ssence of poetry. The Imagist fights for "free verse" as for the
principle of liberty. But why does he fight? If "free verse" is musical,
if it expresses a mood or an emotion or a thought in terms that appeal
to the mind or the heart or the imagination, why should it be necessary
to fight for it? It may suit certain verse makers to make men of straw
in order "to fight" for them; but all the world loves a poet, if the
poet once touches its heart. "The Toys" of Coventry Patmore is a good
example of what "free verse" ought to be. But it is not free because it
is lawless; its freedom is the freedom of all true art which does not
ignore, which obediently accepts, certain laws that govern the
expression of the beautiful. Mr. Richard Aldington's "Daisy" is
certainly a less appealing poem than that one in which Swinburne sings
of the lady who forgot his kisses, and he forgot her name!

Jos['e] de Her['e]dia, in "Les Troph['e]es," is both an Imagist and a
Symbolist. He has the inspiration and the science of the Sibyl without
her contortions. It is unfortunate that the truculent attitude of the
professional makers of "free verse" should have arrayed a small and
angry group against them; and this group will have none of Robert Frost,
who is certainly a poet and a poet of great courage and originality.
There are others, however, who may not be imitators of Robert Frost, but
who seem as if they were. Tennyson's "Owl," which is looked on to-day as
an example of Victorian idiocy, is really better than Mr. T. S. Eliot's
"Cousin Nancy":

Miss Nancy Ellicott
Strode across the hills and broke them,
Rode across the hills and broke them--
The barren New England hills--
Riding to hounds
Over the cow-pasture.

Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,
But they knew that it was modern.

Upon the glazen shelves kept watch
Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,
The army of unalterable law.

The Imagist does not believe in ornament, and this glimpse of character
might be uttered in one sentence. Perhaps, however, a tendency to
ornamentation might have made the poem at least decorative. After all,
when one has emerged from the rarefied atmosphere of the Imagist, the
Symbolist, and the _vers librist_, one swims into the splendours of
Francis Thompson as one might take refuge from a wooden farmhouse
unprotect