Poets in Brief
Mat. LUCAS continues to abridge the poets who seem to him to need it, and now gives us the shorter Crabbe and the shorter Rossetti. Neither of these poets would get their due in an ordinary lyric antltok_g. Whatever the merit of
"Grave Jonas Kindred, Sybil Kindred's sire Was six feet high, and looked six inches higher."
. it is not lyric. Every couplet Crabbe wrote needs to be in . its context. Ressetti, on the other hand, suffers from The Blessed Damsel as Mr. W. B. Yeats suffers from Innisfree. The many other good things he wrote are to be found in Mr. Lucas's selection : best of all, perhaps, his translations from the early Italian poets, and from the poems of Dante and his circle. A delightful introductory essay combines the strange facts of Rossetti's life with perspicacious remarks on his mind, art, and pre-Raphaelitism. The Crabbe volume is valu- able rather for the introduction than for the selection, good though this is. The shorter extracts are merely tantalizing. A complete tale in verse, such as The Frank Courtship or Rulh, , both of which Mr. Lucas prints, is much more satisfying : but those who really enjoy Crabbe's work will want it unabridged. Crabbe has no detachable purple passages. He is the most engaging pedestrian that ever found himself a poet, and I plods steadily on, reducing passion, humour, sarcasm, and • humanitarian zeal to neat, heroic couplets. He seems never to have forgotten his father's gibe that poetry was "words arranged in parallel lines of about the same length." So it is, for him : except that, if he did not add to his spinster-like neatness of versifying certain gifts of observation, of love for his drab East-coast countryside, and of unbounded affection for, and curiosity about, his fellow-beings, his verses_ would not have been poetry at all. For those who want an intro- duction to Crabbe, nothing could be better than Mr. Lucas's
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