Who's Who on Parnassus
Modern English Poetry (1882-1932). By R. L. Wgroz. (Nicholson and Watson. 8s. 6d.) Mn. MEGROZ'S book is remarkable chiefly as a tour de force. He has compressed into about two hundred and fifty pages a list of practically all the poets who have any claim to notice at all during an exceedingly prolific half-century, together with some indication of the characteristics of their work, indicating what place they take in the general course of poetry during the period.
It is not quite clear what is the value of such a repository. Space forbids Mr. Megroz to write at length of any of his subjects, except of a very few to whom he attaches out- standing importance. And although his thumbnail sketches are on the whole just, they are hardly as illuminating as would be fuller sketches of fewer authors, on the one hand, or as useful, on the other, as would be an adequate bibliography of all the poets whom he enumerates.
The chief interest of this survey, therefore, lies in the grouping of the poets, and the history that that grouping is intended to illustrate. No one is more conscious than Mr. Megroz himself that such grouping must be in part arbitrary (still more the choice of labels for the groups in question), and he has wisely made his categories wide and flexible. The chief headings under which he classes his authors are Decadence, Anti-decadence, Poetry of Dream, Eloquent Poets, Simple Poetry. Before these comes pre. Raphaelite poetry (whose leading authors were Swinburne and Morris, with minor names like R. W. Dixon and Mary Coleridge) ; after them "The Real Decadence "—a heading under which Mr. Megroz analyses with a good deal of penetration Osbert Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, Edgell Rickword and Alan Porter (he stops short of Mr. W. H. Auden and his young contemporaries).
The chief " Decadents " are, naturally enough, Dowse% 'Le Gallienne, Wilde, Arthur Symons, and Lionel Johnson. Mr. Megroz exposes the fallacy that associates then' with the 'nineties only, and, more illuminatingly, conmrn inents on their relation to their precursors, the Symbolists.
What a long distance poetry had descended," he exclaims, fter - quoting .a typical passage from Symons, olrom the ereative sensuality of a Rossetti or a Baudelaire 1" "Art for Art's sake," he might have added, had come to mean something very different in England in the 'nineties from what it had meant in France some thirty years before. " Anti-decadence " is the heading for a miscellaneous collec- tion of writers (for instance, Kipling, Bridges, de la Mare and Austin Dobson), untouched by French influences, grouped to- gether less for their resemblance to each other than for their common unlikeness to those writers who have come to be regarded as typical of their period. Similarly heterogeneous is the collection of" Eloquent Poets," which includes authors as various as Chesterton, Masefield, Mrs. Woods, and Maurice Baring.
Mr. Megroz's most important section is that headed "Poetry of Dream." He has a good deal that is very sensible to say about the place of dream in poetry, and the use of the evocative rather than the communicative element in language, and his discussion, in this connexion, of Yeats' work, the development of which he rightly regards as itself a phenomenon of the first importance in the history of recent poetry, is one of the best things in his book. The temperate and balanced judgement that he displays here (fully justifying his claim that he has not `-` run a theory to death and looked at the period through glasses tinted with some contemporary preoccupation ") does not desert him when he comes to deal with Mr. Eliot and the Sitwells ; he is neither shocked by their occasionally wilful unorthodoxy nor provoked by their tendenciousness, and does not desert the unprejudiced and purely aesthetic standard which he lays down as the touchstone of all poetic merit.
It is only to be regretted that Mr. Megroz did not sacrifice his brief references to some dozens of minor poets in order to write more fully on the more important, and to do better justice to his grasp of the principles underlying their work; as it is, his exposition of theory is too often perforce compressed into short sentences composed of long
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