Poets for Kings
PROFESSOR GREIG’S Poets Laureate, now being heard from 3YC, explores the highways and byways of literature, thus bringing to the ordinary listener fresh, interesting and amusing material. The figure of Skelton, for example, becomes something more than a ghostly name, and excites more than passing interest. The forgotten satires of Byron or the liveliness of Southey’s humorous verse made me see these poets much as one sees the contemporary "Whim Wham." The poems were weil tead, too, and the choice of a deepvoiced, short-winded gentleman to read some of the more pompous tributes to dead kings or to speak for the aged Johnson was a dramatic touch scarcely to be rivalled. One thing comes as a surprise-the comparative freedom, or courage, of other days. Or was it that the Crown and private persons then possessed such a sense of security that they felt no need to quieten by law the mocking raillery of satirists? Like Sir Walter Scott, I very much like "Song for St. Cecilia’s Day," but it is a poem which needs to be beaten out as though by cymbals. Only then is the curtain rent and the inspired prospect revealed,
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19530612.2.23.1.4
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 726, 12 June 1953, Page 11
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196Poets for Kings New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 726, 12 June 1953, Page 11
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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