It is too early yet to appreciate feelingly or correctly the influence of the new European hostilities on the creative sphere of man's intellectual attainments such as art and poetry. Up to the present, it has been left to the cartoonist, with pointed thrust and forceful analysis outlined in design wedded to ideas, to portray the war free from deliberate pro-paganism. In the last war, it took years before the Rupert Brook school emerged telling its story of glorious sacrifice tinged with the futility of effort. Today, the modern attitude to the war is one of inevitability which leaves little scope for the play of artistic impulse. Mr Masefield, the Poet Laureate, unlike his predecesser whose muse refuse to be inspired by a national occasion, has published a verse in pamphlet form which he calls "Some Verses to Some Germans." In it, he emphasizes the mutual indebtedness of the English and the Germans in the sphere of art, and calls Beethoven and Shakespeare to witness:
For, in Vienna, while the thunder broke, And he, by sickness shaken, sank to death, These memorable words that Master spoke, "God bless the English" with his dying breath. And, of our Poet, we have heard you say "We call him 'Unser Shakespeare'; he is ours; We share him with you as we share the day, The night, the seasons and the happy hours,"
This may not be great poetry in the true sense of the word, but it does reveal a passion rarely found in a Poet Laureate's works. It tries to invoke an intellectual bond which Nazism is endeavouring to wreck by its criminal wantonness.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.