LXII THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



been deaf to the stimulation of Music we can quote some of the 

 greatest who have been sensitive to it, — Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, 

 and I may quote the remark of Coleridge, made in 1833: "I could 

 write as good verses as ever I did if I were perfectly free from vexations 

 and were in the ad libitum hearing of fine music, which has a sensible 

 efïect in harmonizing my thoughts, and in animating and, as it were, 

 lubricating my inventive faculties". 



The leaders of what is called the "New Movement in Poetry" 

 have some ground for argument, but make unconvincing uses of it. 

 The most voluble centres of the New Movement are in the United 

 States, and the subject is pursued with all the energy and conviction 

 that we have learned to expect from the adoption of any cause to the 

 south of us. We must willingly confess that Americans are an art- 

 loving people, and that now they are immensely interested in all the 

 arts. From the first they were hospitable to foreign production and 

 absorbed all that was best in the work of other nationalities, and 

 lately they have grown confident of their native artists and reward 

 them with patronage and praise. 



The protagonists of the Modern Movement in Poetry are most 

 hospitable to the old poets; they are orthodox in their inclusions and 

 throw a net wide enough to catch all the masters of the art from the 

 earliest to the latest times. They approve of poets of our own day 

 who use the established verse-forms as well as the writers of vers- 

 libre and the innovators. Their quarrel, therefore, must be with the 

 poetasters, with the slavish imitators, with the purveyors of con- 

 ventional ideas and the innumerable composers of dead sonnets. But 

 these people have always been among us and have always been 

 intolerable to the children of light. The weariness they occasion is no 

 new experience. They at once fastened themselves on the New 

 Movement and welcomed vers-libre as the medium which would 

 prove them poets. In proclaiming freedom as the war cry of the 

 New Movement, the leaders admitted all the rebels against forms 

 which they had never succeeded in mastering, and while they poured 

 into vers-libre a vast amount of loose thinking and loose chatter, as if 

 freedom were to include license of all kinds, they were still unable to 

 master the form or prevail in any way except to bring it into con- 

 tempt. The avowed object of the Movement is "a heroic efïort to 

 get rid of obstacles that have hampered the poet and separated him 

 from his audience", and "to make the modern manifestations of 

 poetry less a matter of rules and formulae and more a thing of the 

 spirit and of organic as against imposed rhythm" . A praiseworthy ideal ! 

 But has the poet ever been separated from his audience? Can poetry 



