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Francis Thompson: A boy and his dog.

HE WAS A GOOD Latinist, not so good at Greek, and with no very wide acquaintance with English literature: at least, this is my impression. I remember his delighted amazement when I read aloud George Herbert’s “Love” one night. “I never heard that before,” he said, the words tumbling over each other in their eagerness to be spoken. “It is beautiful, beautiful. I never thought Herbert wrote anything like that.” Yet this lover of Cowley and Crashaw might well have gone on to George Herbert, whose tender intimacy with the Highest those others share. Theirs was the note that disappeared from English poetry when Puritanism came in.

He was silent when the things under discussion did not greatly interest him. When the subject was literature he was a rich, abundant, intemperate talker, as Stevenson might have said, or perhaps did say. He had a curious vein of commonsense, in his literary judgments as in other matters; and he was not to be distracted from the true scent by any red-herring drawn across his path. There I think he was a fine critic. He judged literature, and especially poetry, with a single eye.

W.B. Yeats, by John Butler Yeats

I have a portrait of W. B. Yeats, which has a curious resemblance to Francis Thompson. It was the time when he, too, went bearded. The portrait, by his father, makes the frontispiece to his earliest published poem, “Mosada,” which was brought out in pamphlet form in Dublin somewhere towards the close of the ‘eighties.

There is, of course, no similarity at all between the work of the two poets. The poetry of Mr. Yeats continues no tradition but its own; whereas the poetry of Francis Thompson continues the great Elizabethan tradition. He is in the line of succession to Crashaw and Cowley. He might quite easily have written:

+++++++++Oh, thou undaunted daughter of desires,

as Crashaw might have written “The Hound of Heaven,” although in the latter great poem there is an anguish of suffering which we find nowhere in the poet whose wings were always heavenward. There is very little doubt that Thompson founded himself upon Crashaw, without deliberate intention, to be sure, for who could ascribe deliberation to this flaming heart of modern poetry. And Crashaw was no altogether a good influence for him, for his exemplar excused all his faults, his conceits, his unpruned luxuriance of words, the headlong rush of imagery which, while it sweeps you off your feet, produces a sense of headiness and disorder. Such a poem as “A Corymbus for Autumn” shows his genius at its faultiest, although it is never more unmistakably genius. It is like a dance of Bacchantes. I remember what Lionel Johnson wrote of him in 1895, helping me towards a critical article which I was unable to do at the time unaided.

THOMPSON.

Magnificently faulty at times, magnificently perfect at others. The ardours of poetry taking you triumphantly by storm: a surging sea of verse, rising and falling and irresistibly advancing. Drunk with his inspiration, sometimes helplessly so: more often he is fired and quickened and remains master of himself. He has done more to harm the English language than the worst American newspapers: corruptio optimi pessima. He has the opulent, prodigal manner of the seventeenth century: a profusion of imagery, sometimes excessive and false: and another profusion and opulence, that of Shelley in his lyrical choruses. Beneath the outward manner a passionate reality of thought: profound, pathetic, full of faith without fear. Words that if you pricked them would bleed, as was said of Meredith. Incapable of prettiness and pettiness: for good of bad always vehement and burning, and—to use a despised word—sublime. Sublime rather than noble. Too fevered to be austere: a note of ardent suffering, not of endurance.

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