AGAINST NIGHTINGALES
Picture Show. By Siegfried Sassoon. 12mo. 56 pages. E. P. Dutton and Company. New York.
The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon. 12mo. 95 pages. William Heinemann. London.
EIGHT years ago when the Georgians first appeared as a group, it seemed that they were discovering more strident harmonies, subtler dissonances. But with the publication of each new anthology, the disappointment is cumulative. Every two years a volume bound in fresh brown boards, printed on fresh paper, but with the contents so familiar, so delicately trite, reaching with such skill to new heights of inanity. Out of all the group, one metaphysician who slips between the boundaries of the unreal and the real; one passionate consumptive; one forthright satirist—Siegfried Sassoon—and the rest nightingales. It is by their absorption with nightingales, by their identification of themselves with the nightingale, that one may recognize the Georgians.
O nightingale! creature something more than a bird, your trilled notes are almost the dominant tones of English poetry. From Chaucer's foule, that we were taught to speak of euphoniously as the nichtingawle, to the sentimental melodist of Belleau Wood, we have been tormented by the monotony of your song. Your supremacy was threatened for a time by the red-poppy school of war poets, but once more you rule unchallenged. O feathered pedant! O banal rhapsodist confused by the tic-tac of iambics! You leave me, O ecstatic bore, homesick for the hoot-owls and whippoorwills of an Ohio dusk, or for one moment of lucent quiet in which to forget all the nightingales that sang from Chaucer to John Drinkwater.
When a poet like Siegfried Sassoon tries, in lumbering pentameters, to talk about something else than nightingales and the trees and meadows which are their haunt; when he goes back to Donne and Swift instead of the Elizabethan lyricists, he has to struggle against a whole tradition of vapidity. He is fighting—whether or not consciously—for the theory of poetry as a mature art, as against the
