496 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
and strange manners. Including those outside the pages of ‘‘Poems 
of To-day” and those within, the throng of them is a motley one. 
There are some with old love on their lips and many with new hate on 
their lips. Their music is often a broken sort of music sounding 
strangely. Some of them will not be nicey nice and smoothey smooth 
and sweety sweet as they aver their fathers were. They will denude 
beauty to the flesh and make her march naked. Even hate and horror 
_ they will strip of its conventional dressing. These are the poets whose 
verses are acrid as a road side plum and hard as a wild walnut and as 
virile as all wild things. We confess that we do not like these poets 
very well. Perhaps if we make careful inquiry of ourselves we shall 
find that it is because they perform their office of discoverer to us of 
life too carefully. Some things of course we want said; but there are 
many other things better left unsaid. These wild poets insist too 
much. They speak too plainly. For some of us there is no music 
in plain speaking—at least no low music sweet and hushed which we 
have heretofore been accustomed to associate with poetry. These 
modern young men, so they say, would disabuse us of our notion that 
poetry is only sweet and easy, something for the lover’s lane and the 
cradle. John M. Synge told us that poetry must become brutal 
before it can be true again. But we can shut our ears to all such as 
these and yet find poets who perform musically their office of deliverer 
and extricater of life. The volume ‘‘Poems of To-day” is full of the 
work of these latter. Indeed, it is difficult to discover in the careful 
pages prepared for the English Association any indication that there is 
another sort of poet. The collection would have been more represent- 
ative had it contained work by Gibson, and Ezra Pound and even 
Richard Aldington. There may have been good reason for omitting 
these names but it is not readily apparent. 
When we begin to awaken to the fact of the existence of a modern 
poetry, when we realize that our age is creative and imaginative, that 
our industrialism has its aesthetic side and that even our materialism 
is romantic, the community of poets to which we are suddenly intro- 
duced is indeed a varied one, more varied, as has been suggested 
than the fine volume put out by the English Association would lead 
one to suppose. There are “‘cults of the modern”’ and “‘schools’”’ and 
“tendencies” in abundance. The whole may be superficially divided 
into four main groups. There is the group made up of those poets 
who are wedded to the high standards and traditions of the main line 
of the development of the poetry of the past. There is the group 
composed of the Mystics and the Symbolists. There are the ‘“‘Realists”’ 
and the “Imagists.” 
