ENCOURAGING POETRY.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 828, 28 May 1910, Page 9

ENCOURAGING POETRY.

Quite a numbor of criticisms were levelled at the Poetry Recital Society in connection with their dinner to poets' descendants, .which was held last month. One readied the "Daily News" in the form of a letter from an Ilford gentleman, .who asks what good tho banquet can possibly do. ' "As oho of tho very small minority that reads modern poetry," ho wrote, "might I suggest that it is not the descendants of poets wo want to discover, but rather the poets themselves? They aro hero among us now if wo cared enough about poetry to find them. There arc to-day in England a dozen men writing verso that nobody takes the trouble to read, and these men if they had lived a century ago would be honoured in their descendants on April 5." Mr. Galloway Kyle, secretary of the Poetry Recital Society, said he had received similar letters, tho writers of which apparently did not know they wore voicing the very objects for which tho society W3s working.

"Tlio aim of the l'oetry Recital Society," he said, "is to stimulate interest in English poetry by the ordinary public, to bring home to the mass of the people what a fund of literary treasure lies to hand in their public libraries, and get them to realiso how much tlio perusal of but one book of good poetry is calculated to improve the mind, give a greater appreciation of tho beauty of life, and open up fields of ethical and cultural thought hitherto undreamed of by tlio ordinary man. But to achieve that object you must get at tho popular imagination ill- an original way, and the poets' descendants' dinner is to bo our 'first venture in that direction. You would bo surprised at the widespread interest in poetry the announcements with regard to this dinner have awakened among people who have probably never given a passing thought to poetry before."

Tho demands for the works of great poets in tlio public libraries all over tiio country by people who have never asked for them before has been quite remarkable. Letters have been received from people who have read poetry for tho first time, and to their own surprise have become engrossed in it.

"This dinner," added Mr. Kyle, "is not going to take place and be forgotten. It is but a means to an end. As to his statement that there are a dozen poets who deserve to be honoured like.those who have gone I quite agreo. It is our ambition to get tlio work of the modern poet read and treated with the attention it often doserves, but before you can get tho people to read tho modern poet yon must get them to read the old ones. The poetry reading branches of tho society which we have established in various parts of London, in Bristol, Nottingham, Manchester, Hull, Glasgow, and other provincial centres are with their rapidly increasing membership already doing much towards the attainment of this object.

"Shakespeare has teaching to offer about human life which can 1 most simply bo described as spiritual," says Canon Beeching, of the Temple Church,'in the "Nineteenth Century," in an article on "Shakespeare as a Teacher." "The answer as to whether Shakespeare was a teacher or not," he says, "will turn chiefly upon tho general meaning to bo assigned to the tragedies which are evidently tho poet's most serious compositions. How can we ascertain what Shakespeare meant by the tragic catastrophe? Is it an indictment of tho world,, or an attempt to teach tho lesson of 'tho world ?

"There were two chief types of tragedy in tho popular Elizabethan drama. Some of these, tho most popular plays of ail, dealt with what newspapers still speak of as 'domestic tragedies,' that is to say, they were murder cases, dramatised from tho deed to the conviction. Of quite another sort were the tragedies which described the fall of some notable person from his pride of place—Thomas Jlore or Thomas Cromwell."

Canon Becching says that the ultimate question to bo determined about Shakespeare's tragedies is whether they are optimistic or pessimistic. He hold's that they arc optimistic, although they belong to the second typo. Shakespeare, in his tragic heroes, preserves the ideal typo, from Brutus to Antony. The mam interest of Shakespeare's tragedies is an ethical interest, as it turns upon the character of the hero.