Classic Poem

You now solicit a few enemy thrusts
At the stock poets' thickly bay-leaved busts.
Ranged in that portrait-place, of marble and clay,
August with the as-yet unwithered bay
I seem to note a roman profile bland,
I hear the drone from out the cactus-land:
That must be the poet of the Hollow Men:
The lips seem bursting with a deep Amen.
I espy Ezra, bearded like the Kaiser,
And wistful Earp, like a mediaeval sizar,
The learned beneficiary of provisions,
Gone to the buttery to lubricate his visions.
And there's Roy Campbell, stiff-chested and slim,
Posed for veronicas before wild terrapin.
Moore, the sturgeon of the Hampstead Hill,
Nations of Greeks and Hebrews drives at will
Across a gothic landscape: and James Joyce
For the third time his thirteen poems deploys.
Read broods above old battles. Sacheverell
Odd bloated ghosts compelling to retell
Their famous victories. The greater Yeats,
Turning his back on Ossian, relates
The blasts of more contemporary fates.
And Richard Aldington, equipped to sing
The beauties of an impossible greek spring.
Graves, Osbert, and Sassoon, and many others,
Brothers-in-arms and pen-aborted brothers:
And Auden (most recent bust) with playground whistle:
MacDiarmid beneath a rampant thistle.—
As it's my rôle to provide the personal chord,
These names I hope some slight kick still afford.
We are not very rich in laurelled heads—
We are a little age, where the blind pygmy treads
In hypnotized crusades against all splendour,
Perverts male prowess to the middle gender.
We are a critic-company, what's more.
The Ronin, the Wave-Men, camp in the ruined door.