JOHN DAVIDSON
The Eighteen Nineties had no more remarkable mind and no more
distinctive poet than John Davidson. From the beginning he was both an
expression of and a protest against the decadent movement, and in his
personality as well as in his tragic end he represented the struggle
and defeat of his day in the cause of a bigger sense of life and a
greater power over personality and destiny. At the dawn of the period
he had reached middle age, having been born at Barrhead, Renfrewshire,
on 11th April 1857. But curiously enough, as in the case of so many of
those who gained distinction in art during the period, John Davidson
did not show any distinctive _fin de siècle_ characteristics until he
produced his novel, _Perfervid_, in 1890; and between that time and
1899 he remained an artist in the approved Whistlerian sense, content
in the main to express life in the traditional artistic manner, without
any overweening desire to preach a particular doctrine. With the close
of the decade his mental attitude seems to have undergone a revolution,
which translated him from an artist pure and simple into a philosophic
missioner using literature as a means of propaganda.
He was the son of Alexander Davidson, a minister of the Evangelical
Union, and Helen, daughter of Alexander Crockett of Elgin. His
education began at the Highlanders’ Academy, Greenock, and continued
until he was thirteen years of age, when he was sent to work in the
chemical laboratory of a sugar manufacturer at Greenock, and in the
following year he became an assistant to the town analyst. In 1872 he
returned to the Highlanders’ Academy as a pupil teacher, and remained
there for four years, afterwards spending a year at Edinburgh
University. In 1877 he became a tutor at Alexander’s Charity, Glasgow,
and during the next six years he held similar scholastic posts at
Perth and Paisley. During 1884–1885 he was a clerk in a Glasgow thread
firm, but returned to the scholastic profession in the latter year,
teaching in Morrison’s Academy, Crieff, and in a private school at
Greenock. During these years he devoted much time to literary work,
the drama claiming a considerable amount of his attention, and in 1886
his first work, _Bruce: A Drama_, was published in Glasgow. In 1888 he
published _Smith, a Tragic Farce_; in 1889 _An Unhistorical Pastoral_,
_A Romantic Farce_ and _Scaramouch in Naxos_. All of these were issued
in Scotland during his period of scholastic employment, but this he
abandoned in the year 1889, when he departed for London with the object
of earning his living as a writer.
Then began a period of literary struggle mitigated somewhat by the
rewards of artistic recognition. In the midst of much journalistic
work, which included contributions to _The Glasgow Herald_, _The
Speaker_ and _The Yellow Book_, he produced poems and novels and short
stories; he also translated François Coppée’s play, _Pour la Couronne_,
which was produced by Forbes Robertson at the Lyceum Theatre under the
title of _For the Crown_, and Victor Hugo’s _Ruy Blas_, produced at the
Imperial Theatre as _A Queen’s Romance_.
It was his poetry which first won for him a place among his
contemporaries. _In a Music Hall and Other Poems_ was published in
1891, and during the decade he issued at short intervals eight further
volumes of poetry, followed by two others in the new century. These
volumes were _Fleet Street Eclogues_ (1893), _Ballads and Songs_
(1894), _Fleet Street Eclogues_, second series (1896), _New Ballads_
(1897), _The Last Ballad_ (1899), _Holiday and Other Poems_ (1906), and
_Fleet Street and Other Poems_ (1909). In this body of work Davidson
is represented at his highest as an artist, though he himself set more
store by the remarkable series of “testaments” and philosophical plays
and poems which engaged his genius during his last phase. In the period
covered by his poetic activity he published various prose works, such
as _Sentences and Paragraphs_ (1893), an early volume revealing the
scientific and philosophical interests of his mind, and above all his
early appreciation of the teaching of Friedrich Nietzsche; _A Random
Itinerary_ (1894), and several novels, including _Baptist Lake_ (1894)
and _The Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender_ (1895), published with
Beardsley’s frontispiece illustrating one of the incidents of the book.
The books of his last phase are a designed attempt to co-ordinate and
restate his ideas upon life and art. They begin with the first three
of his four “testaments”: _The Testament of a Vivisector_ (1901), _The
Testament of a Man Forbid_ (1901), and _The Testament of an Empire
Builder_ (1902). He brooded long and deeply over the views expressed
in these works, which reveal a revolutionism transcending all familiar
attacks upon institutions, secular or religious, for the poet lashes
with high and passionate seriousness the tyrannies not of man, but
those also of nature and of fate. Next in order of these philosophical
works came _The Theatrocrat: A Tragic Play of Church and State_
(1905). Later he devised a dramatic trilogy, further to embody his
philosophical gospel, under the title “God and Mammon”; but only two of
the projected plays were written: _The Triumph of Mammon_ (1907), and
_Mammon and his Message_ (1908). Finally, he concluded his message to
humanity fittingly enough with _The Testament of John Davidson_ (1908).
His attitude towards these works is made clear in his prefaces and
other notes, and in the dedication to the last volume he describes the
books as “The Prologue to a Literature that is to be,” a literature, he
adds, “already begun in my Testaments and Tragedies.”
Depression rather than disappointment dogged the life of John Davidson.
It is true that he did not reach fortune by his works, but even he
could hardly have expected such a reward. He did, however, and with
justice in the light of so much industry, expect to earn a living by
his pen, but this expectation had but meagre fulfilment. As in the
case of many other artists he had to pot-boil. This hurt him both
in performance and result, for regular income did not spring out of
the sacrifice. “Nine-tenths of my time,” he wrote, on his fiftieth
birthday, “and that which is more precious, have been wasted in the
endeavour to earn a livelihood. In a world of my own making I should
have been writing only what should have been written.” These words
were written in 1907, and the year before he had been awarded a Civil
List pension of one hundred pounds, but this came too late, however,
to arouse hope in a temperament which long years of struggle with
adversity had steeped in a settled gloom. In 1908 the poet left London
with his family for Penzance, and on 23rd March 1909 he left his home
never to return. Nearly six months afterwards his body was discovered
by some fishermen in Mount’s Bay, and, in accordance with his known
wishes, was buried at sea. Such a death is not a surprising end to one
who adopted or possessed Davidson’s attitude towards life. He resented
the unknown and loathed all forms of weakness. He could not accept
life as he found it, and his philosophy reflects his objection to
circumstance and fate, actuality and condition, in a passionate claim
for control over destiny and power, and over life itself. There was no
reality for him without omnipotence; he repudiated life on any other
terms. That was at the root of his depression, as it was the basis of
his philosophy.
The assumption that he took his own life is consistent with what is
known of his temperament and his ideas. In _The Testament of John
Davidson_, published the year before his death, he anticipates this
fate:
“None should outlive his power.... Who kills
Himself subdues the conqueror of kings:
Exempt from death is he who takes his life:
My time has come.”
And further on in the same poem he gives suicide a philosophic basis
which has, perhaps, more frankness than novelty:
“By my own will alone
The ethereal substance, which I am, attained,
And now by my own sovereign will, forgoes,
Self-consciousness; and thus are men supreme:
No other living thing can choose to die.
This franchise and this high prerogative
I show the world:--Men are the Universe
Aware at last, and must not live in fear,
Slaves of the seasons, padded, bolstered up,
Clystered and drenched and dieted and drugged;
Or hateful victims of senility,
Toothless and like an infant checked and schooled;
Or in the dungeon of a sick room drained
By some tabescent horror in their prime;
But when the tide of life begins to turn,
Before the treason of the ebbing wave
Divulges refuse and the barren shore,
Upon the very period of the flood,
Stand out to sea and bend our weathered sail,
Against the sunset, valiantly resolved
To win the heaven of eternal night.”
The poetry of John Davidson reveals on most pages a keen sense of
life in its various manifestations struggling for power of one kind
or another. His imagination is essentially dramatic, but his sense
of conflict is often philosophic, his artistic sense always showing
a tendency to give way to the imp of reflection which, through
his imagination, was ever seeking to turn drama into philosophy
and philosophy into science. Yet he was not immune from a certain
whimsicality, particularly in his early prose works, in the fantastic
novels, _Perfervid_, _Earl Lavender_, and _Baptist Lake_, and still
more certainly, with a surer touch of genius, in his pantomime
_Scaramouch in Naxos_. In the “Prologue” to this play, spoken by
Silenus, Davidson goes far towards summing up his own peculiar
attitude. The speaker alludes to a fondness for pantomimes, and
proceeds to say: “I don’t know whether I like this one so well as those
which I witnessed when I was a boy. It is too pretentious, I think;
too anxious to be more than a Pantomime--this play in which I am about
to perform. True _Pantomime_ is a good-natured nightmare. Our sense of
humour is titillated and strummed, and kicked and oiled, and fustigated
and stroked, and exalted and bedevilled, and, on the whole, severely
handled by this self-same harmless incubus; and our intellects are
scoffed at. The audience, in fact, is, intellectually, a pantaloon, on
whom the Harlequin-pantomime has no mercy. It is frivolity whipping
its schoolmaster, common-sense; the drama on its apex; art, unsexed,
and without a conscience; the reflection of the world in a green,
knotted glass. Now, I talked to the author and showed him that there
was a certain absence from his work of this kind of thing; but he put
his thumbs in his arm-pits, and replied with some disdain, ‘Which of
the various dramatic forms of the time may one conceive as likeliest
to shoot up in the fabulous manner of the beanstalk, bearing on its
branches things of earth and heaven undreamt of in philosophy? The
sensational dramas? Perhaps from them some new development of tragic
art; but Pantomime seems to be of best hope. It contains in crude
forms, humour, poetry, and romance. It is childhood of a new poetical
comedy.’ Then I saw where he was and said, ‘God be with you,’ and
washed my hands of him.” Here we have Davidson, as early as 1888,
concerned about something new in art, something elastic enough to
contain a big expression of modernity, of that modernity which in the
Eighteen Nineties, and in John Davidson more than in any other British
writer of the time, was more than half reminiscent of the classical
Greek idea of eternal conflict.
But with Davidson and the moderns, led philosophically by Nietzsche,
Davidson’s earliest master, the eternal conflict was not regarded
with Greek resignation. It was looked upon as a thing which might be
directed by the will of man. The modern idea was to make conflict a
means of growth towards power: the stone upon which man might sharpen
the metal of his will until he could literally storm high heaven by his
own might. Such an idea, often vague and chaotic enough, inspired the
hour, making philosophers of artists and artists of philosophers, and
seekers after a new elixir of life of all who were sufficiently alive
to be modern. This idea, more than any other, informed the moods of the
moment with restless curiosity and revolt. It filled the optimist with
the conviction that he lived in a glorious period of transition which
might at any moment end in Utopia, and the pessimist with the equally
romantic notion that the times were so much out of joint that nothing
short of their evacuation for the past or the future would avail. As
Davidson sang:
“The Present is a dungeon dark
Of social problems. Break the gaol!
Get out into the splendid Past
Or bid the splendid Future hail.”
This resentment of the present was always Davidson’s weakness despite
an intellectual courage in which he had few equals in his time.
He could face with heroic fortitude the necessity of revaluing ideas,
just as he could face the necessity of revaluing his own life by
suicide. But he could not face the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune. He never realised that a man and his age were identical,
or that tragedy was an essential of life to be courted even by the
powerful. (“Deep tragedy,” said Napoleon, “is the school of great
men.”) Instead of that he murmured against that which thwarted and
checked him, regretting the absence of might to mould the world for
his own convenience. That was his contribution to the decadence. The
bigness of him, unknown to himself, was the fact that he did fight for
the integrity of his own personality and ideas, and he did accomplish
their conservation, even to rounding off his own life-work with a final
“testament.” But when one has said all one is forced to admit that the
irregularities and incongruities of his genius were nothing less than
the expression and mark of his time.
It is as a poet that Davidson must ultimately stand or fall, although
the philosophy he expressed in his later volumes will doubtless attract
far more attention than that which greeted its inception. At first
glance his poetry suggests a limited outlook, and even a limited
technique; but on closer acquaintance this view cannot be maintained.
John Davidson is as varied as he is excellent, and as charming in
moments of light-heartedness as he is noble in his tragic moods. Time
probably will favour his ballads, but it will by no means neglect the
magic poetry of his eclogues, nor the grandeur of certain passages
in his poetic dramas. And it is not easy to believe that the delicate
lyricism of some of his shorter poems will ever pass out of the favour
of those who love great verse. Such a poem is “In Romney Marsh,” finely
balanced in phrase and image, and rising to a magnificent climax of
metaphorical description in the two last verses:
“Night sank: like flakes of silver fire
The stars in one great shower came down;
Shrill blew the wind; and shrill the wire
Rang out from Hythe to Romney town.
The darkly shining salt sea drops
Streamed as the waves clashed on the shore;
The beach, with all its organ stops
Pealing again, prolonged the roar.”
Even in his last volume of verse, when ideas rather than imaginative
inventions crowded his mind, he proved in many a poem the invincibility
of his lyrical gift. The title-poem itself, “Holiday,” equals any
of his earlier lyrics, and compares well with even the best of his
ballads. And he has wrought a solemn grandeur into the short crisp
lines of the impassioned and deeply felt poem called “The Last Song”:
“Death is but a trance:
Life, but now begun!
Welcome change and chance:
Though my days are done,
Let the planets dance
Lightly round the sun!
Morn and evening clasp
Earth with loving hands--
In a ruddy grasp
All the pleasant lands!
Now I hear the deep
Bourdon of the bee,
Like a sound asleep
Wandering o’er the lea;
While the song-birds keep
Urging nature’s plea.
Hark! The violets pray
Swooning in the sun!
Hush! the roses say
Love and death are one!”
It does not need a very wide acquaintance with Davidson’s poetry
to realise how he was affected by the natural life of his native
countryside and the country places of his residence. He saw the
phenomena of field and hedgerow and woodland with clear eye and
appreciative exactitude. But he did not immolate his personality at
the shrine of Nature after the manner of Wordsworth or Shelley. His
appreciation was in the main sensuous and æsthetic, serving to supply
the poet with some of the fanciful materials of his art, for use in the
more buoyant moments of his muse.
Throughout the whole of his poems passages abound in which Nature
has thus been made to render the sort of tribute Keats demanded of
her, as for instance in the following passage from one of the earlier
eclogues:--
“At early dawn through London you must go
Until you come where long black hedgerows grow,
With pink buds pearled, with here and there a tree,
And gates and stiles; and watch good country folk;
And scent the spicy smoke
Of withered weeds that burn where gardens be;
And in a ditch perhaps a primrose see.
The rooks shall stalk the plough, larks mount the skies,
Blackbirds and speckled thrushes sing aloud,
Hid in the warm white cloud
Mantling the thorn, and far away shall rise
The milky low of cows and farmyard cries.
From windy heavens the climbing sun shall shine,
And February greet you like a maid
In russet-cloak arrayed;
And you shall take her for your mistress fine,
And pluck a crocus for her valentine.”
This keen sense of country sights and sounds reaches its highest in “A
Runnable Stag,” a lyric which stands alone among English poems for its
musical realism and its vividly suggested but unstated sentiment:
“When the pods went pop on the broom, green broom,
And apples began to be golden-skinned,
We harboured a stag in the Priory comb,
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.”
The subject brings to mind the callous stag-hunting chapter in Richard
Jefferies’ book, _Red Deer_, but different are the sentiments
underlying poem and essay--in the former human feeling colours realism
with pity at the stag harried to death in the sea, when
“Three hundred gentlemen, able to ride,
Three hundred horses as gallant and free,
Beheld him escape on the evening tide,
Far out till he sank in the Severn Sea,
Till he sank in the depths of the sea--
The stag, the buoyant stag, the stag
That slept at last in a jewelled bed
Under the sheltering oceans spread,
The stag, the runnable stag.”
Davidson without comment reveals the pity of it all, but Richard
Jefferies is capable of describing a similar incident in the
passionless terms of photography.
Sympathy with pain, oftener of the spirit than of the flesh, links John
Davidson with the Humanist movement of his time and ours, but it does
not imprison him in a specific category. Labels cannot be attached to
him. He was not associated with any coterie or organisation. He was as
strange to the Rhymers’ Club as he was to the Fabian Society or the
Humanitarian League, and although circumstances brought him into the
Bodley Head group of writers, giving some of his books decorations by
Beardsley, and his portrait, by Will Rothenstein, to _The Yellow
Book_, the facts must be set down to Mr John Lane’s sense of what
was new and strong in literature rather than to any feeling of kinship
on Davidson’s part. Kinsman of modernity in the big sense, he was not,
then, in the brotherhood of any clique or special group of modernists,
and although his works were as modern in the smaller topical aspect as
they are part of a larger and more notable awakening of thought and
imagination, they never achieved even a small measure of the popularity
usually accorded topical writings. Davidson’s work, even in what may be
considered its most popular form, in his great ballads, was esteemed
by a few rather than accepted by many. It is conceivable that in due
time “The Ballad of a Nun,” “The Ballad of an Artist’s Wife” and “The
Ballad of Hell” will enter into the familiar poetry of the nation, as
they have taken their places in the realm of good poetry recognised by
the cultured. But that time is not yet; a higher average of culture
must come about before such verses could supplant “Christmas Day in the
Workhouse,” or even Rudyard Kipling’s ballad of “The Mary Glocester” or
“Gunga Din.”
Davidson himself eventually rejected in some measure his own lyric
verse. He came to look upon rhyme as a symptom of decadence, although
he knew that “decadence in any art is always the manure and root of
a higher manifestation of that art.” He sought therefore to discover
in the art of poetry, as he sought also in life, a newer and more apt
means of expression. This he found in English blank verse. And he
associated his discovery with the final profundity of his passionately
asserted vision of life as matter seeking ever finer and more effective
manifestations. “Matter says its will in poetry; above all, in English
blank verse, and often, as in the case of Milton, entirely against the
conscious intention of the poet.” In this verse form, “the subtlest,
most powerful, and most various organ of utterance articulate faculty
has produced,” he saw the latest emanation of what he calls the
“concrete mystery Matter,” created, “like folk, or flowers, or cholera,
or war, or lightning, or light,” by an evolutionary process involving
all activities and states of consciousness, until it produced that
powerful human race which “poured into England instinctively as into
the womb of the future, and having fought there together for centuries
... wrestling together for the mastery, and producing in the struggle
the blended breed of men we know: so tried and welded, so tempered
and damascened, this English race having thrown off the fetters of a
worn-out creed, having obtained the kingdom of the sea and begun to lay
hands as by right on the new world, burst out into blank verse without
premeditation, and earth thrilled to its centre with delight that
Matter had found a voice at last.” Poetry for him was thus no scholarly
accomplishment, no mere decoration or bauble, but the very instrument
of thought and imagination, emotion and passion, the finely tempered
weapon of a nationalism which he linked up with Nature and endowed with
her fierceness, mastery and power.
His sense of the high mission of poetry found ample expression in the
prefaces and appendices of his later books, and in his “testaments.”
But in earlier days he heard himself speaking of the meaning and object
of his own poetry in “A Ballad of Heaven,” where the musician announces
the completion of the masterpiece which “signed the sentence of the
sun” and crowned “the great eternal age”:
“The slow adagio begins;
The winding-sheets are ravelled out
That swathe the minds of men, the sins
That wrap their rotting souls about.
The dead are heralded along;
With silver trumps and golden drums,
And flutes and oboes, keen and strong.
My brave andante singing comes.
Then like a python’s sumptuous dress
The frame of things is cast away,
And out of Time’s obscure distress,
The thundering scherzo crashes Day.”
Davidson’s self-imposed mission was to thunder news of a new dawn.
He repudiated the past (“The insane past of mankind is the incubus,”
he said), and, whilst insisting upon the importance of the present,
he heralded the new day to come with an ardour equalled only by the
Futurists of Milan, who followed him, and are his nearest intellectual
kin. Had John Davidson lived to-day he must have hailed Marinetti
brother. “Undo the past!” he cried, in _The Testament of a Man
Forbid_:
“Undo the past!
The rainbow reaches Asgard now no more;
Olympus stands untenanted; the dead
Have their serene abode in earth itself,
Our womb, our nurture and our sepulchre.
Expel the sweet imaginings, profound
Humanities and golden legends, forms
Heroic, beauties, tripping shades, embalmed
Through hallowed ages in the fragrant hearts
And generous blood of men; the climbing thoughts
Whose roots ethereal grope among the stars,
Whose passion-flowers perfume eternity,
Weed out and tear, scatter and tread them down;
Dismantle and dilapidate high heaven.”
Being a poet, and Davidson never made any other claim, he would use
poetry to help undo the past. “The statement of the present and the
creation of the future,” he said, “are the very body and soul of
poetry.” Of his later intentions he declared, “I begin definitely in my
Testaments and Tragedies to destroy this unfit world and make it over
again in my own image.” He was never weary of asserting the novelty of
his aim and method, and although he admitted that there was no language
for what he had to say, he was convinced that what he had said was
both new in form and idea. “It is a new poetry I bring, a new poetry
for the first time in a thousand years.” He called this new poetry
“an abiding-place for man as matter-of-fact,” and his own purpose in
writing it, “to say that which is, to speak for the universe.” And the
ultimate aim of such work was, again in his own words, “to change the
mood of the world.”
Nor was he less precise, nor less frank, in stating the new mood he
would establish in the place of the old. In the _fin de siècle_
search for reality few possessed his diligence, fewer his intellectual
courage. The terrible and powerful poem, “A Woman and Her Son,”
recalls something of his own unrelenting criticism of life; his own
determination at all costs to face facts and re-value ideas:
“These are times
When all must to the crucible--no thought,
Practice, or use, or custom sacro-sanct
But shall be violable now.”
Early association with the ideas of Nietzsche had directed Davidson’s
innate pessimism into channels of creative inquisitiveness and
speculation. He learnt more from Nietzsche than did any other poet
of his time, but he never became a disciple. He learnt of that
philosophical courage which Nietzsche called “hardness,” and used it
Nietzsche-wise in his continual questioning and revaluing of accepted
ideas. He was imbued also with the German philosopher’s reverence
for power. But he did not accept the Superman doctrine. This he
repudiated equally with the Darwinian idea of sexual selection; both
stood condemned by him because of their anthropomorphism--what in fact
Nietzsche condemned in other directions as being “human-all-too-human.”
Against the idea of evolution by sexual selection, with the ultimates
man and then superman, he set the idea of chemical selection,
with the ultimate object of complete self-consciousness. Beyond
self-consciousness he saw nothing; that in his view was the highest
possible achievement of life. The essence of his teaching is based
in the idea of Matter as the final manifestation of ether seeking,
first, consciousness, which it has long since attained, and next,
self-consciousness, which it has attained more recently in man. This
last form of consciousness, according to Davidson, is capable of the
highest ecstasy and all knowledge. He denies the inconceivability of
eternity, the existence at any time of chaos, and the presence at any
time of spirit. All is Matter, even the ether and the lightning are
forms of Matter. And on this basis he works out a conception of sin
as courage, heaven and hell as “memories of processes of evolution
struggling into consciousness,” and God as ether, from which man came
and to which he will return.
In announcing this theory of the universe he does not ask for
scientific judgment or acceptance. He bases his claim for recognition
on imaginative grounds and on the fact that he is a poet. “The world,”
he wrote, “is in danger of a new fanaticism, of a scientific instead
of a religious tyranny. This is my protest. In the course of many ages
the mind of man may be able to grasp the world scientifically: in the
meantime we can know it only poetically; science is still a valley
of dead bones till imagination breathes upon it.” It was his desire
as a poet to fill the conceptions of science, the world of atoms and
electrons, of gases and electricity, of ether and matter, with the
light of imagination, as a substitute for the dead rationalism of
middle nineteenth-century culture. “Art knows very well that the world
comes to an end when it is purged of Imagination. Rationalism was only
a stage in the process. For the old conception of a created Universe,
with the fall of man, an atonement, and a heaven and hell, the form
and substance of the imagination of Christendom, Rationalism had no
substitute. Science was not ready, but how can poetry wait? Science
is synonymous with patience; poetry is impatience incarnate. If you
take away the symbol of the Universe in which, since the Christian
era began, poetry and all great art lived and had their being, I, for
one, decline to continue the eviscerated Life-in-Death of Rationalism.
I devour, digest, and assimilate the Universe; make for myself in my
Testaments and Tragedies a new form and substance of Imagination; and
by poetic power certify the semi-certitudes of science.”
In the Eighteen Nineties John Davidson strove always for the utterance
of such feelings and ideas as absorbed his mind during his last years;
but in the earlier period he was less conscious of definite aim, and
his best work took the form of poetry and the place of great poetry.
His ballads and eclogues, a few of his lyrics and passages in his
poetic tragedies are already graven on the scroll of immortal verse.
His “testaments” belonged to another realm as they belong also to
another period. They lack the old fine flavour of the poetry of his
less purposeful days, and they hardly fulfil his own promise of a
new poetry. They are in the main arrested poetry. The strife of the
poet for a new expression, a new poetic value, is too evident, and
you lay these later works down baffled and unconvinced, but reverent
before the courage and honesty of a mind valiantly beating itself
to destruction against the locked and barred door of an unknown and
perhaps non-existent reality.