INTRODUCTION
The best poetry is always about the earth itself and all the strange and lovely things that compose and inhabit it. When a 'great poet' sets himself the task of some 'big theme' he needs only to hold, as it were, a magnifying glass to the earth. We who are born and live here like very much to imagine other worlds, and we have even mentally constructed such another in which to exist after dying on this one; but we were careful to make it a glorified version of our own earth, with everything we most love here intensified and improved to the utmost stretch of human imagination.
To each man his 'best poetry' is that which he is able most to enjoy. The first object of poetry is to give pleasure. Pleasure is various, but it cannot exist where the emotions or the imagination have not been powerfully stirred. Whether it be called sensual or intellectual, pleasure cannot be willed. It is impossible to feel happy because one wants to feel happy, or sad because one wishes to feel sad. But such bodily or mental conditions may be induced from outside through a natural agency such as poetry, or music.
Now those dreary people who would maintain that poetry should deal (some say exclusively) with what they call 'big themes,' or 'the larger life', are merely advocating more use of the magnifying glass as against intensive cultivation of the natural eye. The poet is essentially he who examines carefully, and learns to know fully, every detail of common life. He seeks to name in a variety of manners, and to define, the objects about him, to compare them with other objects, near or remote, and to find, for the mere sake of enjoyment, wonderful varieties of description and comparison. When he imagines better places than his earth, or invents gods, the impersonation and combination of the fortunate qualities in man, he is then using the magnifying glass with talent, occasionally with rare genius. But the poet who seeks, without genius, to magnify is simply a fool who sees everything too big, and boasts, in the loudest voice he can raise, of his diseased eyesight.
One of the peculiarities, or perhaps rather the essential quality, of the lyrical poetry of to-day is a minute concentration on the objects immediately near it and an anxious carefulness to describe these in the most appropriate and satisfactory terms. Thus it is often accused of a neglect to sublimate the emotions, and many critics have been at pains to suggest that this affection for the nearest and that careful description of natural events denotes a smallness of mental range. Be it noted, however, that the eye which does not look too far often sees most. It is remarkable that English lyrical poetry should have learnt in this period of religious uncertainty to clasp itself at least to a reality that cannot be questioned or doubted. So far its faith reaches. It expresses a trustfulness in what it can definitely perceive, it hardly ventures outside the circles of human daily experience, and in this capacity it reveals an excellence of many kinds, sincerity often, and, at worst, a playfulness which, if ephemeral, is amusing at any rate to those whom it is intended to amuse, and appropriately irritating to those whom it wants to annoy.
But the most noticeable characteristic of the verse of our present moment is its dislike of the aloofness generally associated with English poetry. About twice a century language consolidates: phrases which were once soft and new harden with use; words once of a ringing beauty become dry and hollow through excessive repetition. This state of language is not much noticed by people who have no special use for it beyond the expression of daily needs. Moreover, they make new colloquial words for themselves as required without forethought or difficulty. Poets, however, must consciously search for new words, and a tired condition of their language is to them a great difficulty. The Victorians were absolute spendthrifts of words: no vocabulary could keep pace with their recklessness; they bequeathed a language almost ruined for sentimental purposes—words and phrases had acquired either such an aloofness that for a long time no one any more would trouble to reach up to them, or had become so thin and common that to use them would have been something like hack-sawing a piece of cotton.
Now in the anthology which follows we may notice a characteristic escape from these difficulties. Words have been brought down from their high places and compelled into ordinary use. This has been accomplished not so much through any new familiarity with the words themselves as by a certain naturalness in the attitude of the people employing them. Rupert Brooke's "Great Lover" is an example.
In short, these are the chief reasons why present-day poetry is readable and entertaining—that it deals with familiar subjects in a familiar manner; that, in doing so, it uses ordinary words literally and as often as possible; that it is not aloof or pretentious; that it refuses to be bullied by tradition: its style, in fact, is itself.