On the Reading of Poetry

In the brilliant pages of his essay on Jean Francois 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 viflarum 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 ball 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.