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The New Poetry Series

PUBLISHED BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY


IRRADIATIONS. SAND AND SPRAY. JOHN GOULD FLETCHER.

SOME IMAGIST POETS.

JAPANESE LYRICS. Translated by LAFCADIO HEARN.

AFTERNOONS OF APRIL. GRACE HAZARD CONKLING.

THE CLOISTER: A VERSE DRAMA. EMILE VERHAEREN.

INTERFLOW. GEOFFREY C. FABER.

STILLWATER PASTORALS AND OTHER POEMS. PAUL SHIVELL.

IDOLS. WALTER CONRAD ARENSBERG.

TURNS AND MOVIES, AND OTHER TALES IN VERSE. CONRAD AIKEN.

ROADS. GRACE FALLOW NORTON.

GOBLINS AND PAGODAS. JOHN GOULD FLETCHER.

SOME IMAGIST POETS. _1916._

A SONG OF THE GUNS. GILBERT FRANKAU.

MOTHERS AND MEN. HAROLD T. PULSIFER.




SOME IMAGIST POETS, _1916_




  SOME IMAGIST POETS
  _1916_

  AN ANNUAL ANTHOLOGY


  [Illustration]

  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
  The Riverside Press Cambridge
  1916

  COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  _Published May 1916_

  THIRD IMPRESSION




PREFACE


In bringing the second volume of _Some Imagist Poets_ before the
public, the authors wish to express their gratitude for the interest
which the 1915 volume aroused. The discussion of it was widespread,
and even those critics out of sympathy with Imagist tenets accorded
it much space. In the Preface to that book, we endeavoured to present
those tenets in a succinct form. But the very brevity we employed has
lead to a great deal of misunderstanding. We have decided, therefore,
to explain the laws which govern us a little more fully. A few people
may understand, and the rest can merely misunderstand again, a result
to which we are quite accustomed.

In the first place "Imagism" does not mean merely the presentation of
pictures. "Imagism" refers to the manner of presentation, not to the
subject. It means a clear presentation of whatever the author wishes
to convey. Now he may wish to convey a mood of indecision, in which
case the poem should be indecisive; he may wish to bring before his
reader the constantly shifting and changing lights over a landscape,
or the varying attitudes of mind of a person under strong emotion,
then his poem must shift and change to present this clearly. The
"exact" word does not mean the word which exactly describes the
object in itself, it means the "exact" word which brings the effect
of that object before the reader as it presented itself to the poet's
mind at the time of writing the poem. Imagists deal but little with
similes, although much of their poetry is metaphorical. The reason
for this is that while acknowledging the figure to be an integral
part of all poetry, they feel that the constant imposing of one
figure upon another in the same poem blurs the central effect.

The great French critic, Remy de Gourmont, wrote last Summer in _La
France_ that the Imagists were the descendants of the French
_Symbolistes_. In the Preface to his _Livre des Masques_, M. de
Gourmont has thus described _Symbolisme_: "Individualism in
literature, liberty of art, abandonment of existing forms.... The
sole excuse which a man can have for writing is to write down
himself, to unveil for others the sort of world which mirrors itself
in his individual glass.... He should create his own aesthetics--and
we should admit as many aesthetics as there are original minds, and
judge them for what they are and not what they are not." In this
sense the Imagists are descendants of the _Symbolistes_; they are
Individualists.

The only reason that Imagism has seemed so anarchaic and strange to
English and American reviewers is that their minds do not easily and
quickly suggest the steps by which modern art has arrived at its
present position. Its immediate prototype cannot be found in English
or American literature, we must turn to Europe for it. With Debussy
and Stravinsky in music, and Gauguin and Matisse in painting, it
should have been evident to every one that art was entering upon an
era of change. But music and painting are universal languages, so we
have become accustomed to new idioms in them, while we still find it
hard to recognize a changed idiom in literature.

The crux of the situation is just here. It is in the idiom employed.
Imagism asks to be judged by different standards from those employed
in Nineteenth-Century art. It is small wonder that Imagist poetry
should be incomprehensible to men whose sole touchstone for art is
the literature of one country for a period of four centuries. And it
is an illuminating fact that among poets and men conversant with many
poetic idioms, Imagism is rarely misconceived. They may not agree
with us, but they do not misunderstand us.

This must not be misconstrued into the desire to belittle our
forerunners. On the contrary, the Imagists have the greatest
admiration for the past, and humility towards it. But they have been
caught in the throes of a new birth. The exterior world is changing,
and with it men's feelings, and every age must express its feelings
in its own individual way. No art is any more "egoistic" than
another; all art is an attempt to express the feelings of the artist,
whether it be couched in narrative form or employ a more personal
expression.

It is not what Imagists write about which makes them hard of
comprehension; it is the way they write it. All nations have laws of
prosody, which undergo changes from time to time. The laws of English
metrical prosody are well known to every one concerned with the
subject. But that is only one form of prosody. Other nations have had
different ones: Anglo-Saxon poetry was founded upon alliteration,
Greek and Roman was built upon quantity, the Oriental was formed out
of repetition, and the Japanese Hokku got its effects by an exact and
never-to-be-added-to series of single syllables. So it is evident
that poetry can be written in many modes. That the Imagists base much
of their poetry upon cadence and not upon metre makes them neither
good nor bad. And no one realizes more than they that no theories nor
rules make poetry. They claim for their work only that it is sincere.

It is this very fact of "cadence" which has misled so many reviewers,
until some have been betrayed into saying that the Imagists discard
rhythm, when rhythm is the most important quality in their technique.
The definition of _vers libre_ is--a verse-form based upon cadence.
Now cadence in music is one thing, cadence in poetry quite another,
since we are not dealing with tone but with rhythm. It is the sense
of perfect balance of flow and rhythm. Not only must the syllables so
fall as to increase and continue the movement, but the whole poem
must be as rounded and recurring as the circular swing of a balanced
pendulum. It can be fast or slow, it may even jerk, but this perfect
swing it must have, even its jerks must follow the central movement.
To illustrate: Suppose a person were given the task of walking, or
running, round a large circle, with two minutes given to do it in.
Two minutes which he would just consume if he walked round the circle
quietly. But in order to make the task easier for him, or harder, as
the case might be, he was required to complete each half of the
circle in exactly a minute. No other restrictions were placed upon
him. He might dawdle in the beginning, and run madly to reach the
half-circle mark on time, and then complete his task by walking
steadily round the second half to goal. Or he might leap, and run,
and skip, and linger in all sorts of ways, making up for slow going
by fast, and for extra haste by pauses, and varying these movements
on either lap of the circle as the humour seized him, only so that he
were just one minute in traversing the first half-circle, and just
one minute in traversing the second. Another illustration which may
be employed is that of a Japanese wood-carving where a toad in one
corner is balanced by a spray of blown flowers in the opposite upper
one. The flowers are not the same shape as the toad, neither are they
the same size, but the balance is preserved.

The unit in _vers libre_ is not the foot, the number of the
syllables, the quantity, or the line. The unit is the strophe, which
may be the whole poem, or may be only a part. Each strophe is a
complete circle: in fact, the meaning of the Greek word "strophe" is
simply that part of the poem which was recited while the chorus were
making a turn round the altar set up in the centre of the theatre.
The simile of the circle is more than a simile, therefore; it is a
fact. Of course the circle need not always be the same size, nor need
the times allowed to negotiate it be always the same. There is room
here for an infinite number of variations. Also, circles can be added
to circles, movement upon movement, to the poem, provided each
movement completes itself, and ramifies naturally into the next. But
one thing must be borne in mind: a cadenced poem is written to be
read aloud, in this way only will its rhythm be felt. Poetry is a
spoken and not a written art.

The _vers libristes_ are often accused of declaring that they have
discovered a new thing. Where such an idea started, it is impossible
to say, certainly none of the better _vers libristes_ was ever guilty
of so ridiculous a statement. The name _vers libre_ is new, the
thing, most emphatically, is not. Not new in English poetry, at any
rate. You will find something very much like it in Dryden's
_Threnodia Augustalis_; a great deal of Milton's _Samson Agonistes_
is written in it; and Matthew Arnold's _Philomela_ is a shining
example of it. Practically all of Henley's _London Voluntaries_ are
written in it, and (so potent are names) until it was christened
_vers libre_, no one thought of objecting to it. But the oldest
reference to _vers libre_ is to be found in Chaucer's _House of
Fame_, where the Eagle addresses the Poet in these words:

  And nevertheless hast set thy wyt
  Although that in thy heed full lyte is
  To make bookes, songes, or dytees
  In rhyme or elles in cadence.

Commentators have wasted reams of paper in an endeavour to determine
what Chaucer meant by this. But is it not possible that he meant a
verse based upon rhythm, but which did not follow the strict metrical
prosody of his usual practice?

One of the charges frequently brought against the Imagists is that
they write, not poetry, but "shredded prose." This misconception
springs from the almost complete ignorance of the public in regard to
the laws of cadenced verse. But, in fact, what is prose and what is
poetry? Is it merely a matter of typographical arrangement? Must
everything which is printed in equal lines, with rhymes at the ends,
be called poetry, and everything which is printed in a block be
called prose? Aristotle, who certainly knew more about this subject
than any one else, declares in his _Rhetoric_ that prose is
rhythmical without being metrical (that is to say, without insistence
on any single rhythm), and then goes on to state the feet that are
employed in prose, making, incidentally, the remark that the iambic
prevailed in ordinary conversation. The fact is, that there is no
hard and fast dividing line between prose and poetry. As a French
poet of distinction, Paul Fort, has said: "Prose and poetry are but
one instrument, graduated." It is not a question of typography; it is
not even a question of rules and forms. Poetry is the vision in a
man's soul which he translates as best he can with the means at his
disposal.

We are young, we are experimentalists, but we ask to be judged by our
own standards, not by those which have governed other men at other
times.




CONTENTS


  RICHARD ALDINGTON

  Eros and Psyche                                                   3

  After Two Years                                                   6

  1915                                                              7

  Whitechapel                                                       8

  Sunsets                                                          10

  People                                                           11

  Reflections: I and II                                            12


  H. D.

  Sea Gods                                                         17

  The Shrine                                                       21

  Temple--The Cliff                                                26

  Mid-day                                                          30


  JOHN GOULD FLETCHER

  Arizona                                                          35

  The Unquiet Street                                               42

  In the Theatre                                                   43

  Ships in the Harbour                                             44

  The Empty House                                                  45

  The Skaters                                                      48


  F. S. FLINT

  Easter                                                           51

  Ogre                                                             54

  Cones                                                            56

  Gloom                                                            57

  Terror                                                           60

  Chalfont Saint Giles                                             61

  War-Time                                                         63


  D. H. LAWRENCE

  Erinnyes                                                         67

  Perfidy                                                          70

  At the Window                                                    72

  In Trouble and Shame                                             73

  Brooding Grief                                                   74


  AMY LOWELL

  Patterns                                                         77

  Spring Day                                                       82

  Stravinsky's Three Pieces, "Grotesques," for String Quartet      87


  BIBLIOGRAPHY                                                     93

The authors wish to express their gratitude to the editors of _The
Egoist_ and _Poetry and Drama_, London; _The Poetry Journal_, Boston;
_The Little Review_ and _Poetry_, Chicago, for permission to reprint
certain of these poems which originally appeared in their columns. To
_Poetry_ belongs the credit of having introduced Imagism to the
world: it seems fitting, therefore, that the authors should record
their thanks in this place for the constant interest and
encouragement shown them by its editor, Miss Harriet Monroe.




RICHARD ALDINGTON




EROS AND PSYCHE


  In an old dull yard