My business (I remind myself) behind the window is not to scribble verses: my business, or a part of it, is to criticise poetry, which involves reading poetry. But why should anyone read poetry in these days?
Well, one answer is that nobody does.
I look around my shelves and, brushing this answer aside as flippant, change the form of my question. Why do we read poetry? What do we find that it does for us? We take to it (I presume) some natural need, and it answers that need. But what is the need? And how does poetry answer it?
Clearly it is not a need of knowledge, or of what we usually understand by knowledge. We do not go to a poem as we go to a work on Chemistry or Physics, to add to our knowledge of the world about us. For example, Keats' glorious lines to the Nightingale—
"Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird…"
"Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird…"
Are unchallengeable poetry; but they add nothing to our stock of information. Indeed, as Mr. Bridges pointed out the other day, the information they contain is mostly inaccurate or fanciful. Man is, as a matter of fact, quite as immortal as a nightingale in every sense but that of sameness. And as for:
"Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faëry lands forlorn,"
"Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faëry lands forlorn,"
Science tells us that no such things exist in this or any other ascertained world. So, when Tennyson tells us that birds in the high Hall garden were crying, "Maud, Maud, Maud," or that: