A CANADIAN VIEW OF ENGLISH POETRY.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9112, 11 June 1908, Page 4

A CANADIAN VIEW OF ENGLISH POETRY.

Tennyson's influence at the present time is impaired by the fact that he attempted before all things to put into his poetry the current theories of his day upon politics, philosophy, and religion, writes Mr Pelham Edgar, in the "University Magazine" (Toronto). With characteristic Saxon bluntnes3 Tennyson all that he means to say, and says it beautifully. It is the aim of the poet now to mean more than the words express, to imply rather than to state, to suggest rather than to define. There is a semblance of remoteness from temporal interests in much of the poetry that is written to-day, and this bodiless ecstasy we find particularly in the Continental symbolists, in Pagan mystics like Russell and Yeats, and in Catholic mystics like Francis Thompson and Lionel Johnson. It is possible that the profounder poetry is that which deals with human life in a more immediate and absolute sense than is possible for a poetry to which the Muse proffers only the food of vision and the wine of rare ideals. But the full-blooded virility, the practical wisdom, and the academic dienity which make English poetiy at its best the greatest poetry in Europe, can be freed from material hardness and from too servile'a dependence upon concrete fact only' by absorbing something of the keenness of spiritual vision which a rare few among the English poets have possessej, and which is reflected to-day most clearly in the poetry of Yeats.