[45] Reprinted by permission of The Macmillan Company, Publishers.
[46] “If you disregard critical trivialities and didactic accessories,
the entire æsthetic system of Croce amounts to a hunt for pseudonyms
of the word ‘art,’ and may indeed be stated briefly and accurately in
this formula: art = intuition = expression = feeling = imagination =
fancy = lyricism = beauty. And you must be careful not to take these
words with the shadings and distinctions which they have in ordinary or
scientific language. Not a bit of it. Every word is merely a different
series of syllables signifying absolutely and completely the same
thing.”--G. Papini, _Four and Twenty Minds_, quoted by I. A. Richards,
_The Principles of Literary Criticism_ (1924), p. 255, note 4.
Mr. Richards adds: “It is interesting to notice that Croce’s appeal has
been exclusively to those unfamiliar with the subject, to the man of
letters and the dilettante. He has been ignored by serious students of
the mind.... [Papini] has here rendered a notable service to those who
have been depressed by the vogue of ‘Expressionism.’”
_Cf._ also the following from Gilbert Murray’s _The Classical
Tradition in Poetry_ (1927), p. 243: “Everything that a man does is
self-expression. The way a man laces his boots, the way he writes,
the way he says, ‘Good-morning,’ is probably different from the way
followed by any other man, and is thus expressive of his personality.
But it need not be good art for that reason. Imagine a pompous and
egotistic man in a state of personal irritation, having to make an
after-dinner speech. It would probably express him only too well, but
it might not be a good speech.”
[47] _A Survey of Modernist Poetry_, by Laura Riding and Robert Graves,
1927, p. 125.
[48] From _Harmonium_, by Wallace Stevens, 1923. Reprinted by and with
permission of and special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
authorised publishers.
[49] For the sake of “communicative efficacy,” as the editors remind
me, I should explain that _transition_ is “an international quarterly
for creative experiment,” edited in Paris by a group of young Americans
and others.
[50] From _Trivial Breath_, by Elinor Wylie, 1928. Reprinted by and
with permission of and special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
authorised publishers.
[51] From _Streets in the Moon_, by Archibald MacLeish, 1926. Reprinted
by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, Publishers.
[52] From _Tulips and Chimneys_. Reprinted by permission of Alfred &
Charles Boni, Inc., Publishers.
[53] For a more elaborate analysis of such effects in Mr. Cummings’s
poetry, see Laura Riding and Robert Graves, _A Survey of Modernist
Poetry_, Chapter I.
[54] E. E. Cummings’s poem, previously referred to, is printed by him
as follows (_Tulips and Chimneys_, New York, 1924, p. 78):
i was considering how
within night’s loose
sack a star’s
nibbling in-
fin
-i-
tes-
i
-mal-
ly devours
darkness the
hungry star
which
will e
-ven
tu-
al
-ly jiggle
the bait of
dawn and be jerked
into
eternity. when over my head a
shooting
star
Bur s
(t
into a stale shriek
like an alarm-clock)
[55] Such, for instance, as the poetry of John Crowe Ransom and Donald
Davidson in the South, and of Wilbert Snow and Robert P. Tristram
Coffin in New England.
[56] From the poem “Earth,” in _Dust and Light_, 1919, published by
Charles Scribner’s Sons.
[57] Mr. Robinson, of course, had been publishing poetry for nearly
twenty years before the new movement got under way, but his work was
regarded as belonging to it in temper and outlook.
[58] Paul Elmer More, “Definitions of Dualism,” Section LXXIII, in
_The Drift of Romanticism_ (1913), p. 291. The next section is almost
prophetic of what has happened in American poetry of the last few years:
“In some men, especially in an age of spiritual apathy, the sense of
disillusion may spring up without the corresponding assurance of faith.
To such men nothing is real; they walk in a place of shadows, and feel
that life is continually slipping away from them into a bottomless
abyss. All their labour is to re-create for themselves the illusion
which has been shattered, or, by ceaseless occupation, to escape the
dull horror of the void.”
[59] I. A. Richards, _Science and Poetry_, 1926, p. 60.
[60] From _Last Poems_, by A. E. Housman, 1922, published by Henry Holt
and Company.
[61] I. A. Richards, _Science and Poetry_, Chapter VII.
[62] Richard Holt Hutton, _Essays on Some of the Modern Guides to
English Thought in Matters of Faith_, 1891 (Second Ed., revised), p.
146.
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