Flew Antonino.
Snap!...
The skeleton of Antonino has made
A good husband, a good provider.
Amy Lowell’s New Book
F. S. Flint
Amy Lowell has sent me her book, Six French Poets,[2] who are: Emile Verhaeren, Albert Samain, Remy de Gourmont, Henri de Régnier, Francis Jammes, and Paul Fort; and it occurs to me that I must be her severest critic—are we not rivals? When, in the summer of 1914, before the war was dreamed of, she told me over her dinner-table of her intention to write this book and of the names of the poets she had chosen, I objected to Samain. Samain, I said, was exquisite, but not important; and he could only be read a few pages at a time without weariness. Stuart Merrill and Francis Vielé-Griffin, I went on, are both more considerable poets; and both are Americans; and since you insist on including Remy de Gourmont as one of your poets, you might increase your number to seven, in many ways an appropriate number where poets are concerned; and so on. But she only motioned the waiter to fill my glass with champagne; and what can a man do against such argument and such a will? And now, even if I wished to damn her book (I do not), she will have already heaped coals of fire upon my head in her preface, where she says kind things about me because I happened to mention the names of one or two books to her, information she did not really need.
Miss Lowell states that she has “made no attempt at an exhaustive critical analysis of the various works” of her poets. “Rather, I have tried to suggest certain things which appear to the trained poet while reading them. The pages and pages of hair-splitting criticism turned out by erudite gentlemen for their own amusement has been no part of my scheme. But I think the student, the poet seeking new inspiration, the reader endeavoring to understand another poetic idiom, will find what they need to set them on their way.” That is so: this book contains six causeries in which Miss Lowell tells you why she loves these poets, and what she loves about them, interrupting her talk every now and then to read some poem to you which illustrates her meaning, introducing every now and then a fragment of biography to correspond with the stage of the poet’s work to which she has brought you, or stopping every now and then to pick out rare phrases and rare music of words for your especial delight. No one, I suppose, will have listened to Miss Lowell’s causerie in so happy a setting as the sitting-room on the third floor of a hotel in Piccadilly in which she talked to us in the August of 1914. Through the long French window open in the corner could be seen the length of Piccadilly, its great electric globes, its shining roadway, and, on the left, the tops of the trees of Green Park, dark grey in the moonlight; the noise of the motorbusses and of the taxis reached us in a muted murmur, and at the corner of the park opposite, beneath a street lamp, stood a newsboy, whose headlines we strained our eyes from time to time to catch. It was in this tenseness created by the expectation of news that Miss Lowell read Paul Fort and Henri de Régnier to us (she reads French beautifully); and it is the emotion of those evenings, more than anything else, that her book brings back to me. This is not criticism, I know; but I am a critic displumed. I have quoted Miss Lowell’s statement of her aims; let me now give my impression of what she has done. You can take up her book, and read it from beginning to end without weariness or boredom; you will be continually interested, continually delighted, continually moved. Miss Lowell’s method of quoting whole poems and long poems as well as detached and beautiful fragments has filled her book with an emotional content that almost makes me afraid to open it; the fear of too much beauty. And, finally, she has flattered the sense of personal superiority in us all by allowing little slips to remain where we may find them, and preen ourselves on our cleverness. When you have absorbed all these sensations, you will have come to Appendix A, which is 140 pages of the finest translations into English that exist of the six poets in question, or, it might truly be said, of the French poets of the symbolist generation. In these translations, Miss Lowell has rarely been tempted away from prose, and you have only to compare her work with the work of other translators to be immediately aware of how much she has gained by her prudence, her artistry had better be said. That Miss Lowell had all the equipment for a task of this kind, her own two books of poems left no doubt at all. In them you will find the same delight in beautiful word and phrase which has undoubtedly led her to modern French poetry as to a friendly country, and to the achievement in these translations. If she had done nothing more than just publish these, she would have earned our gratitude; but she offers them to you as the least of her book (as an appendix!) after you have been amused, interested, instructed and moved. I can conceive of no greater pleasure—my pleasure in the book is of a different kind—than that of the lover of poetry who reads in Miss Lowell’s book about modern French poetry for the first time; it must be like falling into El Dorado. I should add that the book contains an excellent signed photograph of each poet.
[2] Six French Poets, by Amy Lowell. New York: Macmillan Company.