The state of the present world of poetry is curious and worthy of attention. On the one hand poets and publishers declare that there are no readers: poets and readers declare that there are no publishers: and publishers and readers declare that there are no poets. Here we have, reproduced, the celebrated triangular duel of Mr Midshipman Easy. That readers exist, even as they did in the days of Satan Montgomery or of Festus Bailey, may be doubted: that they exist in sufficient numbers to form a Public is, however, indubitable. What one is left to wonder at is: Why they are not ‘reached’. Is it lack of enterprise on the part of the publisher or lack of attractiveness in the poet? Is the answer to the riddle simply that the ‘Fifteen Hundred Market’ is overlooked or despised by the publisher whose eyes are fixed on the shining glories of the boomed novelist? Or is it simply that the verse that sees the light in the waste corners of the magazines is too good, in the sense of being too ‘literary’? Let an example be made of one of the more excellent of the body of poets.

There has been appearing lately, in a humble, almost periodical form – in ‘parts’ as it were – a series of shilling volumes of the poems of Mr T. Sturge Moore. That this enterprise has been completed may be taken as evidence that it has found a public to the extent of paying its way. That it has not overlapped the Fifteen Hundred connoisseurs we may take for granted. I first came across the work of Mr Sturge Moore at the house of a friend – a connoisseur of the connoisseurs – where, lying amongst a heap upon a table, I saw what appeared to be a pamphlet, called The Gazelles. One does not know what these things may not prove: a pamphlet called The Gazelles might be anything; most probably a tract of some society for the prevention of one form or other of vice or cruelty. But, opening it because I was too uninterested to lay it down, I read:

When the sheen on tall summer grass is pale,

Across blue skies white clouds float on

In shoals, or disperse and singly sail,

Till, the sun being set, they all are gone:

Now here is the opening of a rather long poem. And it is, essentially, the right opening – the wording not too close, the frame of the picture, the landscape, put in with simple words, the phrasing not intricate, the rhythm running easily. And, at the right moment, the heroes – the gazelles – appear. It reminds me, in fact, of the opening of the best of Maupassant’s long contes – ‘The Field of Olives’. And, in all these respects, the poem maintains its level to the end.

The other verses of the same fascicule were not so interesting to me. The wording of them was, precisely, too close: the rhythms intricate and rather crabbed: the ideas not very arresting to an unaroused mind. And it must be remembered that verse, suffering under those shackles of metre and form that later so greatly help it, must make an appeal sufficiently strong to arrest unaroused minds. I am glad therefore that I made the acquaintance of Mr Sturge Moore through his ‘Gazelles’ and not through, say: ‘Desire Sings’; ‘Desire Pleads’; and ‘Desire Muses’ – verses which are, as the titles indicate, derivative, allegorical, rather cold and rather crabbedly expressed.

Accidentally and desultorily I came across others of these little pamphlets – (I have them all now in a brown cardboard case) – and gradually there arose in my mind the figure of a poet who interested me – who came back to me at odd moments and set me wondering vaguely. They set me, in fact, wondering what he could be like – using the words in no personal sense – what could be his provenance, who his literary fathers and sponsors. I could not ‘place’ him anywhere. In a sense much of his verse was derivative, much of his vocabulary irritating because of a certain preciousness. Thus the prose introduction to Pan’s Prophecy is in a sort of Wardour Street English, and frequent use of alliteration such as ‘… she sits and works / As women work weaving in wall-cloths wide;’ renders whole passages uninteresting because of their artificiality. But one pardons – or rather one forgets – these things for the sake of a personality that interests one or because of a point of view novel and well worked out.

All the poems contained good things, if all tasted a little too strongly of the honeycomb. On the other hand, if most of the subjects were derivative – classical and not significant to a workaday world – the approach to the subject was new and individual. Thus the Rout of the Amazons is related by a Faun, appalled at the sight of so much beauty, feminine and shining, crushed by the hoofs of horses or emptied of its bright blood by men’s spears. That, too, was the root idea of the ‘Gazelles’.

I know now, because I have heard critics say so, that Mr Sturge Moore is by descent one of the Pre-Raphaelite poets; that he has worked at woodcutting; has made designs; is a thoughtful critic of the plastic arts – that in all probability he is, temperamentally or by accident, an aesthete. I am glad upon the whole that I did not know this until comparatively recently, since the ignorance had let me approach his work with a quite clear mind. But, of course, every man must have a parentage and a jumping-off place; and the question is how far Mr Moore will jump. It is for that that one examines his verse anxiously – for that and because he represents, typifies, and stands for most of the tendencies of the Modern Poet. One may, I mean, see in his verse at its least good pretty clearly, why Modern Poetry makes so little appeal to the modern world; and, in his verse at its really best, one may see some hope for an approaching renascence of appeal.

The Pre-Raphaelite poets – from whom nearly all the poets of today, including Mr William Watson and Mr Rudyard Kipling, in one way or another descend — put back the clock of British verse so woefully not because they sought their ‘subjects’ in the medieval world but because they tried to identify themselves with the medieval point of view. They could not, I mean, see that per se a sewing-machine is as romantic an object, or as poetic a symbol of human destinies, as an embroidery frame. But all the really great poems of the world have been expressed in terms of thought modern to them. It has never been the ‘documenting’ of a poem that has been the important matter. Paradise Lost made its appeal because of its reading of life in terms of the seventeenth century; because it voiced the thought of its time and not because it was a fine projection of the mental state of the Garden of Eden. But the verse of the present day is almost entirely derived from the thought of the present day. It goes searching, as it were, the hidden graves, ruined temples, or golden closets of forgotten worlds. In consequence it deals almost entirely in ‘pictures’; and, at the best, the appeal of the ‘picture-poem’ must be limited.

To a large extent it is a matter of the very bed-rock of all verse – of vocabulary. Imagine a modern poet lying on the beach at, say, Hastings. There is the hot shingle, a dove-coloured sea, a sky half silver half gold, and that most pathetic, suggestive and bewildering of all modern objects – the immense crowd. If we can imagine our modern poet being there at all and not hiding in an Italian cloister, what words will he have to describe the scene, what ‘tone’ will he get into his poem? How will he avoid making it wholly vulgar, or how will he avoid sudden contrasts of ‘poetic’ words with everyday objects? Yet assuredly such a ‘subject’, poetically viewed – the great crowds pouring out of the vast towns in search of some sort of Island of the Blest, in search of some sort of Ideal, Joy, Love, Health, New Youth, or whatever it be they seek – such a subject is worthy of treatment. Are there no classical Idylls that treat of lower middle-class people waiting to view the opening of temples? And are these Idylls not Poetry?

Such subjects are almost barred to the modern poet – by his ‘poetic’ dialect. He finds it, in fact, easier to ransack Chaucer or Spenser for archaic words that gain a certain glamour from their remoteness; he shirks the labour of selecting such modern words as should give his page aloofness from mere colloquialism, and instead of trying to form a modern language that shall be at once vivid and delicate as an instrument he goes further and further in the direction of evoking a literary dialect from dead languages. And the difficulty of understanding him, however slight, induces a weariness in his reader and a general distaste for attacking new verse, since the appreciation of each new poet means for the reader learning a new dialect in addition to getting into touch with a new personality. We wait, in fact, for the poet who, in limpid words, with clear enunciation and, without inverted phrases, shall give the mind of the time sincere frame and utterance.

It is not, let it be repeated, the choice of subject that is at fault. There is no reason why the poet should write solely of the Housing Question, the Sex Problem, or the new forms of locomotion, nor is there any reason why he should not set his story in Persia or in Verona before the Renaissance. There was no reason why Webster should not write of Amalfi or Shakespeare of Elsinore – a dim antiquity; the point is that the mind of the poet should be modern. The appeal of Webster’s Dance of Madmen1 was Cockney of the sixteenth century; and the soliloquy commencing ‘To be or not to be…’ was written by a man alive to the problems of his fellow men of the day. And, too, it is not necessary that the poet should regard himself as a teacher. But, whether he write lyric or epic, drama or contes in verse, it is necessary, if he is to appeal, that he should promote vital thought. He must rouse ideas in the minds of his fellow mortals; and, to that extent, he must voice his time.

It is for that reason that we see cause for hope in the works of Mr Sturge Moore and of some of his fellows. For the ‘problem’ – the query – of his ‘Gazelles’, as of The Rout of the Amazons, is simply: Why was so much beauty, of delicate beasts, of fair women, created to be so senselessly marred? Why are the gods so profuse of beautiful living organisms which are destined to be put to so little apparent use? And that is one of the ‘questions’ of today – one of the things that we are all asking, of our souls as of our neighbours, of our poets as of our preachers – a question that we may ask, lying on the beach at Hastings too. For why does the immense crowd exist? Merely to fill graveyards? It is, too, like the problem set in Hamlet’s soliloquy, one of the eternal questions – one that has been asked by Roman emperors, and one that will be asked, no doubt, by the commanders of the great Trusts of the dim future.

So that, given a vital and expressive vocabulary and a clear use of phrase, there is not much reason why Mr Sturge Moore or one of his fellows should not pass into history – into the history of human thought. But they must put aside – or at least they must digest – their derivations: they must forget that they are literary men. If, given the fact that they possess poetic personalities, they will give up the forcing of their own notes; if they will abandon the attempt to ‘write poetic’ and express themselves – not themselves in the mantles of the dead Elijahs that they variously affect, if they will forget that they are men of letters and discover that they are human beings they will come at last to that psychical suckling of fools, and metaphysical chronicling of small beer that, rightly understood, is the function of the poet. But of course they must first be poets.

Academy, 69 (23 September 1905), 982–4.

1 [Ford refers to Act IV, scene 2 of The Duchess of Malfi, which was written in the seventeenth century. Cf. p. 77.]