LXIV THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



of revolt has been performed inadequately, but it has served to show 

 us that our poetic utterance was becoming formalized. We require 

 more rage of our poets. We should like them to put to the proof that 

 saying of William Blake: "The tigers of wrath are wiser than the 

 horses of instruction". 



I may possibly have taken up too much time in referring to 

 modern tendencies in poetry, which are only ephemeral, and in com- 

 bating the claim, put forward with all gravity, to distinction that 

 flows from a new discovery. Already many of these fads have faded 

 or disappeared. The constancies of these bright spirits have expired 

 before their fashions. They are already absorbed with a new fad. 

 But let it pass, — modernity is not a fad, it is the feeling. for actuality. 



If I am ever to make good the title imposed on this address, I 

 must soon do so, and trace a connection between Poetry and Progress, 

 if there be any. Maybe we shall find that there is no connection, and 

 that they are independent, perhaps hostile. It is certain that Poetry 

 has no connection with material progress and with those advances 

 which we think of as specialties of modern life — the utilization of 

 electricity for example. Euripides living in his cave by the seashore, 

 nourished and clothed in the frugalist and simplest fashion, has told 

 us things about the human spirit and about our relation to the gods 

 which are still piercingly true. Dante's imagination was brooding 

 and intense within the mediaeval walls of Tuscany. Shakespeare, 

 when he lodged in Silver Street with the Mountjoy's, was discom- 

 fortably treated, judged by our standards, and yet he lives forever 

 in the minds of men. It is useless to elaborate this trite assertion; 

 if material progress, convenience, comfort, had any connection with 

 poetry, with expression, our poets would be as much superior to the 

 old poets as a nitrogen electric bulb is to a rush light. Poetry has 

 commerce with feeling and emotion, and the delight of Nausicaa as 

 she drove the mules in the high wain heaped with linen to the river 

 shore, was not less than the joy which the modern girl feels in rushing 

 her motor car along a stretch of tar-macadam. Nausicaa also was 

 free of her family for a while and felt akin to the gull that turned on 

 silver wing over the bay; felt the joy of control over the headstrong 

 mules, and the clean limbed maidens who tossed the ball by the 

 wine-dark sea. 



The feeling of delight is the thing, not its cause, and if there be 

 any progress in the art of poetry, it must be proved in the keenness 

 with which we feel the expression of the emotion. But the emotion 

 gives rise to correspondences. What were the trains of thought set 

 up in the Greek hearers who listened to the recital of that little 



