REVIVAL OF POETRY.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLII, Issue XLII, 5 January 1923, Page 3

REVIVAL OF POETRY.

SOME PRESENT-DAY SYMPTOMS

ITS POWER AT CRITICAL

MOMENTS

A short address on the place of poetry in our life to-day was given by Dr Edmund Gosse at & gathering of the Manchester Luncheon Club in November, says the Manchester Guardian. 1 oetry, he said, really lives in language which thrilled and subdued us, and raised us to a higher level than we had reached before. Accordingly he thought that even in the stress of political excitement we should find in the "Happy Warrior" of Wordsworth the nucleus of a hundred sage addresses. The reason why poetry was allowed to exist and why century after century m all the countries of the world, with, everything apparently to make it seem extraneous and absurd, it still held its dominant, its cardinal place, was that it had the almost magical effect of exhilarating and strengthening the soul at critical moments of emotion. •During the war. which was a very critical period in literature as in everything else, the ordinary output of poetry almost ceased. There was a great outburst of what was ■called war poetry, but that had to a most extraordinary extent exploded. Of th« thousands and thousands of sincere and charming and melancholy effort's that were produced during the war not more than four or five would be likely to last. This had left a curious blank behind- a blank, however, which was being filled up again by what was called the Georgian poets. They represented a remarkably active school of j poets.

Sixty years ago Tennyson was the absolute luminary. There was nothing else at all. And years later when Browning,was a very considerable figure in the world of literature and had published a new book which had been much praised, he remembered saying to him, "Well, at last you must feel that you have got your right place in the sun." 'YV«H, you are very kind," Browning replied, "but you know that when I am most successful and when everything combines to give me a good reception, I only sell one copy of my best book for ten that Tennyson sells at his worst." (Laughter). He did not think there was the slightest exaggeration in that.

To-day, instead of one luminary, \fo had a perfect "milky way," a consteiia- i toon 3 of poets. Poetry was not even I excluded from the Board schools. There were whole troupes of. little boys wno Wrote verses which, of their kind wera very good indeed. This was a curious symptom—not entirely unprecedented. At all events, twice in our history it! had happened before; in the reign of j Elizabeth, about 1580, and again about 1720, when there was an enormous o\itbut of poetry, not of the most eminent, but of remarkable merit. His own feeling was that at this critical moment we were passing through a rather similar condition of things. It was not enough understood, tie thought, that poetry must be aTr-, s jflg B^^ did * "»t tt*n tliat ft JJann- --««OYls or entertain _ty $c c. **c of those excessively entertaining parodies in Punch—which, he undeistood, were written by a Manchester poet and for which, lie had great admiration. Birt we must remember that poetry no lonjjer taught. It was no longer didactic. The poet should remember that if he were 1 going to tell us about the little things' that happened to him, he nttist be giire that the emotion he described was an urgent one. And always there should be tije idea of pleasure—something exciting, - illuminating. We should look upon poetry not as necessarily a sentimental or melancholy thing, but as' a thisng that roused our attention or feelings and strengthened and gave vitality to the soul. The value of poetry existed in the response it made to 'moments of high, emotion in isolation. In the world we lived together and met with the impact of other minds, and this led us a little way out of our own natural course. Poetry came when we were alone and brought us back to what was real, to what wo.s inevitable in our own natural temperament. "Therefore," Mr Gosse concluded, "remember that what you lose in society you gain from poetry in isolation."