As
children, most of us would have flushed before the beauty of a
sunrise on a tropic ocean, felt dimly if profoundly--and
forgotten. The poet--like the painter--has caught, has
interpreted, has preserved the experience, so that, like music, it
may be renewed. And he can perform that miracle for greater things
than sunrises. This, perhaps, is the best of all reasons why every
one except the emotionally senile should sometimes read poetry.
I know at least one honest Philistine who, unlike many
Philistines, has traveled through the Promised Land--and does not
like it. When his emotional friends talk sentimentalism and call
it literature, or his aesthetic acquaintances erect affectations
and call them art, he has the proper word of irony that brings
them back to food, money, and other verities. His voice haunts me
now, suggesting that, in spite of the reasons I have advanced, the
general reader can scarcely be expected to read modern poetry, and
that therefore his habit of skipping must continue. He would say
that most modern poetry is unreadable, at least by the average
man. He would say that if the infinitely complex study of
emotional mind-states that lies behind the poetry of Edwin
Arlington Robinson, or the eerie otherworldliness of Yeats, or the
harsh virility of Sandburg is to be regarded as an intensification
and clarification of experience, he begs to be excused.
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