The poem which begins with these lines is, we believe, the finest in these two books, both in intention and achievement. Yet no one can mistake its source. It comes, almost bodily, from the revised Induction to 'Hyperion.' The sombre imagination, the sombre rhythm is that of the dying Keats; the creative impulse is that of Keats.
'None can usurp this height, return'd that shade, But those to whom the miseries of the world Are misery, and will not let them rest.'
That is true, word by word, and line by line, of Wilfred Owen's 'Strange Meeting.' It touches great poetry by more than the fringe; even in its technique there is the hand of the master to be. Those monosyllabic assonances are the discovery of genius. We are persuaded that this poem by a boy like his great forerunner, who had the certainty of death in his heart, is the most magnificent expression of the emotional significance of the war that has yet been achieved by English poetry. By including it in his book, the editor of _Wheels_ has done a great service to English letters.
Extravagant words, it may be thought. We appeal to the documents. Read _Georgian Poetry_ and read 'Strange Meeting.' Compare Wilfred Owen's poem with the very finest things in the Georgian book--Mr Davies's 'Lovely Dames,' or Mr de la Mare's 'The Tryst,' or 'Fare Well,' or the twenty opening lines of Mr Abercrombie's disappointing poem. You will not find those beautiful poems less beautiful than they are; but you will find in 'Strange Meeting' an awe, an immensity, an adequacy to that which has been most profound in the experience of a generation. You will, finally, have the standard that has been lost, and the losing of which makes the confusion of a book like _Georgian Poetry_ possible, restored to you. You will remember three forgotten things--that poetry is rooted in emotion, and that it grows by the mastery of emotion, and that its significance finally depends upon the quality and comprehensiveness of the emotion. You will recognise that the tricks of the trade have never been and never will be discovered by which ability can conjure emptiness into meaning.
It seems hardly worth while to return to _Wheels_. Once the argument has been pitched on the plane of 'Strange Meeting,' the rest of the contents of the book become irrelevant. But for the sake of symmetry we will characterise the corporate flavour of the opposition as false sophistication. There are the same contemporary reminiscences. Compare Mr Osbert Sitwell's _English Gothic_ with Mr T.S. Eliot's _Sweeney_; and you will detect a simple mind persuading itself that it has to deal with the emotions of a complex one. The spectacle is almost as amusing as that of the similar process in the Georgian book. Nevertheless, in general, the affected sophistication here is, as we have said, merely irritating; while the affected simplicity of the coalition is positively noxious. Miss Edith Sitwell's deliberate painted toys are a great deal better than painted canvas trees and fields, masquerading as real ones. In the poems of Miss Iris Tree a perplexed emotion manages to make its way through a chaotic technique. She represents the solid impulse which lies behind the opposition in general. This impulse she describes, though she is very, very far from making poetry of it, in these not uninteresting verses:--