PEGASUS, so people say,has run away before the march of science. The explorers of the cosmos today are physicists who speak a language of their own. It is hard to versify the atomic theory or the legends of Einstein. But some try to.
POETRY
THE interpretation of experience in poetry goes on, as it must, for men will always be attempting to embody the highest strain of what they feel in the highest strain of what they can say. And yet any considerable dose of contemporary verse is apt to leave the reader wondering just where the search for great experience and its expression has been lost along the way. Of the recent volumes of verse laid before me for review, some are at least obviously upon the main track of the search; others seem to have been tempted into obscure morasses.
Minnie Maylow’s Story and Other Tales and Scenes, by John Masefield (Macmillan, $2.50), makes no departure from the traditional in method or object. The proper business of poetry has always been story-telling, and Mr. Masefield goes about it in the fashion he has made familiar, with many countryside details, with exciting descriptions of horses and racing, with both legendary and modern figures, with an ease and grace in the management of stanzas and couplets which not infrequently slip into rather empty facility. Together with much true and spontaneous beauty, very fresh, tuneful, and delightful, goes a strain of the vapid and the falsely simple. Mr. Masefield has threshed a good deal of old straw, sometimes beating out fine grain, and sometimes not getting much beyond the straw. He gives us a Chaucerian imitation, strikingly incorrect in some details of language, and not much more correct in its implied notion of the qualities of Chaucer as a poet. He gives us a translation of part of the Odyssey arranged in pseudo-dramatic form. He tells of Dick Whittington, of Henry II and Rosamund, of the legendary landing of the Trojans in Britain. I found ‘The Love Gift’ and ‘The Wild Swan’ as much to my taste as anything in the volume.
Perhaps of greater significance, especially since it stands alone, is the new edition, with hitherto unprinted pieces, of Poems by Wilfread Owen, edited, with biographical material and notes, by Edmund Blunden (Viking Press, $2.00). It is an intolerable tragedy that such a spirit as Owen’s should have been crushed out by the war. I doubt if at the present time it is possible to assess fairly his purely poetic gifts. He himself renounced the wish to be considered merely as a poet, and in the imperfect notes designed for a preface to his war pieces he said that their poetry was in their pity. That he was one of the strongest, most deeply moving, most ironically and fiercely discerning spirits who spoke in abhorrence of war and in heart-rent pity for its victims can hardly be doubted. Yet from early youth, before the shadow fell, he was absorbed in learning the poet’s art, and some day the small body of work which time allowed him to leave must be judged as poetry alone. His elucidations of war may be seen in the poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori,’while an example of his more general poetic gifts is ‘The End,’ a sonnet which haunts the imagination with the echo of great tragedy in union with stern beauty.
The quaint and delightful little volume, Strict Joy and Other Poems, by James Stephens (Macmillan, $1.25), contains some of the most perfectly turned songs and lyrics which I have seen in a long day. Mr. Stephens is gratifyingly fresh and original in idiom; his trifles are works of art which in their skill and perfect chastening make a great deal of American versifying seem intolerably heavy-footed and thick-witted. Moreover, the book contains not only such irresponsible and delicately humorous cobwebs as ‘Apple Blossom,’ but also the succession of theosophical lyrics entitled ‘Thetme’ and Variations,’ a sort of Divine Comedy reduced to the minute, and a renunciation of reason in favor of mystical understanding. The range of accent and beauty of form in the tightly compressed little stanzas are remarkable.
Of the American poets in the group under review I wish I could speak more enthusiastically. In Matthias at the Door (Macmillan, $1.75), Edwin Arlington Robinson adds another to the lengthening list of his contemporary novels in wintry blank verse. Again the spiritual point at stake — the mysterious fact that three people have to die to reveal to Matthias his self-righteousness— is good; and again the plot in which the point is embodied is melodramatic, and the characters faint and abstract. The book continues the process by which Mr. Robinson’s style has reduced itself to a cycle of mannerisms.
In The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones (Scribners, $2.00), Conrad Aiken relates the life of an undistinguished citizen by supposing that the various objects closely associated with him offer their comments on his career and announce their part in it. The speakers include articles of clothing, rooms, books, park benches, and the like, and the episodes they recall are frequently disreputable. The book is another expression of the fundamental revulsion from life to which sensitive natures are prone, and which rises to grandeur and terror in such writers as Swift. Mr. Aiken seems to intend an ironic contrast between the terms in which a great ritual, such as that in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, speaks of the life of man, and the realities and betrayals which surround it in the crude world of things and vulgar experience. The ironic contrast is legitimate; it is in essence a powerful and original conception. But it requires great execution, and on the side of form and expression it seems to me that Mr. Aiken has nullified whatever possibilities of achievement his theme intrinsically possessed.
THEODORE MORRISON