Part 4

—cut, torn, mangled, torn by the stress and beat, no stronger than the strips of sand along your ragged beach.

But, says the poet, in a beautiful passage:

But we bring violets, great masses, single, sweet: wood-violets, stream-violets, violets from a wet marsh, violets in clumps from the hills.

Every kind of violet is brought and strewn on the sea. For what reason? Here is the answer:

You will yet come, you will yet haunt men in ships— you will thunder along the cliff, break—retreat—get fresh strength— gather and pour weight upon the beach.

You will bring myrrh-bark, and drift laurel wood from hot coasts; when you hurl, high—high— We will answer with a shout.

For you will come, you will answer our taut hearts, you will break the lie of men’s thoughts, and shelter us for our trust.

Has the sea, then, in this poem been used in some way as a symbol of the eternal drift, change and reflux of our life which we have tried to conceal under theories of ethics, of progress, of immortality, of civilization? Perhaps it has. And the violets—what, then, are they but simply the recollections of our earlier sea-state, of our endless, unconscious drift with the tides of life?

I do not propose here to examine H. D.’s mystic philosophy. That philosophy cannot be disengaged from its context. But from a quite recent poem of hers—a poem very beautiful and baffling, I may perhaps be permitted to quote these few lines, wrenched from their context, without comment:

Sleepless nights, I remember the initiates, their gesture, their calm glance, I have heard how, in rapt thought, in vision they speak with another race More beautiful, more intense than this—

I reason: another life holds what this lacks: a sea, unmoving, quiet, not forcing our strength to rise to it, beat on beat, a hill not set with black violets, but stones, stones, bare rocks, dwarf-trees, twisted, no beauty, to distract—to crowd madness upon madness.

Only a still place, and perhaps some outer horror, some hideousness to stamp beauty— on our hearts.

IV

The third poet whose work I have to examine, Mr. F. S. Flint, was already an accomplished writer of rhymed vers libre before he joined the Imagist movement. Mr. Flint’s early work is contained in a volume entitled, _In the Net of the Stars_, a volume which is still worth reading. _The Net of the Stars_ told a love-story in rather uncommon fashion. The poet and his beloved were presented throughout the book, against the background of the starry sky:

Little knots in the net of light That is held by the infinite Dragon, Night.

This bringing into relation of a quite human love-story, with the impassive and changeless order of the Universe, threw a flavour of supreme irony over the whole book. The work is otherwise remarkable technically. At the date when it was published, 1909, Mr. Flint already revealed that he was an assiduous student of Verhaeren, De Regnier, and other French vers-librists. Hence its importance as a document in the Imagist movement.

But to come to Mr. Flint’s later work which has been assembled under the title of _Cadences_. We find here a poet, first of all, of sentiment. What, you say, an Imagist who deals with sentiment? My reply to that is, that it is time people understood that an Imagist is free to deal with whatever he chooses, so long as he is sincere and honest about it. Mr. Flint’s sincerity is his finest point. He is in some sense the Paul Verlaine of the Imagist movement. His work gives one the same delicacy of nuance, the same fresh fragrance, the same direct simplicity, the same brooding melancholy. He lacks the strain of coarseness which ruined Verlaine; he has, in place of it, a refined nobility. He has not humour. At times he has attempted irony, but I cannot think he has altogether succeeded in it. He feels life too poignantly to ever mock at life. There remains tenderness, wistful pathos, imaginative beauty.

On reading Mr. Flint one obtains a very distinct impression of Mr. Flint’s personality. One pictures him as a shy, sensitive, lonely dreamer filled with a desire to attain to the noblest and finest life, but somehow kept back from it. Mr. Flint is one of the few poets I know who have preserved intact today a spark of the old lyrical idealism. He is, perhaps, though he may not realize it, even closer to Keats and Shelley than to Verlaine—he might almost be called a modern Shelley. His affiliation with these earlier and greater romantics is more marked because it is an affiliation of spirit, not of form. Mr. Flint’s form has always been his own, and by holding conscientiously to his own form, he has come closer, to my way of thinking, to poets like Keats and Shelley than the innumerable tribe of imitators who have rashly taken the form for the substance.

Here is an early example of Mr. Flint’s work:

London, my beautiful, it is not the sunset, nor the pale green sky shimmering through the curtain of the silver birch, nor the quietness; it is not the hopping of the little birds upon the lawn, nor the darkness stealing over all things that moves me.

But as the moon creeps slowly over the treetops among the stars; I think of her, and the glow her passing sheds on men.

London, my beautiful, I will climb into the branches to the moonlit treetops that my blood may be cooled by the wind.

And here is another, equally beautiful:

Under the lily shadow, and the gold, and the blue, and the mauve, that the whin and the lilac pour down upon the water, the fishes quiver.

Over the green cold leaves, and the rippled silver, and the tarnished copper of its neck and beak, toward the deep black water, beneath the arches, the swan floats slowly.

Into the dark of the arch the swan floats, and the black depths of my sorrow bears a white rose of flame.

If Mr. Flint had written nothing else but these two poems he would be immortal for their sake, in spite of his disregard—shared by H. D.—of the convenient device which begins each line of a poem with a capital letter, and of the laws of punctuation. They weave a perfect hypnotic spell in my mind, and they fulfill completely a recent definition of Mr. E. A. Robinson, that poetry is a language which expresses through an emotional reaction something which cannot be said in ordinary speech.

Mr. Flint has given us other poems not less beautiful, but with a strain of greater pathos:

Tired faces, eyes that have never seen the world, bodies that have never lived in air, lips that have never minted speech; they are the clipped and garbled blocking the highway. They swarm and eddy between the banks of glowing shops towards the red meat, the potherbs, the cheapjacks, or surge in before the swift rush of the charging teams; pitiful, ugly, mean, encumbering.

Immortal? In a wood watching the shadow of a bird, leap from frond to frond of bracken, I am immortal, perhaps. But these? Their souls are naphtha lamps, guttering in an odour of carious teeth, and I die with them.

Perhaps the last poem in Mr. Flint’s book will give the most complete exposition of his art and vision:

The Star

Bright Star of Life, Who shattered creeds at Bethlehem, And saw In the irradiance of your vision shining, Children and maidens, youths and men and women, Dancing barefoot among the grasses, singing, Dancing, Over the waving flowery meadows; So calmly watched the universe and men, And yet So fiery was the heart behind the light;

The creeds have been re-made by men Who followed as you walked abroad, And gathered up their shattered shards; Then with a wax of sticky zeal, Each little piece unto its fellow joined; But over the meadows comes the wind Remembering your voice:

_O my love,_ _O my golden-haired, my golden-hearted,_ _I will sing this song to you of Him,_ _This golden afternoon._ _This song of you;_ _For where love is, is He,_ _Whose name has echoed in the halls of Time,_ _Who caught the wise eternal music, ay,_ _And passed it on—_ _For men to sing it since_ _In false and shifting keys—_ _Who hears it now?_

But the hearts of those who have heard it rightly, Grew great; And behind the walls and barriers of the world, Their voices have gone up in sweetness Unheeded, Yet imminent in the wings and flight of change; Comes there a time when men shall shout it, And say to Life: You have the strength of the seas, And the glory of the vine; You shall have the wisdom of the hills, The daring of the eagle’s wings, The yearning of the swallow’s quest. And, in the mighty organ of the world, Great men shall be as pipes and nations stops To harmonize your Song.

_O my love,_ _Like a cornfield in summer_ _Is your body to me;_ _Golden and bending with the wind,_ _And on the tallest ear a bird is piping_ _The lonely song._ _And scarlet poppies thread the golden ways._ _Out of the purple haze of the sea behind it_ _Appears a white ship sailing,_ _And its passengers are harvesters._ _But who dares sing of love?_

The jackals howl; the vultures gorge dead flesh.

In despite of the last line, which is undoubtedly true, and, under the present circumstances, certainly necessary to the context of all that precedes it, yet I feel I cannot share Mr. Flint’s despair of this world. For as long as there is any poet who can have such visions as this is, in such a world as ours, the earth cannot be altogether given over to crime and slaughter. Which one of the Imagists could have given us with so direct and poignant sincerity—scorning all artifice—such a vision of beauty? Or, for that matter, which one of the poets of today?

The Reader Critic

What Is Anarchy?

_Alan Adair, London_:

In the March number of THE LITTLE REVIEW, Miss Alice Groff criticises Anarchy. She criticises it badly and unfairly. She writes as though she did not understand what anarchy is. Have you room in your paper for me to tell her?

Anarchy is the name given to those periods in the life of a people during which the principle of domination is held in abeyance and men are no longer accountable to any magistracy. It is properly a political word. It has no philosophical significance. All it means is absence of material government. It is in that sense that Milton uses it and Swift uses it. It is in that sense that writers of history books employ it. It is a term, and the only correct term, for a certain condition of society. That condition has occurred in the past and will doubtless occur in the future. It is the result of an equality of strength among the different elements, or “social-egos” that make up a community. There is Anarchy only so long as these forces remain equal. Once they cease to be equal, so soon as one begins to tend towards dominance, so soon does the Anarchy end. According to the “social-ego” that has triumphed, the changed commonwealth becomes an oligarchy or a kingdom; a military republic, an ochlocracy or a federation of communes. But until then, while there is still absence of supreme coercive power, while there is still _no dominant “social-ego,”_ so long is the community correctly termed an Anarchy.

Between this, the Anarchy of fact and of history, and the Anarchy of theory and modern revolutionists, there is no substantial difference. The anarchist, in any age, is simply and without qualification, a man who desires an end put to the political power under which he lives. The reason _why_ he desires such a thing does not matter. He may think government to be eternally an evil or only presently an evil. He may be egoist or communist. What makes him an anarchist is that he hates the social order around him and would precipitate its destruction by paralyzing the centers of its administrative and legislative authority.

The theoretical case against government has little part in the mind of the modern anarchist. Miss Groff altogether overestimates the importance that he attaches to it. The war against authority _as authority_ is past. We are beyond that kind of mysticism. Scepticism is a big ingredient of Anarchy and the anarchist knows only too well that we know too little of psychology and too little of philosophy to judge the worth of abstractions like justice or liberty or the principle of domination. We can only fix temporary, conditional values to such things. Actual, modern authority is the only sphinx that troubles the contemporary anarchist. He has no desire to control the destinies of his people and, as anarchist, he has no theories about the future form of its political institutions. His business is solely with present facts. His task is simply destruction. It may be that he does not start from a “basis of reason.” He has seen and thought too much to trouble greatly about reason. He knows too many books to have much optimism. He sees sprawled across the earth a tragic and incoherent civilization and he sees the most virile of the races of man lose under its influence the spontaneity of their actions and the region of their instincts. That, possibly more than the desire to “complete a circuit of reason,” is at the root of his attitude to society. The question of the moral significance of archist or an-archist is beyond the answering of Miss Groff or any one else. The question of whether it is well to endure the present order; to be dwarfed and poisoned by its ideals; to be devoted by its economy to contemptible pursuits; to be forced to conjunction with base influences by every circumstance that past power has created for the control of present humanity; that is at least an answerable question. Of the value of the anarchist answer there may be many opinions, but that it is an intelligible answer is not to be denied. It is simple and coherent. Society is sick of its many counsellors and rulers. Its sources of spiritual vitality are dried up. It is full of confusion; bereft of consistent purpose; continuing only in mechanical existence. To precipitate its decay is the one wise action possible to mankind. All things are grown fatigued; without simplicity of soul or rigour of desire. Religions, institutions and codes of law are no longer animated; solely the dead weight of the past holds them in position. Of what use to plan, meditate or invent, to conquer elements or to evoke from the earth new, fantastic and wonder-working metals, when that which has custody of all such things, that which alone can give continuity to the works and achievements of man our mother civilization itself is in dissolution?

To the mind of the anarchist, there are but two courses open to humanity. First: there may be a continuance of the present conditions: a society stratified as now, stupidified as now, completely organized, of antique institutions, growing perpetually enfeebled in spirit, the current of its vitality becoming attenuated until lost in the morass of an enormous racial degeneracy. Or else, secondly, the mechanism of civilization may break and a period of administrative and moral chaos not easily distinguishable from barbarism supervene upon dilatory decadence. It is this second course that commends itself to the anarchist. Only in a partial cessation of its continuity, only in a barbaric forgetfulness of its eternal problems and speculations can an exhausted humanity come once more to a zest for existence and the will to achievement.

And an Anarchy is commonly an epoch of such confusion and recovery.

Impressions of the Loop

_A Boy Reader, Chicago_:

Is the following good enough for you to print?

As I walk through the streets of the Loop, Big, fat, double-chinned women fan by; They reek of Melba perfume: They might have used some other kind, But they like Melba: fat women, I mean. Then there are whining old ladies; They look disdainfully at the gay styles, Whining, because they are disgusted— (Envious disgust). They are old, you know, and can’t do such things. And drunken men tumble from the corner saloons; I envy them, for they are very happy. Miserable, begging men and women sit in comfort On every corner. Some have _an_ arm, some _a_ leg, But they had _another_ once. Why don’t the rich people take care of them? They might lose their arms and legs! Big limousines glide by; Painted blonde ladies sit on soft cushions. They must sit there! What would the jewelry stores do without them! Diamonds glitter on their perfumed hands; They cannot smile, for the paint would crack And fall from their faces. Besides, they are select. Ragamuffins weave in and out. They hop cars, scream, and envy the blossoming windows Of cheap Delicatessens. Flip stenographers flit by; Their ankles are gay with many-colored stilty shoes, But their stockings are full of holes and Jacob’s ladders Under it all. Terrible odors fill the air: Fish, gasoline, booze, sachet-powder (lots of Melba), Gas, cheap roses, and peanuts; coffee, smoke, And other things. Dirty men, clean men, dudes, street mashers, Cheap Musicians and Artists.... This is life!

Statement of Ownership, Management, Circulation, Etc., Required by the Act of Congress of August 24, 1912

Of THE LITTLE REVIEW, published monthly at Chicago, Ill., for April 1st, 1916.

State of Illinois, County of Cook—ss:

Before me, a Notary Public in and for the State and county aforesaid, personally appeared Margaret C. Anderson, who, having been duly sworn according to law, deposes and says that she is the Editor of THE LITTLE REVIEW, and that the following is, to the best of her knowledge and belief, a true statement of the ownership, management (and if a daily paper, the circulation), etc., of the aforesaid publication for the date shown in the above caption, required by the Act of August 24, 1912, embodied in section 443, Postal Laws and Regulations, printed on the reverse of this form, to wit:

1. That the names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business managers are:

Publisher, Margaret C. Anderson, 834 Fine Arts Building; Editor, Margaret C. Anderson, 834 Fine Arts Building; Managing editor, Margaret C. Anderson, 834 Fine Arts Building; Business manager, Margaret C. Anderson, 834 Fine Arts Building.

2. That the owners are: (Give names and addresses of individual owners, or, if a corporation, give its name and the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding 1 per cent or more of the total amount of stock.)

Margaret C. Anderson, 834 Fine Arts Building.

3. That the known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 per cent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: (If there are none, so state.) None.

4. That the two paragraphs next above, giving the names of the owners, stockholders, and security holders, if any, contain not only the list of stockholders and security holders as they appear upon the books of the company but also, in cases where the stockholders or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting, is given; also that the said two paragraphs contain statements embracing affiant’s full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustee, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner; and this affiant has no reason to believe that any other person, association, or corporation has any interest direct or indirect in the said stock, bonds, or other securities than as so stated by him.

MARGARET C. ANDERSON.

Sworn to and subscribed before me this 31st day of March, 1916.

(SEAL)

MITCHELL DAWSON, Notary Public. (My commission expires December 20, 1917.)

A Vers Libre Prize Contest

Through the generosity of a friend, THE LITTLE REVIEW is enabled to offer an unusual prize for poetry—possibly the first prize extended to free verse. The giver is “interested in all experiments, and has followed the poetry published in THE LITTLE REVIEW with keen appreciation and a growing admiration for the poetic form known as _vers libre_.”

The conditions are as follows:

Contributions must be received by August 15th.

They must not be longer than twenty-five lines.

They must be sent anonymously with stamps for return.

The name and address of the author must be fixed to the manuscript in a sealed envelope.

It should be borne in mind that free verse is wanted—verse having beauty of rhythm, not merely prose separated into lines.

There will be three judges: William Carlos Williams, Zoë Aikens and Helen Hoyt.

There will be two prizes of $25 each. They are offered not as a first and second prize, but for “the two best short poems in free verse form.”

As there will probably be a large number of poems to read, we suggest that contributors adhere closely to the conditions of the contest.

THE NEW POETRY SERIES

A successful attempt to give the best of contemporary verse a wide reading in its own generation.

NEW VOLUMES NOW READY

SOME IMAGIST POETS, 1916

A new collection of the work of this interesting group of poets—Richard Aldington, “H. D.”, John Gould Fletcher, F. S. Flint, D. H. Lawrence, and Amy Lowell—showing increased scope and power and confirming their important position in modern poetry. The volume includes Miss Lowell’s “Patterns” and “Spring Day,” and Mr. Fletcher’s Arizona poems.

GOBLINS AND PAGODAS By JOHN GOULD FLETCHER

This volume includes “Ghosts of an Old House” and ten “Symphonies” interpreting in terms of color the inner life of a poet. In originality of conception, in sheer tonal beauty, and in the subtlety with which moods are evoked, these poems mark a distinct advance in the development of the art of poetry.

ROADS By GRACE FALLOW NORTON

The author of “The Little Gray Songs from St. Joseph’s” writes in the old metres but with all the artistic vitality of the newer school of poets. The poems of this volume represent the best work she has yet done.

TURNS AND MOVIES By CONRAD AIKEN

“Most remarkable of all recent free verse.”—Reedy’s St. Louis Mirror.

A SONG OF THE GUNS By GILBERT FRANKAU

Wonderfully vivid pictures of modern war written to the roar of guns on the western front by a son of Frank Danby, the novelist. These are the war poems the world has been waiting for.

IDOLS By WALTER CONRAD ARENSBERG

Contains many interesting experiments in new metres and reflective verse of much beauty as well as novel and effective renderings of Mallarmé’s “Afternoon of a Faun,” and of Dante’s Fifth Canto.

Each 75 cents Net, except “A Song of the Guns,” which is 50 cents Net.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN CO. At all Bookstores 4 Park Street, Boston

READ THE MISCELLANY

An Illustrated QUARTERLY for Connoisseurs of the Book-Beautiful

Occasional Book Reviews and Articles on Prints, Etchings and Fine Engraving

THE OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN BOOKPLATE SOCIETY

$1.00 a Year 25 Cents a Copy

Address EDITOR, THE MISCELLANY 1010 Euclid Avenue Cleveland, Ohio

Are you really opposed to the war and are you anxious to do anti-military propaganda? Then help spread

ANTI-MILITARY LITERATURE

Preparedness, the Road to Universal Slaughter By Emma Goldman, 5c each, $2.50 a hundred

Patriotism, a Menace to Liberty By Emma Goldman, 5c each, $2.50 a hundred

War and Capitalism By Peter Kropotkin, 5c each