Star In the West TNR.pdf - The Hermetic Library

that a certain system of irregularities in metre became admissible in the
formal court of poetry.
As the Rossetti brotherhood of painters returned to the stiff and simple
elegance as displayed in the “Primavera” of Botticelli, so did Swinburne go
back to the simple beauty of Greek tragedy as depicted in Euripides.*
Crowley does the same, as we see in “The Tale of Archais,” also in “The
Mother’s Tragedy” and “The Fatal Force”; but in these two latter dramas
with this important difference, that instead of applying Greek style to Greek
scenery, he applies it to a totally different end, namely to the expression of
modern surroundings, or to his own intrinsic ideas, as in the last-named play,
which, even more so than in “The Mother’s Tragedy” is, as we shall see later
on, a subtle discount on present-day morality.
*Rather than Sophocles or Aeschylus.
What Beardsley and Whistler did for art, Crowley is now doing for poetry.
Beardsley, especially, succeeded Rossetti just as Crowley is now
superseding Swinburne. A poetic iconoclast to the very backbone, we find
Crowley, especially in his later works, breaking away from every poetic
convention and restraint. At first it makes itself apparent in “The Star and
the Garter,” which was unwound from that same tangled skein from out of
which Browning had ravelled “Fifine,” and then, in the full power of
manhood, in “Why Jesus Wept”; which one day will find its historic niche in
the temple of Poetry, somewhere between the “Hudibras” of Butler and the
“Endymion” of Keats.
Though Crowley, as can be clearly seen throughout his works, is not only a
great admirer but also a disciple of Browning’s, he nevertheless vigorously
attacks that great master’s cacophony and wilful obscurity of meaning, in
that eccentric curiosity of diction “The Sword of Song,” in which our ears
are assailed by the most monstrous diversity of noises, following in a rapid
and dazzling succession till the ideas engendered in our brains are sporting
in an outburst of mental leap-frog. The following are a few:
“Fleas kill us” with “Aeschylus”
“Trough hock lees” “ “Sophocles”
“Globule us” “ “Aristobulus”*
*The Sword of Song, vol. ii, p. 145.