"yngad10" - читать интересную книгу автора (Benet Stephen Vincent)

between the poet and the general public which has been developing
for half a century. The great mass of the reading world,
to whom the arts should minister, have now forgotten that poetry
is a consolation in times of doubt and peril, a beacon,
and "an ever-fixed mark" in a crazed and shifting world. Our poetry --
and I am speaking in particular of American poetry -- has been centrifugal;
our poets have broken up into smaller and ever smaller groups.
Individualism has triumphed.

To the general confusion, critics, if they may be said to have
existed at all, have added by their paltry conception of the art.
They have deemed it a sufficient denunciation of a poet to accuse him
of imitating his masters; as though the history of an art were rather
a series of violent rebellions than a growth and a progressive illumination.
Not all generations are privileged to see the working of a great
creative impulse, but the want, keen though it be, furnishes no reason
for the utter rejection of

A tremulous murmur from great days long dead.

But this fear of echoing the past may work us a yet greater misfortune.
In the rejection of the manner of an earlier epoch may be implicit also
the rejection of the very sources from which springs the life
of the fair art. Melody, and a love of the green earth,
and a yearning for God are of the very fabric of poetry, deny it who will.
The Muses still reign on Parnassus, wax the heathen never so furious.
Poets who love poetry better than their own fame in Grub Street
will do well to remember

The flame, the noble pageant of our life;
The burning seal that stamps man's high indenture
To vain attempt and most forlorn adventure;
Romance and purple seas, and toppling towns,
And the wind's valiance crying o'er the downs.

It is a poor business to find in such words only the illusions of youth and
a new enthusiasm. The desire for novelty, the passion for force and dirt,
and the hankering after freakishness of mood, which many have attempted
to substitute for the older and simpler things, are themselves
the best evidence of disillusion and jaded nerves. There is a weariness
and a disgust in our recent impatience with beauty which indicate too clearly
the exhaustion of our spiritual resources. It may well be that
the rebirth of poetry is to be manifest in a reappearance of the obvious, --
in a love of the sea and of the beauty of clouds, in the adventure of death
and the yet more amazing adventure of living, in a vital love of colour,
whether of the Orient or the drug-shop, in childlike love of melody,
and the cool cleansing of rain, in strange faces and old memories.
This, in the past, has been poetry, and this will be poetry again.
The singer who, out of a full heart, can offer to the world his vision
of its beauty, and out of a noble mind, his conception of its destiny,