In the brilliant pages of his essay on Jean François Millet, Romain
Rolland says that Millet, as a boy, used to read the Bucolics and the
Georgics "with enchantment" and was "seized by emotion--when he came to
the line, 'It is the hour when the great shadows seek the plain.'
Et jam summa procul villarum culmina fumant
Majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae?"
To the lover and student of poetry, this incident has an especial charm
and significance. There is something fine in the quick sympathy of an
artist in one kind, for beauty expressed by the master of another
medium. The glimpse M. Rolland gives us of one of the most passionate
art-students the world has ever known, implies with fresh grace a truth
Anglo-Saxons are always forgetting--that poetry is one of the great
humanities, that poetry is one of the great arts of expression.
Many of our customs conspire to cause, almost to force, this forgetting.
Thousands of us have been educated to a dark and often permanent
ignorance of classic poetry, by being taught in childhood to regard it
as written for the purpose of illustrating Hadley's Latin, or Goodwin's
Greek grammar, and composed to follow the rules of versification at the
end of the book. It seems indeed one of fate's strangest ironies that
the efforts of these distinguished grammarians to unveil immortal
masterpieces are commonly used in schools and colleges to enshroud, not
to say swaddle up, the images of the gods "forever young," and turn them
into mummies. In our own country, far from perceiving in Vergil's quiet
music the magnificent gesture of nature that thrilled his Norman
reader--far from conceiving of epic poetry as the simplest universal
tongue, one early acquires a wary distrust of it as something one must
constantly labor over.
Aside from gaining in childhood this strong, practical objection to
famous poetry, people achieve the deadly habit of reading metrical lines
unimaginatively. After forming--generally in preparation for entering
one of our great universities--the habit of blinding the inner eye,
deafening the inner ear, and dropping into a species of mental coma
before a page of short lines, it is difficult for educated persons to
read poetry with what is known as "ordinary human intelligence."
It does not occur to them simply to listen to the nightingale. But
poetry, I believe, never speaks her beauty--certainly never her scope
and variety, except on the condition that in her presence one sits down
quietly with folded hands, and truly listens to her singing voice.
"So for one the wet sail arching through the rainbow round the bow,
And for one the creak of snow-shoes on the crust."
Many people do not like poetry, in this way, as a living art to be
enjoyed, but rather as an exact science to be approved. To them poetry
may concern herself only with a limited number of subjects to be
presented in a predetermined and conventional manner and form. To such
readers the word "form" means usually only a repeated literary effect:
and they do not understand that every "form" was in its first and best
use an originality, employed not for the purpose of following any rule,
but because it said truly what the artist wished to express. I suppose
much of the monotony of subject and treatment observable in modern verse
is due to this belief that poetry is merely a fixed way of repeating
certain meritorious though highly familiar concepts of existence--and
not in the least the infinite music of words meant to speak the little
and the great tongues of the earth.
It is exhilarating to read the pages of Pope and of Byron, whether you
agree with them or not, because here poetry does speak the little and
the great tongues of the earth, and sings satires, pastorals and
lampoons, literary and dramatic criticism, all manner of fun and
sparkling prettiness, sweeping judgments, nice discriminations,
fashions, politics, the ways of gentle and simple--love and desire and
pain and sorrow, and anguish and death.
The impulse which inspired, and the appreciation which endowed this
magazine, has been a generous sympathy with poetry as an art. The
existence of a gallery for poems and verse has an especially attractive
social value in its power of recalling or creating the beautiful and
clarifying pleasure of truly reading poetry in its broad scope and rich
variety. The hospitality of this hall will have been a genuine source of
happiness if somehow it tells the visitors, either while they are here,
or after they have gone to other places, what a delight it is to enjoy a
poem, to realize it, to live in the vivid dream it evokes, to hark to
its music, to listen to the special magic grace of its own style and
composition, and to know that this special grace will say as deeply as
some revealing hour with a friend one loves, something nothing else can
say--something which is life itself sung in free sympathy beyond the
bars of time and space.
_E. W._