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Did he attain it? Who attains his desire? His name is not married to a song, like Julia Ward Howe's to The Battle Hymn of the Republic (which, by the way, is being sung all over the English-speaking world at war, as the longsought international hymn). And, reading this book, one finds no memorable poem lifting out of the ripple of delicate rhyme. What one does find is fancy and good taste-the extreme of good breeding; and good breeding stifles the impassioned muse.

But the muse of the drawing-room, the muse of satins and chiffons-or be it even prints and twills-thrives upon good breeding, demands fancy and good taste. If there is never a note of passion in this book there is much admirable vers de société, and a few library poems of undeniable charm. In such poems as To a Rose he may have achieved his immortality, along with Locker, Austin Dobson and other masters of compliment:

Go, Rose, and in her golden hair

You shall forget the garden soon;

The sunshine is a captive there

And crowns her with a constant noon.

And when your spicy odor goes,

And fades the beauty of your bloom,
Think what a lovely hand, O Rose,
Shall place your body in a tomb!

H. M.

"HARD" AND "SOFT"

Editor of POETRY: The interesting discussion on The Hard and the Soft in French Poetry, which appeared in your February issue, scarcely gets to the root of its subject. In it, as your readers may remember, Mr. Pound declared that "hardness is in poetry nearly always a virtue-I can think of no case where it is not"; and also "softness opposite quality, which is not always a fault." Then he went on to illustrate this thesis with examples drawn from French and English literature.

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The fact is, that there are two kinds of poetical emotion, the musical and the pictorial. These qualities may be perfectly fused in the poet, or one may preponderate over the other. For example, the poet may see his subject as a hard, clear pictorial outline, something to be cut in Parian marble: this is what Gautier did. Or he may see his subject as something containing rich musical possibilities-cunning variations of sound, adroit combinations of vowels and consonants: This is undoubtedly what Poe did, or Coleridge in Christabel. The subject of Christabel, or of most of Poe's poems, is the veriest nonsense, when coldly analyzed: what makes them poems of an uncommon sort is their power of musical suggestion.

Shakespeare is almost the sole English poet in whom the pictorial and the musical are perfectly blended. Milton, Browning, Blake, tended to the pictorial; that is to say, they

became, as Mr. Pound calls it, "hard." This "hardness" is not always, as he says, a virtue; in fact, it may easily defeat its own ends.

There is so little clear-headed thinking about poetry, and the issue is so consistently befogged with critics who have this or that particular hobby to ride, that it is always wise to remind the reader that the substance of poetry is language -human speech, words. Now with words the mind refuses to be arrested at the outer aspect. Not many people in this world can read a page of either poetry or prose without a thought of its meaning. But dozens can admire a pictureby let us say, Sargent-purely because of the technical quality of its surface, of its drawing and paint.

For this reason, good poets who are purely pictorial, that is to say "hard,” are rare; and equally rare the good poets who are purely musical, that is to say "soft." Most poets achieve a sort of blend of both qualities. But to rank the "hard" poet over the "soft," or vice versa, is an error. Verlaine, whose imagination was purely musical, is as great in his own way as Villon, whose imagination was purely pictorial. I can take pleasure from either.

The thing that counts with a poet is not whether he tries to be "hard" or "soft"; but rather, as Mr. Pound says, whether he has been intent on the quality of the emotion he wants to convey, and whether he has perfectly conveyed that quality. John Gould Fletcher

AS HE SEES IT

Dear Editor: Did I say I rejected Italian standards of good literature? Here is what I feel sometimes about our own stuff. Emanuel Carnevali

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It's an old platitude, an old commonplace. You can't force an artist, what do you think? Modern

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