Part 3

For some years Mr. Monro had lived abroad, in Switzerland and Italy. But the nostalgia of home took possession of him, and he returned to England. Shortly after his arrival The Poetry Society asked him to edit a magazine for them, and he consented, and _The Poetry Review_ began in January, 1912. Mr. Monro not only edited the _Review_, but paid for it. Now the Poetry Society, like all such bodies, is conservative, and Mr. Monro is sown with the seeds of radicalism. So differences of policy began, and at the end of a year, Mr. Monro seceded from _The Poetry Review_ and founded another review, _Poetry and Drama_, to be published quarterly.

But I am anticipating. While editing _The Poetry Review_ Mr. Monro conceived the idea of having a bookshop, which should be at once the office of the review and its various publications, and a shop. An old house in Devonshire Street was leased and everything “en train,” when Mr. Monro found that the inevitable breach with The Poetry Society on matters of policy was imminent. He announced in _The Poetry Review_ the foundation of a new magazine, a quarterly, and relinquished _The Poetry Review_ into other hands after having founded it and edited it for twelve months.

On January 8th, 1913, The Poetry Bookshop opened its doors to the public, and the public, always caught by novelty, flocked in. Professor Henry Newbolt gave the opening address. The first publication of the Bookshop, _Georgian Poets_, an anthology of the work of Lascelles Abercrombie, Rupert Brooke, W. H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, James Elroy Flecker, Wilfred Wilson Gibson, D. H. Lawrence, John Masefield, James Stephens, Harold Monro himself, and others, had already appeared. This book has been extraordinarily successful, and, in two years, has gone through ten editions.

Of course the book helped the bookshop, and the bookshop helped the book. So delighted were the amusement hunters with the idea, that there was some danger of the venture being swamped in the tide of fashion. But Mr. Monro was too genuinely in earnest to be elated by his success, or depressed when it calmed down to a normal interest. The bookshop pegged away at its work and in March, 1913, the first number of _Poetry and Drama_ appeared. This little quarterly is indispensable to anyone wishing to keep abreast with what is being done in poetry abroad. The articles on French poetry by F. S. Flint alone are worth the cost of subscription. But _Poetry and Drama_ also publishes original poetry, critical reviews, and English, French, Italian, and American chronicles. It is an interesting paper, and if I easily see how it could be bettered, that only means that I am an enthusiastic reader. Was anyone ever sincerely devoted to a paper without feeling that with a grain of his advice it could still be improved?

Yet I have a sneaking feeling that Mr. Monro runs his paper better than I should, better than any of us would. It requires a singularly unselfish and dispassionate devotion to run a paper and have it favor all schools, and criticise all cliques, equally. Nobody is quite pleased by that method, but the public gets what it pays for, and I, for one, admire a man with this quality of justice in him. _Poetry and Drama_ ran until December of this year, when it was suspended during the continuance of the war, and the lack of it is so noticeable that it shows very well what a position it had already achieved.

The Poetry Bookshop publishes as well as sells. _Georgian Poetry_ was followed by _Anthologie des Imagistes_, _Poems_ by John Alford, _Anthology of Futurist Poetry_, and various small ventures such as _The Rhyme Sheet_ (the broadsides I have spoken of before), and a number of little chap books called _Flying Fame Publications_, of which one I have seen, _Eve_ by Ralph Hodgson, is enchanting.

Many though Mr. Monro’s activities were, the house was too big for them. So Mr. Monro fitted up some of the attic rooms as bedrooms, and there his clientele of poets hailing from the country find a welcome and inexpensive lodgings. Other rooms are used as reading rooms, for readings are held every Tuesday and Thursday at 6 P. M. Sometimes the poets read their own poems, sometimes other people read them. Verhaeren and Marinetti have read there and many other poets, well-known and still unknown. Mr. Monro invites those he desires, and as he runs his readings as he runs his shop there is great and stimulating variety. The difficulty with this sort of thing is the hangers-on, the horde of the sentimental of both sexes who fasten upon an artistic endeavor and seriously hurt it. It is inevitable that some of these parasites should drift into the readings, as I noticed on one occasion that I was there. But time will weed them out, for such people can never bear to realize that art is as hardworking as, say, stonecutting.

Since the war The Poetry Bookshop has been printing chap books, published at sixpence. Among them are Maurice Hewlett’s _Singsongs of the War_, _Antwerp_ by Ford Maddox Hueffer, _The King’s Highway_ by Henry Newbolt, _The Old Ships_ by James Elroy Flecker; and for unmartial relief, _Spring Morning_ by Frances Cornford, _Songs_ by Edward Shanks, _The Contemplative Quarry_ by Anna Wickham, and _Children of Love_ by Harold Monro.

Mr. Monro is so stern in his idealism that, although a poet of originality and feeling, he willingly minimizes his own production for the sake of advancing poetry “en masse.” That is remarkable, and his enterprise deserves all the success which the poets and the general public can give it.

America, 1915

JOHN GOULD FLETCHER

From the sea coast, from the bleak ravines of the hills that lift their escarpments towards the sky that pours down pitiless threads of sunlight, whirls over chill, clinging tentacles of rain, smashes hard buffets of huge wind, sifts fine, quivering drifts of snow, thrashes with thunder and with hail, uncurls its great sodden, flapping curtains before the gale—from the marshlands, from the banks of slow rivers, from the still brown plateaus, from the midst of steaming valleys, from the wide bays ringed with peaks, a thousand cities reek into the sky. Through a million vents the smell of cookery overflows. It rises upward day and night in strange, tragic black rows of columns that glow and make the stars quiver and dance and darken the sunlight.

Green rivers of corn, golden seas of wheat, white lakes of cotton meet and fuse and inter-cross. Cattle string across in frightened procession: multitudes on multitudes of horses, black, dun, grey, gallop away after them, jarring the earth with their hoofs, beating up dust in heavy, fluffy masses. Far away the sun lies still over broad patches of silence, sparsely green, where an eagle hovers, or an antelope starts up, or a sly, half-starving coyote is seen. The sun looks into yellow castles wedged in the cliff that were old when the first explorers saw them, and on white bulging palaces tinselled with marble and gold. The sun sees engines that rattle and cough, black derricks that wave their arms in arcs aloft, crazy log cabins that topple into the marsh. On every side are symbols of man’s desire, made with his hands, hurried, glorious, sordid, tragic, clashing, insane; the sun looks and does not understand but pours over them its heat and cold, and rain and light, and lightning, always the same.

Immense machines are clamoring, rattling, battling, wheeling, screaming, heaving, weaving. The wheels bound and groan and roar and waver and snap—and go on as before. Between the cities, over plain and hill, reel double paths of shining steel, where screaming locomotives pass like black shuttles leaving great trails of smoke amid the wheat, the cattle, the corn, the cotton, the sordid, hideous factory shafts, the fleet masses of plunging and galloping stallions. Their forces are never spent or tired, for, nervously above them, earth is laced and wired with crackling, chattering, singing, whispering electricity. They fly from city to city, and the sky is scribbled above them with childish grey gigantic scrawls, amid which the sun wabbles and crawls. And over all shoot backward and forward words that walk in air, and perhaps not long will the upper spaces be still, but soon be filled with racing lines of strong black bird-machines bearing men on their backs. Purring autos squawk and squeal, and spray and flutter, pale flashes through the rack. Red, and black and yellow, the earth takes on its coat of colors, from the struggle of a hundred million hands. It is a palimpsest which no one reads or understands, which none has time to heed, a loom-frame woven over with interspersed and tangled threads of which the meaning is lost, from which the pattern hangs in shreds.

Amid all this, men struggle, surge, call out, fall choking, toil with backs bent over the earth in black arcs. Crowds of them clatter, scramble, bustle, push, and drift away. They creep, black, greasy masses, out of the earth like ants; they swing out on great frozen blocks of steel or marble; they saunter in some forgotten place; they yawn with the weariness of little towns. Men, brown, black, yellow, pallid with fatigue, ruddy with gluttony, blotched with disease, swarm and waver back and forth, east, west, south, north. Crackling twigs of dripping forests mark their feet. Red wet furrowed plains receive their pains. Grey, hungry factory towns bellow out through steam-filled lungs for them each morning. Prison gates grate slowly, hospital beds spread stateliness, insane asylums gibber through their windows. They hustle and shovel, piling heaps of hovels, and now and then, as if in mockery, some coppery tower that seems as if it would split its sky with its majesty. They are in a great shallow sea, crinkling uneasily as if some giant’s body were wallowing beneath. Some single impulse creaks through them, pouring out its breath through the chimneys, scattering itself over the fields, closing itself in behind the doors. It is one great, vague, inchoate organism, scarcely feeling its pulse as yet, rolling in the belly of the world, waiting its hour of birth. Earth is heaped about it; still it eats the earth away, red covering after red covering, day on day. Now it half timidly peeps out, now withdraws itself again. And ever the sky pours on it heat and rain, and wind, and light, and lightning, and hail, shaping it, making it less frail, more fit to wake and take its place in the world.

But over there, beyond the seas, where for years the war flags have been stacked and furled, comes the crack of a pistol followed by faint cheers. And now a smeary gloom appears; it seems to swell from out the earth; it bulges in greenish folds above the horizon, and in its depths are flashes from far-off guns. Suddenly from the heart of the cloud, which the cowed world watches, holding its breath, come thick insensate hammer-blows that split the core of earth asunder—the iron cannon unleashed for the dance of death. Deeper and deeper the noise unrolls in a vast salute to the new world from the old. It rises higher and higher, covering the sea with its tumult, and filling the sky with gouts and spatters of crimson fire. North, south, east, west, all the craters are emptying out their vitals on earth’s breast. But the immensity of the troubled continent stirs not, nor gives to the world the life that is restlessly heaving beneath it.

The centuries sit with hands on their knees, wearing on weary foreheads their iron-crowned destinies. The sun glares, the rain spatters, the thunder tramples his drums, the wind, rushing, hums its scorn; but the being—the thing that will master all the ages—still hesitates to be born. The great derricks, black and frozen, lift their arms in mid air; the locomotives hoot and mutter in despair; the shuttles clatter and clamor and hammer at the woof day and night. The black flight of priceless instants reels and rebounds and shivers and crawls, while without the uproar of the cannon calls like black seas battering the earth, grinding, sweeping, flickering, pounding, pounding, pounding, in the increasing throes of birth. But still the thing will not arrive. Still it refuses at the very gates of life. America—America—blood-stained and torn with choked, convulsive sighs, perhaps too late thou shalt arise, perhaps in vain shalt seek to rule the earth!

Poems

MAXWELL BODENHEIM

Silence

The wordless dream of the fire; The white clock dropping gray minutes from its placid lips; The breathing of women, like the birth of little winds; The muttering of the man in the next room, painting a landscape; I threw them together with a jerk of my soul-wrist, And had silence—a swaying sound Made of the death of the others.

A Head

Her head was a morning in April. Loose, livid mist arose from cold ground And revealed two tired shepherds with lanterns, Standing above the wrinkled red blankets they had lain on... Then came the morning light—her smile.

The Operation

With eyes of radium, and beard the color of wet sand, The doctor unlocked his instrument case as carelessly As a child opens an old box of blocks, And almost silently whistled something out of “Aida.” And the nurses—bits of sky with thick clouds— Chattered about patients and hummed frayed songs. But when the still body on the little cart came, The lips of the doctor became stiff and trim (Bows of ribbon turning to circles of stone) And the nurses were no longer women: Were sexless, with tapering fingers and metal eyes... The doctor made the incision and checked the blood: And I thought of a miner, half-reverently, half-wearily cutting soft earth, Picking out lumps of dead silver... But the picture changed when the doctor sewed up the wound, And I saw a middle-aged woman gravely mending a limp rag... The little cart disappeared, And the doctor locked his instrument case as carelessly As a child closes an old box of blocks: And the nurses were once more bits of sky with thick clouds.

Some Imagist Poets

GEORGE LANE

Some months ago, in these pages, Mr. Witter Bynner pointed out that “Imagism” was derived from a Japanese poetical form, the name of which Mr. Bynner regretted that he had forgotten. This name is “Hokku,” and undoubtedly the Japanese Hokku poetry was the model upon which much of the work in the first Imagist Anthology was formed, notably the contributions of Mr. Ezra Pound. There was Greek influence, too, in that first collection. But the whole volume showed a remarkable desire towards perfection and clarity of utterance, and a delicate perception of beauty.

There were few poetry lovers who did not taste its fine, astringent flavour, but its qualities were at once its faults. It was beautiful work, but too tenuous ever to become a great art, said the objectors. It was incapable of embracing many of the elements of life and poetry. The Imagists must remain side-tracked, and therefore, clever though they were, they could not be of real importance.

But it seems that Imagism was more virile, more capable of growth, than was supposed. The jejune maledictions and assertions of their chief spokesman, Mr. Pound, have done so much to make the group ridiculous that it is with a feeling of surprise that we find this volume a great advance upon its predecessor.

Here is the work of six poets, four of whom were represented in the first anthology. In an interesting preface they state their poetical theories, which are much the same as those printed so often in _Poetry_. But here the tenets are soberly and sensibly presented, and the whole preface is dignified and worthy of consideration. Clearly the Imagists are growing up.

It is hardly necessary to rehearse here the Imagist creed. It has been discussed, with more or less hostility, in many reviews. But certainly, in reading this preface, the hostility suddenly vanishes, and the reviewer finds himself wondering if perhaps, after all, this movement is not one of most unusual significance.

Briefly, these poets call themselves Imagists because their object is to present an “image”; they believe “that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous”; they desire “to use the language of common speech,” and “to employ always the _exact_ word, not the nearly exact, nor the merely decorative word.” They wish “to produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite”; and, finally, they are convinced that “concentration is of the very essence of poetry.”

Brave words, excellent aims and hard enough of attainment. Again, these poets agree to allow absolute freedom of subject, and, with a little dig at some of their contemporaries, they say, “It is not good art to write badly about aeroplanes and automobiles; nor is it necessarily bad art to write well about the past. We believe passionately in the artistic value of modern life, but we wish to point out that there is nothing so uninspiring nor so old-fashioned as an aeroplane of the year 1911.”

That is a wholesome point of view, but indeed the Imagists have hardly erred on the side of too great a preoccupation with modern life. In fact this volume is noteworthy as showing a more personal, a less literary, outlook on life.

The first Imagist Anthology contained the work of ten poets. Some were represented by a number of poems, some by only one. In this new volume only four of those poets are represented. But what is remarkable is that they are not all the one poem authors. On the contrary, Richard Aldington and H. D. had more poems in the first anthology than anyone else in the volume, yet here are Richard Aldington and H. D. subscribing to an arrangement which gives each poet approximately the same amount of space. “Also,” says the preface, “to avoid any appearance of precedence, they (the poets included) have been put in alphabetical order.” So art is to come before self-advertisement. Happy omen! With such ideals the group should go far. Six young poets with so much talent, devotion, and singleness of purpose, is a phenomenon to be noticed.

Perhaps this is the key to the “differences of taste and judgment” which have divorced these poets from the others of the first anthology. They go on to say that “growing tendencies are forcing them along different paths.” We can only guess at the tendencies, as the poems in this book show them, and it is not our business to probe farther into a schism which is touched upon so lightly and quietly in this admirable preface.

The six poets of this little anthology are: Richard Aldington, H. D., John Gould Fletcher, F. S. Flint, D. H. Lawrence, and Amy Lowell. It is quite easy to see why “mutual artistic sympathy” binds these young people together. But how extraordinarily individual they are, just the same! From the exquisite, gem-like poems of H. D., to the organ music of Amy Lowell in _The Bombardment_, with the graceful, tender, often humorous work of Richard Aldington and the tragic earnestness of D. H. Lawrence, set off by the rich imagination of John Gould Fletcher, and the poetic realism, touched with a charming intimateness, of F. S. Flint.

Richard Aldington’s contributions begin with _Childhood_, a study of a lonely little boy in a horribly dull English town. It is full of wistfulness, for the little boy is very real, and the detail is admirably managed. The little boy is shut up in the ugly town, like a chrysalis in a matchbox:

I hate that town; ... There were always clouds, smoke, rain In that dingy little valley. It rained; it always rained. I think I never saw the sun until I was nine— And then it was too late; Everything’s too late after the first seven years.

That is very vivid. So, too, is the description of the contents of the large tin box in the attic. But Mr. Aldington never allows the descriptions to usurp the poem; he keeps them properly subordinated to his theme, the loneliness of the child.

Fine as this poem is, it seems more experimental than Mr. Aldington’s shorter work. Long poems require a different technique from short poems, and perhaps Mr. Aldington has not yet become quite master of it. It is in the short poems that he is so eminently successful.

_The Poplar_ is an almost perfect poem of its kind. A complete “image,” and with that fine, poetic imagination which is the hall-mark of Mr. Aldington’s best work. What could be more beautiful than this:

I know that the white wind loves you, Is always kissing you and turning up The white lining of your green petticoat. The sky darts through you like blue rain, And the grey rain drips on your flanks And loves you. And I have seen the moon Slip his silver penny into your pocket As you straightened your hair; And the white mist curling and hesitating Like a bashful lover about your knees.

_The Poplar_ is, on the whole, the best poem of Mr. Aldington’s in the book, but _The Faun Sees Snow for the First Time_ runs it close. And here we have that divine gift of poetical humor which is another of Mr. Aldington’s rare qualities. Space alone prevents me from quoting it. But if I put these two first, where shall I put _Round-Pond_, with its sun “shining upon the water like a scattering of gold crocus-petals”?

Mr. Aldington has advanced in his art. In spite of the _Faun_ and _Lemures_, he has sloughed off much of the Greek mannerism which marred his work in the first anthology. The training which his Greek studies have given him, is here put to excellent and individual use. One looks for much from him in the future.

H. D.’s poems are undoubtedly the most perfect in the book. There is nothing broad, nothing varied about her attempts, but what she tries for she succeeds in doing, absolutely. But in her work, too, we find a grateful change going on. The stage properties are no longer exclusively Greek. In fact, only one poem of her seven has anything obviously Greek about it. There is nothing specifically inartistic in this transplanting of the imagery of another place and time into one’s work. But when an English poet fills every poem full of Greek names and Greek devices, the result is intense weariness on the part of the reader. The poems may be beautiful, but this foreign flavour gives them a sort of chilling quality. One cannot help feeling that the poet is straining after a poetical effect, and that stands in the way of a complete sympathy between poet and reader.

H. D. is too much of an artist not to have realized this, and in these new poems (with the exception I have mentioned), there is no hint of direct preoccupation with the Greek in title or text. Yet the poems are so completely Greek that they might be translations from some newly-discovered papyrus. And still, in reading them, one feels that the sincerity of the artist is not to be questioned. Here is no striving after effect, but a complete saturation of a personality in a past mode. If one believed in reincarnations, one could say, and be certain, that H. D. was the reincarnation of some dead Greek singer. The Greek habit sits upon her as easily as a dress, loosened by constant wear. It is undubitably hers. To adopt another speech would be an unpardonable artificiality. Realizing this, and not making the mistake that so many reviewers have done in considering her a copyist, we must admit that H. D.’s poems attain a perfection which is not to be found in the work of any other modern poet. This garland of sea flowers is a masterpiece of pure beauty. I have only space to quote one of these poems, but it shall be quoted entire.

Sea Iris

Weed, moss-weed root tangled in sand, sea iris, brittle flower, one petal like a shell is broken, and you print a shadow like a thin twig.