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Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21819, 23 November 1940, Page 10

“A literary monthly which publishes a fair amount of verse reports that since the outbreak of war it has been practically flooded out with poetical MSS. Other journals have likely had a similar experience,” says the Glasgow Herald. In time of war, it appears, the writing of verse increases greatly in this country, thereby showing that poetry is the “natural national form of self-expression.” Many of the MSS. are being posted to editorial desks from the military camps and depots at home and abroad, and from offices and the workshop bench. So far as can be observed from the comparatively meagre amount of published material as yet available, the writers are expressing individual reactions to war, including reaffirmations of the love of Nature and of the rights of man, and in style the traditionalists are enroaching on the experimentalists. The clear-cut emotions engendered by war, the stark vision given of love, death,

separation, the beauty of the earth, the brevity of life, the fanaticism, the evil, and the sublime courage of men call for a simple form of expression, and English poetry will benefit to-day if it is purged of some of its recent arid obscurities. One cannot foretell in what direction the current of verse will flow. In 1914-18 it flowed from idealistic patriotism and full-throated praise of the soldier-poet’s native soil to devastating criticism, in the poems of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen, of the horrors of trench warfare. During the past 22 years almost every new poet has employed imagery drawn from the Great War and has expressed horror of war in all its aspects. So poets face this war with their eyes open to all its physical conditions, and unfitted or unwilling to write martial odes in the old conventional style.

In reviewing his latest book for the Observer, A. G. Macdonell pays the following tribute to Negley Farson: — “Negley Farson is a master journalist in the grand tradition of such men as Stanley and Nevinson, men of culture and learning, who were also acute observers, vivid descriptive writers, and filled with an inexhaustible desire to see new things and to visit strange places. The many thousands of neople who read Farson’s Way of a Transgressor will remember that he smashed a leg very seriously in an aeroplane accident in Egypt twenty years ago, and he has gone lame ever since, walking with difficulty with the help of a stick. But not even a disability so serious as that can keep him from visiting wild and uncombortable places and enduring hardships that most men would shrink at even if they had not hurt themselves in aeroplane smashes.”