To the Editor of the "Norni-Cuiwa Dany News"
Sm—A large section of the local English-speaking population has followed with some interest the amusing controversy that has been going on, in your columns, in poetry and doggerel.
It is universally "admitted that Poetry, like each of the fine arts, has field of its own. It existed tong before Chaucer and it has existed throughout the history of the so-called latin countries, Since Aristotle there has never been a time at which there were not a considerable number of people who cultivated the art. Its following tends also to be very unevenly distributed among students of different types and ages. How it rrenets on men and women respectively depends mainly on the temperament which it chiefly affects. Of far more significance Is the incidence of the oration on students of different ages. 'There ds evidenty little interest taken it by. juveniles, to whom the ination of verse does not go beyond the elements of rhyme and stress, Around the mulberry bush they swing), rau and sing. But if recent school records fare any' Indication of the fact, poetry hag lost none of its attractiveness: among adolescents. As media of expression, however, the different kinds fof verse may be disastrous for the adolescent literary drudge and may undermine his productive capacity for the rest of his. life, unless proper measures are taken' to keep him in good trim, from the very start, through the provision of training and educational facilities, It follows that once the embryo oct is allowed to give expression to his exuberance without a. sufficient Knowledge of grammar and prosody, the harder will It'become for him to reach that, stage of relative achieve. ment which is the ultima Thule of poetic ambition, As Bliss Perry puts Ite "Poetry fulals a social purpose, function is social consolidation. And like all other social. structures, unless the fundamentals are properly dd, the edifice is likely to crumble, when least expected, never to rise We have naturally to look at poetry from more than one point of view. How far, we might ask, does, th provide for a suflciency of income? How far does it make for happiness and well-being? 1 must Teave it to all who are interested in this subject the questions. The point, one. of the points, 1 wish to make fs, that there is a gulf between classic poetry—the triumph of structural imagination—and that species of free verse which refuses to conform to the principles of poetics or subdue its flights toa sense of law and harmony, leven had a bit of verse printed on {the front page of the Magazine Supplement (although this was a "command performance"), but today realise that my metier would be more fin the line of verse, with a striving te the funny side; I suggest he take up knitting.
his loiter, J.M: T. quotes on no) fess than two occasions from "Bliss Perry, a Professor of English literati lure?" I take it that Mr, Perry is not poet of much repute; at all events, his name does not appear in any of four or five anthologies now lying Jon my desk, That does not, of course, ule out his opinions as unworthy of countenance or hearing, but in all fairness to the great field of modern poetry it should be pointed out that the Perrys are definitely' in the minority. Alow me to quote briefly from Philip Henderson, a modern poet jand editor of the "Golden Book of one were asked to 59 ins fow fds what were the" culet chai id Often ~extremely vest resi" the "worl, it poetry ig to bea ving Femote golden ages or cel repose fu her light to metaphyst Pertaining to the Georgian and me-@iaeval poets, may I ask if he has fever heard—and if he has heard, re anything by Walt Whitman, C. Day_ Lewis, Stephen Spender, TT. 8, Dist, Herbert Read, Wilfred Owen, J. C. [Squire, D. H. Lawrence or Gerald Manley Hopkins, to name but a few? It he has, 1 think he would realize that his gulf between classic poetry. Jand "that species of free verse which refuses to conform to the principles. of poetics or subdue its fights sense of law and harmony" is oppycock when applied to the works of poets such as thes His own verse is obviously not poetry—for it shows no signs of being ahead of its time, but is quite apparently derived from the works of the poets he read as a young man, About a year or so ago, a friend mine in England, who has published Jat least two extremely poignant novels as well as some of the finest verse showed me a fault then appar-lent in my poems:
It you, would not resent per hay ant thin i 1 ete As my own opinion is of tittle value, having been at times particeps eriminis, may I conclude these considerations with @ few lines, on the subject, by a Professor of English drum-be ays Perry, lies deep Mterature? "the instinct for the
down in our bodies; it' affects our mental life, the organization of our emotions and our response to the rhythmical arrangement of words. For mere ideas and words are not poetry but only part of the material for poetry. A poem does not come into being until the words begin to dance, It is the sound-value, for instance, which you perceive as you listen (9 a beautifully recited poem in Russian, a language of which you may not know a single word; and you may experience a modification of the same pleasure in closing your mind to the sense of a richly musical passage in Swinburne and delighting your ear by its mere beauty of tone."
Shanghai, Apr. 30, A Modernist's Point of View ours a ante feats ald Sethe
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.