The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935
chosen by
[Oxford University Press, $3.75]
ONE is almost at a loss to review this anthology. Forty-five pages of introduction and over four hundred pages of text fail to record the taste or convictions of one of the best of our modern poets, the man who was a warded the Nobel Prize while Thomas Hardy was still living.
Yet the introduction is revelatory in many ways. Let us consider a few aspects of it. Mr. Yeats remarks that he has plucked the foreign feathers from the Ballad of Reading Gaol to retain those portions which show a stark realism akin to that of Thomas Hardy. The ‘foreign feathers’ are doubtless the verbal plumage affected by Wilde and the æsthetes in general. Why, then, in the text of the book do we find nine selections from Ernest Dowson, as against four from Hardy, five from A. E. Housman, and six from Robert Bridges? (Yeats himself is represented by fourteen pieces.) Surely Dowson is mere fluff. The point I must deduce is this: Yeats’s critical faculties are muddled; subconsciously, his sympathies lie (1) with the Celtic revival, (2) with the æsthetic school of the ’90s, and (3) with the Classical school of Bridges; consciously, he makes every effort to placate the modern schools, which seem to frighten him. This Laodicean introduction bears embarrassing testimony of his dilemma.
He pays hasty respects to the genius of Hopkins, Hardy, and Bridges, — whom he admires, — but adds, ‘I will consider the genius of these three when the development of schools gives them great influence.’ Now what can this mean? Shall a writer be considered only in the light of his school? Then Milton must wait until Wordsworth’s period for just criticism; Shelley can be appraised only in the light of Francis Thompson, and Shakespeare can receive no consideration whatever!
These schools, of which Mr. Yeats stands in such awe, command a flattering slice of the Introduction; the school of Eliot, the school of Edith Sitwell, and the school of Pound — in about equal proportions. Now Yeats obviously does not like these poets. But he is afraid of them. Therefore, he rebukes with one phrase and hastily contradicts himself with the most fulsome homage. Pound ‘is probably the source of that lack of form and consequent obscurity which is the main defect of Auden, Day Lewis, and their school, a school which, as will presently be seen, I greatly admire.’
Mr. Yeats lumps together the gummy Orientalisms of Rabindranath Tagore and the sensitive translations of Arthur Waley — much to the advantage of Tagore, who gets seven inclusions to Waley’s one.
Ah, sad and strange! ‘I too have tried to be modern,’ writes Mr. Yeats. It is better not to be self-deceived. A pathetic instance of this attempt to be modern is the reprinting of Pater’s passage on the Mona Lisa in cadenced verse, as the opening selection of the volume. Truly Pater had much to learn about his own prose. We are reminded of that younger Yeats, who, in dealing with Blake’s American Revolution, scoured the literature of the occult to identify the ‘thirteen angels’ who were, of course, none other than New Jersey, Massachusetts, and the other original states.
The selections and omissions are as capricious as the Introduction. I fear the book deserves its place beside Bliss Carman’s Oxford Book of American Verse.
ROBERT HILLYER