' POETS AND POETRY.
FLAT POETRY.° WE do not know whether the early Italian _painters of-frescoes made their pictures look flat deliberately„or not. The Byzan-
tines almost certainly did ; And also such painters as Puvis de Cheyennes set a fashion which a great -many modern artists have followed. Art is so largely a process of selection, elimina- tion; and simplification that there is a great deal to be-said for the "self-denying acts " which this particular type of painting demands. So it is in poetry. Those whom we may, with only a little exaggeration, call the Flat School have gained a great deal by their renunciation. Their effects are achieved by great economy of language--literal as well as metaphorical, for these poems are generally short—by a certain metrical chastity, and by reliance on the poignancy of the commonplace if the object be narrative, and by the beauty of the ordinary if the object be landscape or symbolical. Plenty of instances of the:sort of poem we mean
will of course at once occur to the -reader—Miss Charlotte Mew's poems, which we reviewed last month, -or perhaps Mr.
Joseph Campbell's poem " The Old Woman "
" As a white candle In a holy place, So is the beauty Of an aged face.
As the spent radiance Of the winter sun, So is a woman With her travail done.
Her brood gone from her, And her thoughts as still As the waters Under a ruined mill."
Miss Dorothy Roberts's little book contains a number of sttraetive flat poems, though her work does not possess the
distilled, refined nicety of Mr. Campbell's " Old Woman."
The symbolical story of the woman in the manufacturing town who tries to grow daffodils, but is baffled by the smoke, is success- ful ; but a cleverer piece of fresco painting is " Autumn " :—
" The sheaves of brown barley we gather, and red golden fruit from brown orchards. We gather brown nuts and black • The Child Dancer, and other Poem. By Dorothy' Roberta. London : Bain Mathews. Rs. ed. net.] berries, and dark purple plums. We gather cornflowers and red poppies. But the dead golden leaves run before us, the wrinkled red leaves hide away.
Chrysanthemums bum at our doorway, and daisies are blue in wide clusters. We gather red leaves and blue daisies—but the leaves fall away from our fingers. They fall in red shower° at our doorway. they leap to the voice of the wind."
Mr. Wilfred Wilson Gibson is, of course, another writer who often successfully tries his hand at flat poems, and the method is much practised in America. The style seems a modem product,. We cannot at least recall any but modem instances of its. use.
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