Page:A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919.djvu/38

 38 of existence. And sometimes he will curse the very thought of war as he sees it oversweep all humanity's painful safeguards, attacking the Ariel of man's hopes to make room for his enemy Caliban, brazenly emerging like an international Mr. Hyde from a too trustful Dr. Jekyll, and "reeling back into the beast."

Into the stuff of his thought and utterance, whether he be on active service or not, the poet-interpreter of war weaves these various intentions, and co-operates with his fellows in building up a little higher and better, from time to time, that edifice of truth for whose completion can be spared no human experience, no human hope.

Thus he will be striking balances in mood and verdict, while the seemingly insoluable realities behind these conflicting thoughts continue to impinge upon one another. It is natural enough, therefore, that the long debate between Romanticism and Realism in art should have affected war poetry. The partisans of the work of Robert Nichols, Frederic Manning, and the later Siegfried Sassoon, and of Gilbert Frankau's grimly impatient protest, The Other Side, will find little in common with those who turn habitually to Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, Francis Ledwidge, or Laurence Binyon. But poetry is a more flexible thing than are the minds of either its creators or its critics, who so often allow their temperamental differences to harden into creeds and dicta. Between Realist and Romanticist there is no radical, permanent cleavage. Both are aware that the world is made up of multiple symbols (for even the realist's fact is the symbol of an idea); both select for artistic patterning such symbols as attract their respective imagination. Realistic closeness to fact does not, if it be wise, aim at mere objective copyism, but rather at the precipitation of the bald fact's subjective values, while the Romantic singling out of the exceptional as against the commonplace is due merely to the belief that the exceptional (precisely because it is exceptional) is of more symbolic worth than the commonplace. The art that is broad enough to include the whispered assonances of Poe,