THE PRACTICE OF POETRY

Southland Times, Issue 22074, 22 July 1933, Page 11

THE PRACTICE OF POETRY

Two kinds of dilettanti, says Goethe, there are in poetry: he who neglects the indispensable mechanical part, and thinks he has done enough if he shows spirituality and feeling; and he who seeks to arrive at poetry merely by mechanism, in which he can acquire an artisan’s readiness, and is without soul and matter. And he adds, that the first does most harm to art, and the last to himself. If we must be dilettanti; if it is impossible for us, under circumstances amidst which we live to think clearly, to feel nobly, and to delineate firmly; if we cannot attain to the mastery of the great artists; —let us, at least, have so much respect for our art as to prefer it to ourselves. Let us not bewilder our successors; let us transmit to them the practice of poetry with its boundaries and wholesome regulative laws, under which excellent works may again, perhaps, at some future time, be produced, not yet fallen into oblivion through our neglect, not yet condemned and cancelled by the influence of their eternal enemy, caprice.—Matthew Arnold, in “Shakespeare and Greek Poets.”