Among the men of thirty here, Padraic Colum is the one whom we call most certainly a poet, albeit he has written very little verse—and but a small part of that is worthy of notice. He is fairly unconscious of such words as "aesthetics," "technique" and "method." He is at his best in Garadh, a translation from the Gaelic, beginning:
O woman, shapely as a swan, On your account I shall not die. The men you've slain—a trivial clan— Were less than I:
and in A Drover. He is bad whenever he shows a trace of reading. I quote the opening of A Drover, as I think it shows "all Colum" better than any passage he has written. I think no English-speaking writer now living has had the luck to get so much of himself into twelve lines.
To Meath of the pastures, From wet hills by the sea, Through Leitrim and Longford Go my cattle and me.
I hear in the darkness Their slipping and breathing. I name them the bye-ways They're to pass without heeding.
Then the wet, winding roads, Brown bogs with black water; And my thoughts on white ships And the King o' Spain's daughter.
I would rather talk about poetry with Ford Madox Hueffer than with any man in London. Mr. Hueffer's beliefs about the art may be best explained by saying that they are in diametric opposition to those of Mr. Yeats.
Mr. Yeats has been subjective; believes in the glamour and associations which hang near the words. "Works of art beget works of art." He has much in common with the French symbolists. Mr. Hueffer believes in an exact rendering of things. He would strip words of all "association" for the sake of getting a precise meaning. He professes to prefer prose to verse. You would find his origins in Gautier or in Flaubert. He is objective. This school tends to lapse into description. The other tends to lapse into sentiment.
Mr. Yeats' method is, to my way of thinking, very dangerous, for although he is the greatest of living poets who use English, and though he has sung some of the moods of life immortally, his art has not broadened much in scope during the past decade. His gifts to English art are mostly negative; i. e., he has stripped English poetry of many of its faults. His "followers" have come to nothing. Neither Synge, Lady Gregory nor Colum can be called his followers, though he had much to do with bringing them forth, yet nearly every man who writes English verse seriously is in some way indebted to him.