-8-

Prose does not suffer on account of the age
of the language as does poetry because it does not so
depend upon form, upon the sparkle and brilliancy of
words, the fitness and beauty of phrase. If a man has
an important idea he may express it in the plainest,
bluntest prose, and his message will carry; if he has
an interesting story to tell, he need but do so clearly
in prose, and it will be read; but if he should express
either in such style of poetry it would fall flat.

Another consideration to which as much thought
is not given as its importance demands is that the English
language has already a full supply of poetry. There are
some languages still deficient, but the English language
has poetry to spare. And, the worse for those who have
the ambition to mount Parnassus, so much of it is good
poetry; so much of it cannot be improved. It seems
that bygone poets of the language took no thought of pre-
sent day bards or they determined to forestall them; for
they said everything poetic in every conceivable way.
Many of the purely English subjects they completely ex-
hausted. I doubt that it is possible to add anything ori-
ginal or of value to English poetry by writing poems on
green meadows, or writing shepherd's songs, odes to night-
ingales, skylarks and daisies; Chaucer, Marlowe, Spencer,
Shelley, Keats, Burns and a host of others did their work
too well.

Poetry is primarily the language of the imagi-

-9-

nation; and we are not living in an imaginative age.

Science now reduces everything to cold and
solid facts; nothing is believed which cannot be proved.
Our age is distinctly prosaic, and prose is its
natural mode of expression.

Corinto,
Nicaragua.

1971.

"THE PASSING OF POETRY."

It is universally agreed that there has been
a decline in poetry as regards both its production and
its popularity; and this brings a wail of grief from
many critics. The causes generally assigned are:

There is a decay of the poetic faculty in
writers.

Poets now write with a view to pecuniary
gain.

The reading taste of the public has deteriorated.

These are not really causes; they are conditions; and only half the truth is conveyed by such a statement of them in this connection. To get at the kernel of the matter we must go beneath them in search of the reasons for their existence, if they do exist.

Is the poetic faculty in writers of the present day in a state of decay? I think not; but the use of it is. The reason is not hard to find; a literary man, to-day, in order to get his message to the greatest number and to make a living, must write prose. The literary men of skill and training who, otherwise, would be writing the poetry of the age are writing the novels, the plays, the magazine articles and the newspaper edi-

2.

"THE PASSING OF POETRY."

torials.

The objection raised to the fact that poets
of our time do not despise pecuniary compensation I do
not consider germane; such a condition has always ex-
isted. All of the great poets from Homer on down made
their living by means of their poetry; some of them,
notably Virgil and Shakespeare, made fortunes. There
have been a few exceptions. Byron, for instance, at
first, would not take the money because he didn't need
it, but pecuniary reward has not been the least power-
ful of the incentives that have spurred the pens of
poets. Some of the great poets did work, among their
best, which was written to stave off waiting creditors.
Whence came this notion that a poet can put forth his
highest and best effort only when he works for the love
of his art alone? That because his art lies chiefly
in the realm of imagination, his food, clothes and other
wants should also? Why should a poet write a less
worthy poem because he has vague visions of a publish-
or's check than a painter should execute a less worthy
portrait because he has a cash order from some rich pa-
tron? The idea is all a mistake; poetic exaltation
and anticipations of a check are not, by any means, in-

3.

"THE PASSING OF POETRY."

compatible emotions.

The deterioration of the reading taste of the public in generally put forth as a cause of the decline of poetry by the writers of poetry. Has the reading taste of the public deteriorated? Do you know why the Great Public reads at all, not only now, but why it has ever done so, from the time of cuneiform inscriptions and Egyptian hieroglyphics on down through the history of letters? The Great Public has always read and still reads for the sake of the story. By reading for the sake of the story I mean reading with an interest solely in what is told aside from any judgment upon or appreciation of the literary perfection of the telling or the realization of any deeper meaning under the narration. It is a common error to suppose that all readers of former generations poэred over the classics because they knew them to be classics, and because their cultured minds hungered for them and would not be satisfied with less; that as they read they paused to better enjoy the beauties of the rhetoric, to closer follow the lines and circles of the logic and, as it were, to run their mental fingers with a smile of appreciation over the keen edge of the wit. The truth is, the Great Public

4.

"THE PASSING OF POETRY."

of former generations read the classics just as children
read "Gulliver's Travels"—for the sake of the story;
and the classics which did not contain an interesting
story were not very generally read.

There are few people who will dispute the
statement that for the direct and vivid narration of a
story pure and simple prose is superior to poetry; so,
the Great Public of the present time prefers to read
its stories in prose. But before the use and per-
fection of prose for story telling the world's stories
were all told in verse; then the Great Public read
poetry. The boys of Athens undoubtedly stole time
away from their tasks and duties to read the deeds of
Achilles, Agamemnon and Ulysses; but not because they
had any premonition that Homer's works would be revered
by us as almost sacred, but because the poems contained
for them the equivalent of the Wild West and Rolling
Sea stories of to-day. A reader from the Great Public
will read poetry of the highest order if it contains an
interesting story which he can extract; but when he en-
counters faint and delicate shading of words, lofty im-
ages and involved rhetorical beauties he becomes con-
fused, his mind is lost in the labyrinth, and it is only

5.

"THE PASSING OF POETRY."

with difficulty that he flounders on to find the course
of the story. The most elementary reader would be in-
terested in the narrative of Shakespeare's "Romeo and
Juliet," but such frequent passages as the one in which
Romeo, in order to tell Juliet that day is breaking and
he had better be going, says,

"Night's candles are burned out, and joond day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top."

would be to him like hurdles set purposely in his path.
If such a reader should take up a poem in which was
discussed weighty questions of morals and philosophy,
to use plain words, it would make him tired, and he'd
put the book down.

The people who read not merely for the sake of
the story have always been and still remain relatively
few. And the literary men of to-day, having in their
possession a more direct and effective means of inter-
esting the masses in their stories, whether they be of
love, of a new invention, of politics or of war, have
dropped meter and rime for plain prose.

But what of the few who have literary taste
and discernment; do they not read current poetry?
Ought not our numerous universities, colleges, normal
and high schools furnish an audience sufficient for

6.

"THE PASSING OF POETRY."

the author who might wish not merely to tell his story,
but to adorn, to embellish, to beautify, to idealize it?
There is reason to believe that the general standard of
the reading public is being raised, that the proportion
of readers of literary taste and discernment is increas-
ing, and that there is a growing number of people who
can and do read poetry understandingly and appreciative-
ly, from the ancient classics through the English clas-
sics; but there are reasons why present day poetry does
not appeal to them.—Those who expect me to offer as a
reason, that this poetry is so bad, will be disappointed;
for in my estimation much of it is as good as some which
has gained a place on the shelves of fame.— But much of
the mechanism of poetry is worn and exhausted. Its
chief piece of machinery, the imagination, has become
dull. It was imagination exercised upon the unknown
which contributed charm and power to the poetry of the
ancients — in poetry the thing imagined is always more
potent than the actuality. But what the ancients im-
agined we have in reality; and our realities exceed
their imaginings. The things they imagined we can see
and put our hands upon. They have become common-place;
reality takes the edge off of wonder. Vulcan's glow-

7.

"THE PASSING OF POETRY."

ing forge is but a feeble flame compared to a modern
steel mill. Jove's awful, death-dealing thunderbolts
are but playthings compared to our twelve-inch guns;
of his forked lightnings we have made household ser-
vants. The description of the whirling rush of chari-
ots of war fails to grip us to whom dragon-eyed auto-
mobiles speeding through our streets at forty miles an
hour are an ordinary sight. The sea is no longer an
unexplored mystery; we have ruled it off into squares.
There are for us no strange and unknown lands where
dwell men with heads growing from under their arms; we
have counted the inhabitants of the whole earth. It
is not worth the effort of any poet to to-day to go to
mythology and the unknown, once the chief store-houses
of poetic material.

Not only is much of the mechanism of ancient
and middle poetry worn, but, a fact more vitally impor-
tant to the aspiring poet, our language has grown old;
the words have been turned and dusted and brushed until
the nap is worn off. Ah! if the different nationali-
ties that assembled on this continent and founded the
American State had only formed a new language, then we
should have been able to produce a literature to rival

8.

"THE PASSING OF POETRY."

that of Antiquity or the Renaissance. The English race,
with its wonderful genius for poetry, given a fresh
language, one that had not been worked and explored,
one in which an imaginative mind might experience the
thrills of making discoveries, would produce another
Spencer, another Dryden, perhaps, another Shakespeare.
Prose does not suffer on account of the age of the lan-
guage as does poetry because it does not so depend upon
form, upon the sparkle and brilliancy of words, the fit-
ness and beauty of phrase. If a man has an important
idea he may express it in the plainest, bluntest prose,
and his message will carry; if he has an interesting
story to tell, he need but do so clearly in prose, and
it will be read; but if he should express either in
such style of poetry it would fall flat.

Another consideration to which as much thought
is not given as its importance demands is that the Eng-
lish language has already a full supply of poetry. There
are some languages still deficient, but the English lan-
guage has poetry to spare. And, the worse for those
who have the ambition to mount Parnassus, so much of it
is good poetry; so much of it cannot be improved. It
seems that bygone poets of the language took no thought

9.

"THE PASSING OF POETRY."

of present day bards or they determined to forestall
them; for they said everything poetic in every conceivable poetic way. Many of the purely English subjects
they completely exhausted. I doubt that it is possible to add anything original or of value to English
poetry by writing poems on green meadows, shepherds' songs, odes to nightingales, skylarks and daisies;
Chaucer, Marlowe, Spencer, Shelley, Keats, Burns and
a host of others did their work too well.

Poetry is primarily the language of the imagination; and we are not living in an imaginative age.
Science now reduces everything to cold and solid facts;
nothing is believed which cannot be proven. Our age
is distinctly prosaic, and prose is its natural mode of
expression.