Page:Collected poems of Flecker.djvu/26

 choice of subject or generalize too widely. The Parnassians were not everything to him, nor were those older poets who had resembled them. It was as a corrective that he recommended the study of this particular group to his English contemporaries. It is arguable that most of his major contemporaries–one might instance Mr. Bridges and Mr. Yeats–are anything but chaotic, extravagant, careless, or didactic. References to "the latest writer of manly tales in verse" and "formlessness" might certainly be followed up; but formlessness and moralizing are not so universal amongst modern English writers as Flecker, making out his case, implied. It does not matter; there is not even any necessity to discuss the French Parnassians. Flecker had an affinity with them. He disliked the pedestrian and the wild; he did not care either to pile up dramatic horrors or to burrow in the recesses of his own psychological or physiological structure. He liked the image, vivid, definite in its outline: he aimed everywhere at clarity and compactness. His most fantastic visions are solid and highly coloured and have hard edges. His imagination rioted in images, but he kept it severely under restraint, lest the tropical creepers should stifle the trees. Only occasionally, in his later poems, a reader may find the language a little and the images heaped so profusely as to produce an effect of obscurity and, sometimes, of euphuism. But these poems, it must be remembered, are precisely those which the poet himself did not finally revise. Some of them he never even finished: "The Burial in England," as it appears, is the best that can be done with a confusing collection of manuscript xxii