APPENDIX A LXV 



journey of Nausicaa to the swift running river with the family wash- 

 ing? We can imagine they were simple enough, and we can compare 

 them with the collateral ideas set up by the description of a journey 

 in a high-power car set forth in that profane poem on Heaven by one 

 of the moderns. The power of poetry has here expanded to include a 

 world unknown to Greek expression. Here is progress of a sort. 

 The poetry of the aeroplane has yet to be written, but, when it comes, 

 it will pass beyond the expressions of bird-fîight in the older poets 

 and will awaken images foreign to their states of feeling. Shakespeare 

 wrote of the flower that comes before the swallow dares and takes 

 the world with beauty. The aeroplane has a beauty and daring all 

 its own, and the future poet may associate that daring with some 

 transcendent flower to heighten its world-taking beauty. Here may 

 be found a claim for progress in poetry, that it has proved adequate 

 to its eternal task and gathers up the analogies and implications, the 

 movement and colour of modern life — not as yet in any supreme 

 way, but in a groping fashion. It is far-fetched to compare the work 

 of Homer to that of a lively modern — an immortal to one of those 

 who perish — but how many poets perished in the broad flood of 

 Homer? Immortal! The idea becomes vague and relative when 

 we think of the vestiges of great peoples, confused with the innumer- 

 able blown sand of deserts, or dissolved in the brine of oblivious 

 oceans, lost and irretrievable. Art is immortal, not the work of 

 its votaries, and the poets pass from hand to hand the torch of the 

 spirit, now a mere sparkling of light, now flaming gloriously, ever 

 deathless. 



If this be one contact between Poetry and Progress there may 

 be another in the spread of idealism, in the increase in the poetic 

 outlook on life, which is, I think, apparent. The appeal of poetry 

 has increased and the number of those seeking self-expression has 

 increased. The technique of the art is understood by many and 

 widely practised with varying success, but with an astonishing 

 control of form. This may be regretted in some quarters. One of 

 our distinguished poets was saying the other day that there are too 

 many of us,- — ^too many verse writers crowding one another to death. 

 My own complaint, if I have any, is not that we are too many, but 

 that we do not know enough. Our knowledge of ourselves and the 

 world about us and of the spirit of the age, the true spring of all deep 

 and noble and beautiful work, is inadequate. 



There is evidence of Progress in the growing freedom in the 

 commerce and exchange of ideas the world over. Poetic minds take 

 fire from one another, and there never was a time when international 



