SCARCITY OF GOOD POETS

Evening Star, Issue 22449, 21 September 1936, Page 12

SCARCITY OF GOOD POETS

MR BALDWIN'S HOPE ,“ Mr Baldwin’s statement at tha Congress of the Universities of the British Empire, that the world needs more poets to inspire it with a sense of unity and a sense of freedom will bo simply meaningless to honest Philistines and suspiciously matter-of-fact aesthetes,” states the ‘ Scotsman.’ “Yet poetry does indirectly contribute to the realisation of human unity and the value of freedom,- It is at once the fine flower of the imagination and the chief stimulant of the. imagination. And without the exercise of the imagination one can with difficulty, if at ail, apprehend the truth. It needs an effort of the imagination to realise the essential unity of humanity that transcends race or nation or class, and without spiritual, intellectual, and political freedom full imaginative activity is impossible. “ One of the chief dangers of modern mechanical civilisation is that it tends to stunt the imagination and to substitute an insularity of mind for the insularity formerly caused by difficulties of communication. Poetry, like the arts of music and painting, keeps alive and nourishes the imagination. Unfortunately its power is limited nowadays, for the time is long past when poetry was as eagerly read as the production of popular novelists. “ Whether this is the fault of the poets or the reading public it is diffi--cult to say. At all events there still remains the rich storehouse of the classic poetry of the European nations, most of which is informed with a spirit of humanism and freedom. “It is difficult for those nourished on poetry to accept narrow, exclusive racial theories, • which smack of barbaric tribal pride, or to believe that the individual has-no right to freedom and must be sacrificed, if necessary, to an impersonal entity, “ the State.” “ Unfortunately, there is no way of producing great poets to order,” says the ‘ Yorkshire Post,’ “ but we can ask what are . the ■ circumstances in which they are most likely to emerge. “ If he is a great poet he will be not bo much the voice of his age as the voice of a future age striving to be born; and this is one reason why a great poet is seldom fully appreciated by his contemporaries. He is more deeply aware than they are of the true 1 needs of hie time, and so he is usually both a prophet and a rebel—a rebel against those sluggish prejudices and reactionary loyalties which oppose his prophecies and hinder them from coming true. “In poetry to-day the note of rebellion is strong; most young poets are violent critics of society, impatient equally with traditional beliefs and traditional economics. But the note of prophecy is weak; these young writers may know well enough what they want to destroy, but when they seek to proclaim a positive faith the accent of their verse is halting and confused. “ The state of the world seems to them so menacing that tWy cannot believe confidently in its future; and their own outlook, too, - is often dominated by scientific conceptions dimcult to reconcile with an assured faith in any values not at the mercy of accident and ill-will. “ There are many of these inner problems which poets must wrestle with for themselves, but who is responsible for the dark horizon which is all they can see when they look ahead in time? Governments and peoples together have brought the world to a pass in which the voice of poetry has lost its hopeful ring, and we cannot expect poetry to speak out triumphantly again until we have created a world in which poets will look to the future with nevy nope ” _