Letrer 10 My GRANDSON ON THE Gory or Enxeish Poetry. By Stephen' Coleridge. Mills and Boon.
These admirable letters were written. to stimulate the budding interest of the author's grandson in the glorious heritage of poetry which lies to the hands of the English-speaking peoples of today. They range the whole field from Shakespeare to Rudyard Kipling, including American, Canadian and Antipodean poetry, and are prodigal of quotation throughout. Their author is a man of wide reading and catholic tastes and he is not afraid to quote and to praise' many obscure and neglected poets.
His judgments are usually sound and always thoughtful. The only violence he permits himself is in his oblique and solitary reference to Free Verse "He (Bliss Carman) never prints prose in lines that do not uniformly reach the margin of the pages, and then put the legend 'Poetry' on the cover and tit age of his books." which is rather drastic criticism of the work of Walt Whitman, -Ezra Pound and other modernists.
Mr. Coleridge's sentimental bias 1s revealed by his approval of some stilted lines by F. E. Weatherley and of that masterpiece of sentimental song-writing '"The Rosary." He does not like Swinburne and one can but infer that he has never read "Atalanta in Calydon." It is disappointing, too, to find no reference.to "The Shropshire Lad" nor, in his letter upon elegiac poetry, to that supreme elegy But criticism of minor points in a comprehensive work of this kind is easy and perhaps inexpedient. It is more the duty of the reviewer to call attention to its beauty and use. (Mr. Coleridge has unearthed many "precious odds and ends that the world has neglected and forgotten."" The book would have been worth writing if only to call attention once again to that neglected poet, Austin Dobson. from one of whose poems we print three delicious verses "The ladies of St. James's Wear satin on their backs; They sit all night at Ombre With candles all of wax; But Phyilida, my Phyllid She dons her russet gow And rans to gather May Before the world is down "The ladies of St. James's!
They're painted to the Their white, it stays for ever; Their red, it never di But Phyllida, my Phyllida Her colour comes and goes; It trembles to a lily, It wavers to a rose."
"The ladies of St. James's!
They have their fits and freaks; They smile on you—for seconds, They frown on you—for weeks But Phyliida, my "Phyllida!
Come either storm or shine, From Shrovetide sto Shrovetide Is always true—and mine."
This little book should be in the possession of every boy or girl who shows any signs of appreciation of poetry at all, and can be read, with considerable pleasure and profit by their parents and grandparents.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.