322 Mr. Laurence Binyon [May 31, 



around him. Far easier was it for the poet who lived in a more 

 circumscribed society, in a smaller world, where his relation to his 

 public was definite and assured. The limitation to an expected cycle 

 of subjects concentrated his energy into certain channels, and gave 

 it force and volume. The Greek tragedians worked in those condi- 

 tions. But in times like ours the poet has to establish a relation 

 with his audience, an audience potentially vast but actually vague. 

 He seeks a theme which, in Shelley's words, shall be relative to the 

 age, and in practice he finds that a hard quest. 



If he consults the public, the public will probably say to him : 

 Surely the present is more interesting than the past. Why not boldly 

 take your theme from the life we are living now ? I agree that no time 

 is more interesting than the present ; and I think most poets would 

 like, if they could, to create something splendid and significant out 

 of it. Perhaps some day it will be done. But for the land of 

 poem of which I am speaking, a concrete poem, whether narrative or 

 ostensibly dramatic in form, there are disabling conditions in a purely 

 contemporary theme. Two great modern poets. Whitman and 

 Yerhaeren, have sung the actual scene before them ; and they have 

 given us eyes to see realities, ignored and despised as ugly, Avith a 

 new illumination. Yerhaeren has made wonderful j^oetry out of that 

 great and disturbing phenomenon of our times, the flight from the 

 country to the towns ; he sees it as a kind of elemental struggle 

 between two forces. But Yerhaeren does this by means of separate 

 poems, lyrical in form, which make up a sort of whole, it is true, but 

 are not the same as a single coherent and concrete creation. And 

 Whitman, too, is lyrical from beginning to end. He seems to be 

 always announcing the new great poem of democracy, which never 

 actually comes. It is open to anyone to say that forms like the epic 

 are dead, and that the type of poetry which we find in AVhitman or 

 Yerhaeren, or some other, has taken its place. But the creative 

 instinct in poets will, I think, always urge them at least to attempt 

 something more, to deal with character in action on the grand scale. 



Now, for one thing, modern life, and especially modern demo- 

 cratic life, does not tend to throw up great characters in relief, 

 rather it submerges them in the stream. And poetry like Whitman's 

 is almost entirely concerned with the variegated mass of average 

 men and women ; it is indiscriminate and anonymous. Before the 

 war we might, perhaps, have been apt to scoff at Whitman's glori- 

 fication of the average man. We saw him as we met him in the 

 ordinary ways of life, and found him uninteresting. But it is the 

 average man who is the hero of this war ; there is no doubt of that. 

 He it is who has given us a new reverence for common humanity ; 

 what he has l)orne and done surpasses imagination to conceive. Yet 

 it is just the numbers, the namelessness, of the common man that 

 so deeply impress us. And if the poet takes him for a hero — I 

 am speaking now from the practical point of view — what is he to do ? 



