PHILOSOPHY IN VERSE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 462, 30 April 1948, Page 11

PHILOSOPHY IN VERSE

SANITY RARE, By E. S. Hole. George _Allen and Unwin Ltd. SANITY RARE is a_ philosophical essay-in verse which is reminiscent sometimes of Alexander Pope, occasionally of Ogden Nash. It is an ambitious project-even more ambitious than its prototype "The Essay on Man," since Pope takes 600-odd couplets to draw "The Measure of Man" and Hole gives him a bare 80 before

hurrying on to "The Limits of Logic," "The Problem of Purpose," "The Rays of Reason," etc. The obvious answer to that is that "The Limits of Logic," "The Snare of Science" and "The Coils of Commerce" all, in their own way, do take the measure of man, but that does not make the criticism invalid. Bits and pieces of philosophy, however clever, are merely incoherent if lumped together, and the sum total of them does not make a philosophical essay. Hole has collected (that is the-right word-he borrows freely and punctiliously acknowledges his debts) a number of. thoughts, fitted them with considerable technical skill into quatraines, and presents them to us as gospel according to Hole. The result is an anthology of truisms, which is not as bad as it sounds, because the truisms are stated vigorously, I almost said lustily, in a style which varies from colloquial simplicity to an almost pontifical solemnity but which is sometimes witty and almost always free from humbug. The essay is in verse because "he (Hole) holds that the great power of poetry is that it can say things: arrestingly." It can, but not many will feel that this, his summary to the chapter "Fantasies of Fact," does: So when to-day our so-called facts we face, They change their form at very rapid pace; If any other things are so bizarre,+ Then I for one do not know what they are. There are better and worse stanzas than that, but it is a fair example.

S.P.McL.