There is another poem of Lawrence’s called _Perfidy_ that gives an elusive sense of horror and calamity. This effect lies partially in the five-line stanza formation with the first, third, and fourth lines rhyming. There is no particular reason for calling this poem Imagism either; but we have agreed by now, I trust, that is not our first consideration. No less a person than Miss Lowell herself gives us justification in this viewpoint, for in a review of the poems of Aldington and Flint in the June _Poetry Review_ she says, “Let us take these little volumes as poetry pure and simple, forgetting schools and creeds.” There are thirty-two poems in all in the book. One person will like this one best, another that. Suffice that the book is a valuable contribution to contemporary literature. ---------- [1] _Some Imagist Poets, 1916: An Annual Anthology. Boston: Houghton Mifflin._ Three Imagist Poets JOHN GOULD FLETCHER (_Continued from the May issue_) III To pass from the poetry of Mr. Aldington to the poetry of H. D. is to pass into another world. For H. D. not only is a modern poet, she is in the best sense of the word a primitive poet. She deals with Greek themes in the same way as the Greeks of the seventh century B. C. might have dealt with them. She is not like Mr. Aldington, a sceptic enamoured of their lost beauty. In a sense she is indifferent to beauty. Something speaks to her in every rock, wave, or pine tree of those sunlit landscapes in which she seems to live. For her the decadence of antiquity, the Middle Ages, the modern world seem never to have existed. She is purely and frankly pagan. How is it that so many people interested in Imagism seem never to have grasped this essential distinction between her work and Mr. Aldington’s? I must suppose it is because very few people have ever tried to analyze and rank the Imagist poets on any other basis than that of form. But as I have already pointed out, the form of the Imagists is, after all, a matter of lesser importance than the spirit, with which they approach that form. Aldington writes about life: H. D. is almost completely a nature poet. Nature to her is not mere inanimate scenery or beautiful decoration: it is packed with a life and significance which is beyond our individual lives, and all her poems are in a sense acts of worship towards it. Civilization for her does not exist, in our modern sense: she seeks a civilization based only on the complete realization of natural and physical law, without any ethical problems except the need of merging and compounding all one’s desires and emotions in that law. Her poetry is like a series of hymns of some forgotten and primitive religion.