LITERARY GOSSIP

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22004, 30 January 1937, Page 15

LITERARY GOSSIP

Extracts from W. B. Yeats's introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935, which completes the well-known series of Oxford Books:

Robert Bridges’s influence —practice, not theory—was never deadening: he gave to lyric poetry a new cadence, a distinction as deliberate as that of Whistler’s painting, an impulse moulded and checked like those in certain poems of Landor. but different, more in the nerves, less in the blood, more bird-like, less human; words often commonplace made unforgettable by some trick of speeding and slowing. Eliot is an Alexander Pope, working without apparent imagination, producing his effects by a rejection of all rhvthms and metaphors used by the more popular romantics rather than by the discovery of his own, this rejection giving his work an unexaggerated plainness that has the effect of novelty. He has the rhythmical flatness of “The Essay on Man”—in spite Of Miss Sitwell's advocacy I see Pope as Blake and Keats saw him—later in “The Waste Land,” amid much that is moving in symbol and imagery there is much monotony of accent.

When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone. She smooths her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone. I was affected, as I am by these lines, when I saw for the first time a painting by Manet. I longed for the vivid colour and light of Rousseau and Corbet. I have a distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the Great War ... I have rejected these for the same reason that made Arno’d withdraw his “Empedocles on Etna* from circulation: passing suffering is not a theme for poetry.

I read Gerard Hopkins with great difficulty, I cannot keep my attention fixed for more than a few minutes; I suspect a bias born when I began to think. . . . The publication of his work in 1918 made “sprung verse” the fashion, and now his influence has replaced that of Hardy and Bridges. I have said nothing of my own work, not from modesty, but because writing through 50 years I have been now of the same school with John Synge and James Stephens, now in that by Sturge Moore and the younger “Michael Field”; and though the concentration of philosophy and social passion of the school of Day Lewis and MacNeice lay beyond my desire. I would, but for a failure of talent, have been in that of Turner and Dorothy Wellesley.

The poets of whose work most specimens appear in the book are: Oliver St. John Gogarty 17; Yeats 14; Synge 12; W. J. Turner 12; “Michael Field,” Dowson, J. Stephens, R. Nichols, 9 each; A.E., Dorothy Wellesley, R. Hughes, C. D. Lewis, 8 each; Gerard Hopkins, Tagore, W. H. Davies. T. S. Eliot, F. O’Connor, Margot Ruddock, 7 each; Blunt, Bridges, Lionel Johnson, T. S. Moore, W. de la Mare, Harold Monro, D. H. Lawrence, Edith Sitwell, Blunden, F. R. Higgins, 6 each. Mr Yeats’s choice of his own poems will interest readers who have followed his progress and astonish others, perhaps, who halted where he stood 30 or 40 years ago. These are the poems: After long Silence (Speech after long silence); Three Things (O Cruel Death, give three things back); Lullaby. (Beloved, may your sleep be sound); Symbols (A Storm-beaten old Watch-tower); From “Vacillation** (Must we part, von Hugel); Sailing to Byzantium (That is no country for old men); The Rose Tree (O words are lightly spoken); On a Political Prisoner (She that but little patience knew); In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz (The light of evening, Lissadell); To a Friend whose Work has come to Nothing (Now all the truth is out); An Irish Airman forsees his Death (I know that I shall meet my fate); Coole Park, 1929 (I meditate upon a swallow’s flight); Coole and Ballylee, 1931 (Under my window-ledge the waters race); and from “Oedipus at Colonus” (Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span).

The current number of “English* contains an interesting letter from J. C. Dent. In its previous issue “English” had expressed regret that Sir Walter Raleigh was chosen as the official historian of “War in the Air” since that choice may be thought to have deprived us of such a book on Chaucer as “only Raleigh could have written.” Mr Dent writes that by a curious coincidence on the same day as he received this lament he was listening to a young aircraft apprentice’s account of his life at Halton. He told Mr Dent that in his general course he had to do the history of war in the air. “ ‘What book do you use?’ I asked, and he plunged into an enthusiastic account of a book by ‘a fellow called Raleigh—absolutely splendid—seemed to know everything about it.’ This, from a youth of 19, with no pretensions to literary culture, impressed me as one of the most splendid tributes to Raleigh’s genius. He understood and interpreted the spirit of the service so truly that a young airman of a later generation and of an entirely different culture, recognises and responds to its truth. The easy handling of technical material does not make—in'fact, it does not even contribute largely—to the success of a history, and others of us who knew Raleigh as a teacher and a friend must rejoice that the last book he wrote shone in a sphere so remote from the academic and so congenial to his own untrammelled spirit.”

The librarian of the Canterbury Public Library reports that there is a demand for the memoirs of Sir James Elliott, “Scapel and Sword,*’ much of which deals with early Wellington. Two other books attracting attention are Percy Clark's “Autobiography of an Old Drifter.” a volume of South African reminiscences, and Captain John Iron's “Keeper of the Gate,” which contains much about Dover during the Great War. Another is “Pillars of Cloud,” by John Scanlon, a scathing commentary on English politics. Fiction in demand includes Pearl S. Buck’s “Fighting Angel.” Rafael Sabatini’s “The Fortunes of Captain Blood,” Carolyn Wells's “Murder in the Bookshop,” and Bernard Newman’s “The Mussolini Murder Plot.”