Modern Poetry - 1922-1934

MODERN POETRY 1922-1934 AN ANTHOLOGY COMPILED BY MAURICE WOLLMAN PREFACE THE aim of this Anthology is to be representative of the poetry of the last dozen years, No poem, however, has been admitted merely for the sake of representing its author : each poem has been judged solely on its merits. A few names that one would expect to find in an anthology of modern poetry are missing. The omission of certain poets is due either to a selfimposed exclusion, as with Professor A. E. Housman and Mr. Robert Graves, or to the fact that they have published very little verse since 1922, as with Mr, Hilaire Belloc, Mr. Max Plowman, Q., and Sir William Watson. Similarly, the bulk of the work of certain other poets who are included was published before 1922, and consequently no conclusion about their comparative importance in poetry today is implied by the selec tion of only two or three poems by such writers as A.E., Professor Lascelles Abercrombie, Mr. Laurence Binyon, Mr. Gordon Bottomley, Mr. John Masefield, and Sir Henry Newbolt. The principle of not including extracts from long poems has been observed with only four exceptions. If the late Robert Bridges had not left directions to the contrary, extracts would have been included also from The Testament of Beauty. INTRODUCTION IN 1798 appeared Wordsworths and Coleridges Lyrical Ballads, which is usually regarded as the startingpoint of that new movement in poetry called the Romantic Movement, In 1922 appeared Mr. T. S. Eliots The Waste Land, which many poets and critics of today regard as the most significant land mark in postWar literature, In the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote of homely people in homely language, enlarging the range of poetry by extending their themes to simple people whose thoughts and emotions are common to everyone, In The Waste Land Mr, Eliot explored the world of his own subconscious mind, and exposed the temper of the modern world as decadent and sterile. By means of literary quotation and crossallusion, in everyday prosaic rhythms, without any aesthetic artifices, with broken disconnected images, and with such frequent solecisms of thought, expression and syntax as make one doubt the poems complete seriousness, Mr, Eliot satirised the world of today. ..........................