Mr. Masefield's Lecture
Some of us have had misgivings lately because poetry has seemed to be passing into a new and unfamiliar realm—a realm where the old standards of beauty are apparently neglected and the old gradations lost. But perhaps poetry is simply regaining its lost kingdom. In its new simplicity of diction, its use of the speech of today, and in its direct approach to life, poetry is once more addressed to a living audience. It is only recently that I have pierced the archaic literary disguise of Dan Chaucer which he wore for me at school, and discovered how common and colloquial he was, how he described what people wore: a wrist-watch it might have been; or how they ate, and what actual contact they had with actual life. And ever since then I have been thinking what a good time he and Edgar Lee Masters would have on a pilgrimage through the United States![1]
In becoming readable and in dealing with life, poetry has again addressed itself to its audience, in the wider sense. And if the poet comes to his audience, the audience will come to the poet. This is not, of course, meant in any popular sense. There will always be the refined beauty, the spiritual gauge above the common level. Mr. Masefield has attained it—not in The Widow in Bye Street, Daffodil Fields, The Everlasting Mercy, so much as in The Wanderer, in Biography, and in those shorter poems in which an ascetic spirit—tasting the beauty of life with a stoic thrill—sings of the pride of defeat and death. A. C. H.
- ↑ Written before Mr. John Cowper Powys traced the same kinship. A coincidence, not a plagiarism!
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