Malcolm Cowley

“ It is ruled into squares by tight-ropes, over which harlequins perform. Looking closer you discover that the window is not a window, but an oil painting. In a brief silence is heard the conversation of the bores. To escape, to horrify them, to do everything in their opposite is Mr Sitwell's principal aim.
The bores are Georgian poets or people who write for magazines and praise the Georgian poets. To contradict them is to be modern. To be modern is to be obscure. ”

“ They despise art, which perhaps is fortunate for their self-respect.
The expressionist school is based on two general and contradictory theories. One of them is a sentimental communism, a revolt in favour of a new society. The other is an attempt to express the pure Self, independently of every element imposed on the poet from without; in other words it is a revolt against every form of society. The two theories are to be found existing together in many of the early romantic poets; from one point of view German expressionism is no more than a violent restatement of romanticism. ”

“ Nobody calls the Georgian poets gigantic. By force of combatting them Mr Sitwell has assumed their likeness, but not in all respects. The Georgians were dull, and yet with an effort they were readable. It takes someone more clever to be profoundly boring. ”

“ On the other hand they omit Jakob van Hoddis, who left behind him not forty volumes, but sixteen brief poems, finished roughly but perfectly, remarkable for movement, for thunder, for a cruel extreme fantasy. ”

“ On the other hand, paradoxically, they have a weakness for the decorative and are capable of prettifying passages where the original is rough and new. They avoid real novelty almost as strictly as they avoid obscurity: an attitude which, though honest, prevents their doing justice to some of the best of modern poetry. ”

“ In face of such description to believe in their reality demands an act of faith, and yet they can be proved by the simplest empirical laws or by their collected volumes, numerous enough to pave the highroad of their flight to Berlin, after the suppression of the revolt in Munich. ”

“ He returns with his own accessories, which include italianate landscapes, a hundred and one pasteboard harlequins, and a stuffed unicorn suitable for a hat rack. Press on the horn and he will stamp his silver hooves. ”