THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN

London, England

11 December 1913

(page 4)

NEW BOOKS.

OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE POETS.

Cambridge Poets, 1900-1913. An Anthology chosen by Aelfrida Tillyard. Cambridge: Heffer and Sons. Pp. xx. 226, 5s. net.

Oxford Poetry, 1910-1913. Edited by G.D.H.C., G.P.D., and W.S.V. Oxford: B. H. Blackwell. Pp. xxii. 205. 3s. 6d. net.

Of these two books one is like a moderately high table and, the other like a chain of high peaks divided by deep valleys, and it is quite in character that Oxford should provide the plateau and Cambridge the chain. There is nothing in the Oxford book to rival Mr. H. Q. Meredith’s simple force, Mr. Rupert Brooke’s cleverness, the fresh charm of Mrs. Cornford’s verse. Or the artful limpid warble of Mr. F. W. Stoloe’s. But Cambridge has no cause to exult. All these poets are . . .

[ . . . ]

Speaking generally, though the Oxford men have better taste, the more one dips into the Cambridge book, the more through all its sad, mad lapses does the note of vigorous sincerity emerge. In spite of its defects, which are partly due to indiscretions of compilation (far the worst is the devotion of twenty pages to Mr. Allister [sic] Crowley, whose overblown rhetoric is so well known that it surely might have been omitted altogether), we end by seeing it in the strongest possible evidence of that renewed vitality of poetry which is one of the hopefullest signs of our day. According to Professor Murray, satiety is poetry’s chief enemy, and Cambridge is, perhaps, slightly less satiated than Oxford.