On Wednesday Lord Halal:airy opened the Winter Session of the
Royal Society of Literature by an interesting paper on poetry. The drift was rather to minimise (we think, even excessively) the significance of metre and rhyme, and to treat prose as in a very large degree the instrument of poetic thought. No doubt it is, but rhythm and rhyme add so much, not merely by charming the ear, but by defining the form, and bringing out the mutual relations and adaptations of the various elements in all imaginative conceptions, that we do think poetic thought without rhythm and rhyme, is like a soul without a body, a wandering spirit seeking in vain for any adequate organ of expression. Lord Halsbury concluded with a very just and wise attack on sensual poetry, in which the sensual element drowns the true ideal spirit of poetry. Doubtless it is true that poetry is essentially one of the upward forces of our nature, and that when its magic is used to lay to sleep or paralyse those upward impulses, there is a painful consciousness of perversion,—of the abuse of a divine gift,—as if wings were used only to help in crawling on the earth, or to stimulate the appetites. We should have liked a fuller report of Lord Ha1sbury's interesting address.
Previous page
