Books
ROMANTIC POETS, OLD AND NEW
THE
POETS
at hand·*-from Blake in Stephen Spender's anthology to
Dunstan Thompson-have three themes in common: Love, Death,
and the Dream. Taken together, these themes usually produce a romantic
poem, and these are Romantic poets.
Mr. Spender still speaks of ruins and visions. For the poet the real
world is always in ruin, ruining away from meaning and personality.
The poet's calling is to create a Dream or Vision-another order of
reality, immortal, ,pure, desperately -dedicated to Ideals, having only an
imperfect relation to the real world, yet finally somehow legislating
upon it. As anthologist, Spender has chosen those poems of Blake,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Darley, Beddoes, Tenny–
son, and Emily Bronte which
creat~
the Romantic Dream. His general
intention is to give us what according to his own definition are the mOISt
romantic poems of the Romantics. It is strictly a personal and polemical
anthology, and a very engaging one. But I wish that Spender had
stressed not the super- or extranaturalism and the antihistoricism of the
Romantic poets, as he has dome
in
his preface, but their naturalism and
their historicism-and not the "purity" of their poetry but its psycho–
logical profundity. A revival of Romantic poetry at this time seems to
m~
a very good thing, if only because it would reassert the value of _per–
sonality in our dehumanized culture, the Promethean task which no
poetry since the Romantic movement has been able to accomplish.
(There is one horrifying thing about T. S. Eliot's brilliant literary credo:
if we consider a
finish~d
poem as something absolutely apart from its
creator, we ' have lost a major criteriorn for distinguishing it from the
other products of the machine society.) But remembering the long dis–
appointment and collapse of taste which followed the Romantics, we
ought to
~
sure on what grounds we are proceeding.
*
A
CHOICE OF ENGLISH RoMANTIC PoETRY.
Ed. by Stephen Spender. Dial.
$4.00.
PoEMS OF DEDICATION.
By Stephe-n Spen.der. Random House.
$2.00.
THE NIGHT LovEs
Us.
By Louis Adeane. The Delphic Press.
3s.
GREEN SoNG AND OTHER PoEMS.
By Edith Sitwell. View Editions. Vanguard.
$3.
LoVE PoEMS.
By George Barker. Dial.
$2.00.
PoEMS BY SAMUEL GREENBERG.
Ed. by Holden and McManis. Holt.
$3.00
LAMENT FOR THE SLEEPWALKER.
By Dunstan Thompson. Dodd, Mead.
$2.50.
