OBSCURE POETRY.

[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Will you permit me to state my mature and considered opinion that the defects of the Neo-Obscurantist Poets must be attributed chiefly to conceit, laziness, and the youthful desire to pose? This opinion was arrived at long before Miss Sitwell published her "Promenade Sentimentale " ; but that poem, and her own reply to criticism, present as choice an illustration as one could wish.

On the point of conceit, what could be more illuminating than Miss Sitwell's reference (Spectator, January 6th) to "that section of the public to which I myself belong," followed by her warning to the "more numerous section of the com- munity" (everybody who doesn't inhabit Sitwell-landia) not to attempt to understand her "nonsense." Probably her nursery governess has already scolded her for being rude to grown-up people in the drawing-room, so one may leave the matter thus.

To come now to laziness. "Promenade Sentimentale " follows no intelligible or coherent rhythmical scheme. Miss Sitwell may have taken three-quarters of an hour, or three hours, or three weeks to write it ; but she has produced something which gives the effect of being slogged down on to paper anyhow, with the minimum of intellectual and technical toil. One gets the sensation of being bumped in a dray over cobbles. It is surely ergophobia, too, which

permits an intelligent young woman to send to the printer (and still worse, to return to him)

"When I walked on the grass like the sheepish buds, Of wool that grow on lambs chewing their cuds."

The "lambs chewing their cuds" are dragged in by the ears as a rhyme to "buds "—unless, of course, the author means that the wool ceases to grow during the hours when the lambs are not chewing their cuds. In the previous stanza, the jarring colloquialism "no one cared a rap" is accepted as an easy rhyme to "map." The couplet

"The small flowers grew to a hairy husk That holds Eternity for musk" may possibly conceal some profound horticulturo-psy-chia image which Miss Sitwell has failed to understand perhaps, and certainly failed to express. She might just as well have written "The small flowers grew to a hairy husk That holds Eternity in its tusk," the "hairy husk" being an Elephant, a patient animal on whom our Neo-Obscurantists cast many burdens of sym- bolical nebulosity.

I read the article of Mrs. Williams-Ellis, accompanying the reprint of this poem (Spectator, December 30th, 1922), with a thorough appreciation of its generous trustfulness that the poem could hardly be so absurd as parts of it seemed to be. But when one comes down to brass paper-fasteners, this article was really

an ingenious, liberal-minded apology for the lack of the moral courage required to run a blue pencil through the "buds.

cuds-husk-musk" stanzas and send the poem back for the removal of the concluding Cockney rhyme. If Miss Sitwell had thereupon withdrawn her poem—her letter makes that

probable enough—then the readers of the Spectator would not have been a penny the worse, and posterity would still

have found the " buds-cuds-husk-musk " in her Works in the British Museum.

I write not without intimate experience of the ways of the minor poet. For about ten years before 1916 it was part of my work to select a poem or piece of light verse for each issue

of an important daily paper. Among our regular contributors of poetry were such writers (hall-marked, some of them, by the Spectator) as Douglas Ainslie, C. Kennett Burrow, Haber- ton Lulham, Charles Daimon, Arthur L. S41mon, Ianthe Jerrold and many others whose names escape my memory. They never saw their poems in proof. POCM3 were frequently cut down and altered in other ways. During the ten years we received one complaint from a competent literary crafts-

man on that ground. It was from Mr. Douglas Ainslie; and I still hold that his comparison of a woman's thighs to bananas was not particularly happy. On the other hand, sarcastic references to the low intelligence of editors arrived occasion- ally ; always from the literary amateur whose work could not be printed without being laboriously tidied up.

If our Neo-Obscurantists would (1) shun "free verse," which is a constant incentive to sloth ; (2) go to school to

the lucidity of Alice Meynell ; and (3) take a severe course of ballades, chants royal, pantoums, and sestinas as a gymnastic to dispel sloppy writing and sloppy thinking, then their genuine gifts might be turned to good account. We might miss their unconscious humour a little ; but, even withou t that, the world would still be an amusing place.—I am, Sir, &c.,