Such minds demand poetry prevailingly, just as
the average reader demands prose prevailingly. They profit by
prose now and then, just as, occasionally, he profits by poetry.
We talk so much of the enormous growth of the mass of average
readers in recent years that we forget the corresponding growth in
the number of individualities that are not average. Much modern
poetry is written for such readers, for men and women whose minds
are sensitive to intricate emotional experience, who can and do
respond to otherworldliness, to the subtly romantic, the finely
aesthetic, and the intricately ideal. They deserve whatever poetry
they may desire.
The important point to note is that they do not get it. It is
they--far more than the Philistines--who complain that modern
poetry is insufficient for their needs. The highly personal lyric
is probably more perfected, more abundant, and more poignant in
its appeal to living minds now than ever before in the history of
our civilization. But it occupies only one province of poetry. A
lover of poetry desires, far more keenly than the general reader,
to have verse of his own day that is more Shakespearian, more
Miltonic, more Sophoclean than this.
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