Page:Some soldier poets.djvu/13

Rh Poetry is more profound and significant than prose, wiser and weightier, at once more primitive and more refined; for the fashion of this world passes, but the moods of that remain. They build with durable, precious materials which, though invisible, are stronger and tougher than steel, and more difficult than radium to account for. The poet is not the odd sheepish person whom his friends know, but the worthy playmate of Polyhymnia. In fact the wider the difference the freer the poet is from personal taint. Some "nice man" was Shakespeare to his London, but our Shakespeare was and still is more imposing than Lord Verulam, yet never could be met in any street.

What is poetry? Why do youths love it? To read verse and watch young men answers both questions, but who shall sum those answers up in words? One at present fashionable answer may be worth combating so as to set off the largeness and vigour of that apparent truth which defeats the tongue. Why do young men write verse? They want to express themselves, their own sense of things. This answer only shows how deeply the fallacy of impressionism has sophisticated modern æsthetic thought. No one escapes. The impressionist looks upon his individual peculiarities as the source of value. He offers to exploit the Peru of his mind for the benefit of the world. He would work it with scientific nicety, or else record the whimseys of feeling, seeing and thinking to which he is subject when most alarmingly unlike other men, and thinks thus to add new facts to our knowledge, enlarge our experience. He does, but Apollo is not interested in his wonders as glimpsed from a garret. "Intolerably severe" he has frowned on these votaries who are content with what they see. He smiles on those who, forgetting themselves, follow his splendour into the open. Their worship can never enough divest itself, not only of walls and roof, but of coat and shirt, so as to feel his glory with every pore. Rh