Sir, –
In your last issue the whole subject of Vers Libre is dismissed in a third part of an unsigned review.1 But such a matter cannot be so dismissed – so light-heartedly, summarily and flippantly. Neither can the poems of the most consummately exquisite and gentle master of the form that in England we have be so dismissed, and you hope to escape protest.
Not even The Athenaeum, with the prestige of all its great obscurantist dead trailing behind it, can so dictatorially put back the clock. It is as if, once more from your columns, we heard the voices of our dear old friend Norman MacColl or our dear old preceptor Theodore Watts-Dunton snuffling, as they and their contributors used to snuffle, when they were confronted by anything that had not the support of their close corporation; that was beautiful, sincere and unguarded. You are probably less acquainted than am I – who for twenty-five years lived as it were in the bas fonds of those formidable shadows – with the Great Traditions of your journal! So you will not remember the Great Number in which you, dismissing Walt Whitman with two semi-obscene words (Swinburne), stated that the sonnets of a Mrs Augusta Webster were ‘superior to anything that had been written’ since the days of the ‘Swan of Avon’, and surpassed indeed the similar metrical efforts of that Bard (W.M. Rossetti). And in the same Great Number you stated that the orchestration of the then Queen’s Master of the Music, Sir Somebody Somebody – he had supplied two lost parts for instruments in Hummel’s Quintette – wiped out for ever all the orchestral works of the composer of Tristan (Joseph Knight). When I was still le jeune homme modeste and very, very innocuous, an odious old gentleman, having damned in your columns my infant works, addressed to me the galling exhortation Patrem et avum habes; eos exorna! …2 May I now return those your words to your address? Returning, then, to the present century, let me put it in this way: Your
Reviewer must be a man with some of the knowledges and experiences of a man. He knows that when human beings are undergoing fears, joys, passions or emotions they do not really retire to studies and compose in words jigsaw puzzles: they relieve their minds by rhythmical utterances. These, if rendered by an artist, make up the utterances of passion that are endurable or overwhelming. He must have read some of the Authorized Version and be acquainted with the Book of Job; the Lament for Absalom; the Psalms Of David; or the idyllic utterances of Ruth to her mother-in-law. Perhaps your Reviewer may never have come across really simple persons, peasants and the like at moments of great losses, great joys, great upheavals. In that case he will be surprised to hear that such elementals do not express themselves in rhyme. They do not. They come very near to the Vers Libre of the Translators. I have heard them say:
1. By God! We’re alive: I never thought we should be./ 2. After tonight./ 3. Give it a name, Old Bird. It’s a damn fine thing to taste hooch./ 4. After a straf like last night./ 5. Evans copped it; so did Dai Morgan./ 6. Swallow it down, have another of the same./ 7. Cor! I am all of a tremble. Or they say: sometimes with tears, sometimes not:
That was my eldest son,
Muss ’Uffer!
He lay with his head twid my breastesses
Six hundred mornings and more
Before it was properly light;
Counting the flies on the ceiling,
And me never to see him no more.
That may not be poetry; but it is vers libre and it is the expression of emotion. Nevertheless it does not rhyme ‘Greenwich’ with ‘spinach’, or get entangled in ‘ation’ rhymes as the young do. (Heaven knows I do not wish to run down the young ladies your Reviewer so likes: Good luck to them, now and hereafter! His quotations are probably unfair to them, and they are no doubt emotional enough in other places. It is hard on them that he should have used their verses as sticks with which to beat his dog.)
And then… one does not like to see dog eat dog. One understood that Normanno mortuo3 – The Athenaeum was to become the organ of the Morning Star; the New Day; the Young… Entreat, sir your Reviewer to look up your files for the great number of Whitman v. Augusta Webster and Sir William Blank v. Richard Wagner, and then let him reread his review of Mr Flint and the two young ladies….
Or at any rate let me say in your columns, you have trailed on the ground your august mantle-of-Elijah-tail, that for certain temperaments – hominibus bonae voluntatis – the poems in Mr Flint’s Otherworlds are exquisite, and extract from the life that we today live all the poetry and all the emotion of a non-blatant kind that can be got out of the poor old thing by those not suited for skipping about in meadows and exclaiming:
Ring a ring of roses!
Pocket full of posies!
Though that too is a lovely occupation.
And Mr Flint’s prose introduction is so quietly and beautifully written; so gentle in its cadences that are like those of Mr [W.H.] Hudson; it expresses so modestly and so completely what the whole great world outside these fortunate islands is expressing, feeling, or discovering as to the art of poetry, which is the pursuit of intimate expression between poor lonely man and poor lonely man…. Well, your Reviewer might surely have let it alone if you were unable to place at his disposal space in which seriously to consider, or worthily to condemn, that manifesto. I have the honour to be, Sir, Your obedient servant,
The Athenaeum, 16 July 1920, 93–4.