the symbolists, the translators have done badly; they chose his less characteristic work and allowed the essence even of this to escape, retaining little of the original except the curious punctuation. They seem to lack sympathy for anything in the least obscure.
Liliencron, Dehmel, Rilke, George: these, such giants as they were, loom as giants among the German lyric poets of the 'nineties. Fatally, they lose most of their stature in a translation which comes at the wrong moment, in the middle of a reaction against all forms of naturalism and symbolism. It is too early or too late to judge them fairly, and certainly it is too late to grow enthusiastic over qualities which they borrowed from the French, or which a few of our own poets afterwards borrowed from the German. In translation and at this moment they can give us nothing new. The same objection should not hold against our own contemporaries, the expressionists. Contemporary German Poetry is a volume in two parts, of which the second is devoted to this younger group.
War rages: a nation loses its young men, starves, goes down to a defeat which is the defeat not of a nation only, but of a civilization and a philosophy; out of the general indifference or debauch the surviving poets lift their voices in a chorus which is louder, more despondent and more hopeful than any imagined chorus, and vowed more fatally to remain discordant, unfulfilled, being the celebration of a fallacy.
The fallacy has often been expressed, but nowhere so clearly as in the introduction to Menschheitsdämmerung (Berlin: Emnst Rowohlt Verlag) which incidentally is the most complete anthology of the expressionist school. Its editor says, explaining his choice:
"The reproach can easily be made that during the past decade many poems have been written which are more complete than these; richer, qualitatively better. But can a poetry which presents the pain and passion, the desires and longings of these years . . . can this poetry take a clean and pure shape? Must it not be as chaotic as the epoch out of whose torn and bleeding soil it rose?"
Verse composed before dinner should express no emotion other than hunger. Our epoch is incomplete; therefore its poets should strive to write incompletely, badly. Composition and style, to writers
