But I must draw in my horns, though the poem has such a grave and peculiar quality that I should like to quote it all. Neither of these poems are of the greatest, the most synthetic kind. They excel by taking full advantage of the pictorial quality. And though their pictures do not blend into a single picture, they pass over a single screen, orderly and rhythmically. I would even dare to prophesy that these poets, if they develop a mature poetic power, will find that free verse tends to hamper rather than assist their expression. It is too undirected, too fluid a medium for any but the experimental poet busy with forms rather than waiting upon form. It lets the emotion, the thought, the cadence out at the corners. It bends loosely to feeling but does not discipline thought. And to some of the poets who use it, it is a convenient device for little riches in an infinite

room.

XXXIII

A PILGRIM WHO STOPPED HALF-WAY

MY DEAR X,

In this letter I mean to give you a taste of a poet who achieved a very high level of expert composition, without finding imaginative form-James Elroy Flecker. There are three obvious points about him. He had a poetic method of his own, he was isolated from his contemporaries, and he was inspired by a very strong sense of tradition. Here is a portion of his preface to “The Golden Journey to Samarkand":

"The Parnassian school was a classical Reaction against the perfervid sentimentality and extravagance of some French romantics. The Romantics in France, as in England, had done their powerful work and infinitely widened the scope and enriched the language of poetry. It remained for the Parnassians to raise the technique of their art to a height which should enable them to express the subtlest ideas in powerful and simple verse. But the real meaning of the term Parnassian may be best understood from considering what is definitely not Parnassian. To be didactic like Wordsworth, to write dull poems of unwieldly length, to bury like Tennyson or Browning poetry of exquisite beauty in monstrous realms of vulgar, feeble, or obscure versifying, to overlay fine work with gross and irrelevant egoism like Victor Hugo would be abhorrent, and rightly so,

to members of this school. On the other hand, the finest work of many great English poets, especially Milton, Keats, Matthew Arnold, and Tennyson, is written in the same tradition as the work of the great French school: and one can but wish that the two latter poets had had something of a definite theory to guide them in self-criticism.”

And again:

"At the present moment there can be no doubt that English poetry stands in need of some such saving doctrine to redeem it from the formlessness and the didactic tendencies which are now in fashion. As for English criticism, can it not learn from the Parnassian, or any tolerable theory of poetic art, to examine the beauty and not the message' of poetry?

Lastly, he declares the Golden Journey to have been written "with the sole intention of creating beauty."

That preface is as relevant to his work and its reaction from the modern poetic orientation as was the preface to the Lyrical Ballads to the purposes of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Even though Flecker died of consumption before he had passed thirty, a considerable body of verse remains. And (my text is the collected edition), except for the last few pages (the poems are arranged more or less chronologically), which convey the fragmentary, confused and over-coloured impression natural to a poet fighting vainly against disease, one clearly perceives a sure development of rhythmic power founded upon a theory of poetic art, both natural to Flecker's temperamental approach to literature and indispensable to the quality of his talent. Let me make no mistake about that word "theory." He runs nothing to death, in problems either of structure or detail. True enough;

but bear in mind that on both points he is not theorizing in the air. He is simply defining and materializing his own poetic impulse. Flecker did not beat out a suit of armour and then squeeze himself painfully into it. His poetry and the theoretic expression of its poetic principle stand in the relation of parent and child. The one exists independently, the other, created out of it, is its natural and inevitable advocate. I must make this point, to separate his poetry from the didactic in the first place and, in the second, to distinguish it as implicitly a return to a special kind of tradition and a defiance of a poetic literature violently sundered from it. Flecker's poetic theory, in fact, was simply the product of self-criticism and self-knowledge. Limited in range, measurable in power and intensity, he made the very utmost and the very best of what he possessed. He did not fall back on technique or the Parnassians to puff out and dress up a paltry poetic endowment. The rarest poetic form was not his, but he set out for it and stopped just where he knew that to go farther was to lose himself and wander in circles.

It is not my business in this letter to discuss Flecker's contemporaries, but his critical declaration bears pertinently upon his confident pilgrimage to poetic maturity and must be contrasted with the vacillations of his brother poets. Leaving out of account all qualitative standards, is it not remarkable how even the best of our modern young poets will write one brilliant volume and thenceforward live on its harvest?* I don't mean materially of course, but in the sense that the aftermath is a constant effort to write up to the crest of that earlier volume. This was written some time ago.

They try to realize, gather up, and sustain the sudden impetuosity of that first rapture. Rupert Brooke is one example among many. Brooke discovered himself at once. He leaped straight to an eminence he deserved. But thereafter he steadily declined. The reason of that decline is not far to seek. His poetic development was concurrent with a growth in self-consciousness. The impersonal quality, the objective reality of his vision was gradually narrowed and obscured, and replaced by a particular consciousness usurping the universal. Just this stress upon a self-conscious expression transformed. him from an inspired into a talented poet. With Flecker the interesting thing is that the process was in preciseld the other direction. In spite of profuse imagery any facile diction his "Juvenilia are rather trivial and mannered, highly conventional, and obedient to the models of Tennyson, Francis Thompson, Swinburne, Flaubert, Baudelaire, the Parnassians, and others. But as obviously, his early poems are in statu pupillari—the experiments of a poet feeling his way out of the opaqueness and ambiguities of a rash quest for beauty into the, clear, open, Grecian daylight, with its confined horizonse its definite outlines, its bold colouring, and its concrete appeal. It is a psychological excitement to read the poems in succession and to mark "the growth of tha poet's mind" to its fine accomplishment. Here, in a precise and candid light, are the chain of fortresses the poet has to subdue; here you may observe him getting rid of incidentals and of the self-conscious accretions which impede his poetic freedom, the substitution of concrete for abstract phraseology, the increasing fastidiousness in choice of expression, the expansion of