Company of Poets
HE current rehearing of Time for Verse (from 1YC) confirms the impression that the last programme is also the best. Beginning with the famous passage from Keats about the poet to whom "the miseries of the world are miseries and will not let him rest," it went on to give us Blake’s "Holy Thursday," a passage from Wordsworth’s Prelude, Clare’s "Soldier" and Wilfred Owen’s "Miners." It was a programme which held together as a whole, and in which at the same time the value of each individual poem was brought out. The passage describing Wordsworth’s meeting with the old soldier begging on the road was a remarkable demonstration of the Wordsworthian virtues. There is hardly a line or a word in it that is not utterly commonplace and plain. Yet the whole effect is of sympathy for human beings raised to a kind of sublimity, It was partly the conjunction that brought out similar qualities in the Owen poem, in' which the miner and the soldier merge together as types of suffering humanity. These two were magnificently read by Carleton Hobbs, making up for his recent reading of Elizabethan lyrics, well-selected but tame. One’s only regret was not to hear him read "Strange Meeting," which is surely Owen’s masterpiece.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19530703.2.21.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 729, 3 July 1953, Page 10
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212Company of Poets New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 729, 3 July 1953, Page 10
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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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