ABSTRACT
The party that is assembled in Crome Yellow is representative if not very inclusive. Priscilla recalls the dowagers of Oscar Wilde; Mary belongs to the Freudian moment; Anne is vague. The men are more expressively defined. Mr. Scogan is a Wellsian and discourses with more wit and eloquence than belief on the Rational State; Henry Wimbush lives in the past and seems the least empty of them all; Mr. Barbecue-Smith and the Reverend Mr. Bodiham are two varieties of the species pure fool-the inspirational uplift monger and the monger in prophecy. There remain the two young poets-Denis Stone and Ivor Lombard. To anyone whose chief contacts with contemporary verse are American these two will seem subtly archaic. They are as passionately concerned with the luscious bloom of words as the most
heavily decorative of the Victorians; they have not yet the slightest feeling for the sober or the stripped in poetic diction and scatter verses freighted with perfume and orotund vowels. In the orthodox way, too, they sit waiting for lyrics to be wafted to them out of the common sentimental moods of dawn or dusk and institute no research into such fresh perceptions and observations as may create new forms by virtue of a force within them.
