who share this belief, are qualities which the present era should avoid. They despise art, which perhaps is fortunate for their self-respect.
The expressionist school is based on two general and contradictory theories. One of them is a sentimental communism, a revolt in favour of a new society. The other is an attempt to express the pure Self, independently of every element imposed on the poet from without; in other words it is a revolt against every form of society. The two theories are to be found existing together in many of the early romantic poets; from one point of view German expressionism is no more than a violent restatement of romanticism. It would be more exact to call it a simplification.
Man. God. Self. Brother. Cosmos. Purity. Buttocks. Revolution. Write these eight words, and perhaps a few other generalities of their nature, on separate cards and shake them in a hat. Extract them one by one and place an exclamation point after each. The recipe for making expressionist poetry is not remarkably complicated. Instead of describing the infinite diversity of the exterior world it confines itself to the soul, and souls are uniform and simple. To express the inmost Self is the narrowest of all formulas. One feels when reading Menschheitsdämmerung, which is the work of two dozen poets, that the whole anthology could have been written by any one of them. They are more viciously similar than the Georgians.
Despising art they can write with ease, and voluminously. Johannes Becher has published ten volumes of verse since 1914, Klemm seven since 1915; Rudolf Leonhardt, who was born in 1889, is the author of "some thirteen volumes of verse and prose and also of a tragedy." Klabund is thirty-one years old. He has published forty volumes, eight of which consist of lyric poems. He says in a brief notice: "What you know is only part of what I composed. Often the wind scattered my pages. In my many wanderings I lost the manuscripts of two dramas." Klabund, with his sententiousness, must be an acquaintance of that other poet who began a letter by saying: "Three years ago I was a dadaist. Now I am a communist." Gravely, as if the world and his own personality had been changed by his decision. Of all features of contemporary German verse this seriousness is the most incredible, except perhaps for its unimaginable volume.
