SELECTIONS FROM MODERN POETS
MADE BY J. C. SQUIRE
LONDON: MARTIN SECKER
1921
PREFATORY NOTE
No Poet represented in this book was over fifty when, in 1919, I beganto compile it. The eldest of them all was born in 1870.
Many good and some great living poets are therefore missing from itspages. Nothing is here by Mr Hardy or Mr Bridges, by Mr A. E. Housman,Mr Yeats, Æ, Mr Binyon, Mr Hewlett, Mr Herbert Trench, Mr Gosse, MrAustin Dobson, Mr Doughty, Mr Kipling, Sir Henry Newbolt, Mrs Meynell,Mrs Woods, Mr Wilfrid Blunt, and others whose names must appear inany comprehensive anthology from living poets. The date, 1870, wasarbitrarily chosen: so would any other date have been. But some date Ihad to fix, for my object was to illustrate what many of us think anexceptional recent flowering.
I do not propose to analyse the tendencies, in idea and in method,exhibited in the poems here collected. These things are alwaysbetter seen at a distance; and anyhow the materials are here forthe production of an analysis by the reader himself, if he is eagerfor one. But I will express one opinion, and call attention to onephenomenon. The opinion is that the majority of the poems in this bookhave merit and that many more could have been printed without loweringthe standard. And the phenomenon is the simultaneous appearance—theresult of underlying currents of thought and feeling—of a very largenumber of poets who write only or mainly in lyrical forms. Severalliving poets of the highest repute have won their reputation solely onshort[Pg vi] poems, and there are, and have been, a very large number indeedwho have written one or two good poems.
The better production of our generation has been mainly lyrical andit has been widely diffused. Where is the ambitious work on a largescale? Where is the twentieth century poet who is fulfilling the usualfunctions of the greatest poets: to display human life in all its rangeand variety, or to exercise a clear and powerful influence on thethought of mankind with regard to the main problems of our existence?These questions are asked; possibly Echo may give its traditional andironic answer.
There are several observations, however, which should be made. One isthat the great doctrinal poets have not always become widely recognisedas such in their own prime, their general vogue being posthumous.Another is that we cannot possibly tell what a poet now living andyoung may or may not do before he dies. But though I have my own viewson this subject I do not think that the age, even if admitted to bepurely lyrical, stands in need of defence. It is of no use asking apoetical renascence to conform to type, for there isn't any type.There are marked differences in the features of all those Englishpoetical movements which have chiefly contributed to the body of our"immortal" poetry. In the Elizabethan age we had the greatest diversityof production: a multitude of great and small men, with much genius,or but a spark of it blown to life by the favourable wind, producedworks in every form and on every scale. The age of Herbert and Vaughan,of Crashaw, Herrick, Marvell, Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, Corbet,Habington, is memorable almost solely for its lyrical work. The eraof Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats was an age duringwhich a vast amount of great poetry was written by a few great poets;there was very little healthy undergrowth. Should our literary age beremembered by posterity solely as an age