Our Poets' Chance.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 7, 13 February 1902, Page 1

Our Poets' Chance.

There lies much hope of cash and fair renown for our budding poets in the announcement made a few days ago by the Wellington Times. Says our Empire City contemporary : ' The mute, inglorious Kiplings ot New Zealand, the unlaurelled Austins of Australia, and the budding bards in all parts of the British Empire, from Camlachie to Capetown, and from Limavady to Vancouver, have all offered to them an opportunity for winning fame and cash and Royal favor. The proprietors of the old British magazine, Good Words, are offering three prizes to the value of £75 for the three best odes on the Coronation of Edward VII. These compositions may be in any form and of any length ; the only restriction is that they must

reach Messrs. Isbister and Co., the publishers of GoodiWords, not later than 30th April next.' The market value of poetry seems to have gone down of late years. Time was when Arab rulers paid a thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand, and even thirty thousand chinking gold pieces for a few verses — nay, even for a single couplet— by the Khalifeh. And at a much later and more degenerate day did not Davenant prove by all the rules of logic that he knew that the government of a country ' can never be upheld in prose,' that neither parsons, generals, politicians, judges, nor police can sustain the edifice of the State and keep it plumb without the aid of sweet poesie? And this again is but a variant of what Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote to the Marquis of Montrose : ' I know a very wise man that believed that, if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws, of a nation.' Even as late as Tennyson's declining years, the poet had a certain vogue. The very magazine that now calls for tenders from the real and alleged poets of New Zealand and elsewhere paid Tennyson the tidy little sum of £200 each for a few odd odes on any subject under the sun. But there's a sad slump in rhymed or rhymeless measures now, and the only result of the muchadvertised competition will probably be to flood the longsuffering editor with sundry reams of more or less metrical prose from Those whose fustian's bo sublimely bad, It is not poetry, but prose run mad. * According to Chesterfield, ' any man of common understanding may, by proper culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself whatever he pleases except a good poet.' Poets are born, not made. And they are very scarce. But the number of those who. fancy themselves poets is legion, and some of them — like Alfred Austin — even contrive to scramble into laureateship. He is not the first ' tortured torturer of reluctant rhymes ' who reached that pinnacle of social, if not literary, fame. Withers was a Puritannical soldier laureate. When captured by the Cavaliers, he was about to be hanged, but Sir John Denham, the rival laureate, successfully entreated the King to spare him — because so long as Withers was in the land of the living, Denham could not be deemed the worst poet in England. For a like reason Kipling of the splay-foot rhymes ought to wish a long life to the present laureate. And both deserve the large-hearted sympathy which pious people usually extend to cripples and others who are struggling bravely against adverse circumstances that dated from their birth. The average editor loves poems. But he can assimilate only a limited number, and his appetite for laureate-poems was slain for a time by the doggrel which began : » I stood on a tower in the wet, Where the old and the new year met, and by the drawling measured prose in which Kipling— the people's laureate — told how 'a horse has four feet and a man has two feet, and two into four make two.' It is hard to stand that, and we gravely doubt that a page of such stuff would even make good, curl-paper. How true it is that ' there are many "poems" which are like photographic negatives, and should never see the light. 1 It appears that the two laureates

are excluded from the present competition. The proprietors oJ Good Words are evidently set on getting some poetry for their money. -