THE NEW LAUREATE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 110, 12 May 1930, Page 6

THE NEW LAUREATE.

"Who is Alfred Austin?" Avas asked thirty-six years ago Avhen the name of the successor to Tennyson -was announced. "Who is Robert Bridges V was asked seventeen years later. "Who is John Masefield?" will not be asked to-day, for everybody who cares for poetry at all knows "Beauty" and "Sea Fever" and "Cargoes." Next to Mr. Kipling My. Masefield is the most popular poet of his generation. Popularity and merit, of course, do not necessarily go together. Ella-Wheeler Wilcox's sales must have been far larger than Robert Bridges'. But Mr. Masefield, though an uneven poet, is a genuine one, and he has touched the hearts and imaginations of the English-speaking world. He has done this in prose as well as poetry; his ' "Galhpoli contains the finest of tributes to the Anzacs. It is a good appointment, probably the best that could have been made. Austin's appointment nearly killed the office, but Bridges restored its prestige. Now a poet succeeds a poet, and the tradition will be maintained by a high-minded artist. We must not expect commemorative odes from Mr. Masefield— though in "August, 1914," he wrote one of the most moving of war poems—but what does that matter? In making this almost solitary acknowledgment of the value of poetry as an integral part of civilisation the State has no right to impose conditions.