A Study of Poetry | Page 2

at my desk, wondering how to
begin the first chapter of this book about poetry. Outside the window a
woman is contentedly kneeling on the upturned brown earth of her
tulip-bed, patting lovingly with her trowel as she covers the bulbs for
next spring's blossoming. Does she know Katharine Tynan's verses
about "Planting Bulbs"? Probably not. But I find myself dropping the
procrastinating pen, and murmuring some of the lines:
"Setting my bulbs a-row
In cold earth under the grasses,
Till the
frost and the snow
Are gone and the Winter passes--

"Turning the sods and the clay
I think on the poor sad people

Hiding their dead away
In the churchyard, under the steeple.
"All poor women and men,
Broken-hearted and weeping,
Their
dead they call on in vain,
Quietly smiling and sleeping.
"Friends, now listen and hear,
Give over crying and grieving,
There
shall come a day and a year
When the dead shall be as the living.
"There shall come a call, a foot-fall,
And the golden trumpeters
blowing
Shall stir the dead with their call,
Bid them be rising and
going.
"Then in the daffodil weather,
Lover shall run to lover;
Friends all
trooping together;
Death and Winter be over.
"Laying my bulbs in the dark,
Visions have I of hereafter.
Lip to lip,
breast to breast, hark!
No more weeping, but laughter!"
Yet this is no way to start your chapter, suggests Conscience. Why do

you not write an opening paragraph, for better for worse, instead of
looking out of the window and quoting Katharine Tynan? And then it
flashes over me, in lieu of answer, that I have just discovered one way
of beginning the chapter, after all! For what I should like to do in this
book is to set forth in decent prose some of the strange potencies of
verse: its power, for instance, to seize upon a physical image like that
of a woman planting bulbs, and transmute it into a symbol of the
resurrection of the dead; its capacity for turning fact into truth and
brown earth into beauty; for remoulding the broken syllables of human
speech into sheer music; for lifting the mind, bowed down by wearying
thought and haunting fear, into a brooding ecstasy wherein weeping is
changed into laughter and autumnal premonitions of death into
assurance of life, and the narrow paths of individual experience are
widened into those illimitable spaces where the imagination rules.
Poetry does all this, assuredly. But how? And why? That is our
problem.
"The future of poetry is immense," declared Matthew Arnold, and there
are few lovers of literature who doubt his triumphant assertion. But the
past of poetry is immense also: impressive in its sheer bulk and in its
immemorial duration. At a period earlier than any recorded history,
poetry seems to have occupied the attention of men, and some of the
finest spirits in every race that has attained to civilization have devoted
themselves to its production, or at least given themselves freely to the
enjoyment of reciting and reading verse, and of meditating upon its
significance. A consciousness of this rich human background should
accompany each new endeavor to examine the facts about poetry and to
determine its essential nature. The facts are indeed somewhat
complicated, and the nature of poetry, in certain aspects of it, at least,
will remain as always a mystery. Yet in that very complication and
touch of mystery there is a fascination which has laid its spell upon
countless generations of men, and which has been deepened rather than
destroyed by the advance of science and the results of scholarship. The
study of folklore and comparative literature has helped to explain some
of the secrets of poetry; the psychological laboratory, the history of
criticism, the investigation of linguistics, the modern developments in
music and the other arts, have all contributed something to our

intelligent enjoyment of the art of poetry and to our sense of its
importance in the life of humanity. There is no field of inquiry where
the interrelations of knowledge are more acutely to be perceived. The
beginner in the study of poetry may at once comfort himself and
increase his zest by remembering that any real training which he has
already had in scientific observation, in the habit of analysis, in the
study of races and historic periods, in the use of languages, in the
practice or interpretation of any of the fine arts, or even in any bodily
exercise that has developed his sense of rhythm, will be of
ascertainable value to him in this new study.
But before attempting to apply his specific knowledge or aptitude to the
new field for investigation, he should be made aware of some of the
wider questions which the study of poetry involves. The first of these
questions has to do with the relations of the study of poetry to the
general field of