"That Vulgar Squashy Word" It was the word "loveliness" recurring in a book of poems by Yeats that drew from a modernist reviewer this sneering phrase. To talk of loveliness seemed a sign of utter "low brow", a display of backboneless gush. We must be cerebral, cynical, psychoanalytic: we must not run after outmoded things like beauty. Ingenuity and scepticism and an itch in the genitals mark the truly advanced mind. Of course, vulgar and squashy things still interest people, but these people are relics of a regrettable past and stand pretty near the bottom in the modernist scale. The developed intelligence is bored by idealism, the search for a divine spirit shining thro

Two Packets of Poetry and a Prose Cutting Two slim packets of poetry have been put in my hands by a friend - one in typescript, the other in print - both re-comended with warm admiration; while a prose cutting from The Times Literary Supplement has been given me with disgust and disapproval. The printed booklet is entitled "Magnificat" and its writer is S.I.M., a woman. It makes pleasant reading. The general poetic atmosphere is good - the sentiment in which the verse lives and moves is touched with the mystery of life's birth and growth and of the one Force variously creative everywhere. I think it is this general atmosphere, this prevailing sentime

-07_A Poet's Sincerity.htm A Poet's Sincerity "All writing of poetry," says AE, "should be preceded by a passionate desire for truth and when the poet is writing he should continually ask himself, 'Do I really believe this? Is this truly what I feel?'" AE was himself a poet — but I am afraid his dictum must not be taken at its face-value. We must not ignore the fact that a dramatist can be a poet. A dramatist speaks through a multitude of characters. No doubt, he often packs them with responses he has personally made to the world, yet nowhere does he write an accurate story of his own attitudes, and he writes great poetry through his villains no less than his heroes. Surely he cannot be be

A Book of Love A friend of mine put Havelock Ellis's autobiography into my hands and asked me to read it and pay a tribute to its author. My friend is right in assuming that a tribute is deserved by Havelock Ellis. Perhaps the best tribute is to utter the paradox that the passing of Havelock Ellis leaves no gap in the world. It is the life either frustrated or cut short before fulfilling itself that leaves a gap. What is here left behind is a sense of rich plenitude - an achievement splendid in its calm completeness. Yes, the two characteristics of this man as embodied in his work were an unassuming poise and a thoroughgoing wide-sweeping efficiency. That combination gave him a str

-20_Time's Gap.htm Time's Gap Who could have believed that from Edith Sitwell of the rather equivocal fame of self-consciously clever and deliberately perverse effusions like Jane, Jane! tall as a crane, The light comes creating down the lane, one would get the magnificent lines: That old rag-picker blown along the street Was once great Venus. But now Age unkind Has shrunken her so feeble and so small - Weak as a babe. And she who gave the Lion's kiss Has now all Time's gap for her piteous mouth. Aeschylus might have had a hand in them - Aeschylus of the grandiose and compact audacities. Marlowe might have moulded them - Marlowe with his sublime violence. Here is not

Yeats and Shaw Yeats once wrote to Dorothy Wellesley: "Shaw has written a long, rambling, vegetarian, sexless letter, disturbed by my causing 'bad blood' between the nations." It is curious to find any act of the most efficient fighter of our day described thus. The very efficiency of Shaw's fighting seems to have misled Yeats. Measured against Shaw, Yeats on the war-path can be nothing but frustrated rage, a weakling with a sword in his hand but unable to wield it; he can only scowl and spit. Shaw is like a fencing expert, parrying blows and dealing death-wounds with such smooth ease, such effortlessness, such absence of violent waste that he appears to many eyes "vegetarian"

Science and Poetry Have you read I. A. Richards's Science and Poetry? If you have not, you have missed a very sharp and well-phrased formulation, within a brief compass, of both the value and defect the poetic expression and poetic response in life have for a scientific-minded literary critic. Richards has a genuine concern for the general health and balance of human nature. He makes no denial of the richness poetry brings us. A most apt remark of his runs: "To live reasonably is not to live by reason alone - the mistake is easy and, if carried far, disastrous — but to live in a way of which reason, a clear full sense of the whole situation, would approve." And a clear full sen

The Process of Great Poetry No lover of poetry but feels during its spell over him that he is granted the contact of a deeper and higher state of consciousness than the ordinary. Poetry at such moments is not a mere conspiracy by Dante and Shakespeare and Tagore to crown colourful invention king of our hearts: no doubt, we recognise that its primary work is to bring delight by vision and emotion and not offer demonstrable or verifiable truth, but the delight breathes a superhuman air and is no outcome of transfigured fantasy. Why then should we later look upon these moments with diffidence in their revelatory touch on our being? At times poets themselves shirk in retro