POETRY: A Magazine of Verse
While an authoritative old wiseacre
Stood over us and from a desk fed us with flies.
Dead flies—such as litter the library south-window,
That buzzed at the panes until they fell stiff-baked on the sill.
•••••
A dry biped he was, nurtured likewise
On skins and skeletons, stale from top to toe
With all manner of rubbish and all manner of lies.
The island is to be congratulated on having at last obtained a laureate who declines to treat himself as an institution. E. P.
Let us completely forget for a moment the fact that Mr. Fletcher is one of the Imagists—rhere has been lately so much idle controversy on the subject—and consider him simply as a poet.
His most marked personal characteristic is an extreme sensitiveness to impressions. He gives us the sense of nature—not a description; the thrill of trees in the wind, of boats under sail, or steamers plunging through heavy seas, "like black, plunging dolphins with red bellies"; of shifting wrinkled sand-dunes; or "the mad ballet of the summer sky." His is not the art of the symbolist, although it is largely impressionistic. In intention it is as far removed from the school of descriptive landscape poets as a Japanese painting is from a Hudson River primitive. His method is closely allied to music, not only in verse form, but in sub-
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