SEcTION II, 1916 [487] TRANS. R:S.C: 
The Poetry of To-day. 
By ARTHUR L. PHELPS. 
Presented by PELHAM EDGAR, Pu.D., F.R.S.C. 
(Read May Meeting 1916). 
There is an uninstructed kind of pleasure in which almost every 
age indulges itself. It is the pleasure obtained from saying: our 
age is the worst in the history of the world; of all times ours is the 
wickedest, most sordid, the least unrelieved by greatness and genius. 
This is a melancholy sort of pleasure indeed. Yet it is the indulgence 
throughout their lives of multitudes of people who, even though they 
do not admittedly honour them, accept the dictums of the cynics and 
the preacher-puritans. Quite the most unfortunate form of this 
pleasure is that form of it which pities and deplores the dearth of 
poetry and the poetic feeling. When an age is enjoying its lack of 
poets it has fallen near to the most unmitigated conditions of common- 
place. Of course every age survives its own disparagement. Every 
age is better than its cynics and its preacher-puritans would have all 
believe. But how unhappy the misfortune which separates a 
generation from its own greatness and genius, which makes it acknow- 
ledge greatness and genius only amid the glories of the past or in the 
dreams of the future. We honour Shelly and Wordsworth as great 
ones of the past; we imagine that in some far off future golden age 
other poets will be born. How devastating it is to our spiritual life 
to believe that there is no fine ecstasy to-day. Yet this is just what 
most of us do believe; and we believe it with an unthinking dull 
acquiescence which possesses most of the characteristics of spiritual 
stupidity. 
It is not the presumption of these pages to attempt to prove that 
we have Shakespeares or Miltons or even Tennysons to-day, or that 
our age is as rich as one age was in its gift of the Divine revelation. 
But it is the purpose of these pages to suggest that our age is not 
without that old imagination which makes men and women children of 
the Kingdom of Heaven, and that it is not without its prophets of 
that spiritual order. Some of these prophets are voices crying in 
the wilderness; some are working in our modern carpenter shops and 
attending our wedding feasts. They are talking to us in terms of 
our every day of things other than the things of every day. They 
