He wants poetry that lifts
spacious times into spacious verse, poetry that "enlumynes," like
Petrarch's "rhetorike sweete," a race and a civilization. He
desires, in addition to what he is already getting, precisely that
poetry so universal in its subject-matter and its appeal, which
the general reader thinks he would read if he found it instead of
"lyrical subtleties" in his pages.
Well, they do not get it very abundantly to-day, let us admit the
fact freely. But the fault is not altogether the poets'. The fault
is in the intractable mediocrity of the age, which resists
transference into poetry as stiff clay resists the hoe of the
cultivator. The fault lies in the general reader himself, whose
very opposition to poetry because it _is_ poetry makes him a
difficult person to write for. Commercialized minds, given over to
convention, denying their sentiment and idealism, or wasting them
upon cheap and meretricious literature, do not make a good
audience. Our few poets in English who have possessed some
universality of appeal have had to make concessions. Kipling has
been the most popular among good English poets in our time; but he
has had to put journalism into much of his poetry in order to
succeed.
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