The Imagists believe in the direct presentation of emotion, preferably in terms of objectivity. They abhor an excess of adjectives, and, after a satiety of the pompous Victorian stuff, I am much inclined to sympathize with that tenet of their faith.
I wish, however, to make clear my own position, which is the one that most counts when I am writing. I am an anarchist in poetry: I recognize no rules, no exclusions.
If the expression of a certain thought, vision, or what not, requires twenty adjectives, then let us have them. If it be better expressed without adjectives, then let us abjure them—temporarily.
I am myself a poet (whether performance equals desire is doubtful). My object as a poet is to express the things which are closest to me. This sounds banal, but is better than rhetoric; words exist not with which to define with superclarity the poet’s function, source, and performance.
In the true expression of myself I might write Images which would be worshipped for their perfection by the Imagists. A moment after, I might gloat and wallow in the joy of my cosmic oneness (anathema to Imagists!) and, perhaps recall Whitman. The next minute, chronicling some shadowy episode of my variegated past, I may out-decay the decadent Baudelaire. But, this is always poetry if, by the magic of its words and the music of its arrangement, it speaks directly and beautifully to you, giving you that indescribable but unmistakeable sense of liberation and soul-expansion which comes on the contemplation of true art.
I think I have made myself clear. There is no quarrel with the Imagists, who have done some beautiful work, as such. But, if they claim monopoly of inspiration or art, as some of them appear to do, then—! Therefore, as a restricted and doctrinaire school, “a bas les Imagistes!” But, as an envigored company of the grand army of poets, “Vivent les Imagistes!”
OF RUPERT BROOKE AND OTHER MATTERS
ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE
Since even to poets—and poets are erroneously supposed to sing their hearts out—there remains a certain right of privacy, I am not sure that we do well in writing so much of their personalities and their individual views of life. When we read a poem, we feel a temperament behind it; but the effort to catalogue and label that mind and its “message” is a little impertinent, and very futile. Mr. Rupert Brooke is an excellent illustration. His fondness for this or that—whether in landscape, food, ideas, or morals—is hardly our concern. He deserves to be treated not as a natural-history specimen,—a peculiar group of likes and dislikes and convictions,—but as an artist.
Mr. Brooke has the distinction, rare for a young poet, of not having written any bad verse, or of not having printed it. His sole volume, Poems (Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1913), manifests in even its least notable pieces a creative spirit not allowed to run riot, but chastened and restrained by a keen sense of the obscure laws whose workings turn passion into a decorative pattern, and the emotions of the blood into intelligible designs.