry V 642n Henry VI, Part III 686 King Lear  411n, 687 Love’s Labour’s Lost 406 Macbeth 140 A Midsummer Night’s Dream  251, 376, 523 Othello  39, 136 Romeo and Juliet  176, 458 Sonnets  39, 413, 422–3 The Tempest  666, 667 Troilus and Cressida 686 Two Gentlemen of Verona 665 Sharp, Cecil J. English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions  162n, 271–7 Folk Songs from Somerset  271n, 274 Sharp, William (Fiona Macleod)  279–81, 372–4 The Dominion of Dreams 372–4

From the Hills of Dream: Threnodies, Songs and Later Poems 279–81 Shawcross, J., Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (ed) 310–12 Shaw, George Bernard  xxxii, 138 Preface to Davies’s Autobiography of a Super-Tramp 307 Shelley, Percy Bysshe  xliv, 4, 45, 108–12, 143–6, 488 ‘Adonais’  168, 173, 669n, 689n Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude 110, 111–12, 435 Bradley’s critique of  369 ‘The Coliseum’  4 compared with Keats  110–12 Courthope’s opinion of  435 ‘Dedication’ 11n ‘Defence of Poetry’  4 edited compilations of works  108–12, 143–6, 417 Epipsychidion  143, 435n, 507 ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’  285 ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’  292 ‘Mont Blanc’  145 ‘Ode to Naples’  144 ‘Ode to the West Wind’  392 ‘On Love’  4 ‘Peter Bell the Third’  48, 683 Prometheus Unbound  15, 111–12, 277, 431 Queen Mab 145 The Revolt of Islam (Laon and Cythna) 109, 110, 145, 431 Thompson’s critique of  348–50 ‘To Constantia Singing’  84 ‘To Jane: The Recollection’  17 ‘To Mary’  150 ‘To Night’  110 ‘To the Nile’  83 ‘To a Skylark’  10n, 85, 99 ‘The Witch of Atlas’  527, 683 Shenstone, William  415 Sherren, Wilkinson, The Wessex of Romance 21n Shipley, Orby, Carmina Mariana (ed)  59 Shorter, Clement, The Complete Poems of Emily Brontë (ed)  480–3 Shove, Fredegond  546n Sidgwick, Frank, The Poetry of George Wither (ed) 57–8 Sidney, Sir Philip  2 Apologie for Poetrie xlviii

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/08/23, SPi

Index Arcadia  209, 471–2 Astrophel and Stella 446 ‘Sir Patrick Spens’  277 Skeat, Walter W.  115 Skipsey, Jack  l–li Smart, J. S., James Macpherson, An Episode in Literature 151–4 Socrates 448 ‘A Song of Spring’ (fourteenth century)  270 sonnets  82–3, 219–22, 518 South African poetry  380–2 Southey, Robert, ‘The Cataract of Lodore’  149 Speaker (journal)  xxi Spenser, Edmund  1–2, 387 The Faerie Queene  124, 183n, 209, 354, 433, 491, 523, 524 Statius 33n St Columba  63–4 Steevens, G. W.  545 Stephen, Leslie  xxxviii Stephens, James  540, 580 The Hill of Vision 540n ‘The Lonely God’  541, 543, 567 Stephens, Thomas  66, 67n Stevenson, Robert Louis  32 More’s critique of  140 ‘Thoreau’ 141 Stokes, Whitley  67 Strauss, Richard  226, 227 Stubbs, William, Select Charters 242 Suckling, Sir John  414 ‘A Ballad Upon a Wedding’  512 Suddard, Mary, Keats, Shelley and Shakespeare: Studies & Essays in English Literature 673–4 Sullivan, Alvin  xliii Swedenborg, Emanuel  187 Sweetman, Elinor, The Wild Orchard 282n Swinburne, Algernon Charles  xix, lii, 97–9, 324, 511–14 ‘The Altar of Righteousness’  98 Atalanta in Calydon 511 ‘A Ballad of Death’  513 ‘A Channel Passage’  97n A Channel Passage and Other Poems 97–9 ‘Choriambics’ 522n ‘Dedicatory Epistle’  98n ‘Elegy on Sir Richard Burton’  514 ‘Hesperia’ 512 inventor of the roundel  220n Laus Veneris 523

747

A Midsummer Holiday 99 Poems and Ballads 99 Rosamond  173, 262 ‘Russia: An Ode’  99n ‘Tristram of Lyonesse’  173 William Blake. A Critical Essay  228, 229, 263 Symbolist Movement  xvii, xlix, 305–7, 468 Symons, Arthur  xxiv–xxv, xliv, xlviii, 122, 222–7, 262–4, 305–7, 342–4, 384–9, 601–3 Baudelaire’s Poems in Prose (translation) 170–2 ‘Cornish Wind’  224 ‘The Fool of the World’  223, 601 The Fool of the World and Other Poems  222–5, 386, 602 ‘The Gardener’  224–5 Knave of Hearts, 1894–1908 601–3 London Nights 386 A Pageant of Elizabethan Poetry (ed)  239–40 Poems by John Clare (ed)  342–4, 386 The Poems of Ernest Dowson (ed)  124–8 The Romantic Movement in English Poetry  xlix, 384–9, 602–3 Spiritual Adventures 223 Studies in Seven Arts  222n, 225–7 The Symbolist Movement in Literature  305–7, 338n, 351, 386, 468, 477 William Blake 262–4 ‘The Windmill’  601–2 Synge, J. M.  lii, 249–51, 378–80 ‘In Glencullen’  379 In the Shadow of the Glen  249n, 378 ‘An Old Woman’s Lamentations’  380 ‘The Passing of the Shee’  379, 590 The Playboy of the Western World 249–51, 378n Poems and Translations 378–80 Riders to the Sea 249n The Well of the Saints  378–9, 380 Tabb, ‘Father’ John B.  282n, 287 Tagore, Rabindranath  592–3 The Crescent Moon 593n The Gardener 593n Gitanjali (Song Offerings)  592–3 ‘Tale of Pwyll’  64 Taliesin  66, 67n, 275, 468 Tasso, Torquato  174n, 204 Tatham, Frederick  228, 263 Taylor, Rachel Annand, The Hours of Fiammetta 579

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748

Index

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord  xxxi, 45–9, 54–6 Collins’s edition  54–6 Compared with Morris  345–8 ‘A Dream of Fair Women’  46 ‘Edwin Morris’  217 ‘The Gardener’s Daughter’  326 ‘Hands All Round’  645 Idylls of the King  69n, 199, 216, 326, 346, 348 In Memoriam  47, 49, 56, 79, 216, 665 ‘The Lady of Shalott’  46–7, 217 ‘Launcelot and Elaine’  217 ‘Leodegran the King of Cameliard’  347 Lyall’s critique of  45–9 ‘Mariana’ 217 ‘Maud’  217, 523 ‘May Queen’  77, 216 ‘Morte d’Arthur’  46, 48, 345, 623 ‘A Mr Wilkinson, a clergyman’  216 Noyes’s critique of  345–8 ‘The Palace of Art’  46, 47, 48 ‘The Passing of Arthur’  346 Patriotic Poems 644 Poems by Two Brothers 46 Poetical Works of Tennyson 216 popularity 77 The Princess  47, 56 ‘Sir Galahad’  46 ‘The Sisters’  611 ‘Ulysses’  191, 216 ‘The Vision of Sin’  48 Testament of Love 1 Thackeray, William Makepeace The History of Henry Esmond 140–1 Pendennis  141, 146–7 Thomas, R. George  xxxiii ‘Thomas the Rhymer’  276 Thompson, Francis  27, 318–24, 348–50, 569–71 ‘Corymbus for Autumn’  320 ‘Dedication to Coventry Patmore’  323 Health and Holiness 349 ‘Her Portrait’  320 ‘The Hound of Heaven’  319–20, 571 ‘Ode to the Setting Sun’  320, 571 ‘The Poppy’  321 Selected Poems of Francis Thompson 318–24 Shelley 348–50 The Works of Francis Thompson 569–71 Thomson, James (‘B. V.’)  377 The City of Dreadful Night  233, 584

Walt Whitman: The Man and the Poet 190n Thoreau, Henry David  121–2 Walden 56n Times Literary Supplement (TLS)  xxxii, 404 predecessor (Literature)  xxi, xliv Tolstoy, Leo  122, 264 War and Peace 309 Tottel, Richard, Tottel’s Miscellany: Songs and Sonettes 72 T. P.’s Weekly (journal)  xxvi, 629 ‘Tragedy of the Children of Lir’  64 Traherne, Thomas  58–60, 187 Centuries of Meditations 60 Christian Ethics 59 edited compilations of works  58–60, 215 ‘Innocence’ 59–60 ‘News’ 59 Poems of Felicity 60n Roman Forgeries  58n, 59 Serious and Pathetical Contemplation of the Mercies of God 59 ‘Upon those pure and virgin apprehensions which I had in my infancy’  60 Traill, H. D.  xliv, l Transatlantic Review (journal)  xxxvi translated works  67, 85–7, 170–2, 172n, 302n Homer’s Odyssey 352 Trevelyan, R. C. An Annual of New Poetry (ed with Abercrombie) 76n Cecilia Gonzaga 76 Polyphemus, and Other Poems  76n, 216 The Tribune (newspaper)  214n Tupper, Martin, Proverbial Philosophy 217 Turgenev, Ivan, ‘The Diary of a Superfluous Man’ 127n Turral, J., Lyra Historica: Poems of British History A.D. 61–1910 (ed with Windsor) 208n Tylor, Edward Burnett  31 Tynan, Katharine  688n, 356–8 Experiences 356–8 ‘Introit: An Echo’  357–8 Irish Poems 357n Lauds 357n ‘The New Boy’  358 Underhill, Evelyn, Immanence: A Book of Verses 546 Upward, Allen, ‘Scented Leaves from a Chinese Jar’  621–2

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/08/23, SPi

Index Vaughan, Henry, ‘The Retreat’  59 Vaughan Williams, Ralph  274n Verhaeren, Émile  579 Verlaine, Paul Mes Hôpitaux 352 Mes Prisons 352 Paul Verlaine: His Life—­His Work (trans Lang) 350–2 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste, Comte de 468 Villon, François, Testament 116 Virgil  145, 205 Aeneid  72, 75n, 147, 184, 185, 448n, 688 Georgics  204n, 267 Voltaire, La Henriade  147, 243 Vorticism 621n Voss, Johann Heinrich  153 Wagner, Richard  226, 227 Waldere (eighth century)  269 Waller, Alfred Rayney The Cambridge History of English Literature (ed with Ward)  xlvi, 137n, 268–71 Hudibras by Samuel Butler (ed)  137–9 Poems (by Cowley: ed)  167–9 Steps to the Temple, Delights of the Muses and Other Poems (by Crashaw: ed)  253, 254–7 The Writings of Matthew Prior, Vols I and II (ed)  252–4 Waller, Philip Writers, Readers, and Reputations  xxi, xxx Walsh, Edward, ‘O’Donovan’s Daughter’  425 Walton, Izaak  116, 298 The Compleat Angler  327n, 525 ‘The Wanderer’ (eighth century)  269 Ward, Adolphus William The Cambridge History of English Literature (ed with Waller)  268–71 Crabbe’s Poems, Vols I and II (ed)  194–8 Ward, Thomas Humphry, The English Poets (ed)  42n, 112, 381n ‘War Poetry’ (article by ET)  638–44 Warren, Kate M.  237n A Treasury of English Literature (ed)  238, 269 Warton, Thomas (the younger)  353 Watson, William  26–7, 72–3, 391–2 For England: Poems Written During Estrangement 72–3 More’s critique of  140

749

New Poems 391–2 Ode on the Day of the Coronation of King Edward the Seventh 26–7 Sable and Purple with Other Poems 391n ‘To—, with a Volume of Verse’  221–2 Watts-Dunton, Theodore, Aylwin 4n Watts, George Frederic  99, 226, 227 Waugh, Arthur  xxxii Webster, John  xli The Duchess of Malfi 407 Week’s Survey (journal)  xxxiv Wells, H. G.  xxxv Whibley, Charles  xlvi Whistler, James McNeill  226 White, Gilbert  110, 415 Whitman, Walt  72, 190–4 ‘A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads’ 191 ‘Are You the New Person Drawn toward Me?’ 193 ‘Beat! Beat! Drums!’  645 ‘Behold This Swarthy Face’  193 Carpenter’s work on  190–4 compared with Robert Frost  633 ‘Had I the Choice’  193 Leaves of Grass 190–1 November Boughs 191 ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’  38–9, 43 ‘Pioneers! O Pioneers!’  193 ‘Shut Not Your Doors’  192–3 ‘A Song for Occupations’  192 ‘Song of Myself ’  192, 193, 645 ‘Song of the Broad-Axe’  193 ‘A Song of the Rolling Earth’  192, 193 Thomson’s work on  190n ‘Whoever You Are Holding Me Now In Hand’ 193 Whittier, John Greenleaf  342 ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’  408–9 ‘The Wife’s Complaint’ (eighth century)  269 Wilcox, Ella Wheeler  xli, xliii, li, 550–5 (‘Ella Wheeler Wilcox’: article by ET) Poems of Optimism  655–6, 657, 658 Selected Poems 550–1 ‘Whatever Is—­Is Best’  550n, 553 Wilde, Oscar  301–3 Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (ed Ross)  301–3 ‘Critic as Artist’  xlviii, 61, 214, 302–3, 605 De Profundis 301–2

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/08/23, SPi

750

Index

Wilde, Oscar (cont.) The Duchess of Padua 301 ‘The Garden of Eros’  303 A House of Pomegranates  301, 303 The Picture of Dorian Gray xxxviii, 302, 303 Salomé 302–3 Wilson, Jean Moorcroft  xxii, xxviii Wilson, Mrs James Glenny  15n A Book of Verses  17, 18 Windle, Bertram C. A., The Wessex of Thomas Hardy 19–21 Windsor, M. E., Lyra Historica: Poems of British History A.D. 61–1910 (ed with Turral) 208n Wither, George  57–8, 118 Faire-Virtue, the Mistress of Phil’arete 57–8 The Poetry of George Wither (ed Sidgwick)  57–8 The Shepherds Hunting  57, 58, 206 Wolfe, James  639 Woolf, Virginia, Mrs Dalloway 15n Wordsworth, William  16 ‘After-thought’ 253 Bradley’s critique of  368–9 compared with Robert Frost  633 Courthope’s opinion of  435 ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’  28, 154 The Excursion  457, 617 ‘Expostulation and Reply’  305 ‘The Happy Warrior’  84 Jeffrey’s opinion of  457–8 ‘Laodamia’ 101 ‘Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey’  388, 663 ‘Lucy Gray’  532 Lyrical Ballads (with Coleridge)  2–3, 182n, 250, 311 More’s critique of  122 ‘Ode on the Intimations of Immortality’  36, 38, 602n ‘On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic’  83, 570 opinion of Shelley  109 ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’  2, 182n ‘The Rainbow’  602 ‘Resolution and Independence’  151n, 384n ‘Ruth’ 183 Shelley’s critique of  48, 683 ‘She was a Phantom of delight’  590, 657 ‘The Solitary Reaper’  469

‘Strange fits of passion have I known’  458 ‘The Tables Turned’  438 ‘The Thorn’  474 ‘To the Daisy’  57 The White Doe of Rylstone 457 ‘Yarrow’ poems  497 ‘Yew-trees’ 497 Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary, ‘The Lover’  413–14 Wright, J. C., Some Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (ed)  451n Wyndham, George, Introduction to Thompson’s Shelley 349 Yeats, William Butler  xli, xlix, li, lii, liv, 15n, 27, 30–5, 122, 90–2, 94–7, 133–4, 231–2, 260–2, 309–10, 336–41, 555–9 The Adoration of the Magi 96 ‘At Stratford on Avon’  340 ‘The Autumn of the Body’  338, 341 Cathleen Ni Houlihan 91 ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’  337–8 The Celtic Twilight 30–5 The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats  336–41, 556 The Countess Cathleen  341, 555 critique of Davies  326n Deirdre: Plays for an Irish Theatre, Vol V  260–2, 340, 341, 500 ‘Dhoya’ 339 Discoveries 309–10 ‘Fergus and the Druid’  501 ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’  130 ‘First Principles’  340 The Golden Helmet 339 The Hour-Glass 91 influence of Arthur Symons  305n In the Seven Woods 231 ‘Into the Twilight’  337 Introduction to Gitanjali 592 ‘John Sherman’  339 The King’s Threshold  91–2, 158, 231, 232, 239, 339 The Land of Heart’s Desire 555 ‘Lapis Lazuli’  495n ‘Magic’ 341 ‘Modern Irish Poetry’  340 ‘The Moods’  68 On Baile’s Strand  91, 231, 262, 339 opinion of Maeterlinck  466 ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’  350

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/08/23, SPi

Index Plays for an Irish Theatre, Vols II and III 90–2 ‘The Play, the Player, and the Scene’  340 Poems 231–2 New Edition  555–9 The Pot of Broth (with Lady Gregory)  91, 251 ‘Red Hanrahan’s Curse’  133, 340 review of Sharp’s Dominion of Dreams 372n The Secret Rose  130, 133 The Shadowy Waters  154, 231–2, 309, 339, 340, 555 Stories of Red Hanrahan  133–4, 309

751

‘The Symbolism of Poetry’  477 The Tables of the Law  94–6, 97 ‘To the Rose upon the Rood of Time’  341 ‘The Tower’  31–2 The Unicorn from the Stars  339, 340 The Wanderings of Oisin  151n, 555, 558–9 Where There is Nothing  130, 339 The Wind Among the Reeds  231, 477–8 The Works of William Blake (ed with Ellis)  228n, 354n Yellow Book (magazine)  170, 545 Young, Edward  180 The Complaint: or, Night Thoughts  138, 153