M I INTRODUCTORY RG. S. STREET has some shrewd comments to make on the enormous output of verse during the last few years. It was obvious, of course, that all the young poets were in the Army; to be a poet at all connoted that one was of military age, as one commonly writes verse in the first flush of youth rather than in a ripe old age: it is equally obvious that in moments of great stress or emotion men do write poetry, or at any rate formulate it so that it may be recollected in tranquillity, but most war poetry is remarkable for its reticence on the subject of the deeper emotions; the moods evoked are those called into being by weariness, comradeship, country scenes, and so on. Now Mr Street's theory is that these thousands of verses were hammered out in the mind at a time when paper and pen were not available, on the march, in the trench, on duty of some sort. Thoughts would flit through the minds of these men, pleasant enough or vivid enough to make them want to write them down : as this was impossible they had to commit them to memory. What greater aid to memory than rhythm or rhyme? This seems to me a most likely solution. The planning of a sonnet in his head, with its intricate rhyme-scheme would certainly enable a man to retain an impression, and the search for the best word and the necessary rhymes would certainly heighten the effect of the thought and make it of infinitely greater value than if it had been hastily written down in loose prose. This theory would explain the absence of vers libre among the soldier-poets, perhaps the most popular form of writing poetry before the war. Ford Madox Hueffer certainly still indulges in it, but it is significant that he takes special pains in his preface to defend his use of it. In 1913 it almost needed a defence if one dared to rhyme or scan. Now Hueffer even makes his vers libre rhyme! The war has driven the poet back from fanciful experiment to tradition: the long, lonely hours have led to silent thought, but not silent writing: the silent thought has become crystallised in the old classical form, and we have poetry in the true succession of the Philip Sidneys and the Lovelaces of old. But this is, after all, but a slight matter. The war has done more than drive the vers librist back to saner channels in which to float his argosy. Arthur Waugh has well pointed out, the younger school of poets, headed by Rupert Brooke, stood for individualism against the tyranny of convention, honestly striving to present life as they saw it; they failed through an incurable spirit of selfishness. Incurable, that is, but for the war. The poet back from the trenches still retains his individuality, but it has ceased to be introspective: all our sympathies have become extraordinarily widened: no longer do we speak glibly as the Victorians did of the ennobling glories of war: we have discovered it to be an unspeakable horror, paralysing the very soul: it becomes the mission of a Sassoon "to strip the tinsel from Bellona's robes" and reveal to us the stark and chattering skeleton beneath. By a quaint paradox individualism has expanded into a passion for companionship. Think of the interchange of letters in verse between Graves, Sassoon, and Nichols. Multiply that a millionfold . . . read read any soldier's poetry: his work is brimful of warmth and tenderness for others. The most selfcentred generation in history has been transformed into the most sympathetic and humane. To go back a little. It is not my purpose to take in detail any of those "Georgians " who were famous before the war: it is necessary, therefore, for the purposes of continuity to sum up their achievement. They scorned the amorous pessimism of the decadent nineties they refused to be obsessed by the passions : they would not allow themselves to get drunk on the superb melodies of Swinburne : they prided themselves on their sincerity and fought under the banner of realism. Now realism has been made to connote as many different meanings as that overworked word romantic. To the early Georgians it meant stark nakedness, frank brutality. Luckily it extended its scope to include the mysticism of Evelyn Underhill, the paradoxical balladry of Chesterton, the all-embracing sympathy of Ralph Hodgson, and the quaint humour of Harold Monro (who endows apparently inanimate objects with reason and life), as well as the Billingsgate colloquialism of Masefield's long narrative poems. In a word, these poets refused to specialise: they all overstepped the prescribed boundaries, and poetry became infinitely more human, and consequently humorous. Lascelles Abercrombie relies on intellectuality; De la Mare on a most seductive wizardry; D. H. Lawrence, almost a fanatic on one subject, and that thoroughly unpleasant, owing to the unruly turbulence of his surcharged emotions, relies entirely on sex. The introduction of the dramatic element, at |