The emotionally
dying or dead; the men who have sunk themselves, their
personalities, their hopes, their happiness, in business or
scholarship or politics or sport--they, too, are often useful
citizens, and usually highly prosperous; but they would waste
their time upon literature of any variety, and especially upon
poetry.
There are a dozen good arguments, however, to prove that the
reading of poetry is good for the right kind of general reader,
who is neither defective nor dead in his emotions; and this means,
after all, a very large percentage of all readers. If I had space
I should use them all, for I realize that the convention we have
adopted for poetry makes us skip, in our magazines, as naturally
from story to story over the verse between as from stone to stone
across the brook. However, I choose only two, which seem to me as
convincing for the unpoetical reader (the dead and defective
excepted) as the ethical grandeur of poetry, let us say, for the
moralist, its beauty for the aesthete, its packed knowledge for the
scholar.
The first has often been urged before and far more often
overlooked. We everyday folk plod year after year through routine,
through fairly good or fairly bad, never quite realizing what we
are experiencing, never seeing life as a whole, or any part of it,
perhaps, in complete unity.
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