C URRENT LITERAT (IRE.
MR. YEATS'S POEMS.
In his newly published • volume of Poems (T. Fisher trawin, is. 6d.) Mr. W. B. Yeats gives us a revised reprint of the lyrics• and plays published in three separate volumes (1888, 1891, and 1894), and subsequently in one volume in 1895 and 1898. The additions are hardly of sufficient magnitude to warrant criticism, but the preface calls for a few words of comment. Mr. Yeats's criticism on the tyranny of stage realism is excellent, and there is an eloquent and interesting passage in which he defines his aim as the desire to "add to that majestic heraldry of the poets, that great and complicated' inheritance of images which written literature has substituted for the greater and mop.: complex inheritance of spoken tradition, some new heraldic images, gathered from the lips of the common people." This is interesting and significant, but when Mr. Yeats goes on to say that "one writes poetry for a few careful readers," one would like a little more light to be thrown on the meaning of the word "careful." He certainly does not write for scholars, or he would not talk of the" Hesperedes" [sic], or print in his notes pages of French teeming with misprints and mistakes in punctua- tion. (Even in the body of the book, two poems, those on p. 121—the beautiful "Rose of the World "—and p. 124, end with a comma instead of a full-stop.) The notes again are marked by a deliberate vagueness that amounts to affectation,—e.g., " Orchil. —A. Fomoroh and a sorceress, if I remember rightly. I forget whatever I may have once known about her." We should not have dwelt on these blemishes were it not that Mr. Yeats himself lays such stress in the preface on the revision of these poems. Mr. Yeats may consider the duty of transcribing French correctly beneath his dignity, but it is surely the business of the publisher in such a case to come to the rescue of his author. Obscurity of thought or expression is another matter altogether. The advice of an ancient sage to his pupils was aedeerav, and the advice has been followed with success by poets and thinkers in all ages. But it is not essential to the " majestic heraldry" of poetry to spell " douze" dance, " ce" se, " eut " eat, " ceuvres" ourres, to substitute commas for full-stops, or to leave out the latter altogether.
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