AN ENGLISH LYRIST
Poems: First Series. By J. C. Squire. 12mo. 115 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. New York.
THE business of poetry, like any other, has its minor difficulties which are hardly ever appreciated by the laity; and not the least of these is the question as to what you shall call your book when you have got it together. At the outset of a career, the problem is comparatively simple. You can call your first book, with chaste simplicity, Poems, and the second, if you will, New Poems. And at the end of a career simplicity returns. If you think you have really finished, you can issue your Collected Poems and be done with it; and your literary executors can truthfully call the volume they publish, Complete Poems. But the intermediate stages are not so easy. You can call your third volume Ode to Marshal Foch and Other Poems, or, more imaginatively, Bread and Nightingales; but I confess that neither alternative appeals to me very strongly. And if you want to halt and collect all you have done, weeding out the useless and rearranging the rest, before going on, what are you going to call the result?
These reflections have been provoked in me by the almost pathetic preface which Mr. J. C. Squire has written for his Poems: First Series. The problem has filled him with perplexity:
"Had the volume been called ——— and Other Poems it might have given a false impression that its contents were entirely new. Had it been called Collected Poems the equally false impression might have been given that there was something of finality about it. The title selected seemed best to convey both the fact that it was a collection and that, under Providence, other (and, let us hope, superior) collections will follow it."
The solution is not an unhappy one; and the readers of this volume will receive with pleasure the promise of others to come. The suggestion that its successors will probably be poetically superior to it is
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