POETRY—THE WHAT AND WHY

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1372, 24 February 1912, Page 3

POETRY—THE WHAT AND WHY

• Mr. Mackail is not so strong a thinker in poetics as his predecessor in the Chair f Poetry at Oxforil, Mr.Bradloy. His discussions aro not conducted on the same, i^fplane of thought, and the, suggestions ivSiclil he throws out i do not involve the nme curious and subtle thinking. Some ,£ the problems which he handles, bowiver, are of much practical interest, and ino is attracted in particu ar to his treatment of the question why » many Ao are fond of poetry while the.T are •oun" get out of touch with it as the ears go on. That the fact is as sated -here can be no doubt. That a person in the full and splendid first efflorescence f his nature should be charmed by the deal world set forth in poetry is natural, and, os a matter of fact, the majority of those who patronise the- "poetry and tho drama" section in the public,libraries we found to be under twenty-fi«. On the other hand, that most of those who read poetry" when they are young cease to read poetry when they cease to be young is equally true, and one may hare been amused to hear some old gentleman in whom there was not enough poetry left to rhyme, if necessary, his neckrerso, confess over the walnuts and wine that in his youth poetry was so much to him that he seriously debated, with hapiBelf whether he should not during his life devote to the cultivation of the Muse of Poetry the lime he left over from tho study of the Pandects. The .case being so what aro the reasons that it is soi 1 There are, no doubt, many reasons, and perhaps the persistent and increasing pressure of outward realities as Me goes on is tho chief. One, however, of thoso urged by Mr. Mackail seems less convincing than it is ingenious. His contention is that in poetry there are, speaking broadlv two ingredionts—imagination, which is of' its essence, and other ingredients which are accidental, and from which the essential element of imagination ib, ideally at least separable. Titus in Shelley, say, imagination co-exists with an immense body of rich and beautiful imagery, in Wordsworth with a mass of nhilosophic thought, and , in Keats Sh an innumerable.host of instances of. sensuous beauty. If,. Mr. Mackail ortues, a reader is attracted to poetry by "any one of its accidental elements chiefly, he will soon cease to read it, whereas if ho is attracted by the element common to the work of poets ho will be free of the city, and will remain a reader all M 3 life Now on both the sidos from .which this position may bo approached it will be found disputable. It might bo argued, for eximplo, that there is no accidental element in any one poet which is not to be found in dozens of other noets throughout tho range of English literature so that there is no lack of matter on which a reader attracted by it may pasture, and that there is no intrinsic reason why a reader should tire of an accidental element is proved by the existence of mature lovers of Wordsworth who read the "Excursion" as devoutly as they might their Biblo and would not eliminate its most arid parngrapli. Upon that, however, we do not insist. On the other hand,' whether'a reader'who has boon attracted by tho essential element of poetry will! continuo to read it depends upon the permanence cr impermanence of tho imaginative gift. Mr. Mackail contends that, it is permanent, and quotes a remark of Boss'etti's that, whilo "somethiug that men call their imagination may decline us the animal spirits lessen, tho genuine thine* • from with *««." The • assertion, 1 howoTM, u lnooaoluslTt, The epnroguaix

imagination of the render and tho creative imagination of tho poet arc fithor cognalo faculties or different degrees of manifestation of tho same faculty. In either case they must bo subject to tho same laws, niul nothing could bo more obvious than that, whilo pootio genius is often given to a poet for a life-time, so that ho turns out for deendo after decado work bearing the mark of tho highest poetry, it is not necessarily so. It is an exiguous gift; it is given to lew men, and oven to them often only for a season, as Coleridge's "six years from sixty saved" sho.vs. It may bo believed, therefore, that in a minority at least of thoso waders whoso attention nowadays is strictly confined to prose, there is, as there was in Saints-Beuvc, a poet who "died young."—Manchester "Guardian."