poems, rhetoric, a conventional form of language to be found also in classical text-books, and in some cases a tendency more than slight towards the futurist's cinematographic fluidity.

However, coming at the noble art from the angle of nationalism or chauvinism, dividing the produce geographically, one finds some ground, or at least some excuse, for congratulating ourselves or our country.

Looking at the names of English writers in my first Status Rerum, I find that not one of them has bettered his position one iota. Only Mr. Yeats and Mr. Hueffer have done work worthy of notice. The rest have either stagnated or relapsed completely into silence.

As for the younger generation, in 1912 America had very little wherewith to challenge comparison with England or France. At the present writing one can select an all-America team of les jeunes to compete with les jeunes of either France or England or any other nation.

I am not "buttering" anyone. One usually refrains from complimenting young poets, for it may be thought that compliments tend to make them sit down and contemplate their own beauties, which is not one's intention. I am simply cataloguing cold facts. I do not know Mr. Masters' age, but his work is of our decade; its relations are with our decade and not with the decade preceding, and if we are judging the output of the last three years we must count it in.

With regard to the best work done in these three years we may as well recognize that a certain part of it is American.

Status Rerum-The Second

Eliot, Frost and "H. D." are Americans; so also are Williams, Sandburg, Bodenheim, Orrick Johns, John Gould Fletcher, etc.

Against a team made up of these writers you can place in England: Aldington, Monro, Rodker, Flint, Lawrence, Mrs. Wickham, Douglas Goldring; and we suffer in no degree by the comparison. If Fletcher occasionally goes off in rhetorical bombast, it is at least better than Mr. Abercrombie's bombast. And Lindsay is more alive than his numerous English confrères. As for the sickly multitude pouring out mediocre and sub-mediocre work in both countries in the first place they don't count, and, in the second place, if any among them do turn out a good scrap of work these scraps neutralize.

Even France-and France has not been at war all three years-even France will not leave us hopelessly in the rear. We may estimate the weight of her younger generation at more or less that of Jules Romains, Charles Vildrac, M. Jouve and MM. Klingsor, Jacob, Appollonaire, etc. (Recognizing most emphatically that America of the former generation can in no way compete with the mass of De Regnier, De Gourmont, Francis Jammes, Tailhade, et leurs amis.)

The rest of the current French work is full of loose Hugoesque rhetoric, sociology, mucked mysticism for the multitude, aqueous bombast, and all the fluid and ubiquitous diseases. I don't mean to say there is none good, but one's impression of fifty-odd books of their verse is that they need a deal of sorting, a deal of excerpting and compression.

don't know whether one is to lump the Irish poets into an all-empire team, or to judge them by themselves. James Joyce, by far the most significant writer of our decade, is confining himself to prose; or, to be meticulously exact, he has written a few brief poems, which POETRY will soon publish. I do not know that one can say anything of either Colum or Campbell that one would not have said three years ago.

I shall not indulge in hopes or prophesyings. Certain young American writers have appeared; I can hardly be accused of undue prejudice in favor of my native country in stating the fact of their appearance. But I do not wish to focus attention on what has been done; it is better to keep an eye on what still awaits doing.

Others, with its pages open to any hair-breadth experiment, is deserving of welcome. We can scarcely be too ready to inspect new ventures, and it is a pleasing contrast to the stuffiness of some of our ancestral publication, which still reek of eighteen-fifty. Mr. Kreymborg, its editor, has published Eliot, Cannell, Williams, himself, Carlton Brown, etc. Moreover, certain purely commercial and popular magazines have lifted an eyelid: H. L. Mencken has more or less discovered John McClure, Wattles, and "John Sanborn."

Orrick Johns writes me most vigorously of the genius of a dramatist, Sadakichi Hartman. "But print?-put Rabelais through a bath of perfume, and serve in cigarette holders at a boudoir spree!"

Status Rerum-The Second

I have not seen enough of the work of most of these writers to form any sort of judgment, but it seems to me that they have among them a sense of activity which was lacking in New York when I passed that way five years ago. At any rate the country looks less like a blasted wilderness than it did a few years since, and for that let us be duly thankful-and let us hope it is not a straw blaze.

Ezra Pound

REVIEWS

MR. MASEFIELD'S NEW BOOK

Good Friday and Other Poems, by John Masefield. Macmillan.

The title poem of this volume, a drama of the Crucifixion, is less interesting than the sonnets which follow it. Here the poet, like many a sonneteer before him, presents his philosophy of life, describes his despairing pursuit of Beauty, who is "within all Nature, everywhere," and who yet eludes capture, and gives her votary only

One hour, or two, or three in long years scattered.

No summer butterfly is this brooding spirit of Beauty, but the secret music at the heart of creation, the sublime harmony which the poet overhears in those few divine moments, and to which, forever after, he would tune his life and his lyre.

For these, so many years of useless toil,
Despair, endeavor, and again despair,

Sweat, that the base machine may have its oil,
Idle delight to tempt one everywhere.

A life upon the cross.

To make amends

Three flaming memories that the death-bed ends.

The undertone of these sonnets is profound sadness. Having lost the God whom he "was taught in youth," the poet faces almost with agony the perishing loveliness of the flesh, the earth, the sidereal universe-of all things visible or imagined, and lives on under sword-like flashes of a light too glorious and terrible to be endured.

What am I, Life? A thing of watery salt
Held in cohesion by unresting cells,

Which work they know not why, which never halt,
Myself unwitting where their Master dwells.

I do not bid them, yet they toil, they spin

A world which uses me as I use them;

Nor do I know which end or which begin

Nor which to praise, which pamper, which condemn.
So, like a marvel in a marvel set,

I answer to the vast, as wave by wave

The sea of air goes over, dry or wet,

Or the full moon comes swimming from her cave,
Or the great sun comes forth: this myriad I

Tingles, not knowing how, yet wondering why.

Beside the passionate self-revelation of these sonnets, much of this poet's earlier work becomes stage drapery or melodrama. For Mr. Masefield, as we have said before, is stronger as a reflective and descriptive poet than as a playwright or a novelist in verse. In such sonnets as These myriad days, There on the darkened deathbed, So in the empty sky, It may be so with us, There is no God, The little robin, When all these million cells-in these and others we find a poignant sincerity and simplicity in the expression of