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ties into accepted opinion; and poets of the worse sort seem seldom to have any reading. So a prologue is needed even for a brief attempt to find out where French verse has got to; or where it had arrived a few years ago, seeing that since the war, faute de combattants, no one has had time to go forward, or even to continue the work of 1912-1914since undigested war is no better for poetry than undigested anything else.

Since Gautier, Corbière has been hard, not with a glaze or parian finish, but hard like weather-bit granite. And Heredia and Samain have been hard decreasingly, giving gradually smoothness for hardness. And Jammes has been "soft," in his earlier poems with a pleasurable softness. And De Regnier seems to verge out of Parnassianism into an undefined sort of poetry. Tailhade is hard in his satire.

Romains, Vildrac, Spire, Arcos, are not hard, any one of them, though Spire can be acid. These men have left the ambitions of Gautier; they have done so deliberately, or at least they have, in the quest of something well worth seeking, made a new kind of French poetry. I first wrote of Unanimisme in the New Age something over four years ago. Romains is the centre of it. A recent English essay on the subject, trying to point to English unanimistes, is pure rubbish, and shows no comprehension on the part of its author. Romains' unanimisme is a definite theory, almost a religion. He alone of the better French poets seems to have written at its dictates. The rest of the men of his decade have not written to a theory. Romains has, I think,

more intellect than the rest of them, and he is an equally notable poet. He has tried to make, and in places succeeded in making, poetry out of crowd-psychology. Vildrac has been personal and humanitarian. Arcos and Spire have delineated. Romains' portrayal of the collective emotions of a school of little girls out for the day is the most original poem in our generation's French. His series of "prayers"to the God-one, the god-couple, the god-house, the god-street, and so on-is extremely interesting. Vildrac's short narrative poems are a progress on the pseudo-Maupassant story, and have parallels in English. Romains has no English parallel. Allowing for personal difference, I should say that Spire and Arcos write "more or less as I do myself." I do not mean to make any comparison of merits, but this comparison is the easiest or simplest way of telling the general reader "what sort of poems" they have written.

I do not think I have copied their work, and they certainly have not copied mine. We are contemporary and as sonnets of a certain sort were once written on both sides of the channel, so these short poems depicting certain phases of contemporary life are now written on both sides of the channel; with, of course, personal differences.

Vildrac has written Auberge and Visite, and no doubt these poems will be included in any anthology of the period. The thing that puzzles me in attempting to appreciate both Romains and Vildrac is just this question of "hardness," and a wonder how poetry can get on without itnot by any means demanding that it be ubiquitous. For I

do not in the least mean that I want their poems rewritten
"hard"; any more than I should want Jammes' early poems
rewritten "hard." A critic must spend some of his time
asking questions-which perhaps no one can answer. It is
much more his business to stir up curiosity than to insist on
acceptances.
E. P.

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Literary currents in America often remind one of a switchback road. Somebody over here starts something, but the trail seems to end-get lost in the rocks or the bushes. After months or years, however, it reappears near its sourceAmerican papers quote the great news as coming from London.

For example, the Literary Digest of December 29th quotes the London Times on What Chinese Poets can Teach Ours. Of course POETRY from its beginning has emphasized the oriental influence, and nearly three years ago it printed Mr. Pound's translation (from Fenollosa's notes) of An Exile's Letter, by Li Po-facts which the Digest forgets to mention. Also POETRY from the first has been urging upon occidental poets the qualities for which the Digest now praises the Chinese-simplicity, immediacy, unpretentiousness, etc. "The wonder is, why no European poet has ever written thus," it exclaims, and continues, quoting from the Times:

The difference seems to be that the Chinese poet hardly knows he is one. "The great poets of Europe, in their themes and their language, insist that they are poets-" what they do is accompanied

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with "a magnificent gesture; but the Chinese poet starts talking in the most ordinary language and voice of the most ordinary things, and his poetry seems to happen suddenly out of the commonplace as if it were some beautiful action happening in the routine of actual life."

How often we have urged the poets to forget the "magnificent gesture," to talk "in ordinary language of ordinary things!" How persistently we have declined the "O thou" and "lo and behold" kind of poetry, the poems on grandiloquent and remote subjects, sprinkled with forsooths, erstwhiles, eftsoons, and all the worn-out machinery of rhymed eloquence.

As an admirable reinforcement of principles no modern poet can afford to neglect, we can not do better than quote, like the Digest, from the enthusiasic writer in the Times:

It is the peculiar art of Chinese poets not to arouse any expectation in us by their method of address. European poets have the ambition to make an orchestra out of language; but the Chinese seem to play on a penny whistle, and then suddenly, with a shy smile, to draw the most wonderful thin music out of it. Any one could do it, they seem to say; and they convince us that poetry is not a rare and exotic luxury, but something that happens in life itself, something that one needs only to watch for and record. They are passive to this poetry of reality; they take it in and then give it out again, without insisting that it is their own achievement, without wishing us to be impressed with the momentousness of their passions or the depth of their sorrows. And for them there is no class of poetic events; they are the most utter realists, but not on principle or in any reaction from the romantic. Nothing is common or unclean to them, and they have the innocence of paradise with the sensitiveness of an old and exquisite civilization. They have ideas; but ideas have not made them blind to things; rather they see things more vividly in the light of ideas.

Our poets seem often to be looking away out of their own lives into some distance of the past. Po Chu-i finds all his wonder in his own life; it is on the ground he treads and not in the blue, far-away

mountains, and it is in the language, the images, of ordinary life. Yet it is never prosaic in the bad sense, never subdued to the routine of life or ill-natured with mere discontent. He and the other Chinese poets do not complain of the world that it is stupid and hostile. Their business is to surprise the beauty of the world and to be surprised by it. They are like good craftsmen who make lovely things out of objects of use by shaping them, not by ornament. And there is for them a likeness, not a romantic contrast, between human life and the beauty of nature.

The Times article is an appreciation of Mr. Waley's translations of Chinese poems, which have been printed in the Little Review and POETRY, and issued, some of them, in a bulletin of the Oxford School of Oriental Studies.

A writer in the Smart Set, no doubt Mr. Mencken, is more appreciative than the Times and the Digest of Mr. Pound's work in this direction. He says:

Pound and Eunice Tietjens, the former in Lustra and the latter in Profiles from China, offer poetical evidence of that belated discovery of the Chinese spirit which has already had its influence in decoration. Pound himself gets something of the true Chinese simplicity, the Chinese skill at image-making, the Chinese dignity and delicacy, into his transcriptions. And Mrs. Tietjens, though she never drops the Caucasian robe, nor even that of the frank tourist, yet gives us a glimpse of the unfathomable romance and mystery of old China in her disorderly pieces. Both poets war upon the commonplace, the obvious, the stale.

Anyone who has been long enough in China to note in the national mind and attitude toward life a certain combination of whimsicality and exquisiteness, begins to suspect that every Chinese writes poetry, that but for the barrier of language one's head-boy or one's neighbor's cook would stand revealed as a lyrist of thrush-like purity. Perhaps, however, this hope might be disappointed, for today is not as the past in China. But in the poetry of the great dynasties there

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