New at IWP Books: Leonard Bacon (“Autolycus”), 1923, Ulug Beg: An Epic Poem.

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Words can be terrible things. They overthrow
Their maker, trapped in the net of his own fallacies.
They overwhelm the high and crush the low.
They burn the tenement and gut the palaces.
They check the rapid and they speed the slow.
They quicken thought, or smite it with paralysis,
And they have viper fangs and vampire wings.
A rhymester knows. Words can be terrible things.

Sometimes when they have leagued themselves with fact,
They mean necessity and eternal fate.
But when with mere ideas they strike the pact,
They shrivel down to tattered drivel, and prate
Unmeaning, uninforming, inexact.
And this has been so much the case of late,
That hunger and ferocious hatred rip
The very warp of human fellowship.

Therefore I hate the conversation flingers,
The Utopiasters, formulary-swallowers,
The paper supermen and slogan-singers,
The imbecile leaders and the idiot followers,
The clock-reversers, the millennium-bringers,
And all the low-grade morons who are wallowers
In the slough of theoretic inebriety,
And style themselves the saviors of society.

Each party gives me the same sort of pain,
Whether it be the radical or conservative,
Because, in both, the fluids of the brain
Run mainly undertaker’s ripe preservative.
They swop and chop and lie and lie again,
And each has a programme that a mule would swerve at if
It were displayed before him where he browses.
Programme! Dear Christ! A plague on both your houses.
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