The Evening Star SATURDAY, JANUARY 28, 1928. THE NEW POETRY.

Evening Star, Issue 19776, 28 January 1928, Page 6

The Evening Star SATURDAY, JANUARY 28, 1928. THE NEW POETRY.

A common prediction made in war time was that, when the war was over, England would see such a renewal of poetry as made the sequel of the Elizabethan triumphs of warfare and expansion and of the great struggle with Napoleon. Is the prediction being realised? From the great number of poets that are now writing, and the interest that is being shown in their production, the conclusion becomes natural that it is. England once again is a nest of singing birds. Whether their songs are as great as the old, and whether they will last as long, is another question, not to be hastily answered. The number of them certainly is astonishing. Seven years ago the Poetry Book Shop issued a bibliography of modern poetry which contained “as far as possible a complete record of books of poetry published from January, 1912, to the end of May, 1920.” The list did not include anthologt'S or prose dramas, yet the number of the authors was over a thousand, and of these 104 were considered worthy of a short critical note. A list compiled in 1907 from all available sources showed that the total number of poets known to have published volumes of verse in England down to that date was about 700. The number of present poets, therefore, simply dwarfs all the records of 1 past periods. The wise man will be thankful for the “God’s plenty” of all this output, will enjoy what ho can of recreation and beauty from it, and not worry himself overmuch in comparisons of its quality with that of the past. Its quality cannot be appraised, except very tentatively, by this generation. Specially foolish docs it seem that attempts should bo made to praise it at the price of disparagement of the past, which is the only touchstone by which it can be judged. It is always being weighed and assessed, however, frequently with the implication of “where’s your Willie Shakespeare or at least your Tennyson and Wordsworth —“now?” so that interest must be felt in those appraisements. The first thing to be noted about this new efflorescence of poetry, or efflorescence of the “ new poetry,” is that it makes no real break with the past. It stands, or the great body of it stands, not as the consequence of any sudden revulsion from past standards, but as the result of a continuous development from what had gone before. The war would appear to have exercised very little real influence upon it. The poets who are most honored by our youngest generation arc not new poets; they wore already writing, and had done more or less of their most typical work, bolore the giants who dominated the last half ol the nineteenth century, and whom it is a fashion now to depreciate, had passed away, or at least before their prestige had commenced to wane. Many of Thomas Hardy’s poems were produced in the sixties, and bis style never changed. Dr Bridges, who has been a chief example to the school, published what are still his besEknown and most treasured lyrics, the live books of the ‘ Shorter Poems,’ as early as 1890. Mr A. E. Honsman’s ‘Shropshire End,’ which was another guiding light, appeared in 1896. None of these made any extreme departure from the past. Mr Hardy was the least an innovator. It has been said recently, and in a journal to whose judgments on such matters we should give no small respect, that when his first “miscellaneous collection of verse ” appeared in 1898 it contained poems dated 1866, and “ these verses, which had lain so long in his desk, were more modern by nearly twenty years than the verses even of the poets who were escaping from the Victorian prison-house.” But that modernity surely consisted much more in his subjects and his philosophy than in his severe simplicity, his discarding of ornament, and his “ rejection of poetry as anything but the .medium for the exact expression of what Is truly realised.” In so far as these were new, they were merely a reversion to an older past—the past of Wordsworth, of Crabho, of John Clare. And Matthew Arnold, also writing in the sixties, was severe and plain, if that was not ordinarily the Tennysonian manner.

We talk too much of the Victorian “prison-house.” That age had its own adventurers, if it did not aspire to a freedom in the discussion of sexual matters which has given us in these latest days ‘The Butcher Shop.’ It does not suggest confinement if we consider it not only as the ago of poet and other moralists, but of Barham and Gilbert and Lewis Carroll. Dr Bridges and Mr Walter De la Mare (born in 1873) have gone much further in the way of real metrical innovation than either Mr Hardy or Mr Housman, but even in the Victorian age a poet, Mr Gerald Hopkins, could make such experiments as this; — Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove uuleaving? 1/eaves like the things of man you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can vou ?

He was nob greatly honored at the time when ho wrote, and is not much more honored now. The “ new freedom ” was not lacking to the rhythms of a groat Elizabethan, Thomas Campion. The youngest poets have, delighted their generation by a few’ lyrics each, for the most part, rather than by their poems as a whole. Hence the great vogue in this day of anthologies, which never were so numerous or so much bought before. They can be studied as a school in two books which have just been published—‘ New Paths on Helicon,’ by Sir Henry Newbolt, than whom nobody could speak with more discernment and authority, and ‘Poetry To-day,’ by Mr iolo A. Williams. Mr Williams gives ns one of the happiest descriptions of Thomas Hardy’s poetry when ho writes: “Mr Hardy is, indeed, in the truest sense of the phrase, a poet of to-day: but he is also an old man, and his verse is an old man’s poetry—twisted and gnarled as an ancient yew tree, yet as full of beauty of line and bearing as many green shoots.” Sir Henry Newbolt concludes his review of the youngest poets in saying: 1 ‘ The whole survey seems to. me to show’ that throughout these twenty-five years there has been n movement of liberation and of reordering, which has been carried to a satisfactory issue; old prejudices have been eliminated or very much diminished, new resources have

.been gained, and the danger of an antagonism between the old poetry and the new has almost disappeared. I can myself see no difficulty in printing, for example, poems by Charlotte Mew, Herbert Read, or Peter Quennell side by side with the work of the ‘ Golden Treasury’ poets. They show the same method of selection and concentration, the same obedience to their own law, the same instinctive adaptation of rhythm to the mood or attitude to be expressed.”