Page:A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919.djvu/39

 Rh the cryptic chants of Emerson, the flooding harmonies of Shelley, the dreamy magic of Keats and of Coleridge, the subtle appraisements of Browning, and the marrowy tales of Masefield, can reject neither the bare, hard fact of the Realist nor the "sleep and forgetting" of the Romanticist, provided only that the offering be beautiful in spirit and in truth. Idealistic Realism is as natural as idealistic Romanticism. The difference is one of varying preference and emphasis in the choice and treatment of material. The same poet, it is apparent, may write, with equal success and sincerity, now in one mode, now in another; only he must make sure that fact-symbol and fancy-symbol are in each case prescribed by his imagination, and that the focus of his vision does not suffer distortion. Although Romanticism must continue to offer to the coming poet the most grateful means of escaping sufficiently from the physical world to observe its phenomena with the wholesome perspective of Art, yet he will readily adopt the realistic method where it is indicated by the scale and intention of his work. He may even synthetically employ "romantic realism" (to use Arthur Symons' phrase), as Browning did in Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. The more creative the poet, indeed, the more difficult it must prove to "place" and confine him. He will care less for theory and experimentation—even his own necessary theory and experimentation—than for the patient worship and service of that Truth which "Art remains the one way possible" of discovering,—that true Truth, that essential Truth, which Mrs. Browning so thoughtfully opposes to

As the following pages will attest, English and American literatures have both received genuine accessions during the Great War. With its close, the attempt to review and assemble its poetic voices becomes measurably possible. In the present Anthology the editorial policy has been humanly hospitable rather than academically critical, especially in the case of some of the verses written by soldiers at the Front, which, however slight in certain instances their technical merit may be, are yet of psychological value as sincere