NEW AND APPROPRIATE NAME FOR MODERN PUGILISM.—The "Nobble" Art.
THE BURIAL OF THE "BROAD-GAUGE."
STUDIES IN THE NEW POETRY.
The world is of course aware by this time that a New Poetry has arisen, and has asserted itself by the mouths of many loud-voiced "boomers." It has been Mr. Punch's good fortune to secure several specimens of this new product, not through the intervention of middle men, but from the manufacturers themselves. He proposes to publish them for the benefit and enlightenment of his readers. But first a word of warning. There are perhaps some who believe that a poem should not only express high and noble thoughts, or recount great deeds, but that it should do so in verse that is musical, cadenced, rhythmical, instinct with grace, and reserved rather than boisterous. If any such there be, let them know at once that they are hopelessly old-fashioned. The New Poetry in its highest expression banishes form, regularity and rhythm, and treats rhyme with unexampled barbarity. Here and there, it is true, rhymes get paired off quite happily in the conventional manner, but directly afterwards you may come upon a poor weak little rhyme who will cry in vain for his mate through half a dozen interloping lines. Indeed, cases have been known of rhymes that have been left on a sort of desert island of a verse, and have never been fetched away. And sometimes when the lines have got chopped very short, the rhymes have tumbled overboard altogether. That is really what is meant by "impressionism" in poetry carried to its highest excellence. There are, of course, other forms of the New Poetry. There is the "blustering, hob-nailed" variety which clatters up and down with immense noise, elbows you here, and kicks you there, and if it finds a pardonable weakness strolling about in the middle of the street, immediately knocks it down and tramples upon it. Then too there is the "coarse, but manly" kind which swears by the great god, Jingo, and keeps a large stock of spread eagles always ready to swoop and tear without the least provocation.