"So here we might dispense with her Gina being a female But she was more than that Being an incipience a correlative an instigation to the reaction of man From the palpable to the transcendent Mollescent irritant of his fantasy
Gina had her use Being useful contentedly conscious She flowered in Empyrean From which no well-mated woman ever returns
Sundays a warm light in the parlor From the gritty road on the white wall anybody could see it Shimmered a composite effigy Madonna crinolined a man hidden beneath her hoop.
Patience said Gina is an attribute And she learned at any hour to offer The dish appropriately delectable
What had Miovanni made of his ego In his library What had Gina wondered among the pots and pans One never asked the other."
These lines are not written as Henry Davray said recently in the "Mercure de France," that the last "Georgian Anthology" poems are written, _i.e._, in search for "sentiments pour les accommoder à leur vocabulaire." Miss Loy's are distinctly the opposite, they are words set down to convey a definite meaning, and words accommodated to that meaning, even if they do not copy the mannerisms of the five or six by no means impeccable nineteenth century poets whom the British Poetry Society has decided to imitate.
All this is very pleasing, or very displeasing, according to the taste of the reader; according to his freedom from, or his bondage to, custom.
Distinct and as different as possible from the orderly statements of Eliot, and from the slightly acid whimsicalities of these ladies, are the poems of Carlos Williams. If the sinuosities and mental quirks of Misses Moore and Loy are difficult to follow I do not know what is to be said for, some of Mr. Williams' ramifications and abruptnesses. I do not pretend to follow all of his volts, jerks, sulks, balks, outblurts and jump-overs; but for all his roughness there remains with me the conviction that there is nothing meaningless in his book, "Al que quiere," not a line. There is whimsicality as we found it in his earlier poems. "The Tempers" (published by Elkin Mathews), in the verse to "The Coroner's Children," for example. There is distinctness and color, as was shown in his "Postlude," in "Des Imagistes"; but there is beyond these qualities the absolute conviction of a man with his feet on the soil, on a soil personally and peculiarly his own. He is rooted. He is at times almost inarticulate, but he is never dry, never without sap in abundance. His course may be well indicated by the change of the last few years; we found him six years ago in "The Postlude," full of a thick and opaque color, full of emotional richness, with a maximum of subjective reality: