POETS AND POETRY.

THE YEAR'S POETRY.

HAS nineteen-twenty-two been on the whole a rather unevent- ful year in the matter of poetry ? It certainly seems so, looking back. It has been a year of consolidation and of theory rather than one of brilliant achievement. The most solid additions which it has brought are James Elroy Flecker's Hassan, with which its connexion is fortuitous, and Mr. A. E. Housman's Last Poems.

This collection of forty-one poems will, we believe, when the first flurry of loyalty to A Shropshire Lad has subsided, be judged to be superior to that famous and till now unique series of lyrics. The disfiguring mannerisms are less, the touch firmer and more poignant. We endeavoured last week to analyse and isolate the peculiar qualities which lend a special value to Mr. A. E. Housman's work, and it is enough here to suggest once more to the reader that the War, with its train of revelation, has made Mr. Housman's bitter-sweet note still more penetrating.

But after all is said of Last Poems, and though they may be the most considerable achievement of the year, their very name in its finality sends us on to try prophecy if we can. What tendency do the poems of the established writers show ? Still more interesting to the race of men " who never are, but always to be blessed," What new writers have arisen ? Three new names will certainly be in the mouths of the prophets. One is that of Mr. Conrad Aiken, who, though he had, of course, published a good deal before this year, has yet now come for the first time prominently before the English public. Another is that of Mr. Meyerstein. A third is that of Mr. Richard Hughes.

Mr. Meyerstein is the author of the most metrically ingenious poem not merely of this but of recent years, The Voyage of Ass, a long, medieval narrative written in a stanza of incredible intricacy. The poem is no mere acrobatic trick, but a piece of genuine virtuosity.

Mr. Conrad Aiken is also the author of narrative poems, but of a very different kind. The Voyage of Ass concerns the adventures of the body, but The Jig of Forslyn and Punch the Immortal Liar those of the mind. Mr. Aiken is, most surprisingly, an American. There is a definite tendency and flavour to be detected in American poetry, indeed, there are two or three. The names of Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay and Edgar Lee Masters will recall them. Mr. Aiken follows none of these tendencies and shows no trace of any of these flavours. His work is rather macabre in tone, but often powerful and rich. He is interested chiefly by the things of the mind, especially by strange and abnormal states of mind, body, and situation, by the super- natural and the exotic.

But perhaps on the whole Mr. Richard Hughes is the most interesting of the three writers, if only because his verse suffers from the right faults. His lyrics are often crabbed and overfull of meaning. The lines are stuffed till they burst with thought and emotion, allusion and reflection. There is, in fact, a harshness and astringency about the young fruit which argues very hopefully for the harvest. Not that the reader is to suppose that Gypsy Night is not a book of very beautiful verse. There is a great deal in it that not merely promises but achieves excellence. The faults which can be found abundantly in it are, perhaps, of a more promising sort than those of Mr. Meyerstein or Mr. Conrad Aiken, though we must admit that Mr. Aiken's is the more con- siderable achievement.

Mr. Aiken's countrymen have been active chiefly in the matter of anthologies and collected editions. Of his own anthology of American verse we hope to give an account next week. The most interesting book of new American verse is Hymen, by " H. D." She, the reader will recall,

was, with Richard Aldington, one of the leaders of the Imagist movement, and the scrupulosity and fine taste of the Imagist ideals are enshrined in her work. Whether the Imagist care for exactitude of impression followed by precision of report have left us with a set of clever tech- nicians in place of the poets who wrote the manifesto time and (we hope) a number of new examples of the school's output can alone show.

Most of the established writers of poetry have maintained their reputations with a volume this year, the sort of volume from which a reasonable proportion of verse will go to the " One volume selected edition " of the future. Miss Edith and Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell, with Façade and The Hundred- and-one Harlequins, have probably confirmed both their admirers and their detractors in their respective faiths, as has Mr. John Freeman. Mr. Edward Blunden, who is this year's Ha wthornden Prize winner, gave us an uneven volume in his Shepherd, which contains, beside some very beautiful and simple nature poems, one of the silliest pieces of reflective verse of the year.

Mr. Masefield, who embarked upon the astonishing but not unattractive task of translating Racine, provides a howler or two to equal Mr. Blunden's, and, like him, provides also verse truly individual and of real merit. But his under- taking Esther and Berenice at all will remain one of the curiosi- ties of literature. It would really be a little difficult to select a poet to whom such a translation could have seemed at first less appropriate. Mr. Masefield's comparative success is surely a great proof of his vitality and adaptability.

One of the oddest books of the year is certainly Mr. Harold Monroe's Real Property. Convinced, one would guess, of the truth and value of the Imagist's creed of the supreme importance of the exact word and the unsentimentalized and generally unmodified sense impression, Mr. Monroe does not really share the interests of the Imagists. He tries to employ their formulae in the exposition of a completely different sort of phenomenon. They talk about rocks and pine-trees and spray. He writes an ode to the force of gravity and tries to trace strange impressions which we have about places, the sort of feeling of which the simplest example is that of " l*ja Vile," the impression of having seen a place before. In these highly abstract regions his methods often strike the reader as just rather than applicable. But when he writes of simple things such as a moonlight night with a high wind, Mr. Monroe shows himself to be a poet of great charm and originality.

Finally, what of Mr. Squire and his Second Series of poems and his minute narratives about football and slaughter- houses ? One thing most certainly, that whether we like them or not, these two poems which have aroused so much controversy were very well worth attempting. Inasmuch as poetry and daily life, and the spoken and written language drift away from one another, each grows weaker. These poems arc an attempt at a rapprochement and in so far good and worthy of all praise. They leave us, perhaps, with the question of how far such reconciliations can be forcibly, or even deliberately, brought about. As for Mr. Squire's skill in some of the lyric forms in which he expresses himself, it is unquestionable.

But it is not, perhaps, so much by the output of actual verse that we ought to judge the year which is ending. It is in the consolidation of theory that there is most to show. Mr. Middleton Murry, Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie, and Mr.

Robert Graves are only a few among the writers who have turned towards a reconsideration of the principles of the art which they practise. Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie and Mr. Middle- ton Murry have written soundly ands- often piercingly on the problems which they handle daily. They have not only built up, butalmost more important in the theory of any art—they have cleared and carted away a mass of confusions, both of thought and statement. But Mr. Graves, in a book probably a good deal less generally acceptable, has broken new ground. In English Poetry not only does Mr. Graves apply the principals of modern psychology to poetry in a way which has been only hitherto adopted by Benedetto Croce, but he also shows us, in great minuteness, the actual steps by which he at any rate produces a poem. With the necessary objection that his method may be entirely individual he deals as fully as possible. He leaves the reader in a position

of reasonable certainty that he has tracked down the modus operandi of the afflatus in a whole class of literature whose

origins have hitherto been particularly mysterious. It is tempting to try to prophesy as to next year's output of poetry. Mr. W. J. Turner, for instance, owes us a volume, and it is a long time since Mr. Robert Nichols has written any verse. But when we consider how complex is the pro- duction of a poem, we realize how futile is an attempt to