Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips)
History
Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922
Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips)
Essays; Literature -- History and criticism; Periodicals
When we peruse the poetry of Miss Jackson we are impressed first by its
amazing variety, and almost as quickly by a certain distinctive quality
which gives all the varied specimens a kind of homogeneity. As we
analyse our impressions, we find that both of these qualities have a
common source--the complete objectivity and almost magical imagination
of supreme genius. Objectivity and imagination, the gifts of the epic
bards of classical antiquity, are today the rarest of blessings. We live
in an age of morbid emotion and introspectiveness; wherein the poets,
such as they are, have sunk to the level of mere pathologists engaged in
the dissection of their own ultra-sophisticated spirits. The fresh touch
of Nature is lost to the majority, and rhymesters rant endlessly and
realistically about the relation of man to his fellows and to himself;
overlooking the real foundations of art and beauty--wonder, and man's
relation to the unknown cosmos. But Miss Jackson is not of the majority,
and has not overlooked these things. In her the ancient and unspoiled
bard is refulgently reincarnated; and with an amazing universality and
freedom from self-consciousness she suppresses the ego completely,
delineating Nature's diverse moods and aspects with an impersonal
fidelity and delicacy which form the delight of the discriminating
reader, and the despair of the stupid critic who works by rule and
formula rather than by brain. There is no medium which the spirit of
Miss Jackson can not inhabit. The same mind which reflects the daintiest
and most gorgeous phantasies of the faery world, or furnishes the most
finely wrought pictures or refined pathos and sentiment, can abruptly
take up its abode in some remote Maine timber region and pour out such a
wild, virile chantey of the woods and the river that we seem to glimpse
the singer as the huskiest of a tangle-bearded, fight-scarred,
loud-shouting logging crew sprawling about a pine campfire.
A critic has grouped the poetical work of Miss Jackson into six classes:
Lyrics of ideal beauty, including delightful Nature-poems replete with
local colour; delicate amatory lyrics; rural dialect lyrics and vigorous
colloquial pieces; poems of sparkling optimism; child verse; and poems
of potent terror and dark suggestion. "With her," he adds, "sordid
realism has no place; and her poems glow with a subtle touch of the
fanciful and the supernatural which is well sustained by tasteful and
unusual word-combinations, images, and onomatopoetic effects." This
estimate is confirmed by the latest productions of the poetess, as we
shall endeavour to show by certain specimens lately published or about
to be published, selected almost at random:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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