Active and Passive
MA. POUND'S anthology is aptly named. In the compiler's Preface alone are enough active likes and dislikes7—chicfly dislikes—to justify the title fifty times over. Dislikes of critics, poets, editors and, of course, above all that grand old hoary scapegoat " the British Literary Bureaucracy." So much was inevitable perhaps, given Mr, Pound's present position as militant avant-gardist of English-speaking letters. What was less inevitable, and is very much less tolerable, is
Mr. Pound's readiness to discourse vaguely on a variety of topics—the function of criticism, Mr. EliOt's Essays, attacks
on how To Read, &c.—very few of which have more than the remotest connexion with the business in hand. By which I mean the introduction of the poets presented in this volume. So that when, on p. 12, Mr. Pound admirably classifies critics as follows : " The best are those who actually cause an amelioration in the art which they criticize. The next best are those who must focus attention on the best that is written. And the pestilential vermin are those who distract attention from the best, either to the second rate, or to hokum, or to their own critical writings."
—it becomes clear to which category Mr. Pound himself belongs, at any rate in this instance. No one, of course, enjoys this little joke more than Mr. Pound, who as a serious creative artist would never care to be mistaken for a critic. But then why write Prefaces ?
Such remarks as have any bearing on the selection and purpose of the anthology itself crop up like cherries in a cake, or occur in a " note on particular details " at the end. Boiled
down they amount to about this : that the selection has been confined to poems which - Britain has not accepted and in the main that the British Literary Bureaucracy does not want to have printed in England " ; that only writers
in whose verse " a development " appears to be taking place are included, and that the compiler has no illusions about the possibility of there being better contemporary poetry. What interests him is not the present but the future : " I expect or at least hope that the work of the included writers will interest me more in ten years' time than it does now." I wish I were as sanguine as Mr. Pound, but I see no r.-:ason to suppose that it will. It seems to me that if Mr. Wil!!arq Carlos Williams were likely to be
more interesting in ten years' time, then he would be more interesting now than he was ten years ago, which he isn't. Mr. Hemingway strikes me as bogus—as bogus as Mr. Louis Zukofsky or his namesake of Aragon or the indefatigable Mr. Cummings. By " bogus " I mean that these writers pretend
to be trying to write poetry when, in fact, they arc trying to do something quite else. Miss Moore I should call a com- petent descriptive poet with a stronger interest in Natural History than in poetry, and I cannot understand why she is included here where her essentially conservative accent seems oddly out of place. A single piece of hearty public- school verse from Mr. 13ridson is insufficient evidence to go on, but I should take long odds against Mr. Oppen being read in ten years, despite some superficial attractions. There remain only Mr. Eliot and Mr. Pound, neither of whose names or works are exactly ill-known " in Britain (one of the qualifications for inclusion) and Mr. Basil Bunting. Of the latter Mr. Pound observes that he probably seems reac- tionary to most of the other contributors. Mercifully, he probably does ; but at least he does not appear to be hypno- tized by the idea of Experiment (with a capital E), and seems aware that Mr. Pound's apophthegm (" willingness to experiment is not enough, but unwillingness to experiment is mere death ") is a platitude with the emphasis on the wrong foot. Mrs. Munro's anthology presents less of a contrast to Mr. Pound's than would appear likely, at first sight, from the fact that it is designed and presented as a continuation of the series of " Georgian Poetry " books which issued from the Poetry Bookshop between 1911 and 1922. Not that any of Mr. Pound's poets, other than Mr. Eliot, are represented here. But Mrs. Munro explicity asserts her intention of including not only the work of poets who, writing between 1911-1922, have only become known since then, but also the work of younger writers, some of whom have not yet achieved publica- tion in book form. The intention is admirable. What puzzles me is the manner in which Mrs. Munro has set about realizing it. I cannot, for example, see why she includes three poems of Mr. Siegfried Sassoon's, all in his later senti- mental manner, but nothing whatever by Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen or Isaac Rosenberg, all of whom were writing during the decade in question and any of whom would have as much right as Mr. Sassoon (or Mr. Aldington) to claim that his poetic reputation had in the main been established since then. The fact that all these were killed in the War cannot be an explanation, for other dead poets are included : Char- lotte Mew, Harold Munro.
Nor can I quite fathom the compiler's principle of selection in respect of the poets whose work is more recent. Messrs. Auden, Spender, Pudney, Swingler and Day Lewis are there it is true, though in each case I should have chosen different poems to represent them. But why Mr. Francis Macnamara (a nightmare Browning) or Miss Susan Miles with her dreadful little coy obliquities, or the picture-book poetry of Miss Travers ? And surely there should have been a better use for space than to spend it representing Miss Ruth Pitter or printing the pleasant Oirish banalities of Mr. Frank O'Connor ? For the rest Mr. Read, Mr. Homer and Mr. Quennell fulfil the function which in the Georgian books was performed by Messrs. Abercrombie, Binyon, &c.—that of providing a leaven of respectable academic verse—while Mr. Roy Campbell's farouche rhetoric takes the place of the Poet Laureate's " yarning." It remains to add that the book's production is sensible and pleasant, and that an admirably up-to-date
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