William Stanley Braithwaite

Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1914 William Stanley Braithwaite

The modern idea seems to be that poetry has no relation to life. Life in the modern sense is action, progress, success. Poetry has been conceded special themes: it can deal with passion, -the strange and unnatural and unreal physical attraction of the sexes-with nature, with the symbols of mythology, and with the characteristic sentimental heroism of history and events. With reality, it must have nothing to do. It is supposed, by the modern world of Anglo-Saxon literalness, to create an atmosphere of illusion, which one must avoid to keep one's emotions from going astray in a civilization that needs the hardest kind of common sense. It is paradoxical that the English-speaking people who have given the world the greatest poets, should take this false attitude while in possession of the greatest spiritual and imaginative legacy of life and experience, bequeathed them from one generation to another during the last four hundred years