Page:Poetry, a magazine of verse, Volume 7 (October 1915-March 1916).djvu/390

POETRY: A Magazine of Verse a large share of their inspiration not from life but from books, or from a passionate brooding upon the life of the past.

The subject of the poet and his audience has been worn almost threadbare in these pages, but it is a subject which, because of the gulf between them, will be eternally discussed. And the gulf is bridged in some sense whenever a poet wins his own particular audience, however small the little clan may be. But in a larger sense, and in the sense of Mr. Masefield's remarks, it seems to me that the poet will have his audience when he comes to his audience. Perhaps it was the attitude of the poet that changed with the "new learning." The early poet won his audience if need be, with a sword, or like Hanrahan, with his back to the wall. He did not shun life or any phase of life, and he did not build encrusted sentences in an archaic language which only a lettered man could understand.

As I listened to Mr. Masefield speaking before the Literary department of the Chicago Woman's Club, I could not help wishing that he were speaking to men—to the members of the Commercial Club or the City Club. I fear that I shall be accused of not being a good feminist, but I simply mean that poetry is a man's art as well as a woman's art, and that the poet ought to speak directly to men now as he did at the monks' tables, or in the lull between battles on the trodden held. And he ought to speak directly to men of action as well us men of meditative thought, to men to whom poetry is of life and action and not of books.