no tears can win us;
What of the faith and fire within us,
Men who march away?"

Already, before the close of the autumn of 1914, four or five
anthologies of war-poems were in the press, and the desire of the
general public to be fed with patriotic and emotional verse was
manifested in unmistakable ways. We had been accustomed for some time
past to the issue of a multitude of little pamphlets of verse, often
very carefully written, and these the critics had treated with an
indulgence which would have whitened the hair of the stern reviewers of
forty years ago. The youthful poets, almost a trade-union in themselves,
protected one another by their sedulous generosity. It was very unusual
to see anything criticised, much less "slated"; the balms of praise were
poured over every rising head, and immortalities were predicted by the
dozen. Yet, as a rule, the sale of these little poetic pamphlets had
been small, and they had been read only by those who had a definite
object in doing so.

The immediate success of the anthologies, however, proved that the war
had aroused in a new public an ear for contemporary verse, an attention
anxious to be stirred or soothed by the assiduous company of poets who
had been ripening their talents in a little clan. These had now an
eager world ready to listen to them. The result was surprising; we may
even, without exaggeration, call it unparalleled. There had never
before, in the world's history, been an epoch which had tolerated and
even welcomed such a flood of verse as was poured forth over Great
Britain during the first three years of the war. Those years saw the
publication, as I am credibly informed, of more than five hundred
volumes of new and original poetry. It would be the silliest
complaisance to pretend that all of this, or much of it, or any but a
very little of it, has been of permanent value. Much of it was windy and
superficial, striving in wild vague terms to express great agitations
which were obscurely felt by the poet. There was too much of the bathos
of rhetoric, especially at first; too much addressing the German as
"thou fell, bloody brute," and the like, which broke no bones and took
no trenches.

When once it was understood that, as a cancelled line in Tennyson's
_Maud_ has it,

"The long, long canker of peace was over and done,"

the sentiments of indignation and horror made themselves felt with
considerable vivacity. In this direction, however