THE BIRMINGHAM DAILY POST

Birmingham, Warwickshire, England

30 January 1914

(PAGE 6)

REVIEWS OF NEW BOOKS.

Cambridge Poets, 1900-1913. An Anthology. Chosen by Aelfrida Tillyard. (Heffer.) 5s. net.

After reading first the anthology and then the preface contributed by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, we discovered we had taken an unnecessary precaution. His discursive essay advisedly makes no attempt at detailed praise, and no attempt to indicate any particular and essential tendencies of the poets represented. The anthology contains some poems already well known, notably "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester," by Mr. Rupert Brooke, which was certainly amongst the half-dozen best poems of 1912. Familiar, too, are "The Golden Journey to Samarkand," in the austere style of Mr. Elroy Flecker, and "The Railway Station," by Mr. J. Collings Squire, whose wonderful parodies unfortunately are excluded from the scheme of the volume. From Mr. Aleister Crowley's seven-and-thirty strange and mystical books the editor has selected some twenty pages of poetry which we have contemplated with considerable astonishment, but little admiration, although we recognize in the sonnet "Perdurabo" a Promethean grandeur which elsewhere we seek vainly. Mr. Harold Munro, a courageous writer whom we admire further as a publicist in the cause of poetry, contributes a dramatic poem "God." The asterisks placed against pieces unpublished elsewhere mark a considerable number of school-exercises such as the "Fragmentary Views: of Mr. Francis Bekissy, and at least one fascinating poem, "Mary Ford and Jimmy Price," a ghost story, something after the tritely-rhymed manner of Mr. Masefield, but with certain claims to originality. Perhaps the editor's twelve-page selection from her own undistinguished poetry accounts for some errors in choice, and yet, reading carefully through the anthology, we cannot fail to be comforted by many excellent lyrics from writers well known and unknown. Happily the laborious pseudo-classic productions of an earlier generation are absent, and much of the verse—at lowest the manifestation of the enduring impulse to poetry—is original and underivative. It would be unjust to condemn even the bulk of the volume as 'prentice-work, for with poets such as those first names, and Mr. H. O. Meredith, directly in touch with life itself, and sensitive to its appeal, there is more durable merit than the outward graces of mere literary craftsmanship.