War Poets and Others

130 and Mrs. Grosskurth in her biography, is that Symonds deserves more serious attention for his poetry and his aesthetic than he has received and that his poetry should be ranked higher than it has been. To some extent restrictions on the publication and use of Symonds' autobiography and the general lack of reliable biographical materials has for long deterred scholars and critics from giving Symonds adequate critical attention. His volumes of poetry have, in the main, been long out of print and he is generally not well represented in anthologies. One of the main issues would appear to be whether or not the tension between Symonds' public and private life hampered the quality of his work or whether readers have perhaps been misreading him and ranking his work lower than it deserves. Mrs. Grosskurth's book, because she had restricted access to the unpublished autobiography, in part suggests that Symonds' work deserves better than it has received. Mrs. Grosskurth's biography has already been much reviewed and much commented upon in quibbling letters to editors. Much of the quibbling has been about the ethics of Mrs. Grosskurth's use of the restricted memoirs, and most commentators have side-stepped the real point: this is the best book on Symonds that we have. This does not mean that Mrs. Grosskurth's study will not be superseded, in time, as her book in part supersedes Horatio F. Brown's biography (1903). When Symonds4 autobiography can legally be published (after 1976) and when Robert Peters and Herbert Schueller have completed their edtion of nearly 2,000 of Symonds' letters, we can expect a more definitive biography and perhaps a really significant, extended critical study of Symonds' aesthetic and of his poetic practice. In the meantime, Professor Peters' article in EFT and Mrs. Grosskurth's book should at least stimulate some preliminary critical interest. Mrs. Grosskurth's book is not without flaws, as others have already noted and as still more reviewers will undoubtedly notes. T. H. Green, for example, did not write SEXUAL INVERSION; Havelock Ellis and Symonds did. However, despite this and some other errors, her biography is valuable and brings us far closer to the facts of Symonds' private life than any previous writings about him have done. Purdue University H. E. Gerber 4. War Poets and Others C. K. Stead. THE NEW POETIC. Lond: Hutchinson, 1964. 15s. John H. Johnston. ENGLISH POETRY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR: A STUDY IN THE EVOLUTION OF LYRIC AND NARRATIVE FORM. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1964. $7.50. Brian Gardner. UP THE LINE TO DEATH: THE WAR POETS: 1914-1918, Lond: Methuen, 1964. 18s. The real value of Mr. Stead's book is that he is able to do justice to a number of poets, particularly the Georgians, who are often slighted. The central critical premise that makes this possible is that public poetry, the poetry of Austin and Wi11iam Watson, is propaganda poetry, politics or whatever and hardly poetry at all; and that pure poetry, the poetry of the Aesthetic Movement, the Georgians, dome of Yeats, and some of T. S. Eliot, is genuine poetry, although it may shut itself off too much from an audience. While he justly views the Georgians sympathetically for rejecting didacticism of one kind or another, he seems sometimes to be led into equating popularity with unpoetic intentions in the poet. Thus, he has nothing to say of Walter de la Mare and he too readily dismisses as irrelevant the material in Eliot's poems which forces allegorical readings on us. In the three chapters 131 (5, 6, and 7) chiefly devoted to Eliot, Mr. Stead apparently wishes to see Eliot as the poet who once more brought together the "split into two opposed impulses," symbolized by Kipling, on the one hand, and by Wilde, on the other. Mr. Stead perhaps labors too hard to bring a neat order into the highly individualistic world of poetry from about 1880 onwards. He thus seems to overlook the Wilde ("BaI Id of Reading Gaol" and some of the essays) who doesn't fit the pure poetry pattern and the Kipling (the later poems and stories) who refuses to be...