Malady strikes a stronger note than anything of Mr. Flint’s that I have read before. It is excellent psychology, and steadily, astringently done.
It is this constant change and growth which makes the progress of this little group so interesting to watch. Mr. Flint’s work in the first anthology seemed quite successful and finished. He had done what he had done excellently, and he would go on doing it to the end of the chapter. But here we see Mr. Flint, dissatisfied with mere success, daring a wider horizon. From the point of view of adequacy of technique, his poems suffer, as is natural; but the technique is sure to follow the widened thought, before long. Malady and the poem called Fragment show the direction in which Mr. Flint is moving. His next work will be interesting to see.
Mr. D. H. Lawrence is the best known of the poets in this book, although a newcomer to the anthology. No modern writer is more vigorous than he, and none is more entirely, almost brutally sincere. In Mr. Lawrence’s novels this brutality is sometimes excessively evident, but always one feels that the author inflicts pain upon himself as well as his readers; that he says what he sees and is concerned not to shirk and be a coward for his own comfort.
In his poetry, Mr. Lawrence seems to be more lenient with himself. It is as though he allowed the moralist in him a day out. Not that he ever ceases to be a moralist, really. But he permits himself to lay a slight covering over the stark nakedness of disagreeable facts. This covering is poetry, and very beautiful and original poetry it is.
Green
The sky was apple-green
The sky was green wine held up in the sun,
The moon was a golden petal between.
She opened her eyes, and green
They show, clear like flowers undone,