FUTURISM IN POETRY.

Shannon News, 27 September 1921, Page 4

FUTURISM IN POETRY.

In a recent W.E.A. address Dr. Elizabeth Bryson took for her subject eluding several visitors, at Wednesday’s meeting of the W.E.A. Literature class. Rev. W. Tye presided. Dr. Elizabeth Bryson’s subject was “Futurism and Form in Poetry.” Poetry, she said, was its expression of, an intuition. It was the highest thought fused with a simple preceptipn until both together became a new emotion. And the strongest emotion occurred when the poet, by his poem, helped us to enter with him into that other world of desire where imperfections vanished and every pain and human ill disappeared. Poetry could not exist without form, and all strong 1 testing futurism in art and poefeeling was expressed in rhythm, not necessarily metrical, because rhythm was the essential movement of life.. These points must be considered in try. Futurism was the revolt of the present against the oppression of the past. The early futurist artists advocated drastic measures. In all seriousness they said old cities like Venice, ancient monutnents and pictures should be destroyed, and tha!t living artists should be restricted to 20 years of activity. At 40 they should disappear from the world of art, and their works with them. So life would be rid of the obsession of antiquity, and “by constant cutting back the plant would be compelled to spring away from the root and not from last season’s hardened wood.” We laughed at this extravagant idea, but there was sope truth in it. In Italy, at least, the present was overshadowed. \ The country was a vast museum ojr picture gallery which overshadowed and stunted free development in the present. In England there was a national belief that beauty and power were secrets of the dead —to be imitated, but in disproof of this 'view, the tutor pointed out that the greatpoets had all been innovators. Each had made his own style. The Futurists were not content with this; they wanted drastic changes life h‘a£ changed and there must be forms of" expression / to suit present conditions. The Futurist therefore used new words, disjointed, expressive, without sentences or rules. He contended that as these new feelings were chiefly due to the speed, noise, violence and applied science of modern life, their poetry should he condensed, loud, brutal, wireless and materialistic. The tutor admitted' that new feelings must have new expression, but hate, joy and restlessness would always be the same primal emotions however/new one’s experiences might be. The lecturer read Newbolt’s version of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” in illustration of futurist ideas, and then referred to earlier exponents of free expression, Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter, reviewing the latter’s life at some length, with illustrative - passages from his best known book, “Towards l Democracy.”