HOW terrible to entertain a lunatic!
To keep his earnestness from coming close!

A Madagascar land-crab once
Lifted blue claws at me
And rattled long black eyes
That would have got me
Had I not been gay.

HE'S the remnant of a suit that has been drowned;
That's what decided me," said Clarice.
"And so I married him.
I really wanted a merman;
And this slimy quality in him
Won me.
No one forbade the banns.
Ergo - will you love me?"

I shall be reproached, I fear, for terming the representatives of Imagism and of Spectrism Romanticists. On the one hand, Miss Knish assures us that the doctrines of the Spectric school, of which her collaborator, Mr. Morgan, is the founder, are a fresh interpretation of classic gospels. On the other hand, we have been assured that the reforms which the Imagists are trying to work in our poetry have as their object principles which ,"are the essentials of all great poetry." But to be essentially romantic, a work of art need discover to us no new methods and no new idiom. If through old methods long forgotten and an old idiom it tricks our emotions into responding to a new experience, it has accomplished an essentially romantic result. So that, whether the principles of Imagism and of Spectrism are new or not, we are privileged to call the poetry in which they have found expression romantic art, if for no other reason than that it has, judging by its reception, produced an emotional reaction of romantic quality in its readers.But there is a further reason that we can urge in justification, and that is that these two schools are preoccupied chiefly with promulgating a new technique. Imagism and Spectrism are admittedly programmes of revolt in the field of expression.

The singular fact in the existence of these two schools is that their fundamental objects are directly antithetical. Imagists proclaim their faith in a rendering of an exact picture in an idiom which combines the characteristics of suggestion, vividness, concentration, and externality, in either of two forms, free verse or polyphonic prose. The Spectrists have as their objects the diffraction of emotion, and the conveying of after-images and overtones; moreover, they employ both the traditional poetic forms and free verse. The Spectrists thus seem, in a measure, to be chiefly interested in blurring and encircling with a haze of symbols the image wich the Imagists, in their poems, are anxious to convey with photographic precision.

This is not the place to further elucidate the theories of these two schools of writers. Readers who wish for more light are referred to the preface to "Some Imagist Poets," and to Miss Amy Lowell's article, "A Consideration of Modern Poetry" in The North American Review for January, 1917, and to the preface to "Spectra" by Miss Knish and Mr. Morgan. It is interesting to note, however, that the poetry of both these schools emphasizes, each in its own way, a point touched upon in the contribution of Miss Harriet Munroe, the contrast between man's littleness and the greatness of the universe and the fantastic and ironic self-importance of man in his relation to the universe.

The latest of the movements for a wider technical freedom in poetry is that brought forward by the Spectrists, a school for which Miss Anne Knish and Mr. Emanuel Morgan stand as sponsors. Miss Knish defines its aim as a fresh interpretation of classic gospels. She believes our present poetic renascence to be a derivation from a stale current.

I do not know if I have a right to speak on this subject, for American poets will resent, perhaps, the criticism of one whose native tongue is the Russian, and who has written only one English book. Yet since you ask me, I will answer, with humility, as to poetry only.

Your new movement in poetry seems to me too closely derived from a French movement that is already ancient history to Continental Europe. Young people without genius slip into this stale current and have much fun; but many of their tragic poems are of humorous effect, I think, and when they would be funny I sometimes weep. It is like a piece of cheese left over at breakfast. So little is basically grounded on a theory of Tsthetic that is of new import; and these young people fear the classic aesthetic as they would poison. They need not; though we seek new drinks to become drunken with, the doctrine of Aristoteles remains the staff of life, the bread.

We who are of the Spectric School of poets have tried, contradicting no ancient truth, to give fresh interpretation to classic gospels. If our Tsthetic dogma be sound, the other poets will before long become aware. But these are in American poetry days only of beginning; and I think these people know nothing of European literary history who speak so much of "new, new, new!"

Mr. Emanuel Morgan, collaborator with Miss Knish upon "Spectra," tells us that the essential quality of Spectric poetry is humor, and defines its basis in vision.

Yes, there is a new, or, rather, renewed movement in poetry. Its ideals are life. It is born of the death of the immediate past. Its most important current, for the moment, seems to me to be the current of mirth, and in that current much of our work belongs. We call ourselves a "School." But all we are doing, as I see it, is to combine! and realize qualities which are appearing, now here, now there, among much modern poetry not professedly spectrist, viz.: catholicity of subject and metre, a quick registering of mental reflections by a sort of leapfrog metaphor, an exchange of intuitions; in short, by imagination or humor, a breaking through the mere pretty or ugly surface of things.

In our own convenient terms, spectrism belongs, to its time in that it intends the poem or spectrum, by means of laughter or other illumination, to send an enchanted X-ray through the skin to the lungs and liver and heart of life.