The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo. SATURDAY, OCTOBER .18, 1924. POETRY AND POLITICS.

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 248, 18 October 1924, Page 42 (Supplement)

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER .18, 1924. POETRY AND POLITICS.

For the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that tve can do.

Mr. H. E. Holland, the Leader of the Labour party, has published a small volume of verse bearing the title "Red Roses on tho Highways." When Lowe, an English political light of laet century, published a similar volume, one 'reviewer dismissed it in two lines by saying, "We want but little here by Lowe, nor want that little long." Few politicians make good poets, and Mr. Holland does not strike us as being any exception to this rule, though many people will admire '"Red Roses on the Highways" for the fervour of its sentiments. But it is something to find Labour leaders recognising that poetry has a place in the world to-day. Mr. Ramsay Mac Donald recently made an eloquent plea for a higher appreciation of the poetic and spiritual elements in life. "There can be no good politics," he said, "without poetry. There is no good anything without poetry. Poetry lie 3at the heart of human life. It is Ihe incurable defect of the old parties that they have no poetic consciousness. If they had had this magic possession they would not have made such a mess of things, for they would have had some conception of the human material with which they were dealing. What the world needs more than it needs anything else is a political and social Shakespeare." He thought people could never be really humanised unless they were keen upon art and tho classics. "No person and no society," he affirmed, "can perform a more important public service than by patronising art and classical culture." Few people have ever associated politics with either poetry or art. It is true that the appointment of the Poet Laureate rests with the Government of the day, but some of the appointments have not shown a very high appreciation of literary values. Some members of the party Mr. Holland and Mr. MacDonald represent could learn many useful lessons from the poets, though we would not dream of suggesting this instruction should be confined to that party, for there are men in it whose knowledge of English poetry shames Conservatives who have enjoyed vastly greater opportunities. England's greatest poets have been her greatest patriots, and they have "loved their land with love far-brought." Wordsworth's sonnet on Milton shows the influence a great poet can exert on "a fen of stagnant waters." Mr. Mac Donald thought wo had too much "materialism, vulgarity, assertion without sense, domination lacking fineness of mind and soul, forgetfulness of human value." In speaking of the achievements of our time he said: "Our age is an amazing age, but it is not a Christian age. Our conquests are conquests of knowledge; wo need the conquests of culture. We have learned to fly physically; we need to learn to fly spiritually. Our great achievements have given us a temperature. We want cooling off. We want to relearn the old lesson of joy in a quiet Sunday. Too many of us incline to the Sunday of frivolity and of spiritual sterility." In this reading of the age Mr. Mac Donald does not stand alone.. Mr. Chauncy Depew, known as the "Grand Old Man of America," said, in reviewing • the ninety years of his eventful life, that while he entered fully into the appreciation and praise of the wonders of the last hundred years, yet he felt that what we most needed now was "a revival of the simpler life and comforting belief of normal times—the faith, the ideals, the comforting and saving graces which have carried unnumbered millions through happy lives to a death of confidence and hope." No one denies our material advancement, but perhaps it has been largely bought at the cost of what Wordsworth called "pure religion breathing household laws." Poetry might be advantageously applied,to the fierce political struggle of which Mr. Mac Donald himself is the centre. Some of it would make a warm fight still, warmer, but moat of great poetry would teach breadth of view - and sweet reasonablenw*.