Swift blazing flag of the regiment, Eagle with crest of red and gold, Mother whose heart hung humble as a button Do not weep. Synge's few poems have influenced "the movement," by their hard simplicity, toward a more direct attack and a more vital imaginative speech. Still more his plays, by the marvellous lyricism of their rhythmic dialogue, derived from the speech-rhythms of a primitive people, have taught many lessons to modern poets. Probably this great Irishman has ended forever the long reign of Elizabethan blank verse in English dramatic poetry; and has given aid and comfort to all the groups of present-day poets who are trying to study anew the rhythmic bases and resources of the language. But we need not repeat what was said of the Celtic group and of other influences in the original introduction to this volume. By the time Synge died, in 1909, Edwin Arlington Robinson had published two or three books of stringent poems; in 1909 Ezra Pound's Persona appeared in London, and three years later the establishment of Poetry in Chicago gave an organ to the poets who were separating from the old tradition. By introducing the imagists and such other independents as Carl Sandburg and D. H. Lawrence and Vachel Lindsay, by presenting foreign poets like Rabindranath Tagore and Charles Vildrac, besides many in translation, and by encouraging an experimental spirit and certain new austerities of technique, the magazine exerted a definite influence. To trace the origin and development of the new movement before 1900 was indeed a temptation; but the quest would have led too far, would have made the book not only unwieldy, but theoretic and controversial. It has seemed best to adhere to the limitations imposed in the introduction to the first edition, except that Mr. Yeats, whose later work should be represented in any twentieth-century anthology, now consents to the use of a group of his poems. The second temptation which we have resisted urged us to include translations; especially some of the translations from the Chinese which scholar-poets like Arthur Waley, Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell and Witter Bynner, usually with the aid of collaborators, have published during the past five years-translations which have had an important and far-reaching influence toward simplicity, directness, condensation, and other virtues now much prized. The inclusion of two Pound-Fenellosa paraphrases from Li Po in the first edition seemed to constitute a precedent which the editors were much inclined to follow. But again they would have been led too far. Since 1917 the search in China's treasury of poetry has brought forth numerous volumes of absorbing interest. But, after all, these Chinese poets lived long ago; and if their recent presentation and quaint modernness of spirit entitle them to a place in a twentieth-century anthology, why should not Persia and India be searched as well, and ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Europe-all the fifteen or more literatures represented in Poetry by recent translations? Versions from the Greek by H. D. and Richard Aldington and F. S. Flint, from the Provençal by Ezra Pound, from the modern French by a number of poets, from the Russian and other Slavic tongues by Deutsch-Yarmolinsky and P. Selver, from the American aboriginal by Frank Gordon, Mary Austin, Natalie Curtis Burlin and others-all these, as well as the Chinese, have had an incalculable influence in breaking down provincial barriers which had tended to confine English poets within too narrow bounds of artistic technique and motive. They have assisted greatly in the broadening process now so manifest in the art, in making poetry in the English language more cosmopolitan and more representative of the age. Thus the very number and excellence of important and suggestive translations have made it impossible to include them. The editors were compelled to decide that if the volume was to represent adequately the best work of twentieth-century poets of the Englishspeaking nations, it would be necessary to confine its new inclusions strictly to this field. One other detail of editorial policy, or taste, should perhaps be touched upon. In reading the poetry of the past ten years, we have become conscious of increasing divergences between the English product and that of the United States. This is, no doubt, inevitable and desirable; and it may be both inevitable and desirable—at least it is natural-that an anthology prepared in this country should follow with the greater sympathy the American path in this divergence. But certain conclusions have been forced upon the editors for which they were not quite prepared. The first is the wide range and variety of modern American poetry. At last it begins to be continental in scope; to express the immense differences of climate, landscape, and racial and cultural environment, in this majestically vast and bewilderingly mixed nation. Compared with this variety and spaciousness, so to speak, much of the recent English poetry seems cribbed, cabined and confined in scope and range, and monotonous in feeling and style. Whole groups of poets in the mother country are occupied with English rural life-not wild nature, but nature possessed and civilized: a pleasing subject, but so long and competently handled for two hundred years as to become easily tiresome to an outsider unless presented with such rare freshness as only two or three of these pastoral poets attain. A young English poet said in a recent letter: "It is a question of race-vitality. Most American writers have a sense of life which cannot but impress any impartial English reader. I don't mean any shouting or screaming about modern wonders or modern beauty, I mean an inner force to the poem which is not found in English verse." As American poetry ceases to be colonial, much British poetry seems, by comparison, provincial. The point was stated precisely, not long ago, by Mrs. Padraic Colum, in her review of a certain English novel in The Freeman: "If books like this make all American books seem crude, even the crudest American book makes this seem insular; for despite the paucity of emotion, something of the bigness of this vast continent, with its immense spaces and its conglomeration of races, is in all recent American writings. The bigness, perhaps, crushes and dwarfs the people; but it is something which, when it becomes articulate in literature, will make American writing so different from English that one can hardly feel there is much the American can learn from English writing except its old aristocratic discipline." The divergence of background and feeling will mean, of course, increasing divergence of critical attitude. In 1921 Mr. J. C. Squire, editor of the London Mercury and a well-known Georgian poet, asserted the general English attitude by including not a single American poet among the forty-six British in his anthology Selections from Modern Poets. The present editors, wondering at this insular exclusiveness, and at many of the book's inclusions as well, become aware that they represent a different world. Their world, unlike Mr. Squire's, contains numerous poets of the other nation. If the proportion of these is smaller than certain critics may demand, we can only reply that it presents justly our opinion of the relative importance and significance of the two groups. Every editor feels, and must necessarily reveal, certain unconscious sympathies and predilections; it is better, then, to reveal them quite frankly, without extenuation or apology. There is increasing evidence that Americans are beginning to give a direct and independent rating to the art of their contemporary fellow-countrymen. In particular they begin to appreciate their poets' offering; to admit that, as M. Jean Catel said two years ago in the Mercure de France: "Il est, je crois, évident que la poésie moderne d'Angleterre balbutie, ou-que les amis de Kipling me pardonnent fait du ‘jazz-band'. Il est, pour moi du moins, aussi évident que les Etats-Unis entrent résolument dans l'Assemblée des Muses avec une merveilleuse offrande de poésie." Of course the final verdict is not yet in; indeed, cannot be delivered for many years. Meantime, we offer this collection to the public as a presentation of one phase of contemporary opinion. H. M. · |