Prince Rupert's drop, paper muslin ghost,
White torch "with power to say unkind
Things with kindness and the most
Irritating things in the midst of love and
Tears," you invite destruction.
You are like the meditative man
With the perfunctory heart; its
Carved cordiality ran
To and fro at first, like an inlaid and royal
Immutable production;
Then afterward "neglected to be
Painful" and "deluded him with
Loitering formality,
Doing its duty as if it did not,"
Presenting an obstruction
To the motive that it served. What stood
Erect in you has withered. A
Little "palmtree of turned wood"
Informs your once spontaneous core in its
Immutable reduction.
The reader accustomed only to glutinous imitations of Keats, diaphanous
dilutations of Shelley, woolly Wordsworthian paraphrases, or swish ful
Swinburniania will doubtless dart back appalled by Miss Moore's
departures from custom; custom, that is, as the male or female devotee
of Palgravian insularity understands that highly elastic term. The
Palgravian will then with disappointment discover that his favorite and
conventional whine is inapplicable. Miss Moore "rhymes in places." Her
versification does not fit in with preconceived notions of _vers libre_.
It possesses a strophic structure. The elderly Newboltian groans. The
all-wool unbleached Georgian sighs ominously. Another author has been
reading French poets, and using words for the communication of thought.
Alas, times will not stay anchored.
Mina Loy has been equally subject to something like international
influence; there are lines in her "Ineffectual Marriage" perhaps better
written than anything I have found in Miss Moore, as, for example:--
"So here we might dispense with her
Gina being a female
But she was more than that
Being an incipience a correlative
an instigation to the reaction of man
From the palpable to the transcendent
Mollescent irritant of his fantasy
Gina had her use Being useful
contentedly conscious
She flowered in Empyrean
From which no well-mated woman ever returns
Sundays a warm light in the parlor
From the gritty road on the white wall
anybody could see it
Shimmered a composite effigy
Madonna crinolined a man
hidden beneath her hoop.
Patience said Gina is an attribute
And she learned at any hour to offer
The dish appropriately delectable
What had Miovanni made of his ego
In his library
What had Gina wondered among the pots and pans
One never asked the other."
These lines are not written as Henry Davray said recently in the
"Mercure de France," that the last "Georgian Anthology" poems are
written, _i.e._, in search for "sentiments pour les accommoder à leur
vocabulaire." Miss Loy's are distinctly the opposite, they are words set
down to convey a definite meaning, and words accommodated to that
meaning, even if they do not copy the mannerisms of the five or six by
no means impeccable nineteenth century poets whom the British Poetry
Society has decided to imitate.
All this is very pleasing, or very displeasing, according to the taste
of the reader; according to his freedom from, or his bondage to, custom.
Distinct and as different as possible from the orderly statements of
Eliot, and from the slightly acid whimsicalities of these ladies, are
the poems of Carlos Williams. If the sinuosities and mental quirks of
Misses Moore and Loy are difficult to follow I do not know what is to be
said for, some of Mr. Williams' ramifications and abruptnesses. I do not
pretend to follow all of his volts, jerks, sulks, balks, outblurts and
jump-overs; but for all his roughness there remains with me the
conviction that there is nothing meaningless in his book, "Al que
quiere," not a line. There is whimsicality as we found it in his earlier
poems. "The Tempers" (published by Elkin Mathews), in the verse to "The
Coroner's Children," for example. There is distinctness and color, as
was shown in his "Postlude," in "Des Imagistes"; but there is beyond
these qualities the absolute conviction of a man with his feet on the
soil, on a soil personally and peculiarly his own. He is rooted. He is
at times almost inarticulate, but he is never dry, never without sap in
abundance. His course may be well indicated by the change of the last
few years; we found him six years ago in "The Postlude," full of a
thick and opaque color, full of emotional richness, with a maximum of
subjective reality: