IS POETRY READ?

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1126, 13 May 1911, Page 9

IS POETRY READ?

Someone has been citing as a proof that tho British public does.read and appreciate good poetry tho fact that tno collected poems of -Mr. Noyes have within six months gone into a second edition. A far more striking circumstance (comments a shrewd English critic) tiiat seems to point in tho same direction is the series of editions through which tho "Selected Poems" of Francis Thompson have passed. Mr. Noycs's is just the sort of poetry one would expect to bo popular. It breaks no new ground. It-has reminiscences of 'other poets, and even when tho singing voice is not in absolute unison witli the voice of some one of his immediate precursors it is at least never out of concord with it. .. With .Thompson tho case is different. He has, indeed, affinities with Fatmore, but ho is'.essentially aii innovator. In him the Parnassianism of tho later Victorian ago is cast to tho winds, and there aro three characteristics of- his verso which ono would havo expected to exclude him from his heritage of popularity for at least a generation to come. Ono of them is tho excessive waywardness of his fancy and his style. Ho is extravagant, fantastic, and over-rich, while in the matter of language ho allows himself all sorts .of cjuaintness and neologisms. Further, his rhythms —and the British ear is very slow to accept new rhythms—aro calculated to offend those accustomed to tho Virgilian smoothness of measure, of tho school of Tennyson. Mr. Watson major may not havo had Thompson in his mind when he wrote— Prosody gasps in your tortured numbers, Your metres that writhe, your rhythms that sprawl. but it reads like a description from a hostile point of view. Finally, there arc many instances of a usage 'much in vogue in these days where tho wordpicture has bi'cn introduced into poetry for the sake of its inherent beauty, or, wedded to a thought by an "as"* or a "like," has licon part of a simile, or, fused with tho thought, has been a metaphor.. In Thompson it is used often as a means of Hashing upon the mind of a reader a subtle thought or fooling beyond itself. Such innovations do not conduce to popularity, yet Thompson's verse has found its way' to

the hearts of'lovers of poetry as Mr. Xoyes's never will. It is popular with young men, and critics assign to somo of the best of liis poems not less than classic rank.

Neither the. case of Mr. Noycs nor that of Jlr. Thompson, however, establishes the existence, of a widespread lovo of poetry in the public. If ever such a love existed it has ceased to exist. What one does find is a curious faith in poetry, a conviction, that poetry is a very fine thing and really the perdurable thing in literature. This conviction, coupled with an odd ignorance which makes it amusing, comes out in an address delivered recently by a Mr. Wallace Jiice to the Library Association of America. Mr. Rice is none of your pessimists for whom "thero are no poets." On tho contrary, "Wo have in America at the present time," he said, "no fewer than seventy men and women who are writing admirable poetry, which will bear comparison with the best poetry of the English at any. time." Only seventy, you notice, and in America alone. Their work, too, "in all that constitutes lyric greatness in verse" will "compare favourably" with tho work of Shelley, Keats, Blake, Herrick, and the rest of them. It is exciting news, "It is not. read by anybody"—not even by Mr. Rice, one. may guess—but it will last. "That poetry is going to he, out of all this turmoil and sea of literature that \ve are going through at tho present time, tho only permanent contribution, broadly speaking, to English literature." But, alas! ho falls into a sad bathos when he explains how it is to survive. It is to survive for tho very reason that nobody reads it. "The very fact that it keeps unread allows it to retain its position on tho shelves when the novel passes from hand to hand, wears out, and is not replaced."