Page:Poetry, a magazine of verse, Volume 7 (October 1915-March 1916).djvu/202

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POETRY: A Magazine of Verse

Whether employing the medium of vers libre or metre, they have shown, especially in a certain intensifying quality of mood, the first note of pure romanticism in English poetry of the last decade. . . . In this poetry, as often as it is to be found in other verse of equal quantity, there speaks that alluring voice whose secret is the eternal and pure wizardry of Keats.

Indeed, the image even penetrates his definition of the art; we note that—

The essence of poetry is in the mental and emotional image, and the vitality of the image to weather the usage of familiarity by reading generations is in the personalized spiritual force of the poet.

Which, being interpreted, means that Mr. Braithwaite is climbing up to date, and soon even T. S. Eliot will be taking law and gospel from the Transcript. Good for Boston!


CORRESPONDENCE

A RECANTATION

Dear Editor: I take back most of what I have said to you and others, and thought to myself, about Ezra Pound. And I would like to make an ordeal of it by speaking in a public meeting or at least to a public person, for I want not only to clear myself of the vestments of ingratitude toward one who is a best friend of the muses, but to burn the vestments to ashes. I begin to like Pound very much; what's more to the point, I begin to learn from him—or perhaps, having been learning from him through the months of my distaste, I am at last burning with a fanaticism to shout the

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