ODDS AND ENDS

Southland Times, Issue 23989, 2 December 1939, Page 11

ODDS AND ENDS

Hodder and Stoughton, in spite of the war, are going ahead with the contest for a novel in the great romantic tradition. The winner of this contest will, as has already been announced, receive a cash payment, a travel award, and an assured income for four years.

The question of originality in poetry is discussed by Basil De Selincourt in The Observer. How, he asks, are we to distinguish the man who merely fits words to a conventionally-accepted frame from the man whose head is so hot that the thoughts as they leap from it take shape like leaves and flowers? Our English practitioners, he remarks, have been obsessed in recent years with the search for novel forms of utterance. It has seemed as if the simplest things to be said, whether about larks in the sky or lovers in springtime, had been said once for all, unless some new idiom could be found. Mr De Selincourt admits that no poetic form is final. At the same time he views some recent experiments with little favour. The longer he reflects upon the matter, the more disposed he is to mistrust originality as a conscious aim in artistic creation, or as a standard in the critical appreciation of art. We may hope to see development, but it can only come by slow degrees. An enormous twist or contortion, such as Hopkins took, remains on the shore as a curiosity when the waters move on. Accordingly, this critic regards the present cult of abstruse psychological connections as a pretext behind which certain modern writers hide their lack of originality. He believes they would not need to make originality their aim if they actually had mow of it.