[Footnote 13:  Georgian Poetry, 1918-1919.  Edited by E.M. (The
   Poetry Bookshop.)

   Wheels.  Fourth Cycle. (Oxford:  B.H.  Blackwell.)]

And yet, somehow, this question of modern English poetry has become important for us, as important as the war, important in the same way as the war.  We can even analogise. Georgian Poetry is like the Coalition Government; Wheels is like the Radical opposition.  Out of the one there issues an indefinable odour of complacent sanctity, an unctuous redolence of union sacree; out of the other, some acidulation of perversity.  In the coalition poets we find the larger number of good men, and the larger number of bad ones; in the opposition poets we find no bad ones with the coalition badness, no good ones with the coalition goodness, but in a single case a touch of the apocalyptic, intransigent, passionate honesty that is the mark of the martyr of art or life.

On both sides we have the corporate and the individual flavour; on both sides we have those individuals-by-courtesy whose flavour is almost wholly corporate; on both sides the corporate flavour is one that we find intensely disagreeable.  In the coalition we find it noxious, in the opposition no worse than irritating.  No doubt this is because we recognise a tendency to take the coalition seriously, while the opposition is held to be ridiculous.  But both the coalition and the opposition—­we use both terms in their corporate sense—­are unmistakably the product of the present age.  In that sense they are truly representative and complementary each to the other; they are a fair sample of the goodness and badness of the literary epoch in which we live; they are still more remarkable as an index of the complete confusion of aesthetic values that prevails to-day.

The corporate flavour of the coalition is a false simplicity.  Of the nineteen poets who compose it there are certain individuals whom we except absolutely from this condemnation, Mr de la Mare, Mr Davies, and Mr Lawrence; there are others who are more or less exempt from it, Mr Abercrombie, Mr Sassoon, Mrs Shove, and Mr Nichols; and among the rest there are varying degrees of saturation.  This false simplicity can be quite subtle.  It is compounded of worship of trees and birds and contemporary poets in about equal proportions; it is sicklied over at times with a quite perceptible varnish of modernity, and at other times with what looks to be technical skill, but generally proves to be a fairly clumsy reminiscence of somebody else’s technical skill.  The negative qualities of this simplesse are, however, the most obvious; the poems imbued with it are devoid of any emotional significance whatever.  If they have an idea it leaves you with the queer feeling that it is not an idea at all, that it has been defaced, worn smooth by the rippling of innumerable minds.  Then, spread in a luminous haze over these compounded elements,