POETS AND POETRY.

TWO AMERICAN POETS.*

Smoke and Stall contains some interesting poems—" Losers," for instance, the " Sins of Kalamazoo " and " Telegram." Though there is a great deal that can be read with pleasure in the book, especially if we regard it as a series of essays in blank verse rhythms, there is perhaps nothing in it as attractive as Mr. Sandburg's little poem " Fog," of which I should like to remind

the reader :— " The fog comes on little eat feet.

It sits looking over harbour and city on silent haunches and then moves on."

Mr. Sandburg belongs to a school of American writers whose absorption of the tenets of the Imagists has resulted in a curious deadness of tone. It is like that quality of voice which believe, called " veiled." There is, however, an aesthetic continence about Mr. Sandburg's work which we cannot but respect.

Mr. Conrad Aiken is a poet whose work is by no means what we have been accustomed to think typically American. Perhaps the reader will recall his Punch, the Immortal Liar. The only one of his countrymen to whose work this bore the slightest resemblance was perhaps Edgar Allan Poe, but even here the resemblance was remote, and in his new volume, The Jig of Forslin,1 Mr. Aiken comes very close to an English school of writing which has no particular name, but which in matter and attitude shows a considerable knowledge of modern psychology and a considerable talent for self-analysis, and in manner great concentration and compression combined with a certain harshness of versification. Mr. Richard Hughes' Feb- de Se, which appeared in these columns a week or so ago, and much of the work of Mr. Alan Porter, and some of that of Mr. Robert Graves and Mr. W. J. Turner, furnish examples of what I mean. The present poem represents the visions and day- dreams spun by one Forslin.

" The process of vicarious wish fulfilment is one by which civil- ized man enriches his circumscribed life and obtains emotional balance. It is an exploration of his emotional and mental hinterland, his fairyland of impossible illusions and dreams : ranging on the one extreme from- the desire for a complete tyranny of body over mind to the desire, on the other extreme, for a complete tyranny of mind over body ; by successive natural steps in either direction."

Forslin is everything by turns. He imagines himself a juggler who has sacrificed everything in order to acquire a remote skill in his art. He is a tyrannical magnifico, and is to murder with an exquisite damascened knife the false beauty who has betrayed him. He is watching a burning house and sees with agony the walls crumble :— " The firemen's faces are white in the ghastly light,

A ladder is raised, up it a fireman crawls ;

And suddenly with a roar the ladder falls

With the falling housefront into a storm of fire, And the crowd shrieks, and presses back from the heat, And the twisted flame spouts higher. . . ."

He is a mermaid's lover :-

" Some have wedded sea-girls and lived in the sea, Hearing the whisper of surf far over their hands, And tuned their loving

To green and purple twilight, lazily moving On the cold sway of tides ; Watching the little fish blow bubbles and sands ; And the ships passing, like dark clouds, silently."

There are those who have been beguiled by ghouls or vampires Or some day a man might love a Jamie. :- " My blood was tranced at night by the palest woman,

But when I kissed her the blood in my veins went cold, Her mouth was as cold as the sea, Among the leaves she rose like fire ;

Her eyes were phosphor : her cold hands burned. But when the red sun clanged she fell from me,

She fell from my lips with an anguished cry, And a jewelled snake I saw her he Wreathing her sluggish ashes in green grass beaded with dew, Her little eyes red in the sun.

My heart lay dead when I saw the thing I bad done, And I struck at the wind, I ran in the dark,

I kissed the huge hands of time, I laughed at rain ;

For I, who had loved a Lamle., well I knew

I should never again love a mortal, or see her again . . .

• (1) Smote and Steel. By Carl Sandburg. London: Jonathan oar*: [7a. 6d. net.)—(2) The Jig of 'gratin. By Coed Win• London: Moth* Becker. Os. net.) Now that they are set out I see that none of the quotations I have made support my contention that Mr. Aiken writes like the Turner-Rickward-Hughes school, but if the book is read as a whole, the temperamental likeness becomes clear. In one of its effects it most obviously resembles the work of those English poets, that is to say, it is very markedly less attractive at the first than at the second or third reading.

I am not at all sure that the world will not very soon agree that Mr. Aiken is the most promising of American poets. Though I fancy that we have not in this country seen all his work, I should say that his achievement did not equal that of Mr. Vachel Lindsay or possibly Mr. Robert Frost, but his book is packed so full of matter, his power of thought and interest in technique are so obvious, that he may well have a very brilliant future. What remains to be seen is whether he ever achieves the complete fusion of all the ingredients which go to make the highest sort of poetry. A great many, perhaps most, of these ingredients are present in his work, but for the moment many of them are in the raw state.

A. WILLIAMS-ELLIS.