Monday, August 30, 2021
Our New Poets
Archibald Y. Campbell, Horace: A New Interpretation (LondonL Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1924), p. 22:
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Great as is the diversity of our new poets, they hold perhaps at least one article of faith in common, and that is, that he who is dignified is damned. All strive after effect, and show it; all use this or that of many desperate devices; to be obscure, discordant, slangy, to use words in anything but their natural meaning, to be strident, maundering, affected, abject, prosy, merely feeble-minded or stark raving mad—these things, in their search after new spheres of conquest, the majority of them count no shame; but majesty they will not attempt; they one and all despise it. Modern reviewers for the most part do not slate; but when they are by way of doing so, the one word "pompous" provides an absolutely sure extinguisher.
