NEGLECT OF POETRY

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 19894, 23 March 1939, Page 3

NEGLECT OF POETRY

ETHEL TURNER’S LAMENT QUOTATION UNPOPULAR The Australian novelist and writer of children’s stories, Ethel Turner (the wife of Judge Curlewis), when she addressed the students of the Hornsby Giris’ High School, near Sydney, deplored the small interest taken in poetry in these days. “When I was a young and foolish girl, like all of you,” she said, “we were graciously permitted to love poetry. When we wrote our essays it was pure delight to many of ous to quote lines, the better to illustrate our meaning, from Shelley, Keats, and Browning, and no one ran a reproving red pencil through them. Even When some of us first broke into print in the columns of the Sydney Morning Herald or the Daily Telegraph we rarerly started, and never ended, 1711110111 some banner over us from an immortal mind. And we we never redpencilled or otherwise molested for it even there.

“Editors rather liked quotations themselves in those queer, far-off, and happy days. They seemed to think that a line of sheer beauty or a high and thrilling thought from an Olympian, spilled at random in a column, did no harm.

“Is there an editor who dare trifle in such a fashion with the hard-headed, speed-mad, frivolous, or overworking reader to-clay? Let him keep to his strenuous job of packing his columns with accounts of world wars, the conquests of the air, the miracles of wireless, the colossal disasters that our leisured past never dreamed of.” “I like to come here. This is a brave school. You let the spirit of poetry stay about as it wills.”