Footnotes

[45] Reprinted by permission of The Macmillan Company, Publishers.

[46] “If you disregard critical trivialities and didactic accessories, the entire æsthetic system of Croce amounts to a hunt for pseudonyms of the word ‘art,’ and may indeed be stated briefly and accurately in this formula: art = intuition = expression = feeling = imagination = fancy = lyricism = beauty. And you must be careful not to take these words with the shadings and distinctions which they have in ordinary or scientific language. Not a bit of it. Every word is merely a different series of syllables signifying absolutely and completely the same thing.”—G. Papini, Four and Twenty Minds, quoted by I. A. Richards, The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), p. 255, note 4.

Mr. Richards adds: “It is interesting to notice that Croce’s appeal has been exclusively to those unfamiliar with the subject, to the man of letters and the dilettante. He has been ignored by serious students of the mind.... [Papini] has here rendered a notable service to those who have been depressed by the vogue of ‘Expressionism.’”

Cf. also the following from Gilbert Murray’s The Classical Tradition in Poetry (1927), p. 243: “Everything that a man does is self-expression. The way a man laces his boots, the way he writes, the way he says, ‘Good-morning,’ is probably different from the way followed by any other man, and is thus expressive of his personality. But it need not be good art for that reason. Imagine a pompous and egotistic man in a state of personal irritation, having to make an after-dinner speech. It would probably express him only too well, but it might not be a good speech.”

[47] A Survey of Modernist Poetry, by Laura Riding and Robert Graves, 1927, p. 125.

[48] From Harmonium, by Wallace Stevens, 1923. Reprinted by and with permission of and special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., authorised publishers.

[49] For the sake of “communicative efficacy,” as the editors remind me, I should explain that transition is “an international quarterly for creative experiment,” edited in Paris by a group of young Americans and others.

[50] From Trivial Breath, by Elinor Wylie, 1928. Reprinted by and with permission of and special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., authorised publishers.

[51] From Streets in the Moon, by Archibald MacLeish, 1926. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, Publishers.

[52] From Tulips and Chimneys. Reprinted by permission of Alfred & Charles Boni, Inc., Publishers.

[53] For a more elaborate analysis of such effects in Mr. Cummings’s poetry, see Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, Chapter I.

[54] E. E. Cummings’s poem, previously referred to, is printed by him as follows (Tulips and Chimneys, New York, 1924, p. 78):

[55] Such, for instance, as the poetry of John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson in the South, and of Wilbert Snow and Robert P. Tristram Coffin in New England.

[56] From the poem “Earth,” in Dust and Light, 1919, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

[57] Mr. Robinson, of course, had been publishing poetry for nearly twenty years before the new movement got under way, but his work was regarded as belonging to it in temper and outlook.

[58] Paul Elmer More, “Definitions of Dualism,” Section LXXIII, in The Drift of Romanticism (1913), p. 291. The next section is almost prophetic of what has happened in American poetry of the last few years:

“In some men, especially in an age of spiritual apathy, the sense of disillusion may spring up without the corresponding assurance of faith. To such men nothing is real; they walk in a place of shadows, and feel that life is continually slipping away from them into a bottomless abyss. All their labour is to re-create for themselves the illusion which has been shattered, or, by ceaseless occupation, to escape the dull horror of the void.”

[59] I. A. Richards, Science and Poetry, 1926, p. 60.

[60] From Last Poems, by A. E. Housman, 1922, published by Henry Holt and Company.

[61] I. A. Richards, Science and Poetry, Chapter VII.

[62] Richard Holt Hutton, Essays on Some of the Modern Guides to English Thought in Matters of Faith, 1891 (Second Ed., revised), p. 146.