All art is a twofold revivifying--a recreation of subject and a
reanimating of form. And poetry becomes perennially "new" by returning
to the old--with a different consciousness, a greater awareness. In
1911, when art was again searching for novelty, John Masefield created
something startling and new by going back to 1385 and _The Canterbury
Pilgrims_. Employing both the Chaucerian model and a form similar to
the practically forgotten Byronic stanza, Masefield wrote in rapid
succession, _The Everlasting Mercy_ (1911), _The Widow in the Bye
Street_ (1912), _Dauber_ (1912), _The Daffodil Fields_ (1913)--four
astonishing rhymed narratives and four of the most remarkable poems
of our generation. Expressive of every rugged phase of life, these
poems, uniting old and new manners, responded to Synge's proclamation
that "the strong things of life are needed in poetry also ... and it
may almost be said that before verse can be human again it must be
brutal."
Masefield brought back to poetry that mixture of beauty and brutality
which is its most human and enduring quality. He brought back that
rich and almost vulgar vividness which is the very life-blood of
Chaucer, of Shakespeare, of Burns, of Villon, of Heine--and of all
those who were not only great artists but great humanists. As a purely
descriptive poet, he can take his place with the masters of sea and
landscape. As an imaginative realist, he showed those who were
stumbling from one wild eccentricity to another to thrill them, that
they themselves were wilder, stranger, far more thrilling than
anything in the world--or out of it. Few things in contemporary poetry
are as powerful as the regeneration of Saul Kane (in _The Everlasting
Mercy_) or the story of _Dauber_, the tale of a tragic sea-voyage and
a dreaming youth who wanted to be a painter. The vigorous description
of rounding Cape Horn in the latter poem is superbly done, a
masterpiece in itself. Masefield's later volumes are quieter in tone,
more measured in technique; there is an almost religious ring to many
of his Shakespearian sonnets. But the swinging surge is there, a
passionate strength that leaps through all his work from _Salt Water
Ballads_ (1902) to _Reynard the Fox_ (1919).
"THE GEORGIANS" AND THE YOUNGER MEN
There is no sharp statistical line of demarcation between Masefield
and the younger men. Although several of them owe much to him, most of
the younger poets speak in accents of their own. W. W. Gibson had
already reinforced the "return to actuality" by turning from his first
preoccupation with shining knights, faultless queens, ladies in
distress and all the paraphernalia of hackneyed mediaeval romances, to
write about ferrymen, berry-pickers, stone-cutters, farmers, printers,
circus-men, carpenters--dramatizing (though sometimes theatricalizing)
the primitive emotions of uncultured and ordinary people in
_Livelihood_, _Daily Bread_ and _Fires_. This intensity had been
asking new questions. It found its answers in the war; repressed
emotionalism discovered a new outlet. One hears its echoes in the
younger poets like Siegfried Sassoon, with his poignant and unsparing
poems of conflict; in Robert Graves, who reflects it in a lighter and
more fantastic vein; in James Stephens, whose wild ingenuities are
redolent of the soil. And it finds its corresponding opposite in the
limpid and unperturbed loveliness of Ralph Hodgson; in the ghostly
magic and the nursery-rhyme whimsicality of Walter de la Mare; in the
quiet and delicate lyrics of W. H. Davies. Among the others, the
brilliant G. K. Chesterton, the facile Alfred Noyes, the romantic
Rupert Brooke (who owes less to Masefield and his immediate
predecessors than he does to the passionately intellectual Donne), the
introspective D. H. Lawrence and the versatile J. C. Squire, are
perhaps best known to American readers.
All of the poets mentioned in the foregoing paragraph (with the
exception of Noyes) have formed themselves in a loose group called
"The Georgians," and an anthology of their best work has appeared
every two years since 1913. Masefield, Lascelles Abercrombie and John
Drinkwater are also listed among the Georgian poets. When their first
collection appeared in March, 1913, Henry Newbolt, a critic as well as
poet, wrote: "These younger poets have no temptation to be false. They
are not for making something 'pretty,' something up to the standard of
professional patterns.... They write as grown men walk, each with his
own unconscious stride and gesture.... In short, they express
themselves and seem to steer without an effort between the dangers of
innovation and reminiscence." The secret of this success, and for that
matter, the success of the greater portion of English poetry, is not
an exclusive discovery of the Georgian poets. It is their inheritance,
derived from those predecessors who, "from Wordsworth and Coleridge
onward, have worked for the assimilation of verse to the manner and
accent of natural speech." In its adaptability no less than in its
vigor, modern English poetry is true to its period--and its past.
* * * * *
This collection is obviously a companion volume to _Modern American
Poetry_, which, in its restricted compass, attempted to act as an
introduction to recent native verse. _Modern British Poetry_ covers
the same period (from about 1870 to 1920), follows the same
chronological scheme, but it is more amplified and goes into far
greater detail than its predecessor.
The two volumes, considered together, furnish interesting contrasts;
they reveal certain similarities and certain strange differences.
Broadly speaking, modern American verse is sharp, vigorously
experimental; full of youth and its occasional--and natural--crudities.
English verse is smoother, more matured and, molded by centuries of
literature, richer in associations and surer in artistry. Where the
American output is often rude, extremely varied and uncoordinated (being
the expression of partly indigenous, partly naturalized and largely
unassimilated ideas, emotions, and races), the English product is
formulated, precise and, in spite of its fluctuations, true to its past.
It goes back to traditions as old as Chaucer (witness the narratives of
Masefield and Gibson) or tendencies as classic as Drayton, Herrick and
Blake--as in the frank lyrics of A. E. Housman, the artless lyricism of
Ralph Hodgson, the naif wonder of W. H. Davies. And if English poetry
may be compared to a broad and luxuriating river (while American poetry
might be described as a sudden rush of unconnected mountain torrents,
valley streams and city sluices), it will be inspiring to observe how
its course has been temporarily deflected in the last forty years; how
it has swung away from one tendency toward another; and how, for all its
bends and twists, it has lost neither its strength nor its nobility.