LXVI THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



influences were so strong in poetry as they are to-day. France and 

 Italy have, from the time of Chaucer, exerted an influence on the 

 literature of England. The influence is still evident, and to it is 

 added that of the Norse countries, of Russia and of Central Europe. 

 Oriental thought has touched English minds, and in one instance gave 

 to an English poet the groundwork for an expression in terms of final 

 beauty of the fatalistic view of life. Of late, mainly through the 

 work of French savants, the innumerable treasures of Chinese and 

 Japanese poetry have been disclosed and have led poets writing in 

 English to envy them the delicate touch, light as "airy air", and to 

 try to distill into our smaller verse forms that fugitive and breath- 

 like beauty. English poetry has due influence on the Continent, and 

 there is the constant inter-play of the truest internationalism, the 

 internationalism of ideals and of the ever-changing, ever-advancing 

 laws of the republic of beauty. National relations will be duly 

 influenced by this free interchange of poetic ideals, and the ready 

 accessibility of new and stimulating thought must eventually prevail 

 in mutual understanding. We can resolutely claim for Poetry a 

 vital connection with this Progress. 



In these relationships between Poetry and Progress, Poetry is 

 working in its natural medium as the servant of the imagination, not 

 as the servant of Progress. The imagination has always been con- 

 cerned with endeavours to harmonize life and to set up nobler con- 

 ditions of living; to picture perfect social states and to commend 

 them to the reason. The poet is the voice of the imagination, and 

 the art in which he works, apart from the conveyed message, is an 

 aid to the cause, for it is ever striving for perfection, so that the most 

 fragile lyric is a factor in human progress as well as the most profound 

 drama. The poets have felt their obligation to aid in this progress 

 and many of them have expressed it. The "miseries of the world 

 are misery and will not let them rest", and while it is only given to 

 the few in every age to crystalize the immortal truths, all poets are 

 engaged with the expression of truth. Working without conscious 

 plan and merely repeating to themselves, as it were, what they have 

 learnt of life from experience, or conveying the hints that intuition 

 has whispered to them, they awaken in countless souls sympathetic 

 vibrations of beauty and ideality: the hearer is charmed out of 

 himself, his personality dissolves in the ocean of feeling, his spirit is 

 consoled for sorrows which he cannot understand and fortified for 

 trials which he cannot foretell. This influence is the reward of the 

 poet and his beneficiaries have ever been generous in acknowledging 

 their debt. The voices are legion, but let me choose from the multi- 



