Are buried deep in my heart.
Now let the black tops of the pine-trees break like a spent wave,
Against the grey sky:
These are tombs and memorials and temples and altars sunkindled for me.
The Case of French Poetry
Richard Aldington
It is with a feeling of regret and astonishment that I find nearly all my English confrères so opposed to the spirit of French culture, so mistaken in their views, and so curiously ignorant of the real facts of the development of modern French literature.
I am led to this reflection by reading Mr. Shanks’s excellent article in your December number. It is a most ungracious task to criticise a man who is about to hazard his life in the service of his country; and I honor Mr. Shanks more than I can express. But if I felt as Mr. Shanks does on the subject of French and German poetry I would not fight at all or I would fight for Germany! To a poet poetry must be the great business of life and, speaking for myself, I would emphatically support the Germans if I thought they were better poets than the French and English! (You will take that rhetorical statement for what it is worth.)
Intellectually about fifty per cent of English people are Germanized without knowing it. I should say the percentage is even higher in America. I believe that no study is considered so frivolous or so suspect in both countries as the study of French art and poetry. And yet—Russia and one or two Anglo-Saxons put aside—the history of the art of the last fifty years is the history of French art. You who have given Whistler to the world do not need me to tell you what French art is. The American painting at a recent Exhibition here was of so high a quality that I felt my respect for the intellectual progress of America greatly increased. I admit freely and regretfully that it was immeasurely better than English painting. That is because most Americans study painting in Paris.
Why don’t they sometimes give a look at the poetry of France, for in no country is poetry so cultivated, so well understood, and so honored? Mr. Shanks apparently knows something of German poetry and nothing of French. Of Liliencron I know nothing. But I do know something of Hauptmann, Dehmel, and Stefan Georg. (I have no doubt Mr. Shanks dislikes Georg because the latter got his training in France.) Well, I will cheerfully wager that any more or less fair-minded person would find three equally good poets in France to every one that can be mentioned in Germany.