ABSTRACT
Modern poetry? Yes, he saw most of what appeared in the literary reviews and magazines, and, if he liked what he read, would procure the collected work of a poet. Since the loss of the great Victorians – Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne – poetry had been passing through a dull phase. A revival was overdue, and there were signs of it in the writings of some of the younger men – Walter de la Mare, Laurence Binyon, Wilfrid Gibson, Edward Thomas.1 He thought some of John Masefield’s2 sea ballads were delightful. There was the tang of the brine in them and the romance of the Spanish Main behind them.
