POETIC CRITICISM
SIR,—I did not wish to interevene in this correspondence; Mr. Davie's intelligent, un- favourable review pointed out faults I can correct, and I therefore found it helpful and stimulating. For the record, however, I should say that I was not consciously intending to compare Lionel Johnson and Kipling at all (I give Kipling more space and obviously think him more important). But, of course, if there had to be a choice—and there is a wide range of other models—I do think Horace a better model for poets than the hymn-book. A hymn is not primarily a poem at all. It is a piece of writing in verse with a design on us. It is meant to be sung, not said, or read. It pre- sumes the absence of a critical or questioning mind in those who sing it, and it has rarely much breadth or depth of human interest since it usually consists of rhetorical variations on fragments of dogmatic theology. A phrase like " washed in the blood of the. Lamb," for instance, is effective in a hymn, since it vividly summarises one version of the doctrine of the Atonement. But the phrase would be repulsive and unnatural in a poem, since it would make us realise to ourselves imagina- tively the idea of washing in the blood of an actual lamb. Considerations of this sort, I think, disqualify very many hymns as poems. Some hymns do happen to be poems, but no hymn is the worse for not being a poem. And when a poem is written in the manner of a hymn, as some of Kipling's are, we feel that the poet is unfairly " getting at us," trying to get behind our critical guard, and we have a sense of strain and falsity. No doubt there are also objections to poets imitating Horace (though the successful imitators of Horace in- clude Marvell and Pope); I cannot persuade myself that they are quite so weighty as these objections of mine to substituting Hymns Ancient and Modern for that classical literature of the Mediterranean world to which iny friends on Colonnade are so " puzzlingly " attached.—Yours faithfully, a. S. FRASER.
75 Beaufort Mansions, S.W.3.
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