[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Srn,—The correspondence in the
Spectator on this subject recalls my own experience with regard to the poetry of George Meredith. When first I began to read it I was often baffled by its contorted obscurity. But always gleams of beauty beckoned through the gloom, and I followed, faint, yet pursuing. Lines, phrases, stuck in one's memory ; gradually obscurities resolved into light. In time I learnt the poet's idiom.
That, surely, is what we have to do with modern poetry. To use Mr. Edward Carpenter's phrase in "Angels' Wings," the modern poets are trying to " enlarge the boundary of human expression." The old poetic forms have been brought • to the highest possible pitch of excellence by the great masters. And, as Mr. Carpenter points out, painters and musicians feel the same urge, the same impulse to break away from tradition ; they rightly chafe at limitations. Hence Walt Whitman, Millet, Wagner. There is no finality in the revelation of beauty, its evolution is continuous. New forms, new methods of expression are necessary ; each age, each generation finds its own. In order to understand and appreciate, we must learn this new idiom. Until we have done this, it is unfair to complain of obscurity.
We must read modern poetry in this spirit. It is largely 'experimental. We are too near to it to get its proper perspective ; only posterity can do that. To me much of it seems to fall short of the mark, but there is, at any rate, a residuum which has a chance of attaining immortality. In the meantime,let us " cherish the promise of its good intents."
I imagine that two hundred years hence a committee of super-superior persons met to decide who were the half dozen greatest British poets previous to 1923. If there were to be a sweepstake on the result, I must confess that I would rather 'draw Tennyson than—well, than any modern poet. But I, if not an old, am at any rate a middle-aged fogy.—I am,
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