by Mr. Gibson
and Mr. Masefield to bring poetry into touch with modern life is
without significance. It represented reaction against the
querulousness, the vagueness, the mere prettiness which have so often
resulted in nauseous verse. It had its source in the same impulse
which led J.M. Synge to create his finest imaginative effects by means
of a severely realistic method. And still earlier Mr. Doughty, who
holds a solitary position in modern poetry, had expressed himself in
the only way that was natural to him, through an archaic language, the
language in which he thought, which lent itself to the hard, vivid,
and superbly brutal images belonging to his primitive, barbarian, and
as it were primeval theme. Mr. Doughty belongs neither to our own nor
to any other age, but he has not been without influence upon men of
our time. To appreciate _The Dawn in Britain_ or _Adam Cast Forth_ is
to long for the hardness and masculinity which have been rare in
English poetry for a hundred years; to feel that what poetry needs is
more grit and more brain; and to plead for these is to plead for more
poetry, for a stronger imagination.

There is one among the younger poets who has given promise of
satisfying these needs, though it remains to be seen whether he may
not perhaps be over-weighted on the side of intellect. But in _Mary
and the Bramble_ and _The Sale of St. Thomas_ he has shown us how the
poetic imagination ripens into food for adults when virility and
intellect have gone to the making of it. There is no mere prettiness
in Mr. Abercrombie's writing. The wearisome refrain of sex,
disappointed or desirous, neither has part in the argument nor
supplies him with images or asides. Innumerable things and events upon
the earth appeal to him because of that full-bodied experience which
they carry to the wakeful and the zestful, experience which is
manifold, which fills all the chinks of memory, which may recall pain,
which may be charged with pathos, but is never morbid; beautifully he
masses vigorous impressions of sense under a large imaginative idea.
Here there is no pale, languishing phantom of beauty, but that which
men delight in without the verbal distractions of the aesthete.

In _Mary and the Bramble_ he has taken an intellectual idea and
treated it allegorically, and essentially poetically. The Virgin Mary
in his story symbolises the "upward meaning mind," fastened in
"substance," yet pure and "seemly to the Lord;" and t