This very ignorance makes us cautious where we
have a little knowledge We know something of Mr Lindsay, something of Mr
Masters, and a good deal of Miss Lowell, who has long been a familiar
figure in our anthologies of revolt; and we cannot understand on what
principle they are assembled together. Miss Lowell is, we are persuaded,
a negligible poet, with a tenuous and commonplace impulse to write which
she teases out into stupid 'originalities.' Of the other two gentlemen
we have seen nothing which convinces us that they are poets, but also
nothing which convinces us that they may not be.
Moreover, we can understand how Mr Aiken might be classed with them. All
three have in common what we may call creative energy. They are all
facile, all obviously eager to say something, though it is not at all
obvious what they desire to say, all with an instinctive conviction that
whatever it is it cannot be said in the old ways. Not one of them
produces the certainty that this conviction is really justified or that
he has tested it; not one has written lines which have the doom 'thus
and not otherwise' engraved upon their substance; not one has proved
that he is capable of addressing himself to the central problem of
poetry, no matter what technique be employed--how to achieve a
concentrated unity of aesthetic impression.
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