KEATS AND HEARST
Poems: Second Series. By J. C. Squire. 8vo. 79 pages. George H. Doran Company. $2.
Music: Lyrical and Narrative Poems. By John Freeman. 12mo. 190 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.
LET us consider these volumes as if we knew nothing of the authors. Freeman won the Hawthornden Prize in 1920. Squire has his hands in lord knows how many magazines, and I believe his publishers call him the most influential literary man in England. To any one who followed the school of Ste Beuve these facts would be immensely important; so also would their pedigrees, their thumbprints, and the exact figure of their income taxes. Here such data is unimportant; let us consider only their books.
Both men belong, I believe, to the same group of poets, and Freeman is published in a magazine that Squire edits. These items are irrelevant also, except insomuch as they bear on the fact that both volumes have the same defects and very much the same qualities. Their qualities and defects apply equally to a score of other volumes, all written by friends of Squire or Freeman. When we were in high school our teachers would read us passages from the poets and ask us to identify the authors. The game would have been difficult indeed if we had played it with the Georgians; too many of their verses belong to no individual but to a school, or even to the whole romantic movement.
It is an old sport to badger the Georgian poets, but the emphasis is laid usually and illogically on their lack of substance. They treat the old themes; so does almost everybody else, and to berate them for writing about Eyes, Moons, Birds, Trees, Rivers, and Muses Divine is a little unjust. Even it is not true that they never approach fresher subjects. Squire in particular has the editor's eye for copy, and boldly describes Airships over Suburb and Rugger Matches (than which nothing could be more advanced). More justly one can criticize the Georgians on the ground of their style.
