_London, December 10, 1912_
The state of things here in London is, as I see it, as follows:
I find Mr. Yeats the only poet worthy of serious study. Mr. Yeats' work
is already a recognized classic and is part of the required reading in
the Sorbonne. There is no need of proclaiming him to the American
public.
As to his English contemporaries, they are food, sometimes very good
food, for anthologies. There are a number of men who have written a
poem, or several poems, worth knowing and remembering, but they do not
much concern the young artist studying the art of poetry.
The important work of the last twenty-five years has been done in Paris.
This work is little likely to gain a large audience in either America or
England, because of its tone and content. There has been no "man with a
message," but the work has been excellent and the method worthy of our
emulation. No other body of poets having so little necessity to speak
could have spoken so well as these modern Parisians and Flemings.
There has been some imitation here of their manner and content. Any
donkey can imitate a man's manner. There has been little serious
consideration of their _method_. It requires an artist to analyze and
apply a method.
Among the men of thirty here, Padraic Colum is the one whom we call most
certainly a poet, albeit he has written very little verse--and but a
small part of that is worthy of notice. He is fairly unconscious of such
words as "aesthetics," "technique" and "method." He is at his best in
_Garadh_, a translation from the Gaelic, beginning:
O woman, shapely as a swan,
On your account I shall not die.
The men you've slain--a trivial clan--
Were less than I:
and in _A Drover_. He is bad whenever he shows a trace of reading. I
quote the opening of _A Drover_, as I think it shows "all Colum" better
than any passage he has written. I think no English-speaking writer now
living has had the luck to get so much of himself into twelve lines.
To Meath of the pastures,
From wet hills by the sea,
Through Leitrim and Longford
Go my cattle and me.
I hear in the darkness
Their slipping and breathing.
I name them the bye-ways
They're to pass without heeding.
Then the wet, winding roads,
Brown bogs with black water;
And my thoughts on white ships
And the King o' Spain's daughter.
I would rather talk about poetry with Ford Madox Hueffer than with any
man in London. Mr. Hueffer's beliefs about the art may be best explained
by saying that they are in diametric opposition to those of Mr. Yeats.
Mr. Yeats has been subjective; believes in the glamour and associations
which hang near the words. "Works of art beget works of art." He has
much in common with the French symbolists. Mr. Hueffer believes in an
exact rendering of things. He would strip words of all "association" for
the sake of getting a precise meaning. He professes to prefer prose to
verse. You would find his origins in Gautier or in Flaubert. He is
objective. This school tends to lapse into description. The other tends
to lapse into sentiment.
Mr. Yeats' method is, to my way of thinking, very dangerous, for
although he is the greatest of living poets who use English, and though
he has sung some of the moods of life immortally, his art has not
broadened much in scope during the past decade. His gifts to English art
are mostly negative; i. e., he has stripped English poetry of many of
its faults. His "followers" have come to nothing. Neither Synge, Lady
Gregory nor Colum can be called his followers, though he had much to do
with bringing them forth, yet nearly every man who writes English verse
seriously is in some way indebted to him.
Mr. Hueffer has rarely "come off." His touch is so light and his
attitude so easy that there seems little likelihood of his ever being
taken seriously by anyone save a few specialists and a few of his
intimates. His last leaflet, _High Germany_, contains, however, three
poems from which one may learn his quality. They are not Victorian. I do
not expect many people to understand why I praise them. They are _The
Starling_, _In the Little Old Market-Place_ and _To All the Dead_.
The youngest school here that has the nerve to call itself a school is
that of the _Imagistes_. To belong to a school does not in the least
mean that one writes poetry to a theory. One writes poetry when, where,
because, and as one feels like writing it. A school exists when two or
three young men agree, more or less, to call certain things good; when
they prefer such of their verses as have certain qualities to such of
their verses as do not have them.
Space forbids me to set forth the program of the _Imagistes_ at length,
but one of their watchwords is Precision, and they are in opposition to
the numerous and unassembled writers who busy themselves with dull and
interminable effusions, and who seem to think that a man can write a
good long poem before he learns to write a good short one, or even
before he learns to produce a good single line.
Among the very young men, there seems to be a gleam of hope in the work
of Richard Aldington, but it is too early to make predictions.
There are a number of men whose names are too well known for it to seem
necessary to tell them over. America has already found their work in
volumes or anthologies. Hardy, Kipling, Maurice Hewlett, Binyon, Robert
Bridges, Sturge Moore, Henry Newbolt, McKail, Masefield, who has had the
latest cry; Abercrombie, with passionate defenders, and Rupert Brooke,
recently come down from Cambridge.
There are men also, who are little known to the general public, but who
contribute liberally to the "charm" or the "atmosphere" of London:
Wilfred Scawen Blunt, the grandest of old men, the last of the great
Victorians; great by reason of his double sonnet, beginning--
He who has once been happy is for aye
Out of destruction's reach;
Ernest Rhys, weary with much editing and hack work, to whom we owe gold
digged in Wales, translations, transcripts, and poems of his own, among
them the fine one to Dagonet; Victor Plarr, one of the "old" Rhymers'
Club, a friend of Dowson and of Lionel Johnson. His volume, _In The
Dorian Mood_, has been half forgotten, but not his verses _Epitaphium
Citharistriae_. One would also name the Provost of Oriel, not for
original work, but for his very beautiful translations from Dante.
In fact one might name nearly a hundred writers who have given pleasure
with this or that matter in rhyme. But it is one thing to take pleasure
in a man's work and another to respect him as a great artist.
_Ezra Pound_