• The Team Spirit

New Country. Prose and Poetry by the Authors of New Signatures. Edited by Michael Roberts. (Hogarth Press. 78. 6d.) Tans is a genuine affair of young writers, not one of those attempts to pass off pterodactyls (like the undersigned) as the coming race. Only Mr. Plomer, perhaps, to whose prose story about a sixth of the volume is allotted, haunts the conscience of the editor, being "older." Mr. Roberts himself confesses a single pre-War memory, but we will•not dwell on this, which his comrades have clearly accepted as inevitable in a capitalistic system. As in New Signatures, Mr. Roberts comes forward energetically as the leader of the band which includes still most of those who provided that lively and illuminating mis- cellany ; Mr. Empson, who now keeps his tent in Japan, is among the absentees. The present Hogarthian Night's (or Dawn's) entertainment is a combination of prose and verse. It is a valuable performance, though I fear there will be both CommUnists and Commfinists (how difficult life is !) who will not think so.

To the ordinary enquirer, New Country is valuable as a statement with illustrations of the way in which several young minds of uncommon powers are regarding the present and the prospect. It is a composite didactic. This effect is displayed immediately ; for when we have attended to Mr. Roberts in his editorial duties, and apprehended approximately that the new writers have employed quite naturally a set of images of modern existence, hitherto suspect, we are given Mr. Day Lewis's " Letter to a Young Revolutionary." This is a kind of Operation Orders, seasoned with comments on the dreary tasks involved (" try asking Class E to tea with Class F," " You simply have no notion what an elemental fury you'd raise in the placid bourgeoise housewife if you started taking away some of her silver spoons . . "). Mr. G. F. Brett comes next with a paper called " Science Marking Time "—and we find him taking sides with Newton against Professor Hessen, and

generally artful about the " science -I- bourgeois " decision. Mr. Stephen Spender, whose prose is less jerky and insistent than the preceding, follows with thoughts on " Poetry and

Revolution." Let those who are alarmed lest their faith in poetry as seen through Milton or Thomas Campion or G. M, Hopkins be proved a delusion, consult this steady summing. up. Need the bards who do not feel an impulse to hymn the Dental Parlour or Sowing by Aeroplane do so ? Mr. Spender (it is his funeral) suggests that they need not.

Amid a series of lighter numbers, short stories and sketches

(I should not have called Mr. Plomer's colonial character-study a " lighter number," but it is " out of series ") Mr. Roberts

releases a comic spectacle : " The Intellectual Ferment of the Post-War Years." This item introduces the effigies of a great many recent pursuers of literature, theology and the ultimate ; on " thin Hegelian duckboards " the sons of woman hurry to battle, and Ariel Poets supply the place of aircraft in the ingenious skies sparkling with apophthegmal Archies. Behind all this joyous artifice, Mr. Roberts stands the critic of our intellectual pantheon. Nothing is coming of it ? Let that echo die away unheeded while we turn to the poetry depart- ment of New Country. After all—as things are—one good poem—as poems are hitherto understood—is sufficient for the day ; to quote Mr. Spender, " separate poems are separate and complete and ideal worlds," into which we desire our serene admission.

Mr. Auden comes forward with a " Prologue " of remarkable beauty, and holds us for a time as though he were the Matthew Arnold of our day, ending his poem moreover with an ocean simile that the Victorian would have perceived with congenial admiration : he might have asked Mr. Auden a question or two by the way on his punctuation. This " Prologue " over, Mr. Auden proceeds with his theme, the fate of England. In the course of " A Happy New Year " he surpasses Mr. Roberts in the way of a wild spectacle with what as an old soldier I might call Fred Karno's Army—a Skeltonic tunning of celebrities, and traits, of this present time, "the dingy difficult life of our generation." Since there is already a tendency to label Mr. Auden, I may observe that this satire defies any labellings. But if he does not look out he will be noosed as the Schoolmaster Poet.

The section of poems, this time, seems to me mainly to depend on Mr. Auden. True to the habit of English poets, Mr. Richard Goodman finds his highest ease in an " Ode iu

Autumn." Four pieces from "The Magnetic Mountain" show Mr. Day Lewis sometimes keenly powerful, sometimes maga-

zining it, but still urging the case against that bad " middleman of God," " Who raised his hands to brand a Cain

And bless a submarine— Time is up : the medicine man Must take his medicine."

Mr. John Lehmann avoids making sonnets of ideas somewhere about sonnet-capacity, iambic reflections. Mr. Charles Madge invites the intelligentsia to " the difficult early stages" of a new earth. In his best poem, the editor exemplifies the now

familiar country" of images from pit and laboratory, mingled with those of old usage. There are here also four poems by Mr. Spender, acute in psychology and impression ; four by Mr. Tessimond, who in " Steel April " describes " my civiliza- tion " with some directness, with vitality of rhythm and phrase ; lastly, some examples of Mr. R. E. Warner's addresses to all concerned, on the present discontents and the way out.

" Come then, companions . . . " Mr. Warner invites even the fat men among us to join in, without watch-chains. The whole theory which the miscellany communicates is quaintly deco- rated with such details of impatience and individualism.

EDMUND BLUNDER.