On both sides we have the corporate and the individual flavour; on both
sides we have those individuals-by-courtesy whose flavour is almost
wholly corporate; on both sides the corporate flavour is one that we
find intensely disagreeable. In the coalition we find it noxious, in the
opposition no worse than irritating. No doubt this is because we
recognise a tendency to take the coalition seriously, while the
opposition is held to be ridiculous. But both the coalition and the
opposition--we use both terms in their corporate sense--are unmistakably
the product of the present age. In that sense they are truly
representative and complementary each to the other; they are a fair
sample of the goodness and badness of the literary epoch in which we
live; they are still more remarkable as an index of the complete
confusion of aesthetic values that prevails to-day.
The corporate flavour of the coalition is a false simplicity. Of the
nineteen poets who compose it there are certain individuals whom we
except absolutely from this condemnation, Mr de la Mare, Mr Davies, and
Mr Lawrence; there are others who are more or less exempt from it, Mr
Abercrombie, Mr Sassoon, Mrs Shove, and Mr Nichols; and among the rest
there are varying degrees of saturation.
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