‘Lays of Ancient Rome,’ Scott’s ‘The Lady of the Lake’ and ‘Marmion,’ Stevenson’s ‘A
Child’s Garden of Verses,’ Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King,’ and Whittier’s ‘Snow-Bound.’
There are also collections of poetry, ten of them, of which the best are Henley’s ‘Lyra
Heroica,’ Lang’s ‘Blue Poetry Book,’ and Lucas’s ‘Book of Verses for Children.’
The fairy-tale section is even worse, and how dreary the inclusion of the word
‘Folklore’ in a catalogue intended for the use of children. Certainly, the erudite person
who made this selection never reads fairy stories for amusement. The pseudo-scientific
flavour of ‘folklore’ has intrigued him sadly, else why include Kingsley’s ‘Greek Heroes’
under ‘Fairy Tales,’ why entirely exclude Thackeray’s ‘The Rose and the Ring’ and George
Macdonald’s ‘Princess and the Goblin’ and ‘Princess and Curdie,’ these last both better
books than ‘At the Back of the North Wind,’ by the same author, which has been allowed?
What is the matter with ‘Through the Looking-Glass, since ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is here,
and here without the asterisk which tells the child that the library contains other books
by the same author. Think of growing up conversant with only half of Alice! Where are the
delightful fairy tales of Mrs. Molesworth? where are those of Perrault, of Lord Brabourne?
and why are Andrew Lang’s long series of coloured fairy books represented by only one, and
again with no asterisk? Poor little children, at the mercy of such elders as this
compiling gentleman!
The list for older boys and girls is somewhat better, and here we find ‘Through the
Looking-Glass,’ though why it should be considered too advanced for younger
readers, I cannot imagine. But the fact that this older section starts out with Miss
Addams’s ‘Twenty Years at Hull House,’ is eloquent of the attitude of the present day.
Alas for imagination, when the inclusion of such a volume in such a list is possible!
It is true, a child can have any book that the library contains by asking for it. But
the children who frequent the library most belong to the poorer classes, and their only
chance of becoming familiar with books out of school is at the Public Library. At home,
they are not surrounded with a large culture which makes the names of the great writers
household words to them. How do they know what to ask for? A catalogue tells them nothing,
and the only shelves they have access to until they are eighteen are those containing the
books in the list I have been quoting. And this is in a town famous for its educational
system!
Probably the catalogues intended for the use of children in our large libraries would
show conditions to be less unfortunate, but I think the one I have quoted is at least
typical.
There is no education like self-education, and no stimulus to the imagination so good
as that which it gives itself when allowed to roam through the pent-up stores of the
world’s imaginings at will.
There is a class of people known to all librarians as ‘browsers.’ They wander from
shelf to shelf, now reading here, now there. Sometimes dipping into ten books in the hour,
sometimes absorbed in one for the whole day. If we look back to our childhood we shall see
how large a part ‘browsing’ had in our education. One book suggested another, and as we
finished one we knew the next that was waiting to be begun. They stretched on and on in a
delightful and never-ending vista. The joy of those hours when we sat cross-legged’ on the
floor, or perched on the top of a ladder, a new world hidden behind the covers of every
book within reach, and perfect liberty to open the covers and enter at will, can never be
forgotten.
We talk about ‘creating a demand for books’ among the children of the masses, and about
‘ giving them the reading habit,’ and the best way to do this is to have a well-stocked
reading-room of good books, books for grown-up people as well as for children, and let the
children have free access to the shelves. They will be found reading strange things often,
strange from the point of view of the grown-up person, that is. But in most cases their
instincts will be good guides, and they will read what is best for them.
There is too much teaching to-day.
We love and admire certain things rather inspite of what people say than because of it.
We like to compare notes with some one who enjoys the same things that we do, but the real
enjoyment was there before. Beauty cannot be proved as a mathematical problem can. If
beauty is its own excuse for being, it is also its own teacher for perceiving. Contact
with beautiful things creates a taste for the beautiful, if there is any taste to be
created.
Not every one has a great deal of imagination, but every one has a certain amount
capable of cultivation to a greater or lesser degree, and the chief stimulaters of
imagination are the arts poetry, music, painting; the humanities as opposed to the
materialities.
The boy who said that his Shakespeare class was only questioned on the notes, and so,
as the boys were pressed for time, they only read the notes, was giving the most eloquent
testimony as to the absolute unfitness of his teacher. Doubtless the teacher would have
been horrified had he known of this state of things, but his own imagination must have
been very much in need of cultivating for him not to have noticed it.
For the last two years of my school course, I attended lectures on Shakespeare by an
eminent Harvard professor. I remember those lectures very well; they made an indelible
impression. We learnt everything about the plays we studied except the things that
mattered. Not a historical allusion, not an antiquarian tit-bit, escaped us. The plays
were made mines of valueless information. Out of them we delved all sorts of stray and
curious facts which were as unimportant to Shakespeare as to us. Not once in those two
years were we bidden to notice the poetry, not once was there a single aesthetic analysis.
The plays might have been written in the baldest prose for all the eminent professor
seemed to care. They became merely ‘quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore,’ and if
what we learnt at those lectures were a criterion, might indeed have been promptly and
satisfactorily forgotten. So much time and energy had been wasted in finding out these
things, and when found out their proper goal was the bonfire.
In my own case, however, I was saved, saved from the clutches of ignorant and
unimaginative Academia, by coming across a volume in my father’s library which opened a
door that might otherwise have always remained shut. Browsing about one day, I found Leigh
Hunt’s ‘Imagination and Fancy! I did not read it, I devoured it. I read it over and over,
and then I turned to the works of the poets referred to, and tried to read them by the
light of the new aesthetic perception I had learnt from Hunt.
So engulfed in this new pursuit was 1, that I used to inveigle my schoolmates up to my
room and read them long stretches of Shelley, and Keats, and Coleridge, and Beaumont and
Fletcher. Guided by Hunt, I found a new Shakespeare, one of whom I had never dreamed, and
so the plays were saved for me, and nothing was left of the professor’s lectures except an
immense bitterness for the lost time.
I have often thought that in this book of Leigh Hunt’s we have an excellent text-book
for what should be the proper teaching of literature, and especially of poetry. Poetry is
an art, and to emphasize anything else in teaching it is to deny its true function.
The study of what is now called the ’science of aesthetics’ is a difficult one. Such a
book as Mr. Willard Huntington Wright’s ‘The Creative Will’ is immensely stimulating to
the artist, but would only be confusing to school-children, even to those of high-school
grade. But much of this volume, much of the many volumes on the subject, could be
expressed in simpler terms. Beginning by stimulating the child’s artistic perceptions in
the very primitive manner of the. child’s own reactions, an example of which I mentioned
earlier in this article, the teacher can easily inculcate certain rules and touchstones,
enlarging upon them from year to year, and in this manner lay a firm foundation for
literary understanding; for it is only through understanding that literature, and
particularly poetry, can function as a direct stimulus to imagination.
I realize perfectly that this method would put a great strain on our teachers. It is
comparatively easy to learn a series of antiquarian allusions and reel them off to a
class; to analyse an aesthetic scheme is a much more difficult matter. I was interested to
come across this very idea in an essay of Professor Dowden’s which I read lately. But,
having pointed out the difficulty, the wise professor ignored it, and proceeded to write
his paper without the inclusion of a single aesthetic preoccupation. To be sure, he
apologized for this in the preface, but the essay was published.
We see, therefore, that to permit poetry to exert its imaginative training upon youth,
a complete change must take place in the method by which it is taught. We must lay aside
the academic tricks of the trade. Our teachers and expounders must first put themselves to
school; they must desert the easy path of historical anecdote, for the difficult one of
aesthetic comprehension. They must teach their pupils what poetry is, and why it is good,
greater, greatest. They must be enthusiastic pioneers for themselves and for their
classes. They must forget the mass of criticism (most of it mischievous) grown up about
the classics, and rediscover them with delight. An excellent way to begin would be to
conduct a course upon living poets.
The most significant thing in America to-day is the popular demand for poetry. It has
grown by leaps and bounds. I read recently in a newspaper that the demand for poetry at
the training-camps was extraordinary. In the ‘Book News Monthly’ for July, is an
interesting chart showing the increase in the publication of books on poetry and the drama
since 1902. In that year, 220 such books were published in the United States; in 1916,
there were 633. More volumes of this kind were issued than of any other kind except
fiction, and fiction only exceeded by seventy-three volumes. The publication of fiction
has markedly diminished of late years. Why? Simply because poetry is really much more
vital than fiction. Once poetry had thrown off its shackles, once it had begun to speak
freely, sturdily, with the voice of its own age, it found a ready audience. Even Academia
is listening, puzzled a little perhaps, but still becoming daily more attentive. I have
had various teachers tell me sadly that the difficulty in speaking of it to a class is
that they do not know the good modem poetry from the bad, it is all so ‘different.’ What
is the matter? What has happened to the critical faculty within the walls of learning? I
am sorry to have to say it, but the answer is ‘pure laziness.’ It is so much easier to run
through a couple of volumes of somebody else’s conclusions and be guided by them, than to
form one’s own by first-hand contact with works of art. And then, too, it opens one to an
awful danger. One may be wrong! Still, the world is growing, and humanists, no more than
scientists, can afford to live in an intellectual back-water.
The humanities are not yet a dead letter; one cannot push out of place something which
is daily proving itself an emotional force of profound importance. Granted that, as
taught, they might as well go, so might science if it taught that the world was flat.
Taught as they should be, imagination might once again assert its saving power over a
materialistic world.
The printed outline of work for the English Department of one of our high schools
begins with the following sentence: ‘The primary aim during the first year is to read
works of standard authors which, while quickening the imagination and presenting a strong
element of interest, shall reinforce the History and the Latin.’ Imagination in
parenthesis, that is the attitude of education to-day! And until it is once more
considered as worthy of being the end of a sentence and the end of an endeavour, education
will not be the harmonious and nicely balanced thing that perfect development presupposes.
From Amy Lowell, Poetry and Poets: Essays (New York: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1930) 30-58. Previously published in North American Review 206 (1917):
762-777.
WEARY VERSE
Review of Georgian Poetry, 1918-1919. Edited by E. M. New York:
G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
It is a profound labour to read this book. Not because, let me hastily say, there is
nothing good in it, but because it is all so dreadfully tired.
Is this the exhaustion of the war, or is it the debility of an old habit of mind
deprived of the stimulus of a new inspiration? It is an interesting question, for the
fatigue is undeniable. Here are nineteen poets, in the heyday of their creating years, and
scarcely one of them seems to have energy enough to see personally or forge a manner out
of his own, natural speech. They are all respectable poets, each knows his trade and can
turn out good enough verse on an old model, but how strangely one man’s contribution
dovetails into the next man’s! This is happily not true of all, but it is true of the
majority. Try it—for instance, who wrote this
But this shall be the end of my delight:
That you, my lovely one, shall stoop and see
Your image in the mirrored beauty there.
And did the same man write this?
And Cleopatra’s eyes, that hour they shone
The brighter for a pearl she drank to prove
How poor it was compared to her rich love:
But when I look on thee, love, thou dost give
Substance to those fine ghosts, and make them live.
Is this he again, or another?
Thy hand my hand,
Thine eyes my eyes,
All of thee
Caught and confused with me:
My hand thy hand,
My eyes thine eyes,
All of me Sunken and discovered anew in thee.
And who is responsible for this?
Dear Love, whose strength no pedantry can stir
Whether in thine iron enemies,
Or in thine own strayed follower
Bemused with subtleties and sophistries,
Now dost thou rule the garden…
If the reader will play fairly and guess a bit, I think he will find himself
sufficiently bewildered. The answer to the riddle is purely arbitrary. The book says that
Francis Brett Young is the author of the first quotation and the other names, in order,
read: W. H. Davies, John Freeman, and Edward Shanks. But, for all we can see to the
contrary, the names might be jumbled about in any order without causing the slightest
confusion in style or attitude.
The reason is quite plain, Mr. Young, Mr. Davies, Mr. Freeman, Mr. Shanks are merely
taking the place of our old friends Brown, Jones, and Robinson, or, to telescope the whole
after the manner of a composite photograph, we might name them collectively John Doe. In
other words, these gentlemen are not writing at all, it is their poetic ancestors who are
writing, they have made themselves ouija boards for the recrudescence of a dead song.
There are notable exceptions to this, I am glad to say, and I shall come to them later,
but on the whole, the book seems pale and spectre-like, haunted by the ghosts of England’s
vanished bards.
There is really no excuse for this, for even if these English poets choose to ignore
the fresh vigour of American poetry, they have Masefield in England, and Ralph Hodgson,
and Aldington, and Sassoon. It is stuff and nonsense to try and raise such echoes into the
dignity of a poetic creed as Mr. Squire and Mr. Shanks are constantly trying to do. All
literature is against them; good poets are not echoes, and never were, and that is the
long and the short of it. I am told that Mr. T. S. Eliot is having a great influence in
England and, although I am not a complete admirer of Mr. Eliot’s style, I can well believe
that he is needed in a country where Mr. Young stalks abroad mellifluously bemoaning the
duress of poethood in such a new and striking phrase as: ‘Whither, 0 my sweet mistress,
must I follow thee?’ His own words, farther on in the same poem, are more than portrait;
they are prophecy: ‘The pillared halls of Sleep echoed my ghostly tread,’
He is a wonder, this Mr. Young, I can hardly tear myself away from him. What a memory