MODERN VERSE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 87, 21 February 1941, Page 4

MODERN VERSE

Sir-I notice there has been a discussion in The Listener recently on the subject of modern verse. Like Llewellyn Etherington of Auckland I must confess that I have not read the small book of New Zealand verse J.G.M. reviewed, but I did see that it was "difficult" and "cut its corners." J.G.M. mentioned this as though it were a merit rather than a fault, and it is just this point that prompted me to write. * The cult of obscurity and difficulty in verse is taking a long time to die the death it must inevitably die. It was Mallarmé, I think, who created in France the notion that all good poetry must be difficult, because it must derive from intricate intellectual operations and not such a simple and natural thing as inspiration. Human instinct and inspiration itself, in fact, must be repudiated. Paul Valery, who is generally reckoned one of the greatest of modern symbolists, has even gone so far as to make the following extraordinary statement: "If I must write, I would infinitely rather write a feeble thing thoroughly conscious and with entire lucidity of mind, than give birth to the most beautiful masterpiece by the flavour of a trace or of something outside of myself.’ It all amounts to a confession of aridity of heart, and one result has been a flight from life by these modern poets into the clear, pure air of their own intellects. T. S. Eliot has sought compensation in Royalism: and Anglo-Catholicism. Finally let me say that poetry is much more than a stern intellectual exercise. The sooner the moderns forget their cult of obscurity and speak to the common people in language the common people can understand, the better it will be for everybody.

FIAT LUX

(Wellington).