and accent of the Hindu originals, which celebrate the loves of Krishna and Radha with that union of secular and divine love which is so astonishing to our cruder western minds. This is a poem in the form of a drama, very beautiful in conception and verse.

There is a new intensive lyricism in the work of Gordon Bottomley, Edward Eastaway, and Robert Frost-a new landscape, a new life. Other men have looked on the earth to love it, but with less sense of a merged identity. Other men have written of love or of nature, but in a more general way-love being love-and with less precision in regard to the emotion. These men know the value of the thing so often disregarded, they appreciate the shadow as well as the light; and as Mr. Frost says in The Oven Bird,

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Mr. Frost is represented here almost exclusively in a pastoral vein, no doubt to bring him in closer harmony with the others, but one wishes that his Hill Wife, which is one of the most beautful and perhaps the most lyric of his poems, could also have been included.

Mr. Bottomley's poetry has a personal and intimate charm, and the quality noted above is apparent in such poems as Atlantis, Sinai, A Surrey Night, and New Year's Eve, 1913. Unfortunately much of his work is marred by awkward inversions, as in The Ploughman, and by occasional infelicities of sound (unconsidered apparently by Mr. Garnett) as in The thin light films a wider sky Than I have lived beneath.

His blank verse has a greater security of style than one finds in the stanzaic poems, although one may question if—

Because I have no body to hide my thoughts

That are being scanned, as if by unseen eyes,
Perused and judged, ineluctably judged,

I shivering in that exposury

Until dissemination is complete,

representing a certain rush of words to the pen, represents also that distinction of style which the American poet is advised to emulate.

The poems of Edward Eastaway (the pseudonym of Edward Thomas, who was killed in action last April) are like hazel nuts hid in a hedge. Their meaning only shyly reveals itself; the words play with it and then reveal it, although they are sometimes twisted and crossed a little, like the branches of a tree through which the sky is more beautiful. This poet experiences nature not as something seen, outside one's self, but within one. His identity is only complete through nature. The secret of it is in the poem

called Beauty:

What does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,

No man, woman, or child alive could please

Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph-

"Here lies all that no one loved of him

And that loved no one." Then in a trice that whim

Has wearied. But, though I am like a river
At fall of evening when it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, happily

Floats through the window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale,
Not like a pewit that returns to wail

For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unswerving to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there.

One would like to quote more from Mr. Thomas, but already an American edition of his poems has been published by Henry Holt & Co., and readers will appreciate for themselves this poet's rare quality. A. C. H.

Some Imagist Poets, 1917. Houghton Mifflin Co.

In this anthology we meet again the six poets who have appeared under this title in the volumes of 1915 and 1916; each one a little less provocative and challenging, it may be, now that imagism has become a staple in the market. That is the way with all rebels-they will go and get accepted and become fashionable. Nowadays everyone is writing imagist vers libre, or what the writers conceive as such, particularly those who at the beginning made the most outcry against it. Free verse is now accepted in good society, where rhymed verse is even considered a little shabby and oldfashioned.

The term Imagism was invented to fit a certain element of poetry, involving also a certain artistic approach or method. The name alone was new-this and the determination of a small group of poets living in London to write poetry as entirely imagistic as possible. All the poets have been imagistic at times, some more consistently than others. In the March, 1913, number of POETRY, Mr. Ezra Pound de

fined an "image" as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time:" a definition to which all who are in doubt upon the subject should be referred.

Unfortunately, imagism has now come to mean almost any kind of poetry written in unrhymed irregular verse, and "the image"-referred solely to the visual sense-is taken to mean some sort of a pictorial impression!

Even so astute a critc as Padraic Colum says, in a recent review of Arthur Symons' "All are most efficiently rendered, and as one reads them one queries why the imagists, if they want only to render the visible thing, should strive after a new technique."

Yet, even though imagism has become more of a catchword than a key to understanding, the imagists, early and late, have added much to our enjoyment, not only as poets, but as sprightly antagonists. In the latter aspect, they have shown a marked disposition to "come back at" their critics. Adverse criticism has been as meat and bread to them. It has furnished them with the most capital material for advertisements, the one that I remember best being that in which certain unfavorable, not to say vicious, remarks by Professor William Ellery Leonard were set side by side with extracts from the Blackwoods article condemning John Keats under the bold caption, Is History Repeating Itself?

But to turn to the present volume. It is not with any light mood that one reads the poems of Richard Aldington, filled as these are with the note of regret, the unhappiness

of the conscript who has no taste for war and who is too honest to bolster up his spirits with any false enthusiasm. He records instead the few moments that he can steal off by himself, he longs for solitude, and if he refers to the war and to his condition it is only through allusion, inevitably Greek; as in Captive:

They have torn the gold tettinx
From my hair;

And wrenched the bronze sandals
From my ankles.

They have taken from me my friend

Who knew the holy wisdom of poets,
Who had drunk at the feast

Where Simonides sang.

One always gets the effect of a double image when reading Aldington's poems, it is like watching Hyacinth looking at his own reflection; but in this case it is a young Englishman who sees himself as a Greek youth. One would like, occasionally, to feel the image more single. Curiously enough, these poems are more like H. D.'s in method than Mr. Aldington's usually are-particularly Inarticulate Grief, and they seem less like the poet of Choricos, who has more fluency than H. D. Mr. Aldington has never surpassed that poem. He may hate it, because it is so often quoted; but it has permanence, nevertheless.

One detects a deeper note of passion in H. D.'s poems. What her work lacks is sequence-the kind of music that involves and envelopes the thing. It is hard to read more than two or three of the poems at a time because of a certain broken quality. It remnids one of the work of certain