Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

MR BAILEY opens well with his suggestion, in “The Function of Poetry,” that, in spite of Mr Churton Collins’ plea for greater seriousness in the study of poetry, it is now taken a little too seriously. Poets “take themselves seriously, and are so taken by others,” but “they are now no more popular than other serious things or people.” Here, of course, is a two-edged sword; but it is intended, perhaps not without reason, for the poet and his readers rather than for the frivolous and inattentive public. In this vein there is an excellent appreciation of Scott as a poet, at whose coming “Poetry leapt at one bound out of the silence of the scholar’s closet, and out of the secrecy of the lonely walks, to mount the soldier’s saddle, to climb the hill with the sportsman, to run races in the wind with the schoolboy.” But the best essays in the book are probably those in which the subject may be and is taken most seriously - those namely, on “Wordsworth’s Creed” and on “Shakespeare’s Tragedies.” And it is significant, though it is perhaps merely an unfortunate accident, that there are no essays upon Burns or Byron.
 
If these omissions are not accidental they are possibly explained by the essays upon Keats and Shelley. Mr Bailey, as befits a Times reviewer, and perhaps because of his mild reaction to “serious things,” is a critic in whose breast the revolutionary note finds no very true response. To the patriotic notes, to “the great Wellington Ode,” or to Scott’s lines upon Pitt, Mr Bailey responds with fervour. But Byron upon Wellington, or on Pitt, the gainer by comparison, who “as a high-soul’d minister of State is renown’d for ruining Great Britain gratis “—Byron would be less acceptable. And even Shelley presents the Times reviewer with a serious problem. We have a grave tribute to the “Bohemians who have sometimes imprudently claimed the severe and ascetic Shelley as belonging to their company”; we have an elaborate pyschological explanation of “the one grave blot on a very beautiful character” to the effect that “heights are apt to involve depths,” and so on; but the real explanation is contemptuously dismissed with the remark that Shelley was “as ignorantly confident as Rousseau that vice, instead of being curbed by human institutions, was simply caused by them.”
 
So much for Shelley and Rousseau and Milton and Burns and Byron; but even in his estimate of a poet so apparently harmless as Keats Mr Bailey is strangely blinded by this defect of sympathy with the rebel that is in every poet. The “peculiar gift” of Keats, he tells us, was that “of serious hearts everywhere.” - Was it ? - Did Keats see beauty in

“The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here where men sit and hear each other groan”?

Did he see beauty in “torched mines and noisy factories” or in the operations of moneygrubbers “half ignorant" who turned "an easywheel that set sharp racks at work to pinch and peel”? Was it not rather from a world of modern cities and men where he could see beauty nowhere, that he turned to his “waking dreams” of wild nature, or of the happier past? Mr Bailey finds the last two lines of “The Grecian Urn” and their “high doctrine” very consoling, but what of the preceding and greater, though so much less quoted lines of the great Ode:

                                     “Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste
Thou shalt remain in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man—"

Why should the early mementoes of a happier past remain for ever in the midst of woe? Might not the dreams of the poets and prophets be realized at last if only we had hemlock or lethe for the people who “see beauty everywhere” and necessity in all existing institutions?