Fresh every day, when dawn makes Highbrow Hill Softened and rosy, blithe and gentle and sweet, The Intellectuals their quivers fill With poisonous darts, to fire from safe retreat.
Biffkin and Briggs and Solomon _and_ Snooks Must be put down, for they lead _awful lives_, And any simple souls who read their books Might kiss their housemaids or desert their wives. Earth must be purged, be cleaned from this disease! (And England does what Highbrow Hill decrees.)
_Post-Georgian Poet in Search of a Master_
I had been well brought up: I liked the best. My prose was modelled on Rebecca West, My “little things” erstwhile reflected tone, My brother poets claimed me as their own. In those blithe days, before the War began— Ah me, I was a safe young Georgian!
Now all is chaos, all confusion. Bolshes have cast E. M. from his high throne: Wild women have rushed in, and savage Yanks Blather of Booth and Heaven: and T. S. E. Uses great words that are as Greek to me. Tell me the Truth, and ah, forgo these pranks— Whom must I imitate? Who’s really It? On whose embroidered footstool should I sit?
There’s Podgrass now—he seems a coming man; Writes unintelligible stuff, half French, half Erse. He told me Philomela had technique But not much feeling; Crashaw knew his trade, But Keats had no idea of writing verse.... The thing to read (he said) had just come out, His latest work, entitled “Bloody Shout.”
And then there’s Father Michael, Secker’s pal, Who’s left dear Sylvia for the Clergy-house. Michael lives sumptuously: silver, old oak, Incunabula, the Yellow Book, Madonnas, Art; Excited wobblings on the brink of Rome; The “Inner Life,” birettas, candles, Mass; Fun with Church Times and Bishops; four hair shirts, And Mr. Percy Dearmer’s Parson’s Book. He talked to me of Antinomianism And stirred the incense, while two candles burned, Then read aloud his works, with eye upturned. (Somehow I felt I’d heard it all before— When I was “boat-boy,” in a pinafore.)
Are Sitwells really safe? Is Iris Tree A certain guide to higher poesy? Can Nichols be relied on, for a lead; Or should I thump it with Sassoon and Read? Or would it not be vastly better fun To write of Nymphs, with Richard Aldington? Or shall I train, and nervously aspire To join with Edward Shanks and J. C. Squire —A modest “chorus” in a well-paid choir?