community must not be unduly pressed.  Their most obvious similarity is the prominence into which they throw the novel interest in their verse.  They are, or at moments they seem to be, primarily tellers of stories.  We will not dogmatise and say that the attempt is illegitimate; we prefer to insist that to tell a story in poetry and keep it poetry is a herculean task.  It would indeed be doubly rash to dogmatise, for our three poets desire to tell very different stories, and we are by no means sure that the emotional subtleties which Mr Aiken in particular aims at capturing are capable of being exactly expressed in prose.

Since Mr Aiken is the corpus vile before us we will henceforward confine ourselves to him, though we premise that in spite of his very sufficient originality he is characteristic of what is most worth attention in modern American poetry.  Proceeding then, we find another point of contact between him and Mr Kipling, more important perhaps than the former, and certainly more dangerous.  Both find it apparently impossible to stem the uprush of rhetoric.  Perhaps they do not try to; but we will be charitable—­after all, there is enough good in either of them to justify charity—­and assume that the willingness of the spirit gives way to the weakness of the flesh.  Of course we all know about Mr Kipling’s rhetoric; it is a kind of emanation of the spatial immensities with which he deals—­Empires, the Seven Seas, from Dublin to Diarbekir.  Mr Aiken has taken quite another province for his own; he is an introspective psychologist.  But like Mr Kipling he prefers big business.  His inward eye roves over immensities at least as vast as Mr Kipling’s outward.  In ‘The Charnel Rose and Other Poems’ this appetite for the illimitable inane of introspection seems to have gained upon him.  There is much writing of this kind:—­

  ’Dusk, withdrawing to a single lamplight
  At the end of an infinite street—­
  He saw his ghost walk down that street for ever,
  And heard the eternal rhythm of his feet. 
  And if he should reach at last that final gutter,
  To-day, or to-morrow,
  Or, maybe, after the death of himself and time;
  And stand at the ultimate curbstone by the stars,
  Above dead matches, and smears of paper, and slime;
  Would the secret of his desire
  Blossom out of the dark with a burst of fire? 
  Or would he hear the eternal arc-lamps sputter,
  Only that; and see old shadows crawl;
  And find the stars were street lamps after all?

  Music, quivering to a point of silence,
  Drew his heart down over the edge of the world....’

It is dangerous for a poet to conjure up infinities unless he has made adequate preparation for keeping them in control when they appear.  We are afraid that Mr Aiken is almost a slave of the spirits he has evoked.  Dostoevsky’s devil wore a shabby frock-coat, and was probably managing-clerk to a solicitor at twenty-five shillings a week.  Mr Aiken’s incubus is, unfortunately, devoid of definition; he is protean and unsatisfactory.