probably as a dramatist. What is as certain as anything can be is that if he had survived to accompany the Naval Division in its battles on the Somme in 1916 he would not have continued to write in the manner of the '1914' sonnets. These, fine as they are, are yet typical of all the work produced by the same crisis. A restless, dissatisfied, introspective generation, believing little in the possibility of war, and not at all that war could ever touch it closely, was suddenly, among infinite clamours and paroxysms of mixed emotions, summoned to prepare itself for battle. It was impossible that the poets of this generation should not be over-conscious of their own position, of their own emotions. The attitude of patriotism or of self-sacrifice into which the moment threw them was, for the moment, the sole reality. They knew that they had chosen to fight: the concrete meaning of that choice was as yet only to be imagined. It was later, when some of them had seen real warfare in the trenches, that a more solid and more actual warpoetry began to be written. The change wrought by experience may be seen if we contrast one of Brooke's sonnets with a sonnet written later by Mr Sassoon. Brooke, having made, like thousands of others, his heroic choice, can comprehend its meaning only in general terms. He cries : 'If I should die think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. 'And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; It is a beautiful poem, it is sincerely passionate. For a contrast to it I have chosen not one of Mr Sassoon's vivid, sharply drawn scenes of trench-life but a sonnet no less personal than this. He fought and suffered: he suffered as much in the persons of the others as in his own. He revolted against the war and in consequence he was withdrawn from it. Then he wrote: 6 I am banished from the patient men who fight. They trudged away from life's broad wealds of light. To those who sent them out into the night. Love drives me back to grope with them through hell; The difference, not merely in degree, but equally in kind, of self-consciousness, is at once apparent. Brooke's subject is the impact made on his mind by the imagined possibility of death in certain circumstances. Mr Sassoon is moved by something a great deal more definite. His emotion is more urgent and more poignant, and the experience contained in the poem is at once richer, more complex, and more directly expressed. Of this nature was the true war-poetry which began to be written when warfare had become for many a fact of daily life. It makes up most of the work of Wilfred Owen and Mr Sassoon, some part of the work of Mr Robert Graves and Mr Edmund Blunden. Of these, Mr Blunden, who still retains a passionately remembering interest in his experiences of war, seems the most likely to give us a full picture of the life of those days. Removal in time has not weakened his creative grasp of it, but more and more enables him to disentangle its essential spirit from passing accidents. But it was not only in writing of war that the new poets developed. More sprang up behind the first line, four more times did collections of Georgian Poetry' appear, and presently all sorts of anthologies of contemporary verse were produced. Critics and public continued to supply at least an atmosphere of serious attention, though, not unnaturally, there were protests against the floods of little books of verse which this atmosphere encouraged and against the discovery by too enthusiastic reviewers of a great new poet twice or thrice in every publishing season. But before long more serious notes of dissatisfaction began to be heard, and certain critics, some of them entitled to be listened to, began to find grave faults in much of the work that had been so much applauded. On the one hand, it was not revolutionary, it made no innovation in technique or in diction or in subject-matter or in thought, but continued in the ways of the poetry that had gone before it. On the other hand, it was told, and by such learned and acute-minded critics as Mr Middleton Murry and Mr T. S. Eliot, not to congratulate itself on continuing the tradition of English poetry, for a poet who merely derives from his predecessors and presents their thoughts and images worn and at second-hand does nothing of the sort. Now strictly technical innovation is not at this point of time very easy to accomplish without an altogether disabling degree of eccentricity. The most revolutionary change of recent years is that suggested by the Poet Laureate's experiments in quantitative verse-experiments which, however, seem likely to be more useful in sharpening the ears of poets using the customary metres than in furnishing a new instrument for English poetry. Vers libre, of course, is no new thing, and the truth about most vers libre was expressed by Mr Chesterton when he said that it was no more a revolution in poetry than sleeping in a ditch was a revolution in architecture. There are exceptions. Serious attempts have been made in England during the last fifteen years to establish a technique of free verse, attempts largely inspired by the example of such French poets as M. Georges Duhamel and M. Charles Vildrac, who themselves were chiefly concerned to make a system out of the example of Walt Whitman. These attempts proved, it seems, that in free verse it is possible to achieve new effects without sacrificing the discipline, the precision, and the sensuous beauty afforded by regular metres, but that this is done only rarely and with great difficulty and that on the whole the few successes barely justify the many failures. Of all the earnest experimenters who at one time called themselves 'Imagistes,' only one has had anything like a consistent success, the American writer who signs her poems 'H. D.,' and whose beautiful but minute and remote talent is to be seen in such passages as: 'In my garden the winds have beaten the ripe lilies; in my garden, the salt has wilted the first flakes of young narcissus, and the salt has crept under the leaves of the white hyacinth.' The pauses made by the short lines create a subdued, tenderly pulsing rhythm, and the form justifies itself. But is this anything more than a surer, because a somewhat drier and quieter, accomplishment of what Arnold attempted in The Strayed Reveller'? It is to be noted that 'H. D.' has recently showed a tendency towards the use of rhyme and even of fixed stanza forms. And, with less austere spirits, free verse, by reason of its want of discipline, generally tempts to garrulous commonplace or to pretentious rhetoric. Mr D. H. Lawrence writes: 'And if I never see her again? I think, if they told me so, I could convulse the heavens with my horror I think I could alter the frame of things inmy ag ony. I think I could alter the System with my heart. I think in my convulsion the skies would break' -which he might not have done, if he had had even only a metrical restraint imposed upon him. I do not mean that there is never any difference between free verse and chopped, violent prose or that it is impossible for free verse to express emotion at the temperature proper to poetry. I mean that this happens only with exceptional persons or on exceptional occasions, and that nothing has occurred to suggest that free verse contains in itself any revivifying principle. The way of movement seems to be in the execution of bold variations on the customary rhythms and perhaps in the use of such unbroken fields as the rhymeless lyric. The critics who demand that modern poetry should render more fully and more richly the modern consciousness and the world it lives in stand on surer ground. The most able of the critics who have made this demand, Mr T. S. Eliot, is also the most formidable of the poets who have attempted to comply with it. He began under the inspiration of Jules Laforgue, as Hamlet or as Pierrot, laughing bitterly at life and then more bitterly at himself for paying life so extravagantly serious a compliment; and, like Laforgue, he managed to free himself very noticeably from the conventional use of poetic ornament and image, choosing unexpected similes as, of an evening, 'Like a patient etherised upon a table.' This manner is deliberately adopted and has a coldness that is often repellent. But it is not just to say of Mr Eliot, as some have said, that his is a mechanically excellent intellect which has mistakenly strayed into poetry. He has at times a genuinely singing note and, if he had chosen to write in a conventional manner, might have produced work easily recognisable as beautiful. But his most ambitious work, 'The Waste Land,' affords an almost exclusively intellectual pleasure, and that of two kinds. One enjoys the effort of following his thought and endeavouring to ascertain his meaning. There is also a pleasure comparable with that to be derived from a very superior acrostic or from one of those crossword puzzles which cannot be solved without an exhaustive knowledge of the Latin poets. Mr Eliot makes in his poem-I forget how many quotations from other more or less well-known poems and furnishes it with notes referring the reader to various treatises on anthropology and the like for a proper understanding of his symbolism. The style suggests that the author, an acute analyst of poetic styles, has here attempted something like an operation of synthesis. Having resolved Marlowe, Jonson, Dryden, and others into their elements, he has sought to reassemble some of these elements as constituents of a style of his own; but synthetic products generally lack a vital something which is to be found in the works of nature. What is more important to observe is that this poem expresses a typical mood of disillusionment: the modern consciousness finds the world in which it lives a waste land. |