SKEPTICISM AS ILLUMINATION
Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry. By Conrad Aiken. 12mo. 305 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. New York.
MR. AIKEN seems particularly aware, in the general exuberance of present poetry, of a want of perspective; he would appear to be committed to the very present belief that former traditions of poetry and principles of criticism are outworn. He well recognizes that if the old are outworn, there are then none, since there can be no new—mistakes not having been proved against their makers, or certainties signalized by duration. He is more conscious than his contemporaries in criticism—he is perhaps hyperconscious of the risks that the estimator of new scores and singing in a new age undertakes. This produces in him the attitude one might naturally expect ; he is neither timid nor, in particular statements, indistinct; but he is contained, both in his censures and his enthusiasms. His candour is his other trait of mark. If he distils devastation on Mr. Braithwaite, he at the same time points to himself as another example of fallibility; if he denounces the too partisan commitments of Mr. Untermeyer, he also proclaims himself "as parti-pris in one direction as Mr. Untermeyer is in another." He is a frank skeptic.
M. Aiken sets confines to the lengths he will permit himself and the kinds of judgement he will undertake. His own description of his intention is that he will "single out for a careful casualness of illumination, among so many and such varied aspects, only those facets of the poetic tendencies of the day which are, for one reason or another, suggestive." There is in this declaration a definite stopping down of eloquence; and one eventually finds that there is implied in it also a preconceived dryness, an anterior inclination to be disillusioned, a pro-uncertainty respecting the authority of most of his contemporaries (and himself) which runs in nearly every paper in the book and in some swells into a sort of ground tone. One has no doubt as to the sincerity of this attitude; and in the uproar over repudiations of former accepted conventions, amid the aggrandizement of mere effort in new directions of thought, it is a natural and massively defensible attitude. The reader may be excused some doubt, however, as to its fruitfulness; and Mr. Aiken in carrying it
