OPPORTUNITY FOR POETS

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 154, 26 March 1938, Page 6 (Supplement)

OPPORTUNITY FOR POETS

A rare opportunity offers itself just now to our contemporary poets. This discovery is announced by Mr. Allan C. Bailey, writing in “The Radio Times.” Even the most popular verse writers, he points out, cannot reckon on a circulation of more thail a few thousand copies for their books. A broadcasting poet, on the other hand, has a chance of reaching millions of people. That chance, however, will be worth little to him unless his work is of such a kind as to be effective when read or recited at the microphone.

But how is it to meet that requirement? Mr. Bailey reminds us that the bard of classical and Anglo-Saxon times had to face virtually the same problem. He was not composing for a reading public, but had to keep large and critical audiences interested by his recitations. Hence the old epic poets, in order to prevent the attention of their hearers from straying, learned how to build what might be called an auditory technique into the stuff of their verse. They found that poetry for a listening audience could best be embodied ih narrative, where the dominating interest lay in the sweep of the story. They had no use for brief spasms of lyrical verse, where each word was so heavy with meaning that it had to be pondered over. The radio, Mr. Bailey believes, is now waiting for poets who will revive this ancient technique while writing in the contemporary idiom about the vital issues of today.

Another phase of the same subject is discussed in “Time and Tide” by Mr. Clifford Dyment. He wonders that, with the revival of the poetie drama during recent years, so few people have considered utilising the radio as a medium. Yet the microphone seems to him to offer the poetie dramatist an ideal means of presentation. Action, if not positively inimical to poetry, is at least extremely difficult to combine with it, and the absence of visual movement from radio therefore leaves the poet gloriously free to concentrate upon the dramatic content of his verse. Mr. Dyment calls attention to an experiment recently made in this direction by Mr. Archibald MacLeish in “The Fall of the City,” a mild satire upon dictatorships and mass credulity, where an “announcer” takes the place of the chorus. A question, by the way, that Mr. Dyment seems to have overlooked is whether poetic drama,, lacking action, will be able Jo meet (the -competition, pfi.television,