."^ / 
 
 ). * .0 N • \'^ 
 
 
 ^'^' .<^' 
 
 ^^% 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 \ ■ /A 
 
 .\V 
 
 V ^^ 
 
 \:^ ^ 
 
 ^ ,0' 
 
 
 
 ;^ 
 
 
 ,?^4\o' •^c''.' 
 
 o- ..«•• _,..'=^A 
 
 .6^" 
 
 
 j^ ,,^/'^^, 
 
 
 
 N C 
 
 r%.^ ■'^. ,^ ^# 
 
 r^?^% 
 
 
 o 0' 
 
 v^^ '^^^ 
 
 \ 
 
 
 
 
 A^ <^ 
 
 : '^^.^^ 
 
 ,V' * 
 
 ■-.,;.v#' 
 
 
 '^<< 
 
 %£^2. 
 
 
 
 ■^, A' 
 
 
 
 . -^ V .^/>frj^ 
 
 
 vV' .^;^w%k/, -^ 
 
 
 ^<s^" ^H^^: 
 
 iispr 
 
 i>^^ 
 
 ^V ./>, 
 
 ,0" -o, 
 
 N» s ■•> V ;- '/> 
 
 ,-v 
 
 •r"-^ ^ 
 
 N^ ^.r?-?:. 
 
 
 X''P:2^ -^ 
 
 ^^A v^ 
 
 .^'^^^ 
 
 
 4 •Y'. \*^^^ 
 
 
 
 
 .;i:!?ife^ ' 
 
 ■^^. ,^xV 
 
 ^..\^ 
 
 * .-."^^ 
 
 • 0' 
 
 
 ./\= 
 
^^. 
 
 I.' 
 
 o 0^ 
 
 ^^^ >y 
 
 ■^ '^. -v^ 
 
 G 
 
 
 ' -.^ 
 
 ^^ 
 
 r • 
 
 
 '>%'-^.V 
 
 «/ 
 
 ', %■ 4- 
 
 
 - </^ ,f- 
 
 
 ,- .s^% 
 
 
 ,' .^v- <■ 
 
 
 -1^^ < , 
 
 
 ^' ■-•IfiSW'.^. .^' 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology 
 of This Art, from Evidence Mainly Subjective 
 
 By ROBERT GRAVES 
 
 New Yok ALFRED • A • KNOPF Mciaxn 
 
COPYBIGHT, 1922, BY 
 ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc. 
 
 Published, May, 19n 
 
 •Grn 
 
 Set up and printed hy the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, K. Y. 
 Paper furnished ly Henry Lindenmeyr & Sons, New York, N. Y. 
 Bound ly the H. Wolff Estate, New York, N. Y. 
 
 MANUrACTTBKD IN THB VNITBD STATES OT AMERICA 
 
 ^ JUN -2 1922 
 
 ©CI.A661951 
 
To T. E. Lawrence of Arabia and 
 All SouVs College, Oxford, and to 
 W. H. R. Rivers of the Solomon Is- 
 lands and St. Johns College, Cam- 
 bridge, my gratitude for valuable 
 critical help, and the dedication of 
 this book. 
 
. . . Also of the Mustarde Tarte: Suche 
 problemis to paynt, it longyth to his arte. 
 
 John Skelton. 
 
 Poetry subdues to union under its light yoke 
 all irreconcilable things. 
 
 P. B. Shelley. 
 
NOTE 
 
 The greater part of this book will appear con- 
 troversial, but any critic who expects me to argue on 
 what I have written, is begged kindly to excuse me; 
 my garrison is withdrawn without a shot fired and his 
 artillery may blow the fortress to pieces at leisure. 
 j These notebook reflections are only off^ered as being 
 Dased on the rules which regulate my own work at 
 the moment, for many of which I claim no universal 
 application and have promised no lasting regard. 
 They have been suggested from time to time mostly 
 by particular problems in the writing of my last two 
 volumes of poetry. Hesitating to formulate at present 
 a comprehensivewater-tight philosophy of poetry, I 
 have dispensed with a continuous argument, and so 
 the sections either stand independently or are in- 
 tended to get their force by suggestive neighbourliness 
 rather than by logical catenation. The names of the 
 glass houses in which my name as an authority on 
 poetry lodges at present, are to be found on a back 
 page. 
 
 It is a heartbreaking task to reconcile literary and 
 scientific interests in the same book. Literary en- 
 
 vii 
 
NOTE 
 
 thusiasts seem to regard poetry as something mirac- 
 ulous, something which it is almost blasphemous to 
 analyse, witness the outcry against R. L. Stevenson 
 when he merely underlined examples of Shakes- 
 peare's wonderful dexterity in the manipulation of 
 consonants; 'most scientists on the other hand, being 
 either benevolently contemptuous of poetry, or if in- 
 terested, insensitive to the emotional quality of words 
 and their associative subtleties, themselves use words 
 as weights and counters rather than as chemi- 
 cals powerful in combination and have written, if at 
 all, so boorishly about poetry that the breach has been 
 actually widened. If any false scientific assump- 
 tions or any bad literary blunders I have made, be 
 held up for popular execration, these may yet act as 
 decoys to the truth which I am anxious to buy even 
 at the price of a snubbing; and where in many cases 
 no trouble has apparently been taken to check over- 
 statements, there is this excuse to offer, that when 
 putting a cat among pigeons it is always advisable to 
 make it as large a cat as possible. 
 
 R.G. 
 Islip, 
 Oxford. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I DEFINITIONS, 13 
 
 II THE NINE MUSES, 15 
 
 III POETRY AND PRIMITIVE MAGIC, 19 
 
 IV CONFLICT OF EMOTIONS, 22 
 
 V THE PATTERN UNDERNEATH, 24 
 
 VI INSPIRATION, 26 
 
 VII THE PARABLE OF MR. POETA AND MR. LECTOR, 
 
 27 
 
 VIII THE CARPENTER'S SON, 31 
 
 IX THE GADDING VINE, 33 
 
 X THE DEAD END AND THE MAN OF ONE POEM, 36 
 
 XI SPENSER'S CUFFS, 38 
 
 XII CONNECTION OF POETRY AND HUMOUR, 40 
 
 XIII DICTION, 41 
 
 XIV THE DAFFODILS, 42 
 XV VERS LIBRE, 45 
 
 XVI MOVING MOUNTAINS, 50 
 
 XVII LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI, 50 
 
 XVIII THE GENERAL ELUOTT, 55 
 
 XIX THE GOD CALLED POETRY, 62 
 
 XX LOGICALIZATION, 66 
 
 XXI LBHTATIONS, 69 
 
 XXII THE NAUGHTY BOY, 71 
 
 XXm THE CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC IDEAS, 72 
 
 XXIV COLOUR, 76 
 
 XXV PUTTY, 78 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 XXVI READING ALOUD. 81 
 
 XXVII L'ARTE DELLA PITTURA, 82 
 
 XXVIII ON WRITING MUSICALLY, 83 
 
 XXIX THE USE OF POETRY, 84 
 
 XXX HISTORIES OF POETRY, 86 
 
 XXXI THE BOWL MARKED DOG, 87 
 
 XXXII THE ANALYTIC SPIRIT, 88 
 
 XXXm RHYME AND ALLITERATION, 89 
 
 XXXIV AN AWKWARD FELLOW CALLED ARIPHRADES, 90 
 
 XXXV IMPROVISING NEW CONVENTIONS, 92 
 
 XXXVI WHEN IN DOUBT . . . , 93 
 
 XXXVII THE EDITOR WITH THE MUCKRAKE, 94 
 
 XXXVIII THE MORAL QUESTION, 94 
 
 XXXIX THE POET AS OUTSIDER, 96 
 
 XL A POLITE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT, 97 
 
 XLI FAKE POETRY, BAD POETRY AND MERE VERSE, 
 97 
 
 XLH A DMLOGUE ON FAKE POETRY, 101 
 
 XLIII ASKING ADVICE, 102 
 
 XLIV SURFACE FAULTS, AN ILLUSTRATION, 103 
 
 XLV LINKED SWEETNESS LONG DRAWN OUT, 106 
 
 XLVI THE FABLE OF THE IDEAL GADGET, 108 
 
 XLVII SEQUELS ARE BARRED, 111 
 
 XLVIII TOM FOOL, 111 
 
 XLIX CROSS RHYTHM AND RESOLUTION, 113 
 
 L MY NAME IS LEGION, FOR WE ARE MANY, 116 
 
 LI THE PIG BABY, 121 
 
 LH APOLOGY FOR DEFINITIONS, 122 
 
 LIII TIMES AND SEASONS, 124 
 
 LIV TWO HERESIES, 125 
 
 LV THE ART OF EXPRESSION, 126 
 
 LVI GHOSTS IN THE SHELDONIAN, 129 
 
 LVII THE LAYING-ON OF HANDS, 130 
 
 LVIII WAYS AND MEANS, 132 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 LIX POETRY AS LABOUR, 134 
 LX THE NECESSITY OF ARROGANCE, 134 
 LXI IN PROCESSION, 137 
 
 APPENDIX: THE DANGERS OF DEFINITION, 143 
 
DEFINITIONS 
 
 THERE are two meanings of Poetry as the poet 
 himself has come to use the word: — first, 
 Poetry, the unforeseen fusion in his mind of 
 apparently contradictory emotional ideas; and second, 
 Poetry, the more-or-less deliberate attempt, with the 
 help of a rhythmic mesmerism, to impose an illusion 
 of actual experience on the minds of others. In its 
 first and peculiar sense it is the surprise that 
 comes after thoughtlessly rubbing a mental Aladdin's 
 lamp, and I would suggest that every poem worthy of 
 the name has its central idea, its nucleus, formed 
 by this spontaneous process; later it becomes the duty 
 of the poet as craftsman to present this nucleus in the 
 most effective way possible, by practising poetry 
 more consciously as an art. He creates in passion, 
 then by a reverse process of analyzing, he tests the 
 implied suggestions and corrects them on common- 
 sense principles so as to make them apply universally. 
 Before elaborating the idea of this spontaneous 
 Poetry over which the poet has no direct control, it 
 would be convenient to show what I mean by the 
 Poetry over which he has a certain conscious control, 
 by contrasting its method with the method of standard 
 
 [13] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 Prose. Prose in its most prosy form seems to be the 
 art of accurate statement by suppressing as far as 
 possible the latent associations of words; for the con- 
 venience of his readers the standard prose-writer uses 
 an accurate logical phrasing in which perhaps the 
 periods and the diction vary with the emotional mood; 
 but he only says what he appears at first to say. 
 In Poetry the implication is more important than the 
 manifest statement; the underlying associations of 
 every word are marshalled carefully. Many of the 
 best English poets have found great difficulty in 
 writing standard prose; this is due I suppose to a sort 
 of tender-heartedness, for standard prose-writing 
 seems to the poet very much like turning the machine 
 guns on an innocent crowd of his own work people. 
 
 Certainly there is a hybrid form, prose poetry, in 
 which poets have excelled, a perfectly legitimate 
 medium, but one that must be kept distinct from both 
 its parent elements. It employs the indirect method 
 of poetic suggestion, the flanking movement rather 
 than the frontal attack, but like Prose, does not trouble 
 to keep rhythmic control over the reader. This 
 constant control seems an essential part of Poetry 
 proper. But to expect it in prose poetry is to be dis- 
 appointed; we may take an analogy from the wilder 
 sort of music where if there is continual changing of 
 time and key, the listener often does not "catch on" to 
 each new idiom, so that he is momentarily confused 
 by the changes and the unity of the whole musical 
 form is thereby broken for him. So exactly in prose 
 
 [14] 
 
THE NINE MUSES 
 poetry. In poetry proper our delight is in the emo- 
 tional variations from a clearly indicated norm of 
 rhythm and sound-texture ; but in prose poetry there is 
 no recognizable norm. Where in some notable pas- 
 sages (of the Authorised Version of the Bible for 
 instance) usually called prose poetry, one does find 
 complete rhythmic control even though the pattern is 
 constantly changing, this is no longer prose poetry, it 
 is poetry, not at all the worse for its intricate rhyth- 
 mic resolutions. Popular confusion as to the various 
 properties and qualities of Poetry, prose poetry, 
 verse, prose, with their subcategories of good, bad 
 and imitation, has probably been caused by the 
 inequality of the writing in works popularly regarded 
 as Classics, and made taboo for criticism. There are 
 few "masterpieces of poetry" that do not occasionally 
 sink to verse, many disregarded passages of Prose 
 that are often prose poetry and sometimes even poetry 
 itself. 
 
 II 
 
 THE NINE MUSES 
 
 I SUPPOSE that when old ladies remark with a 
 breathless wonder "My dear, he has more than 
 mere talent, I am convinced he has a touch of 
 genius'^ they are differentiating between the two parts 
 of poetry given at the beginning of the last section, 
 between the man who shows a remarkable aptitude 
 
 [15] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 for conjuring and the man actually also in league with 
 the powers of magic. The weakness of originally 
 unspontaneous poetry seems to be that the poet has 
 only the very small conscious part of his experience 
 to draw upon, and therefore in co-ordinating the 
 central images, his range of selection is narrower and 
 the links are only on the surface. On the other hand, 
 spontaneous poetry! untested by conscious analysis has 
 the opposite weakness of being liable to surface faults 
 and unintelligible thought-connections. Poetry com- 
 posed in sleep is a good instance of the sort I mean. 
 The rhymes are generally inaccurate, the texture 
 clumsy, there is a tendency to use the same words 
 close together in different senses, and the thought-con- 
 nections are so free as to puzzle the author himself 
 when he wakes. A scrap of dream poetry sticks in 
 my mind since my early schooldays : 
 
 "It's Henry the VIII! 
 It's Henry the VIII! 
 I know him by the smile on his face 
 He is leading his armies over to France. 
 
 Here eighth and faee seemed perfect rhymes, to the 
 sleeping ear, the spirit was magnificent, the impli- 
 cations astonishing; but the waking poet was forced 
 to laugh. I believe that in the first draft of 
 Coleridge's Kuhla Khan, Abora was the rhyme for 
 Dulcimer, as: — 
 
 "A damsel with a dulcimer 
 Singing of Momit Abora" 
 
 [16] 
 
THE NINE MUSES 
 
 because "saw" seems too self-conscious an assonance 
 and too far removed from "Abora" to impress us as 
 having been part of the original dream poem. 
 "Could I revive within me" again is surely written in 
 a waking mood, probably after the disastrous visit of 
 the man from Porlock. 
 
 Henceforward, in using the word Poetry I mean 
 both the controlled and uncontrollable parts of 
 the art taken together, because each is helpless without 
 the other. And I do not wish to limit Poetry, as there 
 is a new tendency to do, merely to the short dramatic 
 poem, the ballad and the lyric, though it certainly is a 
 convenience not to take these as the normal manifes- 
 tations of Poetry in order to see more clearly the 
 inter-relation of such different forms as the Drama, 
 the Epic, and the song with music. In the 
 Drama, the emotional conflict which is the whole 
 cause and meaning of Poetry is concentrated 
 in the mental problems of the leading character 
 or characters. They have to choose for instance 
 between doing what they think is right and 
 the suff'ering or contempt which is the penalty, 
 between the gratification of love and the fear of 
 hurting the person they love, or similar dilemmas. 
 The lesser actors in the drama do not themselves 
 necessarily speak the language of poetry or have any 
 question in their minds as to the course they should 
 pursue; still, by throwing their weight into one scale 
 or another they aff'ect the actions of the principals 
 and so contribute to the poetry of the play. It is only 
 
 [17] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 the master dramatist who ever attempts to develop 
 subsidiary characters in sympathy with the principals. 
 
 The true Epic appears to me as an organic growth 
 of dramatic scenes, presented in verse which only 
 becomes true poetry on occasion; but these scenes are 
 so placed in conflicting relation that between them 
 they compose a central theme of Poetry not to be 
 found in the detachable parts, and this theme is a 
 study of the interactions of the ethical principles of 
 opposing tribes or groups. In the Iliad, for instance, 
 the conflict is not only between the Trojan and Greek 
 ideas, but between groups in each camp. In the 
 Odyssey it is between the ethics of sea-wandering and 
 the ethics of the dwellers on dry land. I would be in- 
 clined to deny the Beowulf as an epic, describing it 
 instead as a personal allegory in epical surroundings. 
 The Canterbury Tales are much nearer to an English 
 Epic, the interacting principles being an imported 
 Eastern religion disguised in Southern dress and a 
 ruder, more vigorous Northern spirit unsubdued even 
 when on pilgrimage. 
 
 The words of a song do not necessarily show in 
 themselves the emotional conflict which I regard as 
 essential for poetry, but that is because the song is 
 definitely a compound of words and music, and the 
 poetry lies in this relation. Words for another man's 
 music can hardly have a very lively independent ex- 
 istence, yet with music they must combine to a power- 
 ful chemical action; to write a lyric to conflict with 
 imaginary music is the most exacting art imaginable, 
 
 [18] 
 
POETRY AND PRIMITIVE MAGIC 
 
 and is rather like trying to solve an equation in x, y 
 and z, given only x. 
 
 I wonder if there are as many genuine Muses as the 
 traditional nine; I cannot help thinking that one or 
 two of them have been counted twice over. But the 
 point of this section is to show the strong family like- 
 ness between three or four of them at least. 
 
 Ill 
 
 POETRY AND PRIMITIVE MAGIC 
 
 ONE may think of Poetry as being like 
 Religion, a modified descendant of primitive 
 Magic; it keeps the family characteristic of 
 stirring wonder by creating from unpromising lifeless 
 materials an illusion of unexpected passionate life. 
 The poet, a highly developed witch doctor, does not 
 specialize in calling up at set times some one 
 particular minor divinity, that of Fear or Lust, of 
 War or Family Affection ; he plays on all the emotions 
 and serves as comprehensive and universal a God as 
 he can conceive. There is evidence for explaining the 
 origin of poetry as I have defined it, thus: — 
 Primitive man was much troubled by the phenomenon 
 of dreams, and early discovered what scientists are 
 only just beginning to acknowledge, that the recol- 
 lection of dreams is of great use in solving problems 
 of uncertainty; there is always a secondary meaning 
 behind our most fantastic nightmares. Members of 
 
 [19] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 a primitive society would solemnly recount their 
 dreams to the wise ones of the clan and ask them to 
 draw an inference. Soon it happened that, in cases 
 of doubt, where the dream was forgotten and could 
 not be recalled, or where it was felt that a dream was 
 needed to confirm or reverse a decision, the peculiarly 
 gifted witch doctor or priestess would induce a sort 
 of self -hypnotism, and in the light of the dream so 
 dreamed, utter an oracle which contained an answer 
 to the problem proposed. The compelling use of 
 rhythm to hold people's attention and to make them 
 beat their feet in time, was known, and the witch 
 doctor seems to have combined the rhythmic beat of a 
 drum or gong with the recital of his dream. In these 
 rhythmic dream utterances, intoxicating a primitive 
 community to sympathetic emotional action for a par- 
 ticular purpose of which I will treat later. Poetry, in 
 my opinion, originated, and the dream symbolism of 
 Poetry was further encouraged by the restrictions of 
 the taboo, which made definite reference to certain 
 people, gods and objects, unlucky. 
 
 This is not to say that verse-recital of laws or 
 adventures or history did not possibly come before 
 oracular poetry, and whoever it was who found it 
 convenient that his word stresses should correspond 
 with beat of drum or stamp of feet, thereby originated 
 the rhythm that is common both toi verse and to poetry. 
 Verse is not necessarily degenerate poetry; rhymed 
 advertisement and the memoria technica have kept up 
 the honest tradition of many centuries; witty verse 
 
 [20] 
 
POETRY AND PRIMITIVE MAGIC 
 
 with no poetical pretensions justifies its existence a 
 hundred times over; even the Limerick can become 
 delightful in naughty hands ; but where poetry differs 
 from other verse is by being essentially a solution to 
 some pressing emotional problem and has always the 
 oracular note. 
 
 Between verse, bad poetry and fake poetry, there 
 is a great distinction. Bad poetry is simply the work 
 of a man who solves his emotional problems to his 
 own satisfaction but not to anybody else's. Fake 
 poetry, the decay of poetry, corresponds exactly with 
 fake magic, the decay of true magic. It happens 
 that some member of the priestly caste, finding it im- 
 possible to go into a trance when required, even with 
 the aid of intoxicants, has to resort to subterfuge. 
 He imitates a state of trance, recalls some one else's 
 dream which he alters slightly, and wraps his oracu- 
 lar answer in words recollected from the lips of gen- 
 uine witch doctors. He takes care to put his implied 
 meaning well to the fore and the applicants give him 
 payment and go away as well pleased with their 
 money's worth as the readers of Tupper, Montgomery 
 and Wilcox' with the comfortable verses supplied them 
 under the trade name of "Poetry." 
 
 Acrostics and other verses of wit have, I believe, 
 much the same ancestry in the ingenious double 
 entendres with which the harassed priestesses of 
 Delphi insured against a wrong guess. 
 
 [21] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 IV 
 
 CONFLICT OF EMOTIONS 
 
 THE suggestion that an emotional conflict is 
 necessary for the birth of true poetry will 
 perhaps not be accepted without illustrative 
 instances. But one need only take any of the most 
 famous lines from Elizabethan drama, those generally 
 acknowledged as being the most essential poetry, and 
 a battle of the great emotions, faith, hope or love 
 against fear, grief or hate, will certainly appear; 
 though one side may indeed be fighting a hopeless 
 battle. 
 
 When Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is waiting for the 
 clock to strike tvv^elve and the Devil to exact his debt, 
 he cries out: 
 
 That Time may cease and midnight never come 
 O lente, lente currite noctis equi. 
 
 Scholastic commentators have actually been found to 
 wonder at the "inappropriateness" of "Go slowly, 
 slowly, coursers of the night," a quotation originally 
 spoken by an Ovidian lover with his arms around the 
 mistress from whom he must part at dawn. They do 
 not even note it as marking the distance the scholar 
 Faustus has travelled since his first dry-boned Latin 
 quotation Bene disserere est finis logices which he 
 pedantically translates : 
 
 [22] 
 
CONFLICT OF EMOTIONS 
 
 Is, to dispute well, Logicke's chiefest end. 
 
 Far less do they see how Marlowe has made the lust 
 of life, in its hopeless struggle against the devils com- 
 ing to bind it for the eternal bonfire, tragically unable 
 to find any better expression than this feeble over- 
 sweetness; so that there follows with even greater in- 
 sistence of fate: — 
 
 The starres moove stil, time runs, the clocke wil strike, 
 The divel wil come and Faustus must be damnd. 
 
 When Lady Macbeth, sleep-walking, complains that 
 "all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little 
 hand," these perfumes are not merely typically sweet 
 smells to drown the reek of blood. They represent 
 also her ambitions for the luxury of a Queen, and the 
 conflict of luxurious ambition against fate and dam- 
 nation is as one-sided as before. Or take Webster's 
 most famous line in his Duchess of Malfi: 
 
 Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young, 
 
 spoken by Ferdinand over the Duchess' body; and 
 that word "dazzle" does duty for two emotions at 
 once, sun-dazzled awe at loveliness, tear-dazzled grief 
 for early death. 
 
 The eff*ect of these distractions of mind is so often 
 an appeal to our pity, even for the murderers or for 
 the man who has had his fill of "vaine pleasure for 
 24 yeares" that to rouse this pity has been taken, 
 
 [23] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 wrongly, I think, as the chief end of poetry. Poetry 
 is not always tragedy; and there is no pity stirred by 
 Captain Tobias Hume's love song "Faine would I 
 change this note, To which false love has charmed 
 me," or in Andrew Marvell's Mower's address to the 
 glow-worms : 
 
 Ye country comets that portend 
 
 No war nor prince's funeral, 
 Shining unto no higher end 
 
 Than to presage the grass's fall. 
 
 There is no pity either for Hume's lover who suddenly 
 discovers that he has been making a sad song about 
 nothing, or for Marvell's glow-worms and their rustic- 
 ity and slightness of aim. In the first case Love 
 stands up in its glory against the feeble whining of 
 minor poets ; in the second, thought's of terror and ma- 
 jesty, the heavens themselves blazing forth the death 
 of princes, conflict ineff'ectually with security and 
 peace, the evening glow-worm prophesying fair 
 weather for mowing next morning, and meanwhile 
 lighting rustic lovers to their tryst. 
 
 V 
 
 THE PATTERN UNDERNEATH 
 
 THE power of surprise which marks all true 
 poetry, seems to result from a foreknowledge 
 of certain unwitting processes of the reader's 
 mind, for which the poet more or less deliberately 
 
 [24] 
 
THE PATTERN UNDERNEATH 
 
 provides. The underlying associations of each word 
 in a poem form close combinations of emotion unex- 
 pressed by the bare verbal pattern. 
 
 In this way the poet may be compared with a 
 father piecing together a picture-block puzzle for his 
 children. He surprises them at last by turning over 
 the completed picture, and showing them that by the 
 act of assembling the scattered parts of "Red Riding 
 Hood with the Basket of Food" he has all the while 
 been building up unnoticed underneath another scene 
 of the tragedy — "The Wolf eating the Grandmother." 
 
 The analogy can be more closely pressed ; careless 
 arrangement of the less important pieces or wilfully 
 decorative borrowing from another picture altogether 
 may look very well in the upper scene, but what con- 
 fusion below! 
 
 The possibilities of this pattern underneath have 
 been recognized and exploited for centuries in Far 
 Eastern systems of poetry. I once even heard an 
 English Orientalist declare that Chinese was the only 
 language in which true poetry could be written, be- 
 cause of the undercurrents of allusion contained in 
 every word of the Chinese language. It never 
 occurred to him that the same thing might be 
 unrecognizedly true also of English words. 
 
 [25] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 VI 
 
 "INSPIRATION" 
 
 PEOPLE are always enquiring how exactly 
 poets get their "inspiration," perhaps in the 
 hope that it may happen to themselves one 
 day and that if they know the signs in advance, some- 
 thing profitable may come of it. 
 
 It is a difficult conundrum, but I should answer 
 somehow like this:* — ^The poet is consciously or 
 unconsciously always either taking in or giving out; 
 he hears, observes, weighs, guesses, condenses, 
 idealizes, and the new ideas troop quietly into his 
 mind until suddenly every now and again two of 
 them violently quarrel and drag into the fight a group 
 of other ideas that have been loitering about at the 
 back of his mind for years; there is great excitement, 
 noise and bloodshed, with finally a reconciliation and 
 drinks all round. The poet writes a tactful police 
 report on the affair and there is the poem. 
 
 Or, to put it in a more sober form : — 
 
 When conflicting issues disturb his mind, which in 
 its conscious state is unable to reconcile them logi- 
 cally, the poet acquires the habit of self -hypnotism, 
 as practised by the witch doctors, his ancestors in 
 poetry. 
 
 He learns in self-protection to take pen and paper 
 and let the pen solve the hitherto insoluble problem 
 which has caused the disturbance. 
 
 [26] 
 
MR. POETA AND MR. LECTOR 
 
 I speak of this process of composition as self- 
 hypnotism because on being interrupted the poet ex- 
 periences the disagreeable sensations of a sleep- 
 walker disturbed, and later finds it impossible to 
 remember how the early drafts of a poem ran, though 
 he may recall every word of a version which finally 
 satisfied his conscious scrutiny. Confronted after- 
 wards with the very first draft of the series he cannot 
 in many cases decipher his own writing, far less re- 
 collect the process of thought which made him erase 
 this word and substitute that. Many poets of my ac- 
 quaintance have corroborated what I have just said 
 and also observed that on laying down their pens after 
 the first excitement of composition they feel the same 
 sort of surprise that a man finds on waking from a 
 "fugue," they discover that they have done a piece of 
 work of which they never suspected they were ca- 
 pable; but at the same moment they discover a 
 number of trifling surface defects which were in- 
 visible before. 
 
 VII 
 
 THE PARABLE OF MR. POETA AND MR. LECTOR 
 
 MR. POETA was a child of impulse, and 
 though not really a very careful student of 
 Chaucer himself, was incensed one day at 
 reading a literary article by an old schoolfellow 
 called Lector, patronizing the poet in an impudent 
 
 [27] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 way and showing at the same time a great ignorance 
 of his best work. But instead of taking the more 
 direct and prosaic course of writing a letter of protest 
 to the review which printed the article, or of 
 directly giving the author a piece of his mind, he im- 
 provised a complicated plot for the young man's cor- 
 rection. 
 
 On the following day he invited Mr. Lector to 
 supper at his home and spent a busy morning making 
 preparations. He draped the dining-room walls with 
 crape, took up the carpet, and removed all the 
 furniture except the table and two massive chairs 
 which were finally drawn up to a meal of bread, 
 cheese and water. When supper-time arrived and 
 with it Mr. Lector, Mr. Poeta was discovered sitting 
 in deep dejection in a window seat with his face 
 buried in his hands; he would not notice his guest's 
 arrival for a full minute. Mr. Lector, embarrassed 
 by the strangeness of his reception (for getting no 
 answer to his knock at the door he had forced his way 
 in), was now definitely alarmed by Mr. Poeta's 
 nervous gestures, desultory conversation and his 
 staring eyes perpetually turning to a great rusty 
 scimitar hanging on a nail above the mantelpiece. 
 There was no attendance, nor any knife or plate on the 
 board. The bread was stale, the cheese hard, and no 
 sooner had Mr. Lector raised a glass of water to his 
 lips than his host dashed it from his hands and with 
 a bellow of rage sprang across the table. Mr. Lector, 
 saw him seize the scimitar and flourish it around his 
 
 [28] 
 
MR. POETA AND MR. LECTOR 
 
 head, so for want of any weapon of defence, the 
 unfortunate young man reacted to terror-stricken 
 flight. He darted from the room and heard the 
 blade whistle through the air behind him. 
 
 Out of an open window he jumped and into a small 
 enclosed yard ; with the help of a handy rainwater tub 
 he climbed the opposite wall, then dashed down a 
 pathway through a shrubbery and finding the front 
 door of a deserted cottage standing open, rushed in 
 and upstairs, then breathlessly flinging into an empty 
 room at the stairhead, slammed the door. 
 
 By so slamming the door he had locked it and on 
 recovering his presence of mind found himself a close 
 prisoner, for the only window was stoutly barred and 
 the door lock was too massive to break. Here then, 
 he stayed in confinement for three days, suff*ering 
 severely until released by an accomplice of Mr. Poeta, 
 who aff"ected to be much surprised at finding him there 
 and even threatened an action for trespass. But cold, 
 hungry and thirsty, Mr. Lector had still had for 
 companion in his misery a coverless copy of Chaucer 
 which he found lying in the grate and which he read 
 through from beginning to end with great enjoyment, 
 thereupon reconsidering his previous estimate of the 
 poet's greatness. 
 
 But he never realized that every step he had taken 
 had been predetermined by the supposed maniac and 
 that once frightened off" his balance, he had reacted 
 according to plan. Mr. Poeta did not need to pursue 
 him over the wall or even to go any further than the 
 
 [29] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 dining-room door; he counted on the all-or-none 
 principle of reaction to danger finishing the job for 
 him. So out at the window went Mr. Lector and 
 every recourse offered for escape he accepted iin- 
 questioningly. Mr. Poeta knew well enough that 
 Mr. Lector would eventually treasure that copy of 
 Chaucer prepared for him, as a souvenir of his 
 terrible experience, that he would have it rebound 
 and adopt the poet as a "discovery" of his own. 
 
 The reader in interpreting this parable, must not 
 make too close a comparison of motives; the process 
 is all that is intended to show. The poet, once 
 emotion has suggested a scheme of work, goes over 
 the ground with minute care and makes everything 
 sure, so that when his poem is presented to the reader, 
 the latter is thrown oif his balance temporarily by the 
 novelty of the ideas involved. He has no critical 
 weapons at his command, so he must follow the course 
 wjiich the poet has mapped out for him. He is 
 carried away in spite of himself and though the actual 
 words do not in themselves express all the meaning 
 which the poet manages to convey (Mr. Poeta, as has 
 been said, did not pursue) yet the reader on recover- 
 ing from the first excitement finds the implied con- 
 clusion laid for him to discover, and flattering himself 
 that he has reached it independently, finally carries 
 it off* as his own. Even where a conclusion is 
 definitely expressed in a poem the reader often 
 deceives himself into saying, "I have often thought 
 that before, but never so clearly," when as a matter of 
 
 [30] 
 
THE CARPENTER'S SON 
 fact he has just been unconsciously translating the 
 poet's experience into terms of his own, and finding 
 the formulated conclusion sound, imagines that the 
 thought is originally his. 
 
 VIII 
 THE CARPENTER'S SON 
 
 FABLES and analogies serve very well in- 
 stead of the psychological jargon that 
 would otherwise have to be used in a dis- 
 cussion of the poet's mental clockwork, but they must 
 be supported wherever possible by definite instances, 
 chapter and verse. An example is therefore owed 
 of how easily and completely the poet can 
 deceive his readers once he has assumed control of 
 their imagination, hypnotizing them into a receptive 
 state by indirect sensuous suggestions and by subtle 
 variations of verse-melody; which hypnotism, by the 
 way, I regard as having a physical rather than a 
 mental effect and being identical with the rhythmic 
 hypnotism to which such animals as snakes, elephants 
 or apes are easily subject. 
 
 Turn then to Mr. Housman's classic sequence "A 
 Shropshire Lad," to No. XLVII "The Carpenter's 
 Son," beginning, "Here the hangman stops his cart." 
 Ask any Housman enthusiasts (they are happily 
 many) how long it took them to realize what the poet 
 is forcing on them there. In nine cases out of ten 
 
 [31] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 where this test is applied, it will be found that the 
 lyric has never been consciously recognized as an 
 Apocryphal account of the Crucifixion ; and even those 
 who have consciously recognized the clues offered 
 have failed to formulate consciously the further 
 daring (some would say blasphemous) implica- 
 tions of its position after the last three pieces "Shot, 
 lad? So quick, so clean an ending," "If it chance 
 your eye offend you" and the momentary relief of 
 "Bring in this timeless grave to throw." 
 
 Among Jubilee bonfires; village sports of running, 
 cricket, football; a rustic murder; the London and 
 North Western Railway; the Shropshire Light In- 
 fantry; ploughs; lovers on stiles or in long grass; the 
 ringing of church bells ; and then this suicide by shoot- 
 ing, no reader is prepared for the appearance of the 
 historic Son of Sorrow. The poet has only to call 
 the Cross a gallows-tree and make the Crucified call 
 His disciples "Lads" instead of "My Brethren" or 
 "Children," and we are completely deceived. 
 
 In our almost certain failure to recognize Him in 
 this context lies, I believe, the intended irony of the 
 poem which is strewn with the plainest scriptural 
 allusions. 
 
 In justification of the above and of my deductions 
 about "La Belle Dame sans Merci" in a later section 
 I plead the rule that "Poetry contains nothing hap- 
 hazard," which follows naturally on the theory con- 
 necting poetry with dreams. By this rule I mean 
 that if a poem, poem-sequence or drama is an alle- 
 
 [32] 
 
THE GADDING VINE 
 gory of genuine emotional experience and not a mere 
 cold-blooded exercise, no striking detail and no jux- 
 taposition of apparently irrelevant themes which it 
 contains can be denied at any rate a personal signifi- 
 cance — a cypher that can usually be decoded from 
 another context. 
 
 IX 
 
 THE GADDING VINE 
 
 WHEN we say that a poet is born not made, 
 it is saying something much more that 
 Poetry is essentially spontaneous in ori- 
 gin, and that very little of it can therefore be taught 
 on a blackboard ; it means that a man is not a poet un- 
 less there is some peculiar event in his family history 
 to account for him. It means to me that with the ap- 
 parent exceptions given in the next section, the poet, 
 like his poetry, is himself the result of the fusion of 
 incongruous forces. Marriages between people of 
 conflicting philosophies of life, widely separated 
 nationalities or (most important) different emotional 
 processes, are likely either to result in children hope- 
 lessly struggling with inhibitions or to develop in 
 them a central authority of great resource and most 
 quick witted at compromise. Early influences, other 
 than parental, stimulate the same process. The 
 mind of a poet is like an international conference 
 
 [33] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 composed of delegates of both sexes and every shade 
 of political thought, which is trying to decide on a 
 series of problems of which the chairman has him- 
 self little previous knowledge — ^yet this chairman, 
 this central authority, will somehow contrive to sign a 
 report embodying the specialized knowledge and 
 reconciling the apparently hopeless disagreements of 
 all factions concerned. These factions can be 
 called, for convenience, the poet's sub-personalities. 
 
 It is obviously impossible to analyze with accuracy 
 the various elements that once combined to make a 
 phrase in the mind of a poet long dead, but for the 
 sake of illustration here is a fanciful reconstruction 
 of the clash of ideas that gave us Milton's often quoted 
 "Gadding Vine." The words, to me, represent an 
 encounter between the poet's sub-personalities "B" 
 and "C." Says "B":— 
 
 "What a gentle placid fruitful plant the vine is; I 
 am thinking of putting it in one of my speeches as 
 emblem of the kindly weakness of the Vegetables." 
 
 C replies very tartly: — 
 
 "Gentle placid fruitful fiddle-sticks! Why, my 
 good friend, think of the colossal explosive force re- 
 quired to thrust up that vast structure from a tiny 
 seed buried inches deep in the earth; against the force 
 of gravity too, and against very heavy winds. Placid- 
 ity! Look at its leaves tossing about and its greedy 
 tendrils swaying in search of something to attack. 
 Vegetable indeed! It's mobile, it's vicious, it's more 
 
 [34] 
 
THE GADDING VINE 
 
 like a swarm of gad-flies." B continues obstinate, 
 saying "I never heard such nonsense. A vine is still 
 a vine, in spite of your paradoxes." 
 
 "Anyhow, the juice of the vine makes you gad 
 about pretty lively, sometimes," says C. 
 
 "Grapes are the conventional fruit for the sick- 
 room," retorts B. 
 
 "Well, what did the Greeks think about it?" pur- 
 sues C. "Wasn't Dionysos the god of the Vine? He 
 didn't stop rooted all his life in some miserable little 
 Greek valley. He went gadding off to India and 
 brought back tigers." 
 
 "If you are going to appeal to the poets," returns 
 B, "you can't disregard the position of the vine in 
 decorative art. It has been conventionalized into the 
 most static design you can find, after the lotus. When 
 I say Vine, that's quite enough for me, just V for 
 vegetable." 
 
 They are interrupted by A the master spirit who 
 says with authority: — 
 
 "Silence, the two of you! I rule a compromise. 
 Gall it a "gadding vine" and have done with it." 
 
 The converse of the proposition stated at the begin- 
 ning of this section, namely that every one who has 
 the sort of family history mentioned above and is not 
 the prey of inhibitions, will become a poet, is cer- 
 tainly not intended. Poetry is only one outlet for 
 peculiar individual expression; there are also the 
 
 [35] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 other arts, with politics, generalship, philosophy, and 
 imaginative business; or merely rhetoric, fantastic 
 jokes and original swearing — 
 
 X 
 
 THE DEAD END AND THE MAN OF ONE POEM 
 
 THE question of why Poets suddenly seem to 
 come to a dead end and stop writing true 
 Poetry, is one that has always perplexed lit- 
 erary critics, and the poets themselves still more. 
 The explanation will probably be found in two causes. 
 
 In the first case the poet's preoccupation with the 
 clash of his emotions has been transmuted into a 
 calmer state of meditation on philosophic paradox: 
 but poetry being, by accepted definition, sensuous and 
 passionate is no vehicle of expression for this state. 
 Impersonal concepts can perhaps be expressed in in- 
 tellectual music, but in poetry the musical rhythm 
 and word-texture are linked with a sensuous imagery 
 too gross for the plane of philosophic thought. Thus 
 dithyramb, by which I mean the essentially musical 
 treatment of poetry in defiance of the sense of the 
 words used, is hardly a more satisfactory medium 
 than metaphysical verse: in which even a lyrical 
 sugar-coating to the pill cannot induce the childish 
 mood of poetry to accept philosophic statements re- 
 moved beyond the plane of pictorial allegory. 
 
 In the second case the conflict of the poet's sub- 
 [36] 
 
DEAD END AND MAN OF ONE POEM 
 
 personalities has been finally settled, by some satis- 
 faction of desire or removal of a cause of fear, in the 
 complete rout of the opposing parties, and the victors 
 dictate their own laws, uncontradicted, in legal prose 
 or (from habit) in verse. 
 
 Distinction ought to be drawn between the poet and 
 the man who has written poetry. There are certainly 
 men of only one poem, a James Clarence Mangan, a 
 Christopher Smart, a Julian Grenfell (these are in- 
 stances more convenient than accurate) who may be 
 explained either as born poets, tortured with a life- 
 long mental conflict, though able perhaps only once 
 in their life to "go under" to their own self -hypnotism, 
 or as not naturally poets at all but men who write to 
 express a sudden intolerable clamour in their brain; 
 this is when circumstances have momentarily alien- 
 ated the usually happy members of their mental 
 family, but once the expression has brought reconcilia- 
 tion, there is no further need of poetry, and the poet 
 born out of due time, ceases to be. 
 
 This temporary writing of poetry by normal single- 
 track minds is most common in youth when the sud- 
 den realization of sex, its powers and its limited op- 
 portunities for satisfactory expression, turns the world 
 upside down for any sensitive boy or girl. Wartime 
 has the same sort of effect. I have definite evidence 
 for saying that much of the trench-poetry written 
 during the late war was the work of men not other- 
 wise poetically inclined, and that it was very fre- 
 quently due to an insupportable conflict between 
 
 [37] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 suppressed instincts of love and fear; the officer's 
 actual love which he could never openly show, for the 
 boys he commanded, and the fear, also hidden under 
 a forced gaiety, of the horrible death that threatened 
 them all. 
 
 XI 
 
 SPENSER'S CUFFS 
 
 THE poet's quarrelsome lesser personalities 
 to which I have referred are divided into 
 camps by the distinction of sex. But in a 
 poet the dominant spirit is male and though usually a 
 feminist in sympathy, cannot afford to favour the 
 women at the expense of his own sex. This amplifies 
 my distrust of poets with floppy hats, long hair, ex- 
 travagant clothes and inverted tendencies. Apollo 
 never to my knowledge appears in Greek art as a 
 Hermaphrodite, and the Greeks understood such 
 problems far better than we do. I know it is usual to 
 defend these extravagances of dress by glorifying the 
 Elizabethan age; but let it be remembered that 
 Edmund Spenser himself wore "short hair, little 
 bands and little cuffs." 
 
 If there is no definite sexual inversion to account 
 for breaking out in fancy dress, a poet who is any 
 good at all ought not to feel the need of advertising 
 his profession in this way. As I understand the 
 poet's nature, though he tries to dress as convention- 
 ally as possible, he will always prove too strong for 
 
 [38] 
 
SPENSER'S CUFFS 
 his clothes and look completely ridiculous or very 
 magnificent according to the occasion. 
 
 This matter of dress may seem unimportant, but 
 people are still so shy of acknowledging the poet in 
 his lifetime as a gifted human being who may have 
 something important to say, that any dressing up or 
 unnecessary strutting does a great deal of harm. 
 
 I am convinced that this extravagant dressing up 
 tendency, like the allied tendency to unkemptness, is 
 only another of the many forms in which the capri- 
 cious child spirit which rules our most emotional 
 dreams is trying also to dominate the critical, diligent, 
 constructive man-spirit of waking life, without which 
 the poet is lost beyond recovery. Shelley was a 
 great poet not because he enjoyed sailing paper boats 
 on the Serpentine but because, in spite of this infan- 
 tile preference he had schooled his mind to hard think- 
 ing on the philosophical and political questions of 
 the day and had made friends among men of intellect 
 and sophistication. 
 
 It is from considerations rather similar to these that 
 I have given this book a plain heading and restrained 
 my fancy from elaborating a gay seventeenth-cen- 
 tury title or sub-title: — "A Broad-side from Par- 
 nassus," "The Mustard Tart," "Pebbles to Crack 
 Your Teeth," or "Have at you. Professor Gargoyle!" 
 But I am afraid that extravagance has broken down 
 my determination to write soberly, on almost every 
 page. And ... no, the question of the psychology 
 of poetesses is too big for these covers and too thorny 
 
 [39] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 in argument. When psycho-analysis has provided 
 more evidence on the difference between the 
 symbolism of women's dreams and men's, there will 
 be something to say worth saying. Meanwhile it can 
 only be offered as a strong impression that the dreams 
 of normally-sexed women are, by comparison with 
 those of normally-sexed men, almost always of the 
 same simple and self-centred nature as their poetry 
 and their humour. 
 
 XII 
 CONNECTION OF POETRY AND HUMOUR 
 
 IT was no accident that gave Chaucer, Shakespeare 
 and Keats a very sly sense of humour, because 
 humour is surely only another product of the 
 same process that makes poetry and poets — the 
 reconciliation of incongruities. 
 
 When, for instance, Chaucer says that one of his 
 Canterbury characters could trip and dance "after the 
 schole of Oxenforde" he is saying two things: — 
 
 I. That Absalom thought he could dance well. 
 
 II. That the professors of the University of Oxford 
 are hardly the people from whom one would 
 expect the most likely instruction in that art, 
 
 and to point the joke he adds to "trip and dance" the 
 absurd "and with his legges casten to and fro." A 
 sympathetic grin, as poets and other conjurors know, 
 is the best possible bridge for a successful illusion. 
 
 [40] 
 
DICTION 
 
 Coleridge was the first writer, so far as I know, to see 
 the connection between poetry and humour, but his 
 argument which uses the Irish Bull "I was a fine child 
 but they changed me" to prove the analogy, trails off 
 disappointingly. 
 
 XIII 
 DICTION 
 
 IDEALLY speaking, there is no especially poetic 
 range of subjects, and no especially poetic 
 group of words with which to treat them. 
 Indeed, the more traditionally poetical the subject 
 and the words, the more difficult it is to do anything 
 with them. The nymph, the swain, the faun, and 
 the vernal groves are not any more or less legitimate 
 themes of poetry than Motor Bicycle Trials, Girl 
 Guides, or the Prohibition Question, the only 
 difference being a practical one; the second category 
 may be found unsuitable for the imaginative 
 digestion because these words are still somehow un- 
 cooked; in the former case they are unsuitable be- 
 cause overcooked, rechauffe, tasteless. The cooking 
 process is merely that of constant use. When a word 
 or a phrase is universally adopted and can be used 
 in conversation without any apologetic accentuation, 
 or in a literary review without italics, inverted 
 commas or capital letters, then it is ready for use in 
 poetry. 
 
 [41] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 As a convenient general rule, Mr. Lascelles 
 Abercrombie has pointed out in his admirable 
 pamphlet "Poetry and Contemporary Speech," the 
 poet will always be best advised to choose as the main 
 basis of his diction the ordinary spoken language of 
 his day; the reason being that words grow richer by 
 daily use and take on subtle associations which the 
 artificially bred words of literary or technical appli- 
 cation cannot acquire with such readiness; the former 
 have therefore greater poetic possibilities in juxta- 
 position. 
 
 An objection will be raised to the term "universal" 
 as applied to the audience for poetry; it is a limited 
 universality when one comes to consider it. Most 
 wise poets intend tlieir work only for those who 
 speak the same language as themselves, who have a 
 "mental age" not below normal, and who, if they 
 don't perhaps understand all the allusions in a poem, 
 will know at any rate where to go to look them up in 
 a work of reference. 
 
 XIV 
 
 THE DAFFODILS 
 
 ART of every sort, according to my previous 
 contentions, is an attempt to rationalize 
 some emotional conflict in the artist's mind. 
 When the painter says "That's really good to paint" 
 
 [42] 
 
THE DAFFODILS 
 
 and carefully arranges his still life, he has felt a 
 sort of antagonism between the separate parts of the 
 group and is going to discover by painting on what 
 that antagonism is founded, presenting it as clearly 
 and simply as he knows how, in the slightly distorting 
 haze of the emotion aroused. He never says, "I 
 think I'll paint a jug or bottle, next," any more than 
 the poet says "I've a free morning on Saturday; I'll 
 write an ode to the Moon or something of that sort, 
 and get two guineas for it from the London Mercury J^ 
 No, a particular jug or bottle may well start a train 
 of thought which in time produces a painting, and a 
 particular aspect of the moon may fire some emotional 
 tinder and suggest a poem. But the Moon is no more 
 the subject of the poem than the murder of an 
 Archduke was the cause of the late European War. 
 
 Wordsworth's lines "I wandered lonely as a 
 cloud" are, as he would have said, about "something 
 more" than yellow daffodils at the water's brim. I 
 have heard how schoolmasters and mistresses point out 
 in the "Poetry Lesson" that the whole importance of 
 this poem lies in Wordsworth's simple perception of 
 the beauty of Spring flowers; but it seems to me to be 
 an important poem only because Wordsworth has 
 written spontaneously (though perhaps under his 
 sister's influence) and recorded to his own satis- 
 faction an emotional state which we all can recognize. 
 
 These daff'odils have interrupted the thoughts of 
 an imhappy, lonely man and, reminding him of his 
 childhood, become at once emblems of a golden age 
 
 [43] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 of disinterested human companionship; he uses their 
 memory later as a charm to banish the spectres of 
 trouble and loneliness. I hope I have interpreted the 
 poem correctly. Let us now fantastically sup- 
 pose for the sake of argument that Wordsworth 
 had been intentionally seeking solitude like a hurt 
 beast hating his kind, and had suddenly come across 
 the same daffodil field: he surely might have been 
 struck with a sudden horror for such a huge crowd 
 of flower-faces, especially if his early memories of 
 flower picking had been blighted by disagreeable 
 companionship and the labour of picking for the 
 flower market. He would then have written a poem 
 of exactly the opposite sense, recording his sudden 
 feeling of repulsion at the sight of the flowers and 
 remarking at the end that sometimes when he is lying 
 on his couch in vacant or in pensive mood, they flash 
 across that inward eye which is the curse of solitude, 
 
 "O/i then my heart with horror fills 
 And shudders with the daffodils.'' 
 
 For readers to whom he could communicate his 
 dislike of daffodils on the basis of a common ex- 
 perience of brutal companionship in childhood and 
 forced labour, the poem would seem a masterpiece, 
 and those of them who were schoolmasters would be 
 pretty sure to point out in their Poetry Lessons that 
 the importance of the poem lay in Wordsworth's "per- 
 ception of the dreadfulness of Spring Flowers." 
 
 Again the scholastic critic finds the chief value of 
 [44] 
 
VERS LIBRE 
 
 Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" in the re- 
 ligious argument, and would not be interested to be 
 told that the poet is being disturbed by a melancholy 
 contradiction between his own happy childhood, ideal- 
 istic boyhood and disappointed age. But if he were 
 to go into the psychological question and become 
 doubtful whether as a matter of fact, children have 
 not as many recollections of Hell as of Heaven, 
 whether indeed the grown mind does not purposely 
 forget early misery and see childhood in a deceptive 
 haze of romance; and if he therefore suspected 
 Wordsworth of reasoning from a wrong premise he 
 would have serious doubts as to whether it was a good 
 poem after all. At which conclusion even the most 
 pagan and revolutionary of modern bards would raise 
 a furious protest; if the poem holds together, if the 
 poet has said what he means honestly, convincingly 
 and with passion — as Wordsworth did — the glory 
 and the beauty of the dream are permanently fixed 
 beyond reach of the scientific lecturer's pointer. 
 
 XV 
 VERS LIBRE 
 
 THE limitation of Vers Libre, which I regard 
 as only our old friend, Prose Poetry, broken 
 up in convenient lengths, seems to be that 
 the poet has not the continual hold over his reader's 
 attention that a regulated (this does not mean alto- 
 gether "regular") scheme of verse properly used 
 
 [45] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 would give him. The temporary loss of control must 
 be set off against the freedom which vers libre-ists 
 claim from irrelevant or stereotyped images suggested 
 by the necessity of rhyme or a difficult metre. 
 
 This is not to say that a poet shouldn't start his race 
 from what appears to hardened traditionalists as about 
 ten yards behind scratch; indeed, if he feels that this 
 is the natural place for him, he would be unwise to do 
 otherwise. But my contention is that vers libre has a 
 serious limitation which regulated verse has not. In 
 vers libre there is no natural indication as to how 
 the lines are to be stressed. There are thousands of 
 lines of Walt Whitman's, over the pointing of which, 
 and the intended cadence, elocutionists would dis- 
 agree; and this seems to be leaving too much to 
 chance. 
 
 I met in a modern vers libre poem the line spoken 
 by a fallen angel, "I am outcast of Paradise"; but 
 how was I to say it? What clue had I to the intended 
 rhythm, in a poem without any guiding signs? In 
 regulated verse the reader is compelled to accentuate 
 as the poet determines. Here is the same line intro- 
 duced into three nonsensical examples of rhyming: — 
 
 Satan to the garden came 
 
 And found his Lordship walking lame, 
 
 "Give me manna, figs and spice, 
 
 I am outcast of Paradise." 
 
 or quite differently: — 
 
 "Beryls and porphyries, 
 Pomegranate j uice ! 
 
 [46] 
 
VERS LIBRE 
 
 I am outcast of Paradise 
 (What was the use?) 
 
 or one can even make the reader accept a third 
 alternative, impressively dragging at the last 
 important word: — 
 
 He came to his Lordship then 
 
 For manna, figs and spice, 
 "I am chief of the Fallen Ten, 
 
 I am outcast of Paradise." 
 
 The regulating poet must of course make sure at the 
 beginning of the poem that there is no possible wrong 
 turning for the reader to take. Recently, and since 
 writing the above, an elder poet, who asks to remain 
 anonymous, has given me an amusing account of 
 how he mis-read Swinburne's "Hertha," the opening 
 lines of which are : — 
 
 I am that which began; 
 
 Out of me the years roll; 
 Out of me, God and man; 
 
 I am equal and whole; 
 God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily. I 
 am the soul. 
 
 My informant read the short lines as having four beats 
 
 each:< — 
 
 r am that || which began; 
 
 Out of me II the years roll; 
 Oiit of me 1 1 God and man ; 
 r am equal || and whole 
 [47] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 and thought this very noble and imposing, though the 
 ''6qual and whole" was perhaps a trifle forced. The 
 next stanza told him that something was amiss and he 
 discovered that it was only a two-beat line after all. 
 "It was Swinburne's impudence in putting the 
 Almighty's name in an unaccented place of the line, 
 and accenting the name of Man, that put me on the 
 wrong track," he said. Swinburne's fault here, for 
 such as agree with the accusation, was surely in his 
 wrong sense of material; he was making muslin do 
 the work of camel's hair cloth. He was imposing 
 a metre on his emotions, whereas the emotions should 
 determine the metre — and even then constantly 
 modify it. Apropos of the vers Ubre-ists, my friend 
 also denied that there was such a thing as vers libre 
 possible, arguing beyond refutation that if it was 
 vers it couldn't be truly libre and if it was truly libre 
 it couldn't possibly come under the category of vers. 
 Perhaps the most damaging criticism (if true) of 
 the vers libre school of today is that the standard 
 which most of its professors set themselves is not a 
 very high one; with rhythmic freedom so dearly 
 bought, one expects a more intricate system of inter- 
 lacing implications than in closer bound poetry. 
 Natural rhythms need no hunting; there is some sort 
 of rhythm in every phrase you write, if you break it 
 up small enough and make sufficient allowances for 
 metric resolutions. There is often a queer, wayward 
 broken-kneed rhythm running through whole sentences 
 of standard prose. The following news item has not 
 
 [48] 
 
VERS LIBRE 
 
 had a word changed since I found it in The Daily 
 Mirror. 
 
 John Frain 
 Of Ballyghadereen 
 Was indicted at Roscommon for the murder of his 
 
 father; 
 He battered his father, an old man, to death with a 
 
 pounder; 
 The jury found him unable to plead 
 And he was committed 
 To an as'ylum. 
 
 One doesn't "listen" when reading prose, but in poetry 
 or anything offered under that heading a submerged 
 metre is definitely expected. Very few readers of 
 Mr. Kipling's "Old Man Kangaroo" which is printed 
 as prose, realize that it is written in strict verse all 
 through and that he is, as it were, pulling a long nose 
 at us. The canny vers librist gets help from his 
 printer to call your attention to what he calls 
 "cadence" and "rhythmic relations" (not easy to 
 follow) which might have escaped you if printed as 
 prose; this sentence, you'll find, has its thumb to its 
 nose. 
 
 [49] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 XVI 
 MOVING MOUNTAINS 
 
 PERHAPS some people who buy this book 
 will be disappointed at not being told the 
 correct way of writing triolets and rondeaux. 
 Theirs is the same practical type of mind that longs 
 to join a Correspondence School of Art and learn the 
 formulas for drawing a washer-woman or trousers 
 or the stock caricature of Mr. Winston Churchill. 
 
 But poetry is not a science, it is an act of faith; 
 mountains are often moved by it in the most unex- 
 pected directions against all the rules laid down by 
 professors of dynamics — only for short distances, I 
 admit; still, definitely moved. The only possible 
 test for the legitimacy of this or that method of 
 poetry is the practical one, the question, "Did the 
 moxmtain stir?" 
 
 XVII 
 LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI 
 
 THE psalmist explains an outburst of 
 sorrowful poetry as due to a long suppres- 
 sion of the causes of his grief. He says, 
 "I kept silent, yea, even from good words. My 
 heart was hot within me and while I was thus musing, 
 
 [50] 
 
LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI 
 the fire kindled, and at the last I spake with my 
 tongue." So it was I believe with Keats in the com- 
 position of this compellingly sorrowful ballad. Sir 
 S. Colvin's "Life of Keats" gives the setting well 
 enough. We do not know exactly what kindled the 
 fire but I am inclined to think with Sir S. Colvin, 
 that Keats had been reading a translation ascribed to 
 Chaucer from Alan Chartier's French poem of the 
 same title. The poet says: — 
 
 "I came unto a lustie greene vallay 
 Full of floures. . . 
 
 . . . riding an easy paas 
 I fell in thought of joy full desperate 
 With great disease and paine, so that I was 
 Of all lovers the most unfortunate. . ." 
 
 Death has separated him from the mistress he 
 loved. . . . We know that Keats' heart had been 
 hot within for a long while, and the suppressed 
 emotional conflict that made him keep silent and 
 muse is all too plain. He has a growing passion for 
 the "beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable 
 and strange . . . MINX" Fanny Brawne; she it was 
 who had doubtless been looking on him "as she did 
 love" and "sighing full sore," and this passion comes 
 into conflict with the apprehension, not yet a 
 certainty, of his own destined death from con- 
 sumption, so that the Merciless Lady, to put it baldly, 
 represents both the woman he loved and the death he 
 feared, the woman whom he wanted to glorify by his 
 
 [51] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 poetry and the death that would cut his poetry short. 
 Of shutting "her wild, wild eyes with kisses four" 
 which makes the almost intolerable climax to the 
 ballad, he writes in a journal-letter to his brother 
 George in America, with a triviality and a light- 
 heartedness that can carry no possible conviction. 
 He is concealing the serious conditions of body and of 
 heart which have combined to bring a "loitering indo- 
 lence" on his writing, now his livelihood; he does not 
 want George to read between the lines; at the same 
 time it is a relief even to copy out the poem. George 
 knows little of Fanny beyond the purposely unpre- 
 possessing portraits of her that John himself has 
 given, but the memory of their beloved brother Tom's 
 death from consumption is fresh in the minds of both. 
 George had sailed to America not realizing how ill 
 Tom had been, John had come back tired out from 
 Scotland, to find him dying; he had seen the lily on 
 Tom's brow, the hectic rose on his cheek, his starved 
 lips in horrid warning gaping, and, as the final 
 horrible duty, had shut his brother's wild staring 
 eyes with coins, not kisses. Now Fanny's mocking 
 smile and sidelong glance play hide and seek in his 
 mind with Tom's dreadful death-mask. It was 
 about this time that Keats met Coleridge walking by 
 Highgate Ponds and it is recorded that Keats, wishing 
 with a sudden sense of the mortality of poets, to "carry 
 away the memory" of meeting Coleridge, asked to 
 press his hand. When Keats had gone, Coleridge, 
 turned to his friend Green and said, "There is death 
 
 [52] 
 
LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI 
 in that hand." He described it afterwards as "a heat 
 and a dampness" — but "fever-dew" is Keats' own 
 word. 
 
 There are many other lesser reminiscences and 
 influences in the poem, on which we might speculate 
 — Spenser's "Faery Queen," the ballad of Thomas the 
 Rhymer, Malory's "Lady of the Lake," Coleridge's 
 "Kubla Khan" with its singing maiden and the 
 poet's honey-dew, traceable in Keats' "honey wild and 
 manna dew," an echo from Browne "Let no bird 
 sing," and from Wordsworth "her eyes are wild"; 
 but these are relatively unimportant. 
 
 History and Psychology are interdependent sciences 
 and yet the field of historical literary research is al- 
 most overcrowded with surveyors, while the actual 
 psychology of creative art is country still pictured in 
 our text-books as Terra Incognita, the rumoured 
 abode of Phoenix and Manticor. The spirit of ad- 
 venture made me feel myself a regular Sir John 
 Mandeville when I began even comparing Keats' two 
 descriptions of Fanny as he first knew her with the 
 lady of the poem, noting the "tolerable" foot, the 
 agreeable hair, the elfin grace and elvish manners, 
 in transformation: wondering, did the Knight-at-arms 
 set her on his steed and walk beside so as to see her 
 commended profile at best advantage? When she 
 turned towards him to sing, did the natural thinness 
 and paleness which Keats noted in Fanny's full-face, 
 form the association-link between his thoughts of love 
 and death? What was the real reason of the "kisses 
 
 [53] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 four"? was it not perhaps four because of the painful 
 doubleness of the tragic vision — ^was it extravagant to 
 suppose that two of the kisses were more properly 
 pennies laid on the eyes of death? 
 
 The peculiar value of the ballad for speculation 
 on the birth of poetry is that the version that we know 
 best, the one incorporated in the journal-letter to 
 America, bears every sign of being a very early draft. 
 When Keats altered it later, it is noteworthy that he 
 changed the "kisses four" stanza to the infinitely less 
 poignant: — 
 
 . . . there she gazed and sighed deep, 
 And here I shut her wild sad eyes — 
 So kissed asleep. 
 
 Sir S. Golvin suggests that the kisses four were "too 
 quaint": Keats may have told himself that this was 
 the reason for omitting them, but it is more likely 
 that without realizing it he is trying to limit the pain- 
 ful doubleness: the change of "wild wild eyes" which 
 I understand as meaning "wild" in two senses, elf- 
 wild and horror-wild, to "wild sad eyes" would have 
 the same effect. 
 
 In writing all this I am sorry if I have offended 
 those who, so to speak, prefer in their blindness to 
 bow down to wood and stone, who shrink from hav- 
 ing the particular variety of their religious experience 
 analyzed for them. This section is addressed to those 
 braver minds who can read "The Golden Bough" 
 from cover to cover and still faithfully, with no 
 
 [54] 
 
THE GENERAL ELLIOTT 
 
 dawning contempt, do reverence to the gods of their 
 youth. 
 
 XVIII 
 THE GENERAL ELLIOTT 
 
 IT is impossible to be sure of one's ground when 
 theorizing solely from the work of others, and 
 for commenting on the half-comedy of my own, 
 "The General Elliott," I have the excuse of a letter 
 printed below. It was sent me by an American 
 colonel whose address I do not know, and if he comes 
 across these paragraphs I hope he will understand that 
 I intended no rudeness in not answering his enquiries. 
 This is the poem: — 
 
 THE GENERAL ELLIOTT 
 
 He fell in victory's pierce pursuit, 
 
 Holed through and through with shot, 
 
 A sabre sweep had hacked him deep 
 Twixt neck and shoulderknot. . . 
 
 The potman cannot well recall, 
 
 The ostler never knew, 
 Whether his day was Malplaquet, 
 
 The Boyne or Waterloo. 
 
 But there he hangs for tavern sign, 
 
 With foolish bold regard 
 For cock and hen and loitering men 
 
 And wagons down the yard. 
 
 [55] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 Raised high above the hayseed world 
 
 He smokes his painted pipe, 
 And now surveys the orchard ways, 
 
 The damsons clustering ripe. 
 He sees the churchyard slabs beyond, 
 
 Where country neighbours lie, 
 Their brief renown set lowly down; 
 
 His name assaults the sky. 
 
 He grips the tankard of brown ale 
 That spills a generous foam: 
 
 Oft-times he drinks, they say, and winks 
 At drunk men lurching home. 
 
 No upstart hero may usurp 
 That honoured swinging seat; 
 
 His seasons pass with pipe and glass 
 Until the tale's complete. 
 
 And paint shall keep his buttons bright 
 Though all the world's forgot 
 
 Whether he died for England's pride 
 By battle, or by pot. 
 
 And this is the letter; 
 
 "April, 1921. 
 
 "Mj dear Mr, Graves^ — 
 
 "Friday, I had the pleasure of reading your lines 
 to "The General Elliott" in The Spectator, 
 Yesterday afternoon, about sunset, on returning 
 across fields to Oxford from a visit to Boar's Hill, 
 to my delight and surprise I found myself suddenly 
 confronted with the General Elliott himself, or rather 
 
 [56] 
 
THE GENERAL ELLIOTT 
 
 the duplicate presentment of him — nailed to a tree. 
 But could it be the same, I asked. He did not grip 
 the tankard of brown ale that spills a generous foam 
 r — nor did his seasons seem to pass with pipe and 
 glass — and alas, nor did paint keep his tarnished 
 buttons bright. In spite of your assertion, is the 
 general's tale not already complete? Was he not 
 (like me) but a "temporory officer"? Or have I 
 perhaps seen a spurious General Elliott? He should 
 not die; the post from which he views the world is 
 all too lonely for his eyes to be permitted to close 
 upon that scene, albeit the churchyard slabs do 
 not come within the range. . . . May / help to restore 
 him? 
 
 "Sincerely, 
 
 "J B 
 
 "Lt. Col. U. S. A." 
 
 To which letter I would reply, if I had his 
 address: — 
 
 My dear Colonel B 
 
 . . . The poet very seldom writes about what 
 he is observing at the moment. Usually a poem that 
 has been for a long while maturing unsuspected in 
 the unconscious mind, is brought to birth by an out- 
 side shock, often quite a trivial one, but one which — 
 as midwives would say — leaves a distinct and peculiar 
 birthmark on the child. 
 
 The inn which you saw at Hinksey is the only 
 [57] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 "General Elliott" I know, but I do not remember 
 ever noticing a picture of him. I remember only a 
 board 
 
 THE GENERAL ELLIOTT. 
 MORRELL'S ALES AND STOUT. 
 
 and have never even had a drink there; but once I 
 asked a man working in the garden who this General 
 Elliott was, and he answered that really he didn't 
 know; he reckoned he was a line soldier and killed 
 somewhere long ago in a big battle. As a matter of 
 fact, I find now that Elliott was the great defender 
 of Gibraltar from 1779 to 1783, who survived to be- 
 come Lord Heathfield; but that doesn't affect the 
 poem. Some months after this conversation I 
 passed the sign board again and suddenly a whole 
 lot of floating material crystallized in my mind and 
 the following verse came into my head — more or less 
 as I quote it: — 
 
 "Was it Schellenberg, General Elliott, 
 
 Or Minden or Waterloo 
 Where the bullet struck your shoulderknot, 
 
 And the sabre shore your arm, 
 And the bayonet ran you through?" 
 
 On which lines a poem resulted which seemed un- 
 satisfactory, even after five drafts. I rewrote in a 
 different style a few days later and after several more 
 drafts the poem stood as it now stands. There appear 
 
 [58] 
 
THE GENERAL ELLIOTT 
 
 to be more than one set of conflicting emotions rec- 
 onciled in this poem. In the false start referred to, 
 the 1. A. idea was not properly balanced by 1. B. and 
 1. C, which necessitated reconstruction of the whole 
 scheme; tinkering wouldn't answer. I analyze the 
 final version as follows: — 
 
 A. Admiration for a real old-fashioned 
 General beloved by his whole division, 
 killed in France (1915) while trying to 
 make a broken regiment return to the 
 attack. He was directing operations from 
 the front line, an unusual place for a 
 
 1. divisional commander in modern warfare. 
 
 B. Disgust for the incompetence and folly of 
 several other generals under whom I 
 served; their ambition and jealousy, their 
 
 recklessness of the lives of others. 
 G. Affection, poised between scorn and 
 admiration, for an extraordinary thick- 
 headed, kind-hearted militia Colonel, who 
 w^as fond enough of the bottle, and in 
 private life a big farmer. He was very 
 ignorant of military matters but somehow 
 got through his job surprisingly well. 
 
 2. A. My hope of settling down to a real 
 
 country life in the sort of surroundings 
 that the two Hinkseys afford, sick of 
 nearly five years soldiering. It occurred 
 to me that the inn must have been founded 
 [59] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 by an old soldier who felt much as I did 
 then. Possibly General Elliott himself, 
 when he was dying, had longed to be back 
 in these very parts with his pipe and glass 
 and a view of the orchard. It would have 
 been a kind thought to paint a signboard 
 of him so, like one I saw once (was it in 
 Somerset or Dorset?) — "The Jolly Drink- 
 er" and not like the usual grim, military 
 scowl of "General Wellington's" and "Gen- 
 eral Wolfe's." 
 B. I ought to have known who Elliott was be- 
 cause, I used once to pride myself as an 
 authority on military history. The names 
 of Schellenberg, Minden, Malplaquet, The 
 Boyne (though only the two middle 
 battles appear on the colours as battle 
 honours) are imperishable glories for 
 the Royal Welch Fusilier. And the 
 finest Colonel this regiment ever had, 
 Ellis, was killed at Waterloo; he had ap- 
 parently on his own initiative moved his 
 battalion from the reserves into a gap in 
 the first line. 
 
 A. My own faith in the excellent qualities 
 of our national beverage. 
 
 B. A warning inscription on a tomb at 
 Winchester over a private soldier who died 
 of drink. But his comrades had added a 
 couplet — "An honest soldier ne'er shall be 
 
 [60] 
 
THE GENERAL ELLIOTT 
 
 forgot, Whether he died by musket or by 
 pot." 
 There are all sorts of other sentiments mixed up, 
 which still elude me, but this seems enough for an 
 answer. . . . 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 R. G. —(late Captain R. W. F.) 
 
 Poe's account of the series of cold-blooded delib- 
 erations that evolved "The Raven" is sometimes ex- 
 plained as an attempt in the spirit of "Ask me no 
 questions, and I'll tell you no lies," to hoodwink a 
 too curious Public. A juster suggestion would be 
 that Poe was quite honest in his record, but that the 
 painful nature of the emotions which combined to 
 produce the poem prompted him afterwards to un- 
 intentional dishonesty in telling the story. In my ac- 
 count of "The General Elliott" there may be similar 
 examples of false rationalization long after the event, 
 but that is for others to discover: and even so, I am 
 not disqualified from suggesting that the bird of ill 
 omen, perching at night on the head of Wisdom 
 among the books of a library, is symbolism too par- 
 ticularly applicable to Poe's own disconsolate morbid 
 condition to satisfy us as having been deducted by 
 impersonal logic. 
 
 It is likely enough that Poe worked very hard at 
 later drafts of the poem and afterwards remembered 
 his deliberate conscious universalizing of an essen- 
 tially personal symbolism : but that is a very different 
 
 [61] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 matter from pretending that he approached "The 
 Raven" from the first with the same cold reasoning 
 care that constructed, for instance, his Gold-Bug 
 cipher. 
 
 XIX 
 THE GOD CALLED POETRY 
 
 APIECE with this title which appeared in 
 my "Country Sentiment" was the first im- 
 pulse to more than one of the main con- 
 tentions in this book, and at the same time supplies 
 perhaps the clearest example I can give of the thought- 
 machinery that with greater luck and cunning may 
 produce something like Poetry. I wrote it without 
 being able to explain exactly what it was all about, 
 but I had a vision in my mind of the God of Poetry 
 having two heads like Janus, one savage, scowling 
 and horrible, the face of Blackbeard the Pirate, the 
 other mild and gracious, that of John the Evangelist. 
 Without realizing the full implication of the symbo- 
 lism, I wrote :- 
 
 Then speaking from his double head 
 The glorious fearful monster said, 
 
 "I am Yes and I am No 
 Black as pitch and white as snow; 
 Love me, hate me, reconcile 
 Hate with love, perfect with vile. 
 So equal justice shall be done 
 And life shared between moon and sun. 
 
 [62] 
 
THE GOD CALLED POETRY 
 
 Nature for you shall curse or smile; 
 A poet you shall be, my son." 
 
 The poem so far as I can remember was set going by 
 the sight of . . . a guard of honour drilling on the 
 barrack-square of a camp near Liverpool! I was 
 standing at the door of the Courts-Martial room 
 where I was shortly to attend at the trial of a de- 
 serter (under the Military Service Act) who had 
 unsuccessfully pleaded conscientious objection be- 
 fore a tribunal and had been in hiding for some 
 weeks before being arrested. Now, I had been long 
 pondering about certain paradoxical aspects of Poe- 
 try and, particularly, contrasting the roaring genius 
 of Christopher Marlowe with that of his gentle con- 
 temporary Shakespeare; so, standing there watching 
 the ceremonial drill, I fancifully made the officer in 
 command of the guard, a young terror from Sand- 
 hurst, into a Marlowe strutting, ranting, shouting 
 and cursing — but making the men move; tlici- I 
 imagined Shakespeare in his place. Shakespeare 
 would never have done to command a guard of hon- 
 our, and they would have hated him at Camberley or 
 Chelsea. He would have been like a brother-officer 
 who was with me a few weeks before in this ex- 
 tremely "regimental" camp; he hated all the "ser- 
 geant-major business" and used sometimes on this 
 barrack square to be laughing so much at the absurd 
 pomposity of the drill as hardly to be able to 
 control his word of command. I had more than 
 once seen him going out, beltless, but with a pipe 
 
 [63] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 and a dog, for a pleasant walk in the country when 
 he should really have been on parade. In France, 
 however, this officer was astonishing: the men 
 would do anything for him and his fighting feats had 
 already earned him the name of Mad Jack in a 
 shock-division where military fame was as fugitive 
 as life. This brother-officer, it is to be noted, was a 
 poet, and had a violent feeling against the Military 
 Service Act. I wondered how he would behave if he 
 were in my place, sitting on the Court-Martial ; or how 
 would Shakespeare? Marlowe, of course, would 
 thunder "two years" at the accused with enormous 
 relish, investing the cause of militarism with a mag- 
 nificent poetry. But Shakespeare, or "Mad Jack"? 
 That night in the quarters which I had once shared 
 with "Mad Jack," I began writing: — 
 
 "/ begin to know at last. 
 These nights when I sit down to rhyme, 
 The form and measure of that vast 
 God we call Poetry. . . . 
 
 . . . / see he has two heads 
 Like Janus, calm, benignant this. 
 That grim and scowling. His beard spreads 
 From chin to chin; this God has power 
 Immeasurable at every hour. . . . 
 
 The black beard scowls and says to me 
 ''Human frailty though you be 
 Yet shout and crack your whip, be harsh; 
 They'll obey you in the end, 
 
 [64] 
 
THE GOD CALLED POETRY 
 
 Hill and field, river and marsh 
 Shall obey you, hop and skip 
 At the terrour of your whip, 
 To your gales of anger bend. 
 
 The pale beard smiles and says in turn 
 '^True, a prize goes to the stern 
 But sing and laugh and easily run 
 Through the wide airs of my plain; 
 Bathe in my waters, drink my sun. 
 And draw my creatures with soft song; 
 They shall follow you along 
 Graciously, with no doubt or pain." 
 
 Then speaking from his double head, etc. 
 
 The rather scriptural setting of what the pale beard 
 said was probably suggested by the picture I had 
 formed in my mind of the conscientious objector, 
 whom I somehow sympathetically expected to be an 
 earnest Christian, mild and honest; as a matter of 
 fact, he turned out to be the other kind, violent and 
 shifty alternately. He was accordingly sentenced 
 by Major Tamburlaine and Captains Guise and 
 Bajazeth, to the customary term of imprison- 
 ment. 
 
 And by the way, talking of Marlowe and Shakes- 
 peare ; — 
 
 Here ranted Isaac's elder son, 
 The proud shag-breasted godless one 
 From whom observant Smooth-cheek stole 
 Birth-right, blessing, hunter's soul. 
 
 [65] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 XX 
 
 LOGICALIZATION 
 
 John King is dead, that good old man 
 
 You ne'er shall see him more. 
 He used to wear a long brown coat 
 
 All buttoned down before. 
 
 Apparently a simple statement, this rustic epitaph has 
 for any sensitive reader a curiously wistful quality 
 and the easiest way I can show the mixed feelings it 
 stirs, is by supposing a typical eighteenth-century 
 writer to have logicalized them into a polite epigram. 
 The poem would appear mutilated as follows: — 
 
 Hereunder lies old John Brown's honoured dust: 
 His worthy soul has flown to Heav'n we trust. 
 Yet still we mourn his vanished russet smock 
 While frowning fates our trifling mem'ries mock. 
 
 Many of the subtler implications are necessarily lost 
 in the formal translation for in poetry the more stand- 
 ardized the machinery of logical expression, the less 
 emotional power is accumulated. But the force of 
 the words "he used to wear" is shown in more obvious 
 opposition to the words "dead" and "good." The 
 importance of "good" will appear at once if we sub- 
 stitute some word like "ancient" for "good old" and 
 see the collapse of the poetic fabric, still more if we 
 change "good" to "bad" and watch the effect it has 
 
 [66] 
 
LOGICALIZATION 
 
 in our imaginations on the "you ne'er shall see him 
 more," the cut of his coat, and the reasons John King 
 had for buttoning it. Good John King wore a long 
 brown coat because he was old and felt the cold and 
 because, being a neat old man, he wished to conceal 
 his ragged jacket and patched small-clothes. Bad 
 John King kept pheasants, hares, salmon and silver 
 spoons buttoned for concealment under his. How did 
 good John King die? A Christian death in bed sur- 
 rounded by weeping neighbours, each begging a coat- 
 button for keepsake. Bad John King? Waylaid 
 and murdered one dark night by an avenger, and 
 buried where he fell, still buttoned in his long brown 
 coat. 
 
 The emotional conflict enters curiously into such 
 one-strand songs as Blake's "Infant Joy" from the 
 Songs of Innocence, a poem over which for the grown 
 reader the sharp sword of Experience dangles from a 
 single horsehair. The formal version (which I beg 
 nobody to attempt even in fun) logicalized in creak- 
 ing sonnet-form would have the octave filled with an 
 address to the Melancholy of Sophistication, the 
 sestet reserved for: — 
 
 But thou, Blest Infant, smiling radiantly 
 Hast taught me etc, etc. 
 
 An immoral but far more entertaining parlour 
 game than logicalization — perhaps even a profit- 
 able trade — would be to extract the essentials from 
 some long-winded but sincere Augustan poem, dis- 
 
 [67] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 guise the self-conscious antitheses, modernize the 
 diction, liven up the rhythm, fake a personal twist, 
 and publish. Would there be no pundit found to 
 give it credit as a poem of passion and originality? 
 I hope this suggestion for a New-Lamps-for-Old In- 
 dustry will not meet the eye of those advanced but ill- 
 advised English Masters who are now beginning to 
 supervise with their red-and-blue pencils the writing 
 of English Poetry in our schools. 
 
 Now, the trouble about the use of logic in poetry 
 seems not to be that logic isn't a very useful and 
 (rightly viewed) a very beautiful invention, but that 
 it finds little place in our dreams : dreams are illogical 
 as a child's mind is illogical, and spontaneous un- 
 doctored poetry, like the dream, represents the com- 
 plications of adult experience translated into thought- 
 processes analogous to, or identical with, those of 
 childhood. 
 
 This I regard as a very important view, and it ex- 
 plains, to my satisfaction at any rate, a number of 
 puzzling aspects of poetry, such as the greater emo- 
 tional power on the average reader's mind of simple 
 metres and short homely words with an occasional 
 long strange one for wonder; also, the difficulty of 
 introducing a foreign or unusual prosody into poems 
 of intense passion: also the very much wider use in 
 poetry than in daily speech of animal, bird, cloud 
 and flower imagery, of Biblical types characters and 
 emblems, of fairies and devils, of legendary heroes 
 and heroines, which are the stock-in-trade of imagin- 
 
 [68] 
 
LIMITATIONS 
 
 ative childhood; also, the constant appeal poetry- 
 makes to the childish habits of amazed wondering, 
 sudden terrors, laughter to signify mere joy, frequent 
 tears and similar manifestations of imcontrolled emo- 
 tion which in a grown man and especially an English- 
 man are considered ridiculous; following this last, 
 the reason appears for the strict Classicist's dislike 
 of the ungovemed Romantic, the dislike being appar- 
 ently founded on a feeling that to wake this child- 
 spirit in the mind of a grown person is stupid and 
 even disgusting, an objection that has similarly been 
 raised to the indiscriminate practice of psycho-anal- 
 ysis, which involves the same process. 
 
 XXI 
 LIMITATIONS 
 
 ONE of the most embarrassing limitations 
 of poetry is that the language you use is 
 not your own to do entirely what you like 
 with. Times actually come when in the conscious 
 stage of composition you have to consult a diction- 
 ary or another writer as to what word you are going 
 to use. It is no longer practical to coin words, 
 resurrect obsolete ones and generally to tease the 
 language as the Elizabethans did. A great living 
 English poet, Mr. Charles Doughty, is apparently a 
 disquieting instance to the contrary. But he has 
 lost his way in the centuries; he belongs really to 
 
 [69] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 the sixteenth. English has never recovered its 
 happy-go-lucky civilian slouch since the more than 
 Prussian stiffening it was given by the eighteenth 
 century drill-sergeants. 
 
 It is intolerable to feel so bound compared with 
 the freedom of a musician or a sculptor; in spite of 
 the exactions of that side of the art, the poet cannot 
 escape into mere rhythmic sound; there is always 
 the dead load of sense to drag about with him. I 
 have often felt I would like to be a painter at work 
 on a still life, puzzling out ingenious relationships 
 between a group of objects varying in form, texture 
 and colour. Then when people came up and asked 
 me: "Tell me, sir, is that a Spode jar?" or "Isn't 
 that a very unusual variety of lily?" I would be able 
 to wave them away placidly; the questions would be 
 irrelevant. But I can't do that in poetry, everything 
 is relevant; it is an omnibus of an art — a public 
 omnibus. 
 
 There are consolations, of course; poetry, to be 
 appreciated, is not, like music, dependent on a middle- 
 man, the interpretative artist; nor, once in print, is 
 it so liable to damage from accident, deterioration 
 or the reproducer as the plastic arts. 
 
 [70] 
 
THE NAUGHTY BOY 
 
 XXH 
 THE NAUGHTY BOY 
 
 BOUND up with the business of controlling 
 the association-ghosts which haunt in their 
 millions every word of the English language, 
 there is the great mesmeric art of giving mere fancy an 
 illusion of solid substance. The chief way this is 
 done, and nobody has ever done it better than Keats, 
 is constantly to make appeals to each of the different 
 bodily senses, especially those more elementary ones 
 of taste, touch, smell, until they have unconsciously 
 built up a scene which is as real as anything can be. 
 As an example of the way Keats rung the changes 
 on the senses, take his "Song about Myself" : — 
 
 There was a naughty Boy 
 And a naughty boy was 
 he 
 He ran away to Scotland 
 The people for to see 
 Then he found 
 That the ground 
 Was as hard, 
 That a yard 
 Was as long, 
 That a song 
 Was as merry. 
 That a cherry 
 Was as red — 
 [71] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 That lead 
 Was as weighty, 
 That fourscore 
 Was as eighty, 
 That a door 
 Was as wooden 
 As in Eno;land — 
 
 'D' 
 
 So he stood in his shoes 
 
 And he wonder'd, 
 
 He wonder'd, 
 He stood in his shoes 
 
 And he wonder'd. 
 
 Here we have a succession of staccato notes, but 
 in the "Eve of St. Agnes" or "Ode to Autumn" al- 
 most every phrase is a chord, the individual notes 
 of which each strike a separate sense. 
 
 XXIII 
 THE CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC IDEAS 
 
 WHEN Aristotle lays down that poets de- 
 scribe the thing that might be, but that 
 the historian (like the natural historians 
 above mentioned) merely describes that which has 
 been, and that poetry is something of "more philoso- 
 phic, graver import than history because its statements 
 are of a universal nature" so far his idea of poetry 
 tallies with our own. But when he explains his "might 
 be" as meaning the "probable and necessary" accord- 
 
 [72] 
 
THE CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC IDEAS 
 
 ing to our every-day experience of life, then we feel 
 the difference between the Classical and Romantic 
 conceptions of the art — Aristotle was trying to weed 
 poetry of all the symbolic extravagances and impossi- 
 bilities of the dream state in which it seems to have 
 originated, and to confine it within rational and edu- 
 cative limits. Poetry was with him only an intuitive 
 imitation of how typical men think and react upon 
 each other when variously stimulated. It was what 
 we might call the straight goods of thought conveyed 
 in the traditional magic hampers; but there proved to 
 be difficulties in the packing; the Classical ideal was, 
 in practice, modified by the use of heroic diction and 
 action, conventional indications to the audience that 
 "imitation" was not realism, and that there must be 
 no criticisms on that score; every one must "go un- 
 der" to the hypnotic suggestion of the buskin and the 
 archaic unnatural speech, and for once think ideally. 
 For the same reason the Classical doctrine lays stress 
 on the importance of the set verse-forms and the 
 traditional construction of drama. For the benefit 
 of my scientific readers, if my literary friends prom- 
 ise not to listen to what I am saying, I will attempt 
 a definition of Classical and Romantic notions of 
 Poetry:— 
 
 Classical is characteristic and Romantic is Meta- 
 morphic, that is, though they are both expressions of 
 a mental conflict, in Classical poetry this conflict is 
 expressed within the confines of waking probability 
 and logic, in terms of the typical interaction of typi- 
 
 [73] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 cal minds; in Romantic poetry the conflict is ex- 
 pressed in the illogical but vivid method of dream- 
 changings. 
 
 The dream origin of Romantic Poetry gives it the 
 advantage of putting the audience in a state of mind 
 ready to accept it; in a word, it has a naturally hyp- 
 notic effect. Characteristic poetry, which is social 
 rather than personal, and proudly divorced from the 
 hit-and-miss methods of the dream, yet feels the need 
 of this easy suggestion to the audience for ideal think- 
 ing; and finds it necessary to avoid realism by bor- 
 rowing shreds of accredited metamorphic diction and 
 legend and building with them an illusion of real 
 metamorphism. So the Hermit Crab, and once it 
 has taken up a cast-off shell to cover its nakedness, 
 it becomes a very terror among the whelks. The 
 borrowed Metamorphism is hardened to a convention 
 and a traditional form, and can be trusted almost in- 
 evitably to induce the receptive state in an average 
 audience wherever used. Such a convention as I 
 mean is the May-day dream of the Mediaeval 
 rhymed moralities or the talking beasts of the fabu- 
 lists. 
 
 Sometimes, however, owing to a sudden adventur- 
 ous spirit appearing in the land, a nation's Classical 
 tradition is broken by popular ridicule and the re- 
 appearance of young Metamorphic Poets. But after 
 a little paper-bloodshed and wranglings in the coffee- 
 houses, the Classical tradition reappears, dressed up 
 in the cast-off finery of the pioneer Metamorphics 
 
 [74] 
 
THE CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC IDEAS 
 
 (who have by this time been succeeded by licentious 
 and worthless pyrotechnists), and rules securely 
 again. It is only fair to observe that the Romantic 
 Revivalist often borrows largely from some Classical 
 writer so obscured by Time and corrupt texts as to 
 seem a comparative Romantic. This complicated 
 dog-eat-dog process is cheerfully called "The Tradi- 
 tion of English Poetry." 
 
 There is an interesting line of investigation which 
 I have no space to pursue far, in a comparison be- 
 tween the Classicism of Wit and the Romanticism 
 of Humour. 
 
 Wit depends on a study of the characteristic re- 
 actions of typical men to typically incongruous cir- 
 cumstances, and changed little from Theophrastus 
 to Joe Miller. It depends for its effect very largely 
 on the set form and careful diction, e. g: — 
 
 A certain inn-keeper of Euboea, with gout in his 
 fingers, returned to his city after sacrificing an Ox to 
 Delphic Apollo. . . . The celebrated wit, Sidney 
 Smith, one day encountered Foote the comedian, in 
 the Mall. . . . An Englishman, an Irishman and a 
 Scotchman agreed on a wager of one hundred 
 guineas . . . 
 
 That is Classicism. 
 
 Romantic humour is marked by the extravagant 
 improbability of dream-vision and by the same 
 stereoscopic expression as in Romantic poetry. 
 
 Would Theophrastus have deigned to laugh at the 
 fabliau of "The Great Panjandrum himself with the 
 
 [75] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 little round button at top?" I think not. Our lead- 
 ing living Classical poet was recently set a Romantic 
 riddle as a test of his humour, "What did the tooth- 
 paste say to the tooth brush?" Answer: "Squeeze 
 me and I'll meet you outside the Tube." The bard 
 was angry. "Who on earth squeezes his tube of 
 tooth-paste with his tooth brush? Your riddle does 
 not hold water." He could understand the fable 
 convention of inanimate objects talking, but this 
 other was not "the probable and necessary." 
 
 XXIV 
 
 COLOUR 
 
 THE naming of colours in poetry may be used 
 as a typical instance of the circumspection 
 with which a poet is forced to move. The 
 inexperienced one drenches his poems in gold, silver, 
 purple, scarlet, with the idea of giving them, in fact, 
 "colour." The old hand almost never names a col- 
 our unless definitely presenting the well-known child- 
 ish delight for bright colours, with the aid of some 
 other indication of childhood, or unless definitely to 
 imply a notable change from the normal nature of 
 the coloured object, or at least some particular 
 quality such as the ripeness of the cherry in 
 Keats' song just quoted. But even then he usually 
 prefers to find a way round, for the appeal to the 
 sense of colour alone is a most insecure way of 
 
 [76] 
 
COLOUR 
 
 creating an illusion ; colours vary in mood by so very 
 slight a change in shade or tone that pure colour 
 named without qualification in a poem will seldom 
 call up any precise image or mood. 
 
 To extemporize a couple of self-conscious black- 
 board examples: — 
 
 I. "Then Mary came dressed in a robe that was green 
 
 And her white hands and neck were a sight to be 
 seen." 
 
 II. "Mary's robe was rich pasture, her neck and her 
 
 hands 
 Were glimpses of river that dazzled those lands." 
 
 The first couplet has not nearly so much colour in 
 it as the second, although in the first the mantle is 
 definitely called green and the lady's hands and neck, 
 white, while in the second no colour is mentioned at 
 all. The first robe is as it were coloured in a cheap 
 painting-book; the green paint has only come off the 
 cake in a thin yellowish solution and the painting- 
 book instructions for colouring the hands and 
 neck were "leave blank." The second robe derives 
 its far richer colour from the texture that the pasture 
 simile suggests; the flesh parts get their whiteness 
 from the suggestion of sun shining on water. 
 
 [77] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 XXV 
 PUTTY 
 
 THE conscious part of composition is like the 
 finishing of roughly shaped briars in a pipe 
 factory. Where there are flaws in the wood, 
 putty has to be used in order to make the pipe 
 presentable. Only an expert eye can tell the putty 
 when it has been coloured over, but there it is, time 
 will reveal it and nobody is more aware of its presence 
 now than the man who put it there. The public is 
 often gulled into paying two guineas for a well- 
 coloured straight-grain, when a tiny patch of putty 
 under the bowl pulls down its sentimental value to 
 ten shillings or so. 
 
 It is only fair to give an example of putty in a 
 poem of my own; in writing songs, where the pattern 
 is more fixed than in any other form, putty is almost 
 inevitable. This song started sincerely and cheer- 
 fully enough: — 
 
 Once there came a mighty furious wind 
 
 (So old worthies tell). 
 It blew the oaks like ninepins down, 
 And all the chimney stacks in town 
 
 Down together fell. 
 That was a wind — to write a record on, 
 to hang a story on, 
 to sing a ballad on, 
 
 [78] 
 
PUTTY 
 
 To ring the loud church bell! 
 But for one huge storm that cracks the sky 
 Came a thousand lesser winds rustling by, 
 And the only wind that will make me sing 
 Is breeze of summer or gust of spring 
 But no more hurtful thing. 
 
 This was leading up to a final verse: — 
 
 Once my sweetheart spoke an unkind word 
 
 As I myself must tell, 
 For none but I have seen or heard 
 My sweetheart to such cruelty stirred 
 
 For one who loved her well. 
 That was a word — to write no record on, 
 to hang no story on, 
 to sing no ballad on, 
 
 To ring no loud church bell ! 
 Yet for one fierce word that has made me smart 
 Ten thousand gentle ones ease my heart. 
 So all the song that springs in me 
 Is "Never a sweetheart bom could be 
 So kind as only she." 
 
 Half-way through this verse I was interrupted, and 
 had to finish the poem consciously as best I could. 
 On picking it up again, apparently I needed another 
 middle verse of exactly the same sort of pattern as 
 the first, to prepare the reader for the third. Search- 
 ing among natural phenomena, I had already hit on 
 drought as being a sufficiently destructive plague to 
 be long remembered by old worthies. This would 
 make the second verse. 
 
 [79] ' 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 So without more ado I started: — 
 
 Once there came a mighty thirsty drought 
 
 (So old worthies tell). 
 The quags were drained, the brooks were dried, 
 Cattle and sheep and pigs all died, 
 
 The parson preached on Hell. 
 That was a drought — to write a record on etc. 
 
 So far I had concealed the poverty of my inspiration 
 well enough, I flattered myself, but here we were 
 stuck, my self-conscious muse and I. What was a 
 pleasing diminutive of drought? — Pleasant sunshine? 
 Not quite; the thirstiness of nature doesn't show in 
 pleasant sunshine at all. So, knowing all the time 
 that I was doing wrong, I took my putty knife and 
 slapped the stuff on thick, then trimmed and smoothed 
 over carefully: — 
 
 BuLfor one long drought of world-wide note 
 Come a thousand lesser ones on man's throat, 
 And the only drought for my singing mood 
 Is a thirst for the very best ale that's brewed. 
 Soon quenched, but soon renewed. 
 
 In manuscript, the putty didn't show, somehow, but 
 I am ashamed to say I published the song. And in 
 print, it seemed to show disgracefully. "It was the 
 best butter," said the March Hare. "It was the best 
 putty," I echoed, to excuse myself. But there is too 
 much of it; the last half of the last verse even, is not 
 all sound wood. This poem has been on my con- 
 science for some time. 
 
 [80] 
 
READING ALOUD 
 
 If spontaneous poetry is like the Genie from 
 Aladdin's Lamp, this conscious part of the art is like 
 the assemblage of sheet, turnip-head, lighted candle 
 and rake to make the village ghost. 
 
 As I were a trapesin' 
 To Fox and Grapes Inn 
 
 To get I a bottle of ginger wine 
 I saw summat 
 In they old tummut 
 
 And Lordie how his eyes did shine! 
 
 Suffolk rhyme, 
 (Cetera desunt) 
 
 The Genie is the most powerful magic of the two, 
 and surest of its effect, but the Turnip Ghost is usually 
 enough to startle rustics who wander at night, into 
 prayer, sobriety, rapid movement or some other un- 
 usual state. 
 
 XXVI 
 READING ALOUD 
 
 THOUGH it is a sound principle that the poet 
 should write as if his work were first of all 
 intended to be repeated from mouth to 
 mouth, recitation or reading aloud actually distracts 
 attention from the subtler properties of a poem, which 
 though addressed nominally to the ear, the eye has to 
 see in black and white before they can be appreciated. 
 A beautiful voice can make magic of utter nonsense; 
 
 [81] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 I have been taken in by this sort of thing too often. 
 The eye is the most sophisticated organ of sense and 
 is therefore the one to which the poet must make a 
 final appeal in critical matters, but as limited an 
 appeal as possible when he is engaged in the art of 
 illusion. The universal use of printing has put too 
 much work on the eye : which has learned to skip and 
 cut in self-defence. Ask any one who has read 
 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT the name of the hero. 
 It is probable that he will remember the initial letter, 
 possible that he will be able to repeat the whole name 
 more or less recognizably, unlikely that he will be 
 able to spell it correctly, almost certain that he will 
 not have troubled to find out the correct pronunci- 
 ation in Russian. 
 
 XXVII 
 L'ARTE BELLA PITTURA 
 
 A SCIENTIFIC treatise could, I suppose, be 
 written on how to manipulate vowels and 
 consonants so as to hurry or slow down 
 rhythm, and suggest every different emotion by mere 
 sound sequence but this is for every poet to find out 
 for himself and practise automatically as a painter 
 mixes his paints. 
 
 There was once an old Italian portrait painter, who 
 coming to the end of his life, gathered his friends 
 
 [82] 
 
L'ARTE BELLA PITTURA 
 and pupils together and revealed to them a great 
 discovery he had made, as follows: — 
 
 "The art of portrait painting consists in putting 
 the High Lights in exactly the right place in the eyes." 
 
 When I come to my death-bed I have a similarly 
 important message to deliver: — 
 
 'The art of poetry consists in knowing exactly how 
 to manipulate the letter S." 
 
 XXVIII 
 ON WRITING MUSICALLY 
 
 IN true poetry the mental bracing and relaxing 
 on receipt of sensuous impressions, which we 
 may call the rhythm of emotions, conditions the 
 musical rhythm. This rhythm of emotions also de- 
 termines the sound-texture of vowels and consonants, 
 so that Metre, as schoolboys understand it when they 
 are made to scan: — Friends, R5m|ans, count |rymen, 
 lend me|your ears!, has in spontaneous poetry only a 
 submerged existence. For the moment I will content 
 myself by saying that if all words in daily speech 
 were spoken at the same rate, if all stressed syllables 
 and all unstressed syllables, similarly, were dwelt on 
 for exactly the same length of time, as many proso- 
 dists assume, poetry would be a much easier art to 
 practise; but it is the haste with which we treat some 
 parts of speech, the deliberation we give to others, and 
 
 [83] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 the wide difference in the weight of syllables com- 
 posed of thin or broad vowels and liquid or rasping 
 consonants, that make it impossible for the Anglo- 
 French theory of only two standardized sound values, 
 long or short, to be reasonably maintained. A far 
 more subtle notation must be adopted, and if it must 
 be shown on a black-board, poetry will appear marked 
 out not in "feet" but in convenient musical bars, with 
 the syllables resolved into quaver, dotted crotchet, 
 semibreve and all the rest of them. Metre in the 
 classical sense of an orderly succession of iambuses, 
 trochees or whatnot, is forced to accept the part of 
 policeman in the Harlequinade, a mere sparring 
 partner for Rhythm the Clown who with his string of 
 sausages is continually tripping him up and beating 
 him over the head, and Texture the Harlequin who 
 steals his truncheon and helmet. This preparatory 
 explanation is necessary because if I were to pro- 
 claim in public that "the poet must write musically" 
 it would be understood as an injunction to write like 
 Thomas Moore, or his disciples of today. 
 
 XXIX 
 THE USE OF POETRY 
 
 AT this stage the question of the use of poetry 
 to its readers may be considered briefly and 
 without rhapsody. Poetry as the Greeks 
 knew when they adopted the Drama as a cleansing 
 
 [84] 
 
THE USE OF POETRY 
 
 rite of religion, is a form of psycho-therapy. Be- 
 ing the transformation into dream symbolism of some 
 disturbing emotional crisis in the poet's mind 
 (whether dominated by delight or pain) poetry has 
 the power of homoeopathically healing other men's 
 minds similarly troubled, by presenting them under 
 the spell of hypnosis with an allegorical solution of 
 the trouble. Once the allegory is recognized, by 
 the reader's unconscious mind as applicable the affec- 
 tive power of his own emotional crisis is diminished. 
 Apparently on a recognition of this aspect of poetry 
 the Greeks founded their splendid emblem of its 
 power — the polished shield of Perseus that mirrored 
 the Gorgon's head with no hurtful effect and allowed 
 the hero to behead her at his ease. A well chosen an- 
 thology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the 
 more common mental disorders, and may be used as 
 much for prevention as cure if we are to believe Mr. 
 Housman's argument in "Terence, this is stupid stuff" 
 no. LXII of his Shropshire Lad, 
 
 The musical side of poetry is, properly understood, 
 not merely a hypnotic inducement to the reader to 
 accept suggestions, but a form of psycho-therapy in 
 itself, which, working in conjunction with the pictorial 
 allegory, immensely strengthens its chance of success. 
 
 [85] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 XXX 
 
 HISTORIES OF POETRY 
 
 THE History of English Poetry is a subject I 
 hope I shall never have to undertake, es- 
 pecially as I have grave doubts if there really 
 is such a thing. Poets appear spasmodically, write 
 their best poetry at uncertain intervals and owe noth- 
 ing worth mentioning to any school or convention. 
 Most histories of English Poetry are full of talk about 
 "schools" or they concentrate on what they are 
 pleased to call "the political tendencies" of poetry, 
 and painfully trace the introduction and development 
 in English of various set forms like the Sonnet, 
 Blank Verse, and the Spenserian Stanza. This talk 
 about politics I read as an excuse of the symmetrical- 
 minded for spreading out the Eighteenth Century 
 poets famous in their day to a greater length than the 
 quality of their work can justify. As for the history 
 of metric forms it is, in a sense, of little more vital 
 importance to poetry than the study of numismatics 
 would appear to an expert in finance. 
 
 An undergraduate studying English Literature at 
 one of our oldest universities was recently confronted 
 by a senior tutor, Professor X, with a review of his 
 terminal studies and the charge of temperamentalism. 
 
 [86] 
 
THE BOWL MARKED DOG 
 
 "I understand from Prof. Y," he explained, 
 "that your literary judgments are a trifle sum- 
 mary, that in fact you prefer some poets to 
 others." 
 
 He acknowledged the charge with all humility. 
 
 I 
 
 XXXI 
 
 THE BOWL MARKED DOG 
 
 ', ' "^ AM sorry, nephew, that I cannot under^ 
 stand your Modern Poetry. Indeed I strongly 
 dislike it; it seems to me mostly mere impu- 
 dence." 
 
 "But, uncle, you are not expected to like it! 
 The old house-dog goes at dinner time to the broken 
 biscuits in his bowl marked dog and eats heartily. 
 Tomorrow give him an unaccustomed dainty in an 
 unaccustomed bowl and he will sniff and turn away 
 in disgust. Though tempted to kick him for his 
 unrecognizing stupidity, his ingratitude, his ridic- 
 ulous preference for the formal biscuit, yet re- 
 frain! 
 
 "The sight and smell associations of the DOG bowl 
 out of which he has eaten so long have actually, 
 scientists say, become necessary for bringing the 
 proper digestive juices into his mouth. What you 
 offer him awakes no hunger, his mouth does not 
 water; he is puzzled and insulted. 
 
 "But give it to the puppies instead; they'll gobble 
 [87] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 it up and sniff contemptuously aftferwards at the 
 old dog and his bowl of biscuit." 
 
 XXXII 
 THE ANALYTIC SPIRIT 
 
 IN England, since — shall we name the convenient 
 date 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition? — 
 the educated reading public has developed ana- 
 lytic powers which have not been generally matched 
 by a corresponding development of the co-ordinating 
 arts of the poet. Old charms will no longer hold, 
 old baits will no longer be taken; the reader has be- 
 come too wary. The triumph of the analytic spirit 
 is nowhere better shown than in these histories of 
 Poetry just mentioned, where the interest in fake 
 poetry is just as strong or even stronger than the in- 
 terest in poetry itself. 
 
 As Religions inevitably die with their founders, 
 the disciples having either to reject or formularize 
 their master's opinions, so with Poetry, it dies on the 
 formation of a poetic school. The analytic spirit 
 has been, I believe, responsible both for the present 
 coma of religion among our educated classes and for 
 the disrespect into which poetry and the fine arts have 
 fallen. As for these histories of poetry, the very 
 fact that people are interested in failures of the 
 various "Schools" to universalize the individual 
 system of a master, is a great discouragement to a 
 
 [88] 
 
RHYMES AND ALLITERATION 
 
 poet trying by every means in his power to lay the 
 spirit of sophistication. 
 
 But the age of poetry is not yet over if poets will 
 only remember what the word means and not confuse 
 it with acrostic-making and similar ingenious 
 Alexandrianisms. Earlier civilizations than ours 
 have forgotten the necessarily spontaneous nature of 
 the art, and have tried (for lack of any compelling 
 utterance) to beat the sophisticated critics of their 
 day by piling an immense number of technical 
 devices on their verses, killing what little passion 
 there was, by the tyranny of self-imposed rules. The 
 antithetical couplet of Pope or the Ovidian hexameter- 
 and-pentameter are bad enough, but the ancient 
 Irish and Welsh bards were even more restricted by 
 their chain-rhymes and systems of consonantal 
 sequence, the final monstrosity being the Welsh englyn 
 of four lines, governed by ninety-odd separate rules. 
 The way out for Poetry does not lie by this road, we 
 may be sure. But neither on the other hand do we 
 yet need to call in the Da-da-ists. 
 
 XXXIII 
 RHYMES AND ALLITERATION 
 
 RHYMES properly used are the good servants 
 whose presence gives the dinner table a 
 sense of opulent security; they are never 
 awkward, they hand the dishes silently and pro- 
 
 [89] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 fessionally. You can trust them not to interrupt the 
 conversation of the table or allow their personal dis- 
 agreements to come to the notice of the guests; but 
 some of them are getting very old for their work. 
 
 The principle governing the use of alliteration and 
 rhyme appear to be much the same. In unsophisti- 
 cated days an audience could be moved by the profuse 
 straight-ahead alliteration of Piers Plowman, but this 
 is too obvious a device for our times. The best 
 effects seem to have been attained in more recent 
 poetry by precisely (if unconsciously) gauging the 
 memory length of a reader's mental ear and planting 
 the second alliterative word at a point where the 
 memory of the first is just beginning to blurr; but has 
 not quite faded. By cross-alliteration on these lines 
 a rich atmosphere has resulted and the reader's eye 
 has been cheated. So with internal and ordinary 
 rhyme ; but the memory length for the internal rhyme 
 appears somewhat longer than memory for alliter- 
 ation, and for ordinary rhyme, longer still. 
 
 XXXIV 
 
 AN AWKWARD FELLOW CALLED 
 ARIPHRADES 
 
 ARISTOTLE defended poetical "properties" 
 that would correspond nowadays with 
 "thine" and "whensoe'er" and "flowerets 
 gay," by saying "it is a great thing indeed to make 
 
 [90] 
 
AN AWKWARD FELLOW 
 proper use of these poetic forms as also of compounds 
 and strange words. The mere fact of their not being 
 in ordinary speech, gives the diction a non-prosaic 
 character." One Ariphrades had been ridiculing 
 the Tragedians on this score; and Aristotle saw, I 
 suppose, that a strange diction has for the simple- 
 minded reader a power of surprise which enables the 
 poet to work on his feelings unhindered, but he did 
 not see that as soon as a single Ariphrades had 
 ridiculed what was becoming a conventional surprise, 
 a Jack-in-the-Box that every one expected, then was 
 the time for the convention to be scrapped; ridicule 
 is awkwardly catching. 
 
 The same argument applies to the use of rhyme to- 
 day; while rhyme can still be used as one of the 
 ingredients of the illusion, a compelling force to make 
 the reader go on till he hears an echo to the syllable 
 at the end of the last pause, it still remains a valuable 
 technical asset. But as soon as rhyme is worn thread- 
 bare the ear anticipates the echo and is contemptuous 
 of the clumsy trick. 
 
 The reader must be made to surrender himself 
 completely to the poet, as to his guide in a strange 
 country; he must never be allowed to run ahead and 
 say "Hurry up, sir, I know this part of the country 
 as well as you. After that 'snow-capped mountain' 
 we inevitably come to a 'leaping fountain.' I see it 
 'dancing' and 'glancing' in the distance. And by the 
 token of these 'varied flowers' on the grass, I know 
 that another few feet will bring us to the 'leafy 
 
 [91] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 bowers' which, if I am not mistaken, will protect us 
 nicely from the 'April showers' for a few 'blissful 
 hours.' Come on, sir! am I guiding you, or are you 
 guiding me?" 
 
 However, the time has not yet come to get rid of 
 rhyme altogether: it has still plenty of possibilities, 
 as Dumb Crambo at a Christmas party will soon con- 
 vince the sceptical; and assonances separated even 
 by the whole length of the mouth can work happily 
 together, with or without the co-operation of ordinary 
 rhyme. 
 
 These are all merely illustrations of the general 
 principle that as soon as a poem emerges from the 
 hidden thought processes that give it birth, and the 
 poet reviews it with the conscious part of his mind, 
 then his task is one not of rules or precedents so much 
 as of ordinary common-sense. 
 
 XXXV 
 IMPROVISING NEW CONVENTIONS 
 
 THERE is a great dignity in poetry unaffectedly 
 written in stern stiff traditional forms and 
 we feel in spite of ourselves that we owe it 
 the reverence due to ruined abbeys, prints of 
 Fujiyama, or Chelsea pensioners with red coats, 
 medals, and long white beards. But that is no 
 
 [92] 
 
WHEN IN DOUBT 
 
 reason for following tradition blindly; it should be 
 possible for a master of words to improvise a new 
 convention, whenever he wishes, that will give his 
 readers just the same notion of centuried authority 
 and smoothness without any feeling of contempt. 
 
 XXXVI 
 WHEN IN DOUBT 
 
 A YOUNG poet of whose friendship I am very 
 proud was speaking about poetry to one of 
 those University literary clubs which regard 
 English poetry as having found its culmination in the 
 last decade of the nineteenth century and as having 
 no further destiny left for it. He said that he was 
 about to tell them the most important thing he knew 
 about poetry, so having roused themselves from a 
 customary languor, the young fellows were disap- 
 pointed to hear, not a brilliant critical paradox or a 
 sparkling definition identifying poetry with decay, 
 but a mere rule of thumb for the working poet: 
 
 When in Doubt 
 Cut it Out. 
 
 [93] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 XXXVII 
 THE EDITOR WITH THE MUCKRAKE 
 
 ORDINARY readers may deplore the habit of 
 raking up the trivial and bad verse of good 
 poets now long dead, but for living poets 
 there is nothing more instructive in the world than 
 these lapses, and in the absence of honest biography 
 they alone are evidence for what would be naturally 
 assumed, that these great poets in defiance of 
 principle often tried to write in their dull moments 
 just because they longed for the exquisite excitement 
 of composition, and thought that the act of taking up 
 a pen might induce the hypnotic state of which I have 
 spoken. But afterwards they forgot to destroy what 
 they produced, or kept it in the hope that it was some 
 good after all. 
 
 XXXVIII 
 THE MORAL QUESTION 
 
 MODERN treatises on Poetry usually begin 
 with definitions; ancient treatises with 
 a heavy weight of classical authority and 
 a number of grave reflections on the nature of the 
 Poet, proving conclusively that he should be a man 
 
 [94] 
 
THE MORAL QUESTION 
 
 of vast experience of life, apt judgment, versatile 
 talent, and above all unimpeachable moral character. 
 Authority seems to count for nothing in these days, 
 compared with the value set on it by Sir Philip 
 Sidney in his "Apologie for Poetrie," and the modern 
 treatise would never ask its reader more than to 
 admit a negative conclusion on the moral question, 
 that poets who think they can combine indiscriminate 
 debauch with dyspeptic Bohemian squalor and yet 
 turn out good work merely by applying themselves 
 conscientiously and soberly in working hours, are 
 likely to be disappointed; however, my personal feel- 
 ing is that poets who modify the general ethical prin- 
 ciples first taught them at home and at school, can only 
 afford to purchase the right to do so at a great price 
 of mental suffering and difficult thinking. Wanton, 
 lighthearted apostasies from tradition are always 
 either a sign or a prophecy of ineffectual creative 
 work. 
 
 Art is not moral, but civilized man has invented the 
 word to denote a standard of conduct which the mass 
 demands of the individual and so poetry which makes 
 a definitely anti-moral appeal is likely to antagonize 
 two readers out of three straight away, and there is 
 little hope of playing the confidence trick on an enemy. 
 Being therefore addressed to a limited section even of 
 the smallish class who read poetry, such poetry will 
 tend like most high-brow art to have more dexterity 
 than robustness. 
 
 For a complete identification of successful art with 
 [95] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 morality I always remember with appreciation what 
 an Irishman, a complete stranger, once said to my 
 father on hearing that he was author of the song 
 "Father O'Flynn" — "Ye behaved well, sir, when ye 
 wrote that one." 
 
 XXXIX 
 
 THE POET AS OUTSIDER 
 
 THE ethical problem is further complicated for 
 poets by the tussle in their nature between 
 the spontaneous and the critical biases. The 
 principle of loyalty on which the present non- 
 religious system of English manners depends is 
 strained in them to breaking point by the tendency 
 to sudden excitement, delight or disgust with ideas 
 for which mature consideration entirely alters the val- 
 ues, or with people who change by the same process 
 from mere acquaintances to intimate friends and 
 back in a flash. Which should explain many ap- 
 parently discreditable passages in, for instance, the 
 life and letters of Keats or Wordsworth, and should 
 justify Walt Whitman's outspoken "Do I contradict 
 myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am 
 large, I contain multitudes." 
 
 The poet is the outsider who sees most of the game, 
 and, by the same token, all or nearly all the great 
 English poets have been men either of ungenteel 
 
 [96] 
 
A POLITE ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
 
 birth or of good family which has been scandalized 
 by their subsequent adoption of unusual social habits 
 during the best years of their writing. To the polite 
 society of their day — outsiders to a man. 
 
 XL 
 
 A POLITE ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
 
 Dear Sir, — 
 
 Many thanks for the volume of your poems you 
 have sent me. Though I had never seen any of your 
 compositions before, they are already old friends — 
 that is, I like them but I see through them. 
 Yours cordially, Etc. 
 
 XLI 
 
 FAKE POETRY, BAD POETRY AND MERE 
 VERSE 
 
 AS in household economics, you cannot take 
 out of a stocking more than has been put 
 in, so in poetry you cannot present suffer- 
 ing or romance beyond your own experience. The 
 attempt to do this is one of the chief symptoms of the 
 fake poet; ignorance forces him to draw on the ex- 
 perience of a real poet who actually has been through 
 the emotional crises which he himself wants to re- 
 
 [97] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 state. The fake is often made worse by the theft 
 of small turns of speech which though not in any 
 sense irregular or grotesque, the poet has somehow 
 made his own; it is like stealing marked coins, and 
 is a dangerous practice when Posterity is policeman. 
 Most poets visit Tom Tiddler's ground now and then, 
 but the wise ones melt down the stolen coin and im- 
 press it with their own "character." 
 
 There is a great deal of difference between fake 
 poetry and ordinary bad poetry. The bad poet is 
 likely to have suffered and felt joy as deeply as the 
 poet reckoned first class, but he has not somehow 
 been given the power of translating experience into 
 images and emblems, or of melting words in the fur- 
 nace of his mind and making them flow into the chan- 
 nels prepared to take them. Charles Sorley said, 
 addressing the good poets on behalf of the bad poets 
 (though he was really on the other side) :— 
 
 We are the homeless even as you, 
 
 Who hope but never can begin. 
 Our hearts are wounded through and through 
 
 Like yours, but our hearts bleed within; 
 We too make music but our tones 
 Scape not the barrier of our bones. 
 
 Mere verse, as an earlier section has attempted to 
 show, is neither bad poetry nor fake poetry neces- 
 sarily. It finds its own categories, good verse, bad 
 verse and imitation. In its relation to poetry it 
 
 [98] 
 
BAD POETRY AND MERE VERSE 
 stands as chimpanzee to man: only the theory that 
 a conflict of emotional ideas is a necessary ingredi- 
 ent of verse to make it poetry, will satisfactorily ex- 
 plain why many kinds of verse, loosely called Poetry, 
 such as Satire and Didactic verse are yet popularly 
 felt not to be the "highest" forms of Poetry. I 
 would say that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred 
 these bear no real relation to Poetry, even though 
 dressed up in poetical language, and that in the hun- 
 dredth case they are poetry in spite of themselves. 
 Where the writer is dominated by only one aim, in 
 satire, the correction of morals; in didactic verse, 
 instruction; there is no conflict and therefore no 
 poetry. But in rare cases where some Juvenal slips 
 through feelings of compunction to a momentary 
 mood of self-satire and even forgets himself so much 
 as to compliment his adversary; or in didactic verse 
 where a sudden doubt arises and the teacher admits 
 himself a blind groper after truth (so Lucretius time 
 and time again) and breaks his main argument in 
 digressions after loveliness and terror, only then does 
 Poetry appear. It flashes out with the surprise and 
 shock of a broken electric circuit. 
 
 Even the memoria technica can slide from verse 
 into poetry. The rhyme to remember the signs of 
 the Zodiac by, ends wonderfully : — 
 
 The Ram the Bull, the Heavenly Twins, 
 And next the Crab, the Lion shines, 
 The Virgin and the Scales, 
 
 [99] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 The Scorpion, Archer and He Goat, 
 The Man who carries the Watering Pot, 
 The Fish with glittering tails. 
 
 The language of science makes a hieroglyphic, or 
 says "The sign of Aquarius"; the language of prose 
 says "A group of stars likened by popular imagery 
 to a Water Carrier"; the language of Poetry converts 
 the Eastern water carrier with his goatskin bag or 
 pitcher, into an English gardener, then puts him to 
 fill his watering pot from heavenly waters where the 
 Fish are darting. The author of this rhyme has 
 visualized his terrestrial emblems most clearly; he 
 has smelt the rankness of the Goat, and yet in the 
 "Lion shines" and the "glittering tails" one can see 
 that he has been thinking in terms of stars also. The 
 emotional contradiction lies in the stars' remote aloof- 
 ness from complications of this climatic and smelly 
 world, from the terror of Lion, Archer, Scorpion, 
 from the implied love-interest of Heavenly Twins 
 and Virgin, and from the daily cares of the Scales, 
 Ram, Bull, Goat, Fish, Crab and Watering Pot. 
 
 The ready way to distinguish verse from poetry is 
 this. Verse makes a flat pattern on the paper, Poetry 
 stands out in relief. 
 
 [100] 
 
A DIALOGUE ON FAKE-POETRY 
 
 XLII 
 A DIALOGUE ON FAKE-POETRY 
 
 QWHEN is a fake not a fake? 
 A. When hard-working and ingenious 
 conjurors are billed by common courtesy as 
 'magicians.' 
 
 Q. But when is a fake not a fake? 
 A. When it's a Classic. 
 Q. And when else? 
 
 A. When it's "organ-music" and all that. - - 
 Q. Elaborate your answer, dear sir! 
 A. A fake, then, is not a fake when lapse of time 
 has tended to obscure the original source of 
 the borrowing, and when the textural and 
 structural competence that the borrower 
 has used in synthesising the occasional good 
 things of otherwise indifferent authors is so 
 remarkable that even the incorruptible Porter 
 of Parnassus winks and says "Pass Friend!" 
 Q. Then the Fake Poet is, as you have hinted be- 
 fore, a sort of Hermit Crab? 
 A. Yes, and here is another parable from Marine 
 Life. Poetry is the protective pearl formed 
 by an oyster around the irritations of a mag- 
 got. Now if, as we are told, it is becoming 
 [101] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 possible to put synthetic pearls on the market, 
 which not even the expert with his X-ray can 
 detect from the natural kind, is not our valua- 
 tion of the latter perhaps only a sentimental- 
 ity? 
 
 XLIII 
 ASKING ADVICE 
 
 THERE is a blind spot or many blind spots in 
 the critical eye of every writer; he cannot 
 find for himself certain surface faults which 
 anybody else picks out at once. Especially there is a 
 bias towards running to death a set of words which 
 when he found them, were quite honest and inoffen- 
 sive. Shelley had a queer obsession about "caves," 
 "abysses," and "chasms" which evidently meant for 
 him much more than he can make us see. A poet will 
 always be wise to submit his work, when he can do no 
 more to straighten it, to the judgment of friends whose 
 eyes have their blind spots differently placed; only, he 
 must be careful, I suppose, not to be forced into mak- 
 ing any alterations while in their presence. 
 
 A poet reveals to a friend in a fit of excitement 
 "I say, listen, I am going to write a great poem on 
 such-and-such! I have the whole thing clear in my 
 mind, waiting to be put down." But if he goes on 
 to give a detailed account of the scheme, then the act 
 
 [102] 
 
SURFACE FAULTS, AN ILLUSTRATION 
 
 of expression (especially prose expression) kills the 
 creative impulse by presenting it prematurely with 
 too much definiteness. The poem is never written. 
 It remains for a few hopeless days as a title, a couple 
 of phrases and an elaborate scheme of work, and is 
 then banished to the lumber room of the mind; later 
 it probably becomes subsidiary to another apparently 
 irrelevant idea and appears after a month or two in 
 quite a different shape, the elaboration very much 
 condensed, the phrase altered and the title lost. 
 
 Now this section is as suitable as any other for the 
 prophecy that the study of Poetry will very soon 
 pass from the hands of Grammarians, Prosodists, 
 historical research men, and such-like, into those of 
 the psychologists. And what a mess they'll make of 
 it; to be sure! 
 
 XLIV 
 SURFACE FAULTS, AN ILLUSTRATION 
 
 THE later drafts of some lines I wrote re- 
 cently called CYNICS AND ROMANTICS, 
 and contrasting the sophisticated and ingenu- 
 ous ideas of Love, give a fairly good idea of the con- 
 scious process of getting a poem in order. I make no 
 claim for achievement, the process is all that is in- 
 tended to appear, and three or four lines are enough 
 for illustration: 
 
 [103] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 1st Draft. 
 
 In club or messroom let them sit, 
 Let them indulge salacious wit 
 On love's romance, but not with hearts 
 Accustomed to those healthier parts 
 Of grim self-mockery. . . . 
 
 2nd Draft. (Consideration: — It is too 
 
 soon in the poem for the angry jerkiness of "Let them 
 indulge." Also "Indulge salacious" is hard to say; 
 at present, this is a case for being as smooth as 
 possible.) 
 
 In club or messroom let them sit 
 Indulging contraversial wit 
 On love's romance, but not with hearts 
 Accustomed. . . . 
 
 3rd Draft. (Consideration: — No, we 
 
 have the first two lines beginning with "In." It 
 worries the eye. And "sit, indulging" puts two 
 short "i's" close together. "Contraversial" is not 
 the word. It sounds as if they were angry, but they 
 are too blase for that. And "love's romance" is 
 cheap for the poet's own ideal.) 
 
 In club or messroom let them sit 
 At skirmish of salacious wit 
 Laughing at love, yet not with hearts 
 Accustomed. ... 
 
 [104] 
 
SURFACE FAULTS, AN ILLUSTRATION 
 
 4!th Draft, (Consideration: — Bother 
 
 the thing! "Skirmish" is good because it suggests 
 their profession, but now we have three S's, — "sit," 
 "skirmish," "salacious." It makes them sound too 
 much in earnest. The "salacious" idea can come in 
 later in the poem. And at present we have two 
 "at's" bumping into each other; one of them must 
 go. "Yet" sounds better than "but" somehow.) 
 
 In club or messroom let them sit 
 With skirmish of destructive wit 
 Laughing at love, yet not with hearts 
 Accustomed. . . . 
 
 5th Draft, (Consideration: — And now 
 
 we have two "with's" which don't quite correspond. 
 And we have the two short "i's" next to each other 
 again. Well, put the first "at" back and change 
 "laughing at" to "deriding.'" The long "i" is a 
 pleasant variant; "laughing" and "hearts" have 
 vowel-sounds too much alike.) 
 
 In club or messroom let them sit 
 At skirmish of destructive wit 
 Deriding love, yet not with hearts 
 Accustomed. . . . 
 
 6th Draft. (Consideration: — Yes, that's 
 
 a bit better. But now we have "(destructive" and 
 ^'c^eriding" too close together. "Ingenious" is more 
 the word I want. It has a long vowel, and suggests 
 
 [105] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 that it was a really witty performance. The two 
 "in's" are far enough separated. "Accorded" is 
 better than "accustomed"; more accurate and sounds 
 better. Now then: — ) 
 
 In club or messroom let them sit 
 At skirmish of ingenious wit 
 Deriding love, yet not with hearts 
 Accorded etc. 
 
 (Consideration: — It may be 
 rotten, but I've done my best.) 
 
 The discussion of more radical constructive faults 
 is to be found in PUTTY and THE ART OF EX- 
 PRESSION. 
 
 XLV 
 LINKED SWEETNESS LONG DRAWN OUT 
 
 IN this last section, besides an attempt at a 
 greater accuracy of meaning and implication 
 than the first slap-dash arrangement of words 
 had provided, there may have been noticed three 
 other technical considerations which are especially 
 exacting in this case, where I am intending by par- 
 ticularly careful craftsmanship to suggest the bril- 
 liance of the conversation I am reporting. 
 
 The first is a care to avoid unintentional echoes, 
 [106] 
 
LINKED SWEETNESS LONG DRAWN OUT 
 as for example "/ti club or messroom. . . mdulging." 
 
 The second is a care which all song writers and 
 singing masters understand, to keep apart words like 
 "indulge salacious," where the j and s sound coming 
 together interfere with easy breathing. 
 
 The third is an attempt to vary the vowel sounds 
 so far as is consistent with getting the right shade 
 of meaning; it pleases the mental ear like stroking 
 pleases a cat (note the vowel sequence of the phrase 
 that heads this section. John Milton knew a thing 
 or two about texture, worth knowing). At the same 
 time I am trying to arrange the position of con- 
 sonants and open vowels with much the same care. 
 
 But all these three considerations, and even the 
 consideration for lucidity of expression, can and 
 must be modified where an emotional mood of ob- 
 scurity, fear, difficulty or monotony will be better 
 illustrated by so doing. 
 
 Keats was very conscious of the necessity of modi- 
 fication. Leigh Hunt recounts in his Autobiog- 
 raphy : — 
 
 "I remember Keats reading to me with great rel- 
 ish and particularity, conscious of what he had set 
 forth, the lines describing the supper ^ and ending 
 with the words, 
 
 ** 'And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon.' " 
 
 Mr. Wordsworth would have said the vowels were not 
 varied enough; but Keats knew where his vowels 
 were not to be varied. On the occasion above al- 
 
 1 St. Agnes' Eve. 
 
 [107] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 luded to, Wordsworth found fault with the repetition 
 of the concluding sound of the participles in Shake- 
 speare's line about bees: — 
 
 " 'The singing masons building roofs of gold.' " 
 
 This, he said, was a line which Milton would never 
 have written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that 
 the repetition was in harmony with the continued 
 note of the singers, and that Shakespeare's negligence, 
 if negligence it was, had instinctively felt the thing in 
 the best manner." 
 
 Keats here was surely intending with his succession 
 of short i-sounds, a gourmet's fastidious pursing of 
 lips. Poets even of the Virgil-Milton-Tennyson-Long- 
 fellow metrical tradition will on occasion similarly 
 break their strict metric form with an obviously imita- 
 tive "quadrepedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula cam- 
 pum," but the manipulation of vowels and consonants 
 is for them rather a study in abstract grandeur of 
 music than a relation with the emotional content of 
 the poetry. 
 
 XLVI 
 THE FABLE OF THE IDEAL GADGET 
 
 NO poem can turn out respectably well unless 
 written in the full confidence that this time 
 at last the poet is going to attain perfect ex- 
 pression. So long as this confidence survives^ he 
 
 [108] 
 
THE FABLE OF THE IDEAL GADGET 
 
 goes on revising the poem at intervals for days or 
 months imtil nothing more can be done, and the 
 inevitable sense of failure is felt, leaving him at 
 liberty to try again. It is on this inevitable failure 
 that the practice of every art is made conditional. 
 
 A man once went into an ironmonger's shop and 
 said hesitatingly, "Do you sell those gadgets for fix- 
 ing on doors?" 
 
 "Well, sir," replied the assistant, "I am not 
 quite sure if I understand your requirements, but I 
 take it you are needing a patent automatic door- 
 closer?" 
 
 "Exactly," said the customer. "One to fix on my 
 pantry door which, by the way, contains a glass 
 window." 
 
 "You will want a cheap one, sir?" 
 
 "Cheap but serviceable." 
 
 "You will prefer an English make, sir?" 
 
 "Indeed, that's a most important consideration." 
 
 "You will perhaps want one with ornamentations, 
 scroll work and roses for instance?" 
 
 "Oh no, nothing of that sort, thank you. I want 
 it as plain and unobtrusive as possible." 
 
 "You would like it made of some rustless metal, 
 sir?" 
 
 "That would be very convenient. 
 "And with a strong spring?" 
 "Well, moderately strong." 
 [109] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 "To be fixed on which side, sir?" 
 
 "Let me see; the right-hand side." 
 
 "Now, sir," said the assistant, "I will go through 
 each point, one by one. You want an efficient (but 
 not too costly) English made, unobtrusive, rustless, 
 unomamented, patent automatic door closer, to be 
 fixed right-handed with a moderately strong spring 
 to a pantry door with a glass window. Is there any 
 further desideratum, sir?" 
 
 "Well, it's very good of you to help me like this 
 ("Not at all, sir"). I should like it easily adjusted 
 and easily removed, and above all it must not squeak 
 or need constant oiling." 
 
 "In fact, sir, you want an apparatus combining a 
 variety of qualities, in a word, an absolutely silent, 
 efficient, economical, invisible, corrosive proof, un- 
 omamented, not-too-heavily-springed, easily adjust- 
 able, readily removable, British-made, right-handed, 
 patent automatic door closer, ideally fitted in every 
 possible respect for attaching to your pantry door 
 which (I understand you to say) contains a glass 
 window. How is that, sir?" 
 
 "Splendid, splendid." 
 
 "Well, sir, I regret that there has never been any 
 article of that description put on the market, but if 
 you care to visit our wholesale department across 
 the road, you may perhaps be able to make your 
 choice from a reasonably large selection of our 
 present imperfect models. Good day, sir." 
 
 [110] 
 
I 
 
 SEQUELS ARE BARRED 
 
 XLVII 
 
 SEQUELS ARE BARRED 
 
 F you solve a problem to the best of your ability, 
 it never bothers you again. Enough said: but 
 the following emblem may be taken to heart: — 
 
 EPITAPH ON AN UNFORTUNATE ARTIST 
 
 He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits: 
 This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid. 
 
 So in the end he could not change the tragic habits 
 This formula for drawinor comic rabbits made. 
 
 XLVIII 
 TOM FOOL 
 
 THERE is a saying that "More people know 
 Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows"; that may 
 be all right if it means recognizing him in the 
 street, but he has to be a wonder before he can, with- 
 out eccentricity, make his work immediately 
 recognized in print and be even distinguishable from 
 the best efforts of imitators. This proverb was 
 obviously in the head of the man or woman who wrote 
 the following sonnet, in the Spectator (I think) about 
 
 [111] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 a year ago; I have lost the cutting and the reference, 
 and ask to be pardoned if I misquote : — 
 
 Cunning indeed Tom Fool must be to-day 
 
 For us, who meet his verses in a book, 
 To cry "Tom Fool wrote that ... I know his way. . . . 
 
 . . . Unsigned, yet eyed all over with Tom's look, . . . 
 
 Why see! It's pure Tom Fool, I'm not mistook 
 
 Fine simple verses too; now who's to say 
 
 How Tom has charmed these worn old words to obey 
 
 His shepherd's voice and march beneath his crook? 
 Instead we ponder "I can't name the man, 
 
 But he's been reading Wilde," or "That's the school 
 Of Coterie. . . Voices. . . Pound. . . the Sitwell clan. . . " 
 
 '^He 'knows his Kipling' ". . . "/le accepts the rule 
 Of Monro . . . of Lord Tennyson ... of Queen Anne" 
 
 How seldom, "There, for a ducat, writes, 
 
 TOM FooL. 
 
 The writer evidently had a keen eye for the failings 
 of others, but is convicted out of his own mouth, for 
 I have met nobody who can identify this particular 
 Tom Fool for me. 
 
 Hateful as is the art of the parodist when it spoils 
 poems which have delighted and puzzled us, parody 
 has its uses. A convincing parody is the best possible 
 danger signal to inform a poet that he is writing 
 sequels, repeating his conjuring tricks until they can 
 be seen through and ridiculously imitated. "That 
 awkward fellow Ariphrades," much as we dislike 
 him, is one of the most useful members of our 
 republic of letters. 
 
 [112] 
 
CROSS RHYTHM AND RESOLUTION 
 
 XLIX 
 CROSS RHYTHM AND RESOLUTION 
 
 I HAVE already attempted to show Poetry as the 
 Recorder's precis of a warm debate between 
 the members of the poet's mental Senate on 
 some unusually contraversial subject. Let the 
 same idea be expressed less personally in the terms 
 of coloured circles intersecting, the space cut off 
 having the combined colour of both circles. In the 
 Drama these circles represent the warring influences 
 of the plot; the principal characters lie in the 
 enclosed space and the interest of the play is to watch 
 their attempts to return to the state of primary 
 colouring which means mental ease; with tragedy they 
 are eventually forced to the colourless blackness of 
 Death, with comedy the warring colours disappear in 
 white. In the lyrical poem, the circles are coinciding 
 stereoscopically so that it is difficult to discover how 
 each individual circle is coloured; we only see the 
 combination. 
 
 If we consider that each influence represented by 
 these circles has an equivalent musical rhythm, then 
 in the drama these rhythms interact orchestrally, 
 tonic theme against dominant; in lyrical poetry where 
 we get two images almost fused into one, the rhythms 
 interlace correspondingly closely. Of the warring 
 
 [113] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 influences, one is naturally the original steady-going 
 conservative, the others novel, disquieting, almost 
 accidental. Then in lyrical poetry the established in- 
 fluence takes the original metre as its expression, 
 and the new influences introduce the cross rhythm 
 modifying the metre until it is half sub- 
 merged. Shakespeare's developments of blank verse 
 have much distressed prosodists, but have these ever 
 considered that they were not mere wantonness or lack 
 of thought, that what he was doing was to send 
 emotional cross-rhythms working against the familiar 
 iambic five-stress line? 
 
 I remember "doing Greek iambics" at Charter- 
 house and being allowed as a great privilege on 
 reaching the Upper School to resolve the usual short- 
 long foot into a short-short-short or even in certain 
 spots into a long-short. These resolutions I never 
 understood as having any reference to the emotional 
 mood of the verse I was supposed to be translating, 
 but they came in very conveniently when proper 
 names had too many short syllables in them to fit 
 otherwise. 
 
 A young poet showed me a set of English verses the 
 other day which I returned him without taking a copy 
 but I remember reading somewhat as follows: — 
 
 T-tum, t-tum, t-tum, t-tum, t-tum 
 A midnight garden, where as I went past 
 I saw the cherry's moonfrozen delicate ivory. 
 [114] 
 
CROSS RHYTHM AND RESOLUTION 
 
 "Good heavens," I said, "what's that last line all 
 about?" 
 
 "Oh, it's just an experiment in resolution." 
 
 "Take a pencil, like a good fellow, and scan it for 
 me in the old fashioned way as we used to do at school 
 together." 
 
 He did so: — 
 
 I saw I the cherr | (y's) mo6nfroz|en del|ic(ate) iv|(ory) 
 
 "It's a sort of anapaestic resolution," he explained. 
 
 "Anapaestic resolution of what?" 
 
 "Of an iambic decasyllabic line." 
 
 "Excuse me, it's not. Since we're talking in that 
 sort of jargon, it?'s a spondaic resolution of a dactylic 
 line." 
 
 "What do you mean?" 
 
 "Well, you've put in four extra syllables for your 
 resolution. I'll put in a fifth, the word "in." Now 
 listen ! 
 
 Swimmery | floatery | bobbery | duckery | divery — 
 
 / saw the | cherries moon | frozen in | delicate | ivory 
 
 In this case the cross-rhythm, which my friend ex- 
 plained was meant to suggest the curious ethereal look 
 of cherry blossoms in moonlight, had so swamped the 
 original metre that it was completely stifled. The 
 poet has a licence to resolve metre where the emotion 
 demands it, and he is a poor poet if he daren't use it; 
 but there is commonsense in restraint. 
 
 [115] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 MY NAME IS LEGION, FOR WE ARE MANY 
 
 ONE goes plodding on and hoping for a 
 miracle, but who has ever recovered the 
 strange quality that makes the early work 
 (which follows a preliminary period of imitation) in 
 a sense the best work? There is a fine single- 
 heartedness, an economy of material, an adventurous 
 delight in expression, a beginner's luck for which I 
 suppose honest hard work and mature observation 
 can in time substitute certain other qualities, but 
 poetry is never the same again. 
 
 I will attempt to explain this feeling by an analogy 
 which can be pressed as closely as any one likes: it 
 is an elaboration of what has been said of the poet as 
 a "peculiarly gifted witch doctor." Cases of 
 multiple personality have recently been investigated 
 in people who believed themselves to be possessed by 
 spirits. Analysis has proved pretty conclusively 
 that the mediums have originally mimicked ac- 
 quaintances whom they found strange, persons ap- 
 parently selected for having completely different out- 
 looks on life, both from the medium and from each 
 other, different religions, different emotional proc- 
 esses and usually different dialects. This mimicry 
 
 [116] 
 
MY NAME IS LEGION 
 has given rise to unconscious impersonations of these 
 people, impersonations so complete that the medium 
 is in a state of trance and unconscious of any other 
 existence. Mere imitation changes to a synthetic 
 representation of how these characters would act in 
 given circumstances. Finally the characters get so 
 much a part of the medium's self that they actually 
 seem to appear visibly when summoned, and a sight 
 of them can even be communicated to sympathetic by- 
 standers. So the Witch of Endor called up Samuel 
 for King Saul. The trances, originally spontaneous, 
 are induced in later stages to meet the wishes of an 
 inquisitive or devout seance-audience; the manifes- 
 tations are more and more presented (this is no charge 
 of charlatanism) with a view to their effect on the 
 seance. It is the original unpremeditated trances, 
 or rather the first ones that have the synthetic quality 
 and are no longer mere mimicry, which correspond 
 to Early Work. 
 
 But it is hardly necessary to quote extreme cases 
 of morbid psychology or to enter the dangerous arena 
 of spiritualistic argument in order to explain the 
 presence of subpersonalities in the poet's mind. 
 They have a simple origin, it seems, as supplying the 
 need of a primitive mind when confused. Quite 
 normal children invent their own familiar spirits, 
 their "shadows," "dummies" or "slaves," in order to 
 excuse erratic actions of their own which seem on 
 reflection incompatible with their usual habits or code 
 
 [117] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 of honour. I have seen a child of two years old ac- 
 cept literally an aunt's sarcasm, "Surely it wasn't my 
 little girl who did that? It must have been a horrid 
 little stranger dressed just like you who came in and 
 behaved so badly. My little girl always does what 
 she's told." The child divided into two her own 
 identity of which she had only recently become con- 
 scious. She expected sympathy instead of scolding 
 when the horrid little stranger reappeared, broke 
 china and flung water all over the room. I have 
 heard of several developments of the dummy, or 
 slave idea; how one child used his dummy as a 
 representative to send out into the world to do the 
 glorious deeds which he himself was not allowed to 
 attempt; on one occasion this particular dummy got 
 three weeks' imprisonment after a collision with the 
 police and so complete was his master's faith in the 
 independent existence of the creature that he eagerly 
 counted the days until the dummy's release and would 
 not call on his services, however urgently needed, until 
 the sentence had been completed. Another child, a 
 girl, employed a committee of several dummies each 
 having very different characteristics, to whom all 
 social problems were referred for discussion. 
 
 Richard Middleton, the poet, in a short essay, 
 "Harold," traces the development of a dummy of this 
 sort which assumed a tyranny over his mind until it 
 became a recurrent nightmare. Middleton says, and 
 it immensely strengthens my contention if Middleton 
 realized the full implications of the remark, that but 
 
 [118] 
 
MY NAME IS LEGION 
 for this dummy, Harold, he would never have become 
 a poet. 
 
 Two or three poets of my acquaintance have 
 admitted (I can confirm it from my own experience) 
 that they are frequently conscious of their own divided 
 personalities; that is, that they adopt an entirely 
 different view of life, a different vocabulary, gesture, 
 intonation, according as they happen to find them- 
 selves, for instance, in clerical society, in sporting 
 circles, or among labourers in inns. It is no af- 
 fectation, but a mimesis or sympathetic imitation 
 hardened into a habit; the sportsman is a fixed and 
 definite character ready to turn out for every sporting 
 or quasi-sporting emergency and has no interest 
 outside the pages of the Field, the clerical 
 dummy pops up as soon as a clergyman passes down 
 the road and can quote scripture by the chapter; the 
 rustic dummy mops its brow with a red pocket hand- 
 kerchief and murmurs "keeps very dry." These 
 characters have individual tastes in food, drink, 
 clothes, society, peculiar vices and virtues and even 
 different handwriting. 
 
 The difficulty of remaining loyal, which I mention 
 elsewhere, is most disastrously increased, but the poet 
 finds a certain compensation in the excitement of 
 doing the quick change. He also finds it amusing to 
 watch the comments of reviews or private friends on 
 some small batch of poems which appear under his 
 name. Every poem though signed John Jones is 
 virtually by a different author. The poem which 
 
 [119] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 comes nearest to the point of view of one critic may 
 be obnoxious to another; and vice versa; but it all 
 turns on which "dummy" or "sub-personality'^ had 
 momentarily the most influence on the mental chair- 
 man. 
 
 In a piece which represents an interlude in a con- 
 templated collection of poems, the following pas- 
 sage occurs to give the same thought from a 
 different angle. I am asking a friend to overlook 
 irreconcilabilities in my book and refer him to two 
 or three poems which are particularly hostile to each 
 other. 
 
 "Yet these are all the same stuff, really. 
 
 The obverse and reverse, if you look closely. 
 
 Of busy imagination's new-coined money — 
 
 And if you watch the blind 
 
 Phototropisms of my fluttering mind. 
 
 Whether, growing strong, I wrestle Jacob-wise 
 
 With fiendish darkness blinking threatfully 
 
 Its bale-fire eyes. 
 
 Or whether childishly 
 
 'I dart to Mother -skirts of love and peace 
 
 To play with toys until those horrors leave me. 
 
 Yet note, whichever way I find release, 
 
 By fight or flight, 
 
 By being wild or tame, 
 
 The Spirit's the same, the Pen and Ink's the same." 
 
 [120] 
 
THE PIG BABY 
 
 LI 
 
 THE PIG BABY 
 
 n 
 
 M 
 
 ULTIPLE personality, perhaps," says 
 some one. "But does that account for 
 the stereoscopic process of which you 
 speak, that makes two sub-personalities speak from 
 a double head, that as it were prints two pictures on 
 the same photographic plate?" The objector is 
 thereupon referred to the dream-machinery on which 
 poetry appears to be founded. He will acknowledge 
 that in dreams the characters are always changing in 
 a most sudden and baffling manner. He will 
 remember for example that in "Alice in Wonderland," 
 which is founded on dream-material, the Duchess' 
 baby is represented as turning into a pig; in "Alice 
 through the Looking Glass" the White Queen becomes 
 an old sheep. That is a commonplace of dreams. 
 When there is a thought-connection of similarity 
 or contrast between two concepts, the second is 
 printed over the first on the mental photographic 
 plate so rapidly that you hardly know at any given 
 moment whether it is a pig or a baby you are 
 addressing. "You quite make me giddy," said Alice 
 to the Cheshire Cat who was performing similar 
 evolutions. One image starts a sentence, another 
 image succeeds and finishes it, almost, but the first 
 reappears and has the last word. The result is 
 
 [121] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 poetry — or nonsense. With music much the same 
 happens; I believe that those wonderful bursts of 
 music heard in sleep are impossible to reproduce in 
 a waking state largely because they consist of a 
 number of melodies of different times and keys 
 imposed on one another. 
 
 LII 
 
 APOLOGY FOR DEFINITIONS 
 
 IN my opening definition I have given rather an 
 ideal of English Poetry than an analysis of the 
 ruling poetics of this, that and the other century. 
 If those who rally to the later Pope and those who find 
 in the prophetic Blake the true standard of Poetry, 
 equally deny that my definition covers their ex- 
 perience of the word, I admit that in an encyclopediac 
 sense it is quite inadequate, and indeed a fusion of 
 two contradictory senses; indeed, again, a typically 
 poetic definition. 
 
 But how else to make it? Blake's poetry dictated 
 by angels (a too-impulsive race) with its abstruse 
 personal symbolism and tangled rhythms, and Pope's 
 elegantly didactic generalizations, in rigidly metrical 
 forms, on the nature of his fellow man, have 
 a common factor so low as hardly to be worth re- 
 covering; my justification is based on the works of 
 our everywhere acknowledged Chaucer, Spenser, 
 
 [122] 
 
APOLOGY FOR DEFINITIONS 
 
 Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley and the rest, where the 
 baffling Metamorphism of Romance and the formal 
 Characterism of Classical Poetry, often reconcile 
 their traditional quarrel and merge contentedly and 
 inseparably as Jack Spratt and Mrs. Spratt, dividing 
 the fat and the lean in equable portions. 
 
 Here let me then, for the scientific interest, sum- 
 marize my conception of the typical poet: — 
 
 A poet in the fullest sense is one whom some un- 
 usual complications of early environment or mixed 
 parentage develop as an intermediary between the 
 small-group consciousnesses of particular sects, clans, 
 castes, types and professions among whom he moves. 
 To so many of these has he been formally enrolled as 
 a member, and to so many more has he virtually 
 added himself as a supernumerary member by show- 
 ing a disinterested sympathy and by practising his ex- 
 ceptionally developed powers of intuition, that in 
 any small-group sense the wide diffusion of his loyal- 
 ties makes him everywhere a hypocrite and a traitor. 
 
 But the rival sub-personalities formed in him by 
 his relation to these various groups, constantly 
 struggle to reconciliation in his poetry, and in propor- 
 tion as these sub-personalities are more numerous 
 more varied and more inharmonious, and his con- 
 trolling personality stronger and quicker at compro- 
 mise, so he becomes a more or less capable spokes- 
 man of that larger group-mind of his culture which 
 we somehow consider greater than the sum of its 
 
 [123] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 parts : so that men of smaller scope and more concen- 
 trated loyalties swallow personal prejudices and hear 
 at times in his utterances what seems to them the di- 
 rect voice of God. 
 
 LIII 
 TIMES AND SEASONS 
 
 EiCH poet finds that there are special times 
 and seasons most suitable for his work; for 
 times, I have heard mentioned with favour 
 the hour before breakfast and the hour after the usual 
 bed-time, for seasons, the pause between the ex- 
 uberance of Spring and the heaviness of Summer 
 seems popular, also the month of October. There are 
 also places more free from interruption and dis- 
 traction than others, such as caves, attics barely 
 furnished, lonely barns, woods, bed, which make the 
 hypnotic state necessary for poetry easier to induce. 
 The poet has to be very honest with himself about 
 only writing when he feels like it. To take pen in 
 hand at the self-conscious hour of (say) nine A. M., 
 for a morning's poetry, and with a mental arena free 
 of combatants, is to be disappointed, and even "put 
 off" poetry for some time to come. 
 
 I have often heard it said that a poet in intervals 
 between inspirations should keep his hand in by 
 writing verse-exercises, but that he should on such 
 
 [124] 
 
TWO HERESIES 
 
 occasions immediately destroy what he has written. 
 That seems all wrong, it is an insult to the spon- 
 taneity of true poetry to go through a ritual farce of 
 this sort and the poet will only be blunting his tools. 
 He ought not to feel distressed at the passage of time 
 as if it represented so many masterpieces unwritten. 
 If he keeps mentally alive and has patience, the real 
 stuff may arrive any moment; when it doesn't, it isn't 
 his fault, but the harder he tries to force it, the longer 
 will it be delayed. 
 
 LIV 
 TWO HERESIES 
 
 AMONG the most usual heresies held about 
 poetry is the idea that the first importance 
 of the poet is his "message" ; this idea prob- 
 ably originated with the decline of polite sermon- 
 writing, when the poet was expected to take on the 
 double duty; but it is quite untenable. The poet is 
 only concerned with reconciling certain impressions 
 of life as they occur to him, and presenting them in 
 the most effective way possible, without reference to 
 their educational value. The cumulative effect of 
 his work is to suggest a great number of personal 
 obsessions the sum of which compose if you like his 
 "message," but the more definitely propagandist the 
 poet, the less of a poet is the propagandist. 
 
 [125] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 With this is bound up a heresy of about the same 
 standing that poetry should only be concerned with 
 presenting what is beautiful, beautiful in the limited 
 sense of the picture-postcard. This romantic ob- 
 session (using the word "romantic" in the sense of 
 optimistic loose thinking) is as absurd as that of the 
 blood-and-guts realists. Poetry is no more a nar- 
 cotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bitter-sweet 
 mixture for all possible household emergencies, and 
 its action varies according as it is taken in a wine- 
 glass or tablespoon, inhaled, gargled, or rubbed on 
 the chest (like the literary Epic) by hard fingers 
 covered with rings. 
 
 LV 
 THE ART OF EXPRESSION 
 
 IT is as foolish to sneer at the Very Wild Men as 
 it is to assume that the Very Tame Men are all 
 right because they are "in the tradition." The 
 Very Wild Men are at any rate likely to have done 
 work which has explored the desert boundaries of the 
 art they profess, and the Very Tame Men have never 
 done anything worth doing at all. The only ex- 
 cusable quarrel is with the pretended Wild Men who 
 persist in identically repeating the experiments * i 
 which their masters have already failed, and with 
 those whose Very Wilderness is traceable to this — that 
 
 [126] 
 
THE ART OF EXPRESSION 
 
 they are satisfied with the original spontaneity of their 
 work and do not trouble to test it in the light of what 
 it will convey to others, whom they then blame for 
 want of appreciation. What seems to be the matter 
 with Blake's Prophetic Books is just this, he connected 
 his images by a system of free association the clue to 
 which was lost by his death: for instance his enemy, 
 Schofield, a soldier who informed against him, 
 suddenly enters "Jerusalem" and its strange company 
 of abstractions, in the guise of a universal devil 
 "Skofeld." 
 
 Suppose that one Hodge, a labourer, attempted in 
 a fit of homicidal mania to split my skull with a 
 spade, but that my faithful bloodhound sprang to the 
 rescue and Hodge barely escaped with his life. In 
 my imagination, Hodge's spade might well come to 
 symbolize murder and madness, while the bloodhound 
 became an emblem of loyal assistance in the hour of 
 discomfiture. With this experience in my mind I 
 might be inclined to eulogize a national hero as 
 
 "Bloodhound leaping at the throat of Hodge 
 Who stands with lifted spade," i 
 
 and convey a meaning directly contrary to the one 
 intended and having an apparent reference to 
 agrarian unrest. But conscious reflection would 
 put my image into line with a more widely favoured 
 conception of Man the Attacker, and Dog the Rescuer; 
 I would rewrite the eulogy as 
 
 [127] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 ^Watchdog leaping at the burglar's throat 
 Who stands with pistol aimed,'' 
 
 One of the chief problems of the art of poetry is to 
 decide what are the essentials of the image that has 
 formed in your mind; the accidental has to be 
 eliminated and replaced by the essential. There is 
 the double danger of mistaking a significant feature 
 of the image for an accident and of giving an 
 accident more prominence than it deserves. 
 
 Too much modern country-side poetry is mere 
 verbal photography, admirably accurate and full of 
 observation but not excited by memories of human 
 relationships, the emotional bias which could make 
 Bunyan see the bee as an emblem of sin, and Blake 
 the lion's loving-kindness. 
 
 Now, if Wordsworth had followed the poetical 
 fashion of the day and told the world that when wan- 
 dering lonely as a cloud he had seen a number of 
 vernal flowers, the poem would have fallen pretty flat 
 — if however, anticipating the present century he had 
 quoted the order, the species and the subspecies and 
 remarked on having found among the rest no fewer 
 than five double blooms, we would almost liave 
 wished the vernal flowers back again. 
 
 Mr. Edmund Blunden lately called my attention to 
 a message from Keats to John Clare sent through 
 their common publisher, Taylor. Keats thought that 
 Clare's "Images from Nature" were "too much in- 
 troduced without being called for by a particular 
 
 [128] 
 
GHOSTS IN THE SHELDONIAN 
 
 sentiment." Clare, in reply, is troubled that Keats 
 shov/s the usual inaccuracies of the townsman when 
 treating of nature, and that when in doubt he bor- 
 rows from the Classics and is too inclined to see 
 "behind every bush a thrumming Apollo." 
 
 LVI 
 
 GHOSTS IN THE SHELDONIAN 
 
 THE most popular theory advanced to account 
 for the haunting of houses is that emana- 
 tions of fear, hate or grief somehow im- 
 pregnate a locality, and these emotions are released 
 when in contact with a suitable medium. So with 
 a poem or novel, passion impregnates the words and 
 can make them active even divorced from the locality 
 of creation. 
 
 An extreme instance of this process was claimed 
 when Mr. Thomas Hardy came to Oxford to receive 
 his honorary degree as Doctor of Literature, in the 
 Sheldonian Theatre. 
 
 There were two very aged dons sitting together on 
 a front bench, whom nobody in the assembly had ever 
 seen before. They frowned and refrained from 
 clapping Mr. Hardy or the Public Orator who had 
 just described him as "Omnium poetarum Britan- 
 nicorum necnon fabulatorum etiam facile princeps," 
 and people said they were certainly ghosts and 
 
 [129] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 identified them with those masters of colleges who 
 failed to answer Jude the Obscure when he enquired 
 by letter how he might become a student of the 
 University. It seems one ought to be very careful 
 when writing realistically. 
 
 LVII 
 THE LAYING ON OF HANDS 
 
 WHILE still in my perambulator about the 
 year 1899/ I once received with great 
 alarm the blessing of Algernon Charles 
 Swinburne who was making his daily journey from 
 "The Pines" in Putney to the Rose and Crown public 
 house on the edge of Wimbledon Common. It was 
 many years before I identified our nursery bogey 
 man, "mad Mr. Swinburne," with the poet. It in- 
 terests me to read that Swinburne as a young man once 
 asked and received the blessing of Walter Savage Lan- 
 dor who was a very old man indeed at the time, and 
 that Landor as a child had been himself taken to get a 
 blessing at the hand of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and that 
 the great lexicographer in his childhood had been 
 unsuccessfully "touched" by Queen Anne for the 
 King's Evil. And what the moral may be, I cannot 
 say, but I have traced the story back to Queen Anne 
 because I want to make my grimace at the sacerdotal- 
 1 See Mr. Max Beerbohm's AND EVEN NOW, page 69. 
 
 [130] 
 
THE LAYING ON OF HANDS 
 ists; for I must confess, I have been many times 
 disillusioned over such "poetry in the great tradition" 
 as Authority has put beyond criticism. 
 
 In caution, and out of deference to my reader's 
 sensibilities I will only quote a single example. 
 Before reading a line of Swinburne I had been fre- 
 quently told that he was "absolutely wonderful," I 
 would be quite carried away by him. They all said 
 that the opening chorus, for instance, of Atalanta in 
 Calydon was the most melodious verse in the English 
 language. I read: 
 
 When the hounds of Spring are on Winter's traces, 
 The Mother of months in meadow and plain, . . . 
 
 and I was not carried away as far as I expected. 
 For a time I persuaded myself that it was my own 
 fault, that I was a Philistine and had no ear — but one 
 day pride reasserted itself and I began asking myself 
 whether in the lines quoted above, the two "in's" of 
 Spring and Winter and the two "mo's" of Mother and 
 Months did not come too close together for euphony, 
 and who exactly was the heroine of the second line, 
 and whether the heavy alliteration in m was not too 
 obvious a device, and whether months was not rather 
 a stumbling-block in galloping verse of this kind, and 
 would it not have been better. . . . 
 
 Thereupon faith in the "great tradition" and in 
 "Authority" waned. 
 
 Still, I would be hard-hearted and stiff-necked 
 [131] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 indeed if I did not wish to have had on my own head 
 the blessinsf that Swinburne received. 
 
 LVIII 
 
 WAYS AND MEANS 
 
 IT is true that Genius can't lie hid in a garret 
 nowadays; there are too many people eager to 
 get credit for discovering and showing it to the 
 world. But as most of the acknowledged best living 
 poets find it impossible to make anything like a 
 living wage from their poetry, and patronage has long 
 gone out of fashion (a great pity I think) the poet 
 after a little fuss and flattery is obliged to return dis- 
 consolately to his garret. The problem of an 
 alternative profession is one for which I have never 
 heard a really satisfactory solution. Even Coleridge 
 (whose Biographia Literaria should be the poet's 
 Bible) could make no more hopeful suggestion than 
 that the poet should become a country parson. 
 
 Surely a most unhappy choice! The alternative 
 profession should be as far as possible removed from, 
 and subsidiary to, poetry. True priesthood will 
 never allow itself to become subordinate to any other 
 calling, and the dangerous consanguinity of poetry 
 and religion has already been emphasized. It is the 
 old difficulty of serving two masters; with the more 
 orthodox poets Herbert and Vaughan, for example, 
 
 [132] 
 
WAYS AND MEANS 
 poetry was all but always tamed into meek subjection 
 to religious propaganda; with Skelton and Donne it 
 was very diflferent, and one feels that they were the 
 better poets for their independence, their rebellious- 
 ness towards priestly conventions. 
 
 Schoolmastering is another unfortunate subsidiary 
 profession, it is apt to give poetry a didactic flavour; 
 journalism is too exacting on the invention, which the 
 poet must keep fresh; manual labour wearies the 
 body and tends to make the mind sluggish; office- 
 routine limits the experience. Perhaps Chaucer as 
 dockyard inspector and diplomat, Shakespeare as 
 actor manager, and Blake as engraver, solved the 
 problem at best. 
 
 These practical reflections may be supplemented by 
 a paragraph lifted from the New York Nation 
 apropos of a trans-Atlantic poet whose works have 
 already sold a million copies; a new volume of his 
 poems has evidently broken the hearty muscular open- 
 prairie tradition of the 'fifties and 'sixties and 
 advanced forty years at a stride to the Parisian 
 ecstasies of the naughty 'nineties; — 
 
 "That verse is in itself a hopelessly unpopular 
 form of literature is an error of the sophisticated 
 but imperfectly informed. Every period has its 
 widely read poets. Only, these poets rarely rise 
 into the field of criticism since they always echo 
 the music of the day before yesterday and express 
 as an astonishing message the delusions of the 
 huge rear-guard of civilization." 
 
 [133] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 LIX 
 
 POETRY AS LABOUR 
 
 A BOOK of verses must be either priceless or 
 valueless and as the general reading public 
 is never told which by the council of critics 
 until fifty years at least after the first publication, 
 poets can only expect payment at a nominal rate. If 
 they complain that the labourer is worthy of his hire, 
 the analogy is not admitted. The public denies 
 poetry to be labour; it is supposed to be a gentle rec- 
 reation like cutting out "Home Sweet Home" from 
 three-ply wood with a fretsaw, or collecting pressed 
 flowers. 
 
 LX 
 
 THE NECESSITY OF ARROGANCE 
 
 TO say of any poet that there is complete 
 individuality in his poems combined with ex- 
 cellent craftsmanship amounts to a charge of 
 arrogance. Craftsmanship in its present-day sense 
 seems necessarily to imply acquaintance with other 
 poetry; polish is only learned from the shortcomings 
 and triumphs of others, it is not natural to the back- 
 woodsman. A poet who after reading the work of 
 those whom he recognizes as masters of the craft, does 
 
 [134] 
 
THE NECESSITY OF ARROGANCE 
 not allow himself to be influenced into imitation of 
 peculiar technical tricks (as we often find ourselves 
 unwittingly influenced to imitate the peculiar gestures 
 of people we admire or love), that poet must have 
 the arrogance to put his own potential achievements 
 on a level with the work he most admires. 
 
 Then is asked the question, "But why do poets 
 write? Why do they go on polishing the rough ideas 
 which, once on paper, even in a crude and messy 
 form, should give the mental conflict complete relief? 
 Why, if the conflict is purely a personal one, do they 
 definitely attempt to press the poem on their neigh- 
 bour's imagination with all the zeal of a hot-gospel- 
 ler?" 
 
 There is arrogance in that, the arrogance of a child 
 who takes for granted that all the world is interested 
 in its doings and clever sayings. The emotional 
 crises that make Poetry, imply suff'ering, and suff'ering 
 usually humiliation, so that the poet makes his secret 
 or open confidence in his poetic powers a set-off 
 against a sense of alienation from society due to some 
 physical deformity, stigma of birth or other early 
 spite of nature, or against his later misfortunes in 
 love. 
 
 The expectation and desire of a spurious im- 
 mortality "fluttering alive on the mouths of men" is 
 admitted by most poets of my acquaintance, both the 
 good and the bad. This may be only a more 
 definitely expressed form of the same instinct for self- 
 perpetuation that makes the schoolboy cut his name 
 
 [135] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 on the leaden gutter of the church porch, or the rich 
 man give a college scholarship to preserve his name 
 in perpetuo. But with the poet there is always the 
 tinge of arrogance in the thought that his own poetry 
 has a lasting quality which most of his contempo- 
 raries cannot claim. 
 
 The danger of this very necessary arrogance is that 
 it is likely so to intrude the poet's personal eccen- 
 tricities into what he writes that the reader recognizes 
 them and does not read the "I" as being the voice of 
 universality. ... It was the first night of a senti- 
 mental play in an Early English setting; the crisis 
 long deferred was just coming, the heroine and hero 
 were on the point of reconciliation and the long 
 embrace, the audience had lumps in their throats. 
 At that actual instant of suspense, a man in evening- 
 dress leaped down on the stage from a box, kicked 
 the ruffed and doubleted hero into the orchestra, and 
 began to embrace the lady. A moment's silence; 
 then terrible confusion and rage. The stage manager 
 burst into tears, attendants rushed forward to arrest 
 the desperado. 
 
 "But, ladies and gentlemen, I am the author!! I 
 have an artist's right to do what I like with my own 
 play." 
 
 "Duck him! scratch his face! tar and feather him!" 
 
 Arrogance? Yes, but a self-contradictory arro- 
 gance that takes the form of believing that there is 
 nobody beside themselves who could point out just 
 
 [136] 
 
IN PROCESSION 
 
 where in a given poem they have written well, and 
 Vv^here badly. They know that it contains all sorts of 
 hidden lesser implications (besides the more im- 
 portant ones) which, they think, a few sensitive minds 
 may feel, but none could analyze ; they think that they 
 have disguised this or that bit of putty (of which no 
 poem is innocent) so that no living critic could detect 
 it. They are arrogant because they claim to under- 
 stand better than any rivals how impossible an art 
 poetry is, and because they still have the courage to 
 face it. They have most arrogance before writing 
 their poem of the moment, most humility when they 
 know that they have once more failed. 
 
 LXI 
 IN PROCESSION 
 
 THIS piece was written a few weeks after the 
 remainder of the book: I had no cold-blooded 
 intention of summarizing the paradox of 
 poetic arrogance contained in the last section, but 
 so it happened, and I print it here. 
 
 Donne (for example's sake) 
 
 Keats, Marlowe, Spenser, Blake, 
 
 Shelley and Milton, 
 
 Shakespeare and Chaucer, Skelton — 
 
 I love them as I know them, 
 
 But who could dare outgo them 
 
 At their several arts 
 
 At their particular parts 
 
 [137] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 Of wisdom, power and knowledge? 
 
 In the Poet's College 
 
 Are no degrees nor stations, 
 
 Comparisons, rivals, 
 
 Stem examinations, 
 
 Class declarations, 
 
 Senior survivals; 
 
 No creeds, religions, nations 
 
 Combatant together 
 
 With mutual damnations. 
 
 Or tell me whether 
 
 Shelley's hand could take 
 
 The laurel wreath from Blake? 
 
 Could Shakespeare make the less 
 
 Chaucer's goodliness? 
 
 The poets of old 
 Each with his pen of gold 
 Gloriously writing 
 Found no need for fighting, 
 In common being so rich; 
 None need take the ditch. 
 Unless this Chaucer beats 
 That Chaucer, or this Keats 
 With other Keats is flyting: 
 See Donne deny Donne's feats, 
 Shelley take Shelley down, 
 Blake snatch at his own crown. 
 Without comparison aiming high, 
 Watching with no jealous eye, 
 A neighbour's renown, 
 Each in his time contended 
 But with a mood late ended, 
 Some manner now put by. 
 Or force expended, 
 
 [1381 
 
IN PROCESSION 
 
 Sinking a new well when the old ran dry. 
 
 So, like my masters, I 
 
 Voice my ambition loud, 
 
 In prospect proud, 
 
 Treading the poet's road, 
 
 In retrospect most humble 
 
 For I stumble and tumble^ 
 
 I spill my load. 
 
 But often half-way to sleep, 
 
 On a mountain shagged and steep, 
 
 The sudden moment on me comes 
 
 With terrible roll of dream drums. 
 
 Reverberations, cymbals, horns replying, 
 
 When with standards flying, 
 
 A cloud of horsemen behind. 
 
 The coloured pomps unwind 
 
 The Carnival wagons 
 
 With their saints and their dragons 
 
 On the screen of my teeming mind, 
 
 The Creation and Flood 
 
 With our Saviour's Blood 
 
 And fat Silenus' flagons, 
 
 With every rare beast 
 
 From the South and East, 
 
 Both greatest and least, 
 
 On and on. 
 
 In endless variable procession. 
 
 I stand on the top rungs 
 
 Of a ladder reared in the air 
 
 And I speak with strange tongues 
 
 So the crowds murmur and stare, 
 
 Then volleys again the blare 
 
 Of horns, and Summer flowers 
 
 Fly scattering in showers, 
 
 And the Sun rolls in the sky, 
 
 [139] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 While the drums thumping by 
 Proclaim me. . . . 
 
 Oh then, when I wake 
 Could I recovering take 
 And propose on this page 
 The words of my rage 
 And my blandishing speech 
 Steadfast and sage, 
 Could I stretch and reach 
 The flowers and the ripe fruit 
 Laid out at the ladder's foot, 
 Could I rip a silken shred 
 From the banner tossed ahead. 
 Could I call a double flam 
 From the drums, could the Goat 
 Horned with gold, could the Ram 
 With a flank like a barn-door 
 The dwarf and blackamoor. 
 Could Jonah and the Whale 
 And the Holy Grail 
 With the ''Sacking of Rome' 
 And ''Lot at his home'' 
 The Ape with his platter, 
 Going clitter-clatter. 
 The Nymphs and the Satyr, 
 And every other such matter 
 Come before me here 
 Standing and speaking clear 
 With a "how do ye do?" 
 And "who are ye, who?" 
 Could I show them to you 
 That you saw them with me. 
 Oh then, then I could be 
 The Prince of all Poetry 
 With never a peer, 
 
 [140] 
 
IN PROCESSION 
 
 Seeing my way so clear 
 To unveil mystery. 
 
 Telling you of land and sea 
 
 Of Heaven blithe and free, 
 
 How I know there to be 
 
 Such and such Castles built in Spain, 
 
 Telling also of Cockaigne 
 
 Of that glorious kingdom, Cand 
 
 Of the Delectable Land, 
 
 The Land of Crooked Stiles, 
 
 The Fortunate Isles, 
 
 Of the more than three score miles 
 
 That to Babylon lead, 
 
 A pretty city indeed 
 
 Built on a foursquare plan. 
 
 Of the land of the Gold Man 
 
 Whose eager horses whinney 
 
 In their cribs of gold. 
 
 Of the lands of Whipperginny 
 
 Of the land where none grow old. 
 
 Especially I could tell 
 
 Of the Town of Hell, 
 
 A huddle of dirty woes 
 
 And houses in endless rows 
 
 Straggling across all space; 
 
 Hell has no market place. 
 
 Nor point where four ways meet, 
 
 Nor principal street. 
 
 Nor barracks, nor Town Hall, 
 
 Nor shops at all. 
 
 Nor rest for weary feet, 
 
 Nor theatre, square or park, 
 
 Nor lights after dark 
 
 [141] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 Nor churches nor inns, 
 
 Nor convenience for sins, 
 
 Hell nowhere begins. 
 
 Hell nowhere ends, 
 
 But over the world extends 
 
 Rambling, dreamy, limitless, hated well; 
 
 The suburbs of itself, I say, is Hell. 
 
 But back to the sweets 
 
 Of Spenser and Keats 
 
 And the calm joy that greets 
 
 The chosen of Apollo! 
 
 Here let me mope, quirk, holloa 
 
 With a gesture that meets 
 
 The needs that I follow 
 
 In my own fierce way. 
 
 Let me be grave-gay 
 
 Or merry-sad, 
 
 Who rhyming here have had 
 
 Marvellous hope of achievement 
 
 And deeds of ample scope. 
 
 Then deceiving and bereavement 
 
 Of this same hope. 
 
 [142] 
 
APPENDIX:— THE DANGERS OF DEFINITION 
 
 The following letter I reprint from Tract No. 6 
 issued by the Society for Pure English, but put it as 
 an appendix because it explains my attitude to the 
 careful use of language by prose writers as well as 
 by poets. It is intended to be read in conjunction 
 with my section on Diction, 
 
 To the Editor of the S. P. E. tracts. 
 
 Sir, 
 As one rather more interested in the choice, use, and 
 blending of words than in the niceties of historical 
 grammar, and having no greater knowledge of 
 etymology than will occasionally allow me to question 
 vulgar derivations of place-names, I would like to 
 sound a warning against the attempt to purify the 
 language too much — "one word, one meaning" is as 
 impossible to impose on English as "one letter, one 
 sound." By all means weed out homophones, and 
 wherever a word is overloaded and driven to death let 
 another bear part of the burden; suppress the bastard 
 and ugly words of journalese or commerce; keep a 
 watchful eye on the scientists; take necessary French 
 and Italian words out of their italics to give them an 
 English spelling and accentuation; call a bird or a 
 flower by its proper name, revive useful dialect or 
 obsolescent words, and so on; that is the right sort of 
 
 [143] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 purification, but let it be tactfully done, let the Dic- 
 tionary be a hive of living things and not a museum of 
 minutely ticketed fossils. A common-sense precision 
 in writing is clearly necessary; one has only to read a 
 page or two of Nashe, Lyly, or (especially) the lesser 
 Euphuists to come to this conclusion; their sentences 
 often can have meant no more to themselves than a 
 mere grimace or the latest sweep of the hat learned in 
 Italy. A common-sense precision, yes, but when the 
 pedantic scientist accuses the man in the street of ver- 
 bal inexactitude the latter will do well to point out to 
 the scientist that of all classes of writers, his is the 
 least accurate of any in the use of ordinary words. 
 Witness a typical sentence, none the better for being 
 taken from a book which has made an extremely im- 
 portant contribution to modern psychological research, 
 and is written by a scientist so enlightened that, 
 dispensing almost entirely with the usual scientific 
 jargon, he has improvised his own technical 
 terms as they are needed for the argument. 
 Very good words they are, such as would 
 doubtless be as highly approved by the Society for 
 Pure English, in session, as they have been by the 
 British Association. This Doctor X is explaining the 
 unaccountable foreknowledge in certain insects of the 
 needs they will meet after their metamorphosis from 
 grub to moth. He writes: 
 
 . . . This grub, after a life completely spent within 
 the channels in a tree-trunk which it itself manu- 
 factures. . . . 
 
 [144] 
 
APPENDIX:— DANGERS OF DEFINITION 
 
 "Yes," said Doctor X to me, "somehow the two it's 
 coming together look a bit awkward, but I have had a 
 lot of trouble with that sentence and I came to the con- 
 clusion that I'd rather have it clumsy than obscure." 
 I pointed out have the "tree-trunk which''' was surely 
 not what he meant, but that the faults of the sentence 
 lay deeper than that. He was using words not as 
 winged angels always ready to do his command, but 
 as lifeless counters, weights, measures, or automatic 
 engines wrongly adjusted. A grub cannot manU' 
 facture a channel. Even a human being who can 
 manufacture a boot or a box can only scoop 
 or dig a channel. And you can only have 
 a channel on the outer surface of a tree; inside 
 a tree you have tunnels. A tunnel you drive 
 or bore, A grub cannot be within either a 
 channel or a tunnel (surely) in the same way as a fly 
 is found within a piece of amber. Doctor X excused 
 himself by saying that "scientists are usually function- 
 ally incapable of visualization," and that "normal 
 mental visualization is dangerous, and abnormal visu- 
 alization fatal to scientific theorizations, as olfermg 
 tempting vistas of imaginative synthetical concepts un- 
 confirmed by actual investigation of phenomena" — or 
 words to that effect. Unaware of the beam in his own 
 eye, our Doctor complains more than once in his book 
 of the motes in the public eye, of the extended popular 
 application of scientific terms to phenomena for which 
 they were never intended, until they become like so 
 many blunted chisels. On the other hand, he would 
 
 [145] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 be the first to acknowledge that over-nice definition is, 
 for scientific purposes, just as dangerous as blurring 
 of sense ; Herr Einstein wasi saying only the other day 
 that men become so much the slaves of words that the 
 propositions of Euclid, for instance, which are abstract 
 processes of reason only holding good in reference to 
 one another, have been taken to apply absolutely in 
 concrete cases, where they do not. Over-definition, I 
 am trying to show, discourages any progressive under- 
 standing of the idea for which it acts as hieroglyph. 
 It even seems that the more precisely circumscribed a 
 word, the less accurate it is in its relation to other 
 closely-defined words. 
 
 There is a story of a governess who asked her 
 charges what was the shape of the earth? "It may 
 conveniently be described as an oblate spheroid" was 
 the glib and almost mutinous answer. "Who told you 
 girls that?" asked the suspicious Miss Smithson. A 
 scientific elder brother was quoted as authority, 
 but Miss Smithson with commendable common sense 
 gave her ruling, "Indeed that may be so, and it may 
 be not, but it certainly is nicer for little girls to say 
 that the earth is more or less the shape of an orange." 
 
 From which fruit, as conveniently as from anywhere 
 else, can be drawn our homely moral of common sense 
 in the use of words. As every schoolboy I hope 
 doesn't know, the orange is the globose fruit of that 
 rutaceous tree the citrus aurantium, but as every 
 schoolboy certainly is aware, there are several 
 kinds of orange on the market, to wit the 
 
 [146] 
 
APPENDIX:— DANGERS OF DEFINITION 
 
 ordinary everyday sweet orange from Jaffa or 
 Jamaica, the bitter marmalade orange that either 
 comes or does not come from Seville, the 
 navel orange, and the excellent "blood," with 
 several other varieties. Moreover the orange 
 has as many points as a horse, and parts or processes 
 connected with its dissection and use as a motor- 
 bicycle. "I would I were an Orange Tree, that busie 
 Plante," sighed George Herbert once. I wonder how 
 Herbert would have anatomized his Orange, then a 
 rarer fruit than today when popular affection and 
 necessary daily intercourse have wrapped the orange 
 with a whole glossary of words as well as with tissue- 
 paper. Old gentlemen usually pare their oranges, 
 but the homophonic barrage of puns when Jones pere 
 prepares to pare a pair of — even oranges (let alone 
 another English-grown fruit), has taught the younger 
 generations either to peel a norange or skin their 
 roranges. Peel (subst.) is ousting rind; a pity be- 
 cause there is also peal as a homophone; but I am 
 glad to say that what used to be called divisions are 
 now almost universally known as fingers or pigs (is 
 the derivation from the tithe-or parson's pig known 
 by its extreme smallness?) ; the seeds are "pips," and 
 quite rightly too, because in this country they are 
 seldom used for planting, and "pip''' obviously means 
 that when you squeeze them between forefinger and 
 thumb they are a useful form of minor artillery; then 
 there is the white pithy part under the outer rind; I 
 have heard this called blanket, and that is pretty 
 
 [147] 
 
ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 good, but I have also heard it called kill-baby, and 
 that is better; for me it will always remain kill-baby. 
 On consulting Webster's International Dictionary I 
 find that there is no authority or precedent for calling 
 the withered calix on the orange the kim, but I have 
 done so ever since I can remember, and have heard 
 the word in many respectable nurseries (it has a 
 fascination for children), and I can't imagine it 
 having any other name. Poetical wit might call it 
 "the beauty-patch on that fairy orange cheek"; 
 heraldry might blazon it, on tenne, as a mullet, vert, 
 for difference; and contemporary slang would 
 probably explain it as that "rotten little star-shaped 
 gadget at the place where you shove in your lump of 
 sugar"; but kim is obviously the word that is wanted, 
 it needs no confirmation by a Dictionary Revisal 
 Committee or National Academy. There it is, you 
 can hardly get away from it. Misguided supporters 
 of the Society for Pure English, resisting the impulse 
 to say casually "the yellow stuff round my yorange" 
 and "the bits inside, what you eat," and knowing bet- 
 ter than to give us exocarp, carpel, and ovule, will, 
 however, perhaps misunderstand the aims of the So- 
 ciety by only using literary and semi-scientific lan- 
 guage, by insisting on paring the integument and 
 afterwards removing the divisions of their fruit for 
 mastication. But pure English does not mean putting 
 back the clock; or doing mental gymnastics. Let 
 them rather (when they don't honestly push in that 
 lump of sugar and suck) skin off the rind, ignoring 
 
 [148] 
 
APPENDIX:— DANGERS OF DEFINITION 
 
 the kim and scraping away the kill-baby, then pull out 
 the pigs, chew them decently, and put the pips to their 
 proper use. 
 
 Good English surely is clear, easy, unambiguous, 
 rich, well-sounding, but not self-conscious; for too 
 much pruning kills. . . . 
 
 THE END 
 
 [149] 
 
1 
 
 n 
 
 QH^ 
 

 .^ ^^. 
 
 
 A\^ . ^- ^ '" * '^b/ 
 
 v^ 
 
 "oo^ 
 
 .^^ ^^. 
 
 
 ^^. 
 
 '^ " ' ^^i- V » <■ r '^ J N "J \V von '^- 
 
 P.s; 
 
 .^^ 
 
 -^. ,^ :,r/ '-■ 
 
 -^ ^t 
 
 .,,^ 
 
 
 Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
 Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
 Treatment Date: Jan. 2009 
 
 PreservationTechnologies 
 
 A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 
 
 111 Thomson Park Drive 
 Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
 (724) 779-2111 
 
' = sj> -n^ 
 
 0- 
 
 
 '>''-"\</\^":'.%'""\K^"', 
 
 .^'' 
 
 -^ ^^ 
 
 >0^ 
 
 
 
 ^^% 
 
 *A <*>' ~ -«" 
 
 
 ,00.