A WORD FOR MODERN POETRY

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 501, 2 November 1928, Page 14

A WORD FOR MODERN POETRY

(Written for THE SUN) in a blue moon I have a visitor, a demented creature who comes ten miles by a bush track to inform me that ours is a degenerate age and that Great Art, especially in the matter of poetry, is now as dead as the Dodo. “Where are your Chaucers and your Spensers to-day?” the creature has a habit of demanding. He seldom waits for an answer, but invariably continues, “Where are your Shakespeares, your Drydens and your Miltons?” To show his utter contempt for modern poetry as well as the severely classical bent of his own mind, he will then expectorate delicately in the direction of the electric heater. Now, as one who has found, and still continues to find this world of ours a vastly interesting and entertaining place, I sometimes pretend to take him seriously and endeavour to show, logically and with the requisite amount of personal abuse, that the facts are quite otherwise and to the contrary. X roundly declare that ours is really a brilliant age, not merely in things material, but also in the sweet, stinging things of the soul. I tell him that in both spirit and technique the modern poets can hold their own with any poets he cares to mention.

Mind you, I strongly suspect, in fact I know, that my visitor’s esteem for great poetry, like that of many another member of this tribe of tailless, madeover apes is founded, not on a knowledge of great poetry, but purely on hearsay. He has never read “The Canterbury Tales” or “The Faerie Queen,” or “Paradise Lost,” but someone, probably some Sunday school teacher or other, told him in his yituth that Chaucer, Spenser and Milton were great poets, and, ever since, this has been to him an axiomatically obvious proposition. In connection with this question of epic poetry allow me to remark that in spite of all pedagogic dicta to the contrary, the chances are that Hardy’s “Dynasts” is just as great an epic as any other that has been written in England since Alfred the Great signed his first pay-sheet—“ Rex Anglorum Saxonum.” It is foreign to the purpose of this short article, however, to attempt to show that such is actually the case. And for this reason: Strictly speaking, the epic is not a poem at all. The appeal of the epic is to the intellect, whereas true poetry appeals to the emotions. Poetry has no concern with truth, or even with thought. Its concern is with beauty. Some of the most lovely poems in English, “Kubla Khan,” for instance, are absolutely meaningless when judged from the intellectual standpoint. Having a purely emotional appeal, the poem must necessarily be short. It must be lyrical. It must he capable of being sung. Epic poetry has more in common with science than with music. One cannot sing “The Dynasts,” for instance, any more than

one can sing the differential calculus. No doubt all this will sound suspiciously as if I were in the pay of the devil, and possibly these lines may transform some admirer of epic poetry into a potential mayhem artist: but, choosing my words deliberately, and using them dispassionately, I humbly venture to affirm that all the great poetry that any one of our great poets has written could be comfortably read in two hours. As to true poetry, i.e.. lyrical poetry, I grant you that it would be difficult to-day to match Poe’s “Bells,” or to find a more beautiful line than Byron’s ’ She walks in beauty like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies.” Nevertheless, allow me to remark that there is Swinburne, probably the greatest master of music that has ever written in the English language. And t here is Masefield, some of whose poems are as good as Shelley.’s own. Take his “:Cargoes,” for instance:— Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir. Bowing home to haven in sunny Palesfine, "With a cargo of ivory, apes, and peacocks, Sandalwood , cedarwood, and sweet white wine. And besides Swinburne and Masefield, there are William Butler Yeats, and Walter de la Mare, and Moira O’Neill, and Padraic Colum, and scores of others, some of them practically unknown. How many readers of poetry, I wonder, have heard of Marjory Pickthall? And yet, where will

you find lines of greater beauty than verses three, four, and five in her “Mary Shepherdess”?— All the little sighing souls born of dust’s despair, They ioho fed on bitter bread when the world was bare, Frighted of the glory gates and the starry stair. All about the windy doion, housing in the ling, Underneath the alder bough, linnet-light they cling, Frighted of the shining house where the martyrs sing. Crying in the ivy bloom, fingering at the pane, Grieving in the hollow dark, lone along the rain — Mary , Mary Shepherdess, gathers them again. S. ANDERSON. Horahora.