They are, or at moments
they seem to be, primarily tellers of stories. We will not dogmatise and
say that the attempt is illegitimate; we prefer to insist that to tell a
story in poetry and keep it poetry is a herculean task. It would indeed
be doubly rash to dogmatise, for our three poets desire to tell very
different stories, and we are by no means sure that the emotional
subtleties which Mr Aiken in particular aims at capturing are capable of
being exactly expressed in prose.
Since Mr Aiken is the _corpus vile_ before us we will henceforward
confine ourselves to him, though we premise that in spite of his very
sufficient originality he is characteristic of what is most worth
attention in modern American poetry. Proceeding then, we find another
point of contact between him and Mr Kipling, more important perhaps than
the former, and certainly more dangerous. Both find it apparently
impossible to stem the uprush of rhetoric. Perhaps they do not try to;
but we will be charitable--after all, there is enough good in either of
them to justify charity--and assume that the willingness of the spirit
gives way to the weakness of the flesh.
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