THE POET LAUREATE.

Evening Star, Issue 20316, 26 October 1929, Page 14

THE POET LAUREATE.

Health to the Poet' Laureate, who, during the week, has celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday by publishing a new poem of 4,000 lines. The cable tells us nothing—or next to nothing—about it except its length, which is not usually the most important thing in poetrs’; but for once even that has significance. Four, thousand lines—to put the matter on its most prosaic footing—would be at least twenty columns of the'" ‘ Evening Star.’ That would not be anything unusual for a Budget, but for a poem, a w r ork of combined imagination and beauty and creative power, it tells its own tale of a vitality rarely sustained by singers who have passed their eightieth year. It is the (Inal refutal of the silliest gibe that was ever flung at a song-smith since the ‘Daily Mail’ on one occasion called Swinburne “the Poet of Putney,” ‘ King’s Canary Refuses to Twitter was how an American paper headed an article onco on the Laureate, when most English papers, more politely, were making the same complaint. But this canary has never ceased to do more than twitter. Wordsworth published only one poem—a sonnet against a railway—in the seven years that he lived after he was appointed Laureate. Dr Bridges, it has been recalled, wrote more poems about the lato war than Tennyson did about all the wars of Queen Victoria’s reign. It was, no doubt, because he. wished them to have their own influence, nndiminished or unassisted by any official suggestion, that he preferred to publish so many of them anonymously. He has written so much since he became Laureate that it has been said: “He and Thomas Hardy may well go down to our posterity as the youngest old men in the whole annals of English literature.” Tennyson lived to be eighty-three, and some of his best poems were written in his closing years, but that is rare. The world would not have lost much if Wordsworth had written nothing after his. fiftieth year, and it was the later poems of Robert Browning that were most suited to Browning societies. Dr Bridges calls his now poem ‘ The Testament of Beauty,’ but all that ho has written has been a testament to beauty. From more .than one of his lyrics we might gather that few lives have been more happy than his—spent in worshipping beauty and in making it. Edgar Allan Poe did not believe in long poems. They could never bo more, ho held, than successions of short ones, with gaps of prose between where inspiration must fail. Dr Bridges apparently does not hold the theory, though there is much to say for it. He has written fairly long poems before—plays and sonnet sequences—and his new work will be nearly half the length of the ‘ /Eneid ’ and more than a third of that of 1 Paradise Lost.’ Nobody perhaps will read it except a few students of poetry, but the rest can admire his spirit. If they do not read and delight in bis shorter poems, that is their own loss.