A MISCELLANY OF POETRY—1919. Edited by William Kean Seymour. Palmer & Hayward. 5s. net.
This miscellany "is issued to the public as a truly catholic anthology of contemporary poetry." We do not quite gather what the author means by this. He has restricted the range of his selection by printing only poems which have not yet appeared "in book form," and he certainly cannot suppose that he has even half of the best living poets in his volume, or even half of the best poets of the younger generation. Mr. Chesterton appears, but not Mr. Belloc; Mr. Binyon, but not A. E. or Mr. Yeats; Mr. Davies, but not Mr. de la Mare; Mr. Sturge Moore, but not Mr. Freeman; Mr. Nichols, but not Mr. Sassoon, Mr. Graves, or Mr. Turner. Possibly the suggestion is that Mr. Seymour has consulted other people's tastes as well as his own; this might explain the presence here of poets who are not known to have written anything of any merit and who certainly contribute nothing of merit to this collection.
However, the good things make the book worth having. Chief among them is a long epistle by Mr. Sturge Moore, which contains pictures as clean-cut and vivid as those which made his Micah so peculiarly rich a poem. Mr. Chesterton's Ballad of St. Barbara has glorious lines, and the spirit is the spirit of The White Horse, but ballads should not be obscure, and this one is. There is no obscurity in Mr. Chesterton's Elegy in a Country Churchyard:
The men that worked for England
They have their graves at home,
And bees and birds of England
About the cross can roam.
But they that fought for England,
Following a fallen star,
Alas, alas, for England
They have their graves afar!
And they that rule in England
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas, for England,
They have no graves as yet!
The series of lyrics by Mr. Davies are, as usual, delicious, and there is less of rotundity than usual, and more exactness and feeling, in Mr. John Drinkwater's Malediction. Mr. Gibson contributes a series of descriptive war-sonnets, adjectival but interesting; and Mr. Gerald Gould eight sonnets very skilfully written and full of good, if reminiscent, phrases, which are unfortunately not as intelligible as they look. The editor's Fruitage is too much like the more pontifical octosyllabics of Mr. Drinkwater, but his Siesta gives a hot coloured picture vividly. Of the other contributors Mr. Binyon, Miss Macaulay, Mr. Theodore Maynard, and Mr. Charles Williams (whose Poems of Conformity, difficult but sinewy, should be better known than they are) are interestingly represented. To these we may add Mr. F. V. Branford, who has almost made a good poem out of mathematics. It concludes:
For here and hence I sail
Alone beyond the pale,
Where square and circle coincide,
And the parallels collide,
And perfect pyramids flower.
Obscurity is more excusable in this poem than in his others. The discriminating reader who has read this book once will probably mark the poems he wants to read a second time; there are many here by authors who need not be specified which have given us an uncompensated headache. If the editor means to follow the volume up he would be well advised next time in being less "catholic" in this regard; an anthology of contemporary verse has to be almost uniformly good to serve any useful purpose.