The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth CenturyPhelps, William Lyon
History
The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century
Phelps, William Lyon
American poetry -- 20th century -- History and criticism; English poetry -- 20th century -- History and criticism
Here tulips bloom as they are told;
Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose;
And there the unregulated sun
Slopes down to rest when day is done,
And wakes a vague unpunctual star,
A slippered Hesper; and there are
Meads toward Haslingfleld and Coton
Where _das Betreten'_s not _verboten_....
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? ... oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
When Hamlet died, he bequeathed his reputation to Horatio, the
official custodian of his good name. He could not have made a better
choice. Would that all poets who die young were equally fortunate in
their posthumous editors! For there are some friends who conceive it
to be their duty to print every scrap of written paper the bard left
behind him, even if they have to act as scavengers to find the
"remains"; and there are others who think affection and admiration for
the dead are best shown by adopting the methods and the language of
the press-agent. To my mind, the pious memoir of Tennyson is injured
by the inclusion of a long list of "testimonials," which assure us
that Alfred Tennyson was a remarkable poet. Mr. J. C. Squire, under
whose auspices the works of Flecker appear in one handsome volume, is
an admirable editor. His introduction is a model of its kind, giving
the necessary biographical information, explaining the chronology, the
origin, the background of the poems, and showing how the poet revised
his earlier work; the last paragraph ought to serve as an example to
those who may be entrusted with a task of similar delicacy in the
future. "My only object in writing this necessarily rather disjointed
Introduction is to give some information that may interest the reader
and be useful to the critic; and if a few personal opinions have
slipped in they may conveniently be ignored. A vehement 'puff
preliminary' is an insolence in a volume of this kind; it might
pardonably be supposed to imply either doubts about the author or
distrust of his readers."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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