POETS AND POETRY.

NEW VOICES.*

"SUPPOSE and suppose," the poet has often thought, echoing Mr. De La Mare, "that twice as many people again should suddenly take to reading poetry. Suppose and suppose there should be a really educated public, a public which wanted good contemporary poetry so much that it would buy the books of unknown poets in hundreds, and that, harder still, it would refrain from buying such of the books of the best-known men as were badly written. Suppose the great public should leave off reading Longfellow and take to reading Edward Shanks."

The dream is in a fair way to come true. A most remarkable book has been written by an American, a book which is not only a book but also, we hope and believe, a portent. It is called New Voices, and is by a Miss Marguerite Wilkinson, and in its pages are suddenly displayed to us not only a new public, but a whole quantity of poets whose work is both unknown to most English readers and is worth looking at. New Voices is a modest-looking green volume in rather close print. The reader's first thought will be one of surprise at the extraordinary variety of the poets quoted. Gilbert's "Anthony Trollope and Monsieur Guiso " are a mere joke to the catholicism of Miss Wilkinson, who praises with great discrimination Kipling, 'Gordon Bottomley, Vachel Lindsay, Masefield, Robert Bridges, and Alfred Noyes all in the same chapter. But the present ;writer's astonishment was still greater to find that from America, comprised in a single volume, and written by an unknown critic, comes what is in his opinion the most remarkable body of criticism of modern poetry, and perhaps of poetry in general, that has as yet appeared. The present writer has not the faintest intention of attempting to substantiate a valuation which half his readers will probably immediately dub "absurd." He does not mean to quote or :to "let the reader judge for himself" in any way, but pronounces ex cathedra that such is his opinion. However, lest the reader accuse him of wilfulness, he must explain that he is really compelled to adopt this swashbuckling attitude. The book is not only a long one, but the matter in it has obviously undergone considerable compression, and its fourteen chapters of analysis, comparison, appreciation, con- demnation, and valuation are so concise as not to admit of edentate summarization.

In the first chapter Miss Wilkinson has a happy comparison of poetry with the pool of Bethesda, whose waters are troubled from time to time. "Ten years " ago in America," she says, " the waters were still, and many educated persons supposed that poetry had died an unnatural death with the passing of Tennyson." Miss Wilkinson is afraid of nothing. She does not mind being obvious if obviousness is the price of making a point clear. She is not afraid of being thought either banal or precious. She is willing to try to analyse many of the things that the boldest critics have shirked. She tries, for example, to define the points in respect of which contemporary English poetry differs from that of other times and nations, and in this task she is to a great extent successful. Again, she attempts anaccount of the qualities in which poetry differs from prose ; for 'instance, In its greater conciseness and in its greater power of stating the whole of a truth. She also gives a most interesting analysis of the particular qualities of borderline vers Mires, and a curious and distinct species of writing successfully practised by at least .one American poet, " polyphonic " or rhymed prose. She discusses the patterns of poems, and has illuminating things to stay of the relation between the length of a poem and its metric NITIV VOW,. By Miss Marguerite Wilkinson. New York : Macmillan. In.] arrangement and dependence on refrain—its pattern. A propos of the word "pattern," the present writer begs to differ from her in her liking for a poem called "Patterns," by Miss Amy Lowell, an American poet of undoubted merit, which seems to him almost entirely " Wardour Street" in spirit, and in which an unexpected piece of realism will strike most readers as funny. "Organic Rhythm" is another interesting chapter in which she remarks how successfully Mr. Rudyard Kipling takes "a cadence of speech as the rhythmical beginning of a poem." She instances "Here we go in a flung festoon."

She has cruel things to say about bad poetry ; for example, her strictures on what she calls the " hath-doth " school. Then she has a damaging way of comparing two poems. She quotes a set of verses called "The Strong Woman" :—

"Somehow her very delicacy was strength

With which she met the tempest-tide of life ; Frail craft that did not fear the journey's length Nor dread the billow's strife.

Somehow her gentle tenderness was power

With which she did the larger task alone, Frail toiler fashioned for the leisure hour, A sturdy workman grown.

Somehow her unfeigned purity was rule, With which she wrought in meek yet regal mien— Frail monarch acting as her Maker's tool— Unknown, uncrowned, unseen ! "

"We are willing to believe that the worthy woman so described has lived a worthy life and merits praise. But we do not care, we are not interested. Hundreds of verses like this are written daily. It does no harm provided no one is led to suppose that they are poetry. . . . We notice that the lady changes incredibly from line to line. In the first stanza she is a 'frail craft,' in the second a 'frail toiler' and a sturdy workman,' in the third a 'frail monarch' and her 'Maker's tool.' Imagine a tool that is 'unknown, uncrowned, unseen.'" .

With this Miss Wilkinson contrasts a poem by Joseph Campbell called "The Old Woman," in which, as she says, not a word embarrasses the meaning :—

" 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."

The English reader will be particularly grateful to her for her sound habit of quoting in full at the end of every chapter any poem which has been criticized or from which instances have been taken in the course of an exposition. For we shall most of us come to know a number of American writers *hose work is new to us. Perhaps J. G. Fletcher, Miss Amy Lowell, Mrs. Tietjens, and Mr. Edwin Markham are the most successful of the Americans. Mr. Vachel Lindsay is of course a curious and powerful figure who stands in a category by himself. A number of poems are quoted which may be classed as extremely modern- ist. To many English readers these American modernists will probably appear to have knocked the classics from under their feet without having quite found satisfactory planks out of which to make a new platform. They produce rather an effect of people enduring the discomforts of hanging by their arms with their legs dangling. Mr. Vachel Lindsay alone has achieved a real return to Nature, for he is not afraid to write a lyric about the " Auto " ; but the effect upon us of most of the others' is, as we have said, of something a little suspensive and we believe impermanent. For it is clear that, to pursue our analogy, there is plenty of seasoned timber in America—and in Europe too— authentic life, moods and problems that are new or at least newly felt, and it is as clear that there are -vigorous attificera who are skilful to split, hew, and shape the timber to their ends.