Among earnest social workers poetry is gaining
a recognition that few anticipated. The reformer
of the past was an orator who preferred the longer
sentences of the pulpit to the concise expression
of the poet. Oratory is in the mouth of the
speaker; rimes in the heart of the singer. The
one must be constantly repeated to be effective;
the other, living in its own right, soon gets beyond
the control of its maker, and creates a perpetual
harvest wherever it is blown. This revival
of poetry has been encouraged by The Survey,
which recently printed a collection of social
hymns. The same tendency is everywhere visible,
and means a return to older modes of emotional
expression combined with intense modern feelings.
If this movement in poetic expression did not
have a double trend, it might be left to work out
its own salvation; but the contrast between the
two tendencies is too marked not to arrest attention.
What is poetry, after all? Merely a survival,
a relic of older modes of thought, something
seeking expression only when deep-seated passions
are occasionally revived; or is it a living,
present force, an effective weapon of social reform?
Few people can resist the impulse to write
verse. Does this tendency and the interest it reflects
indicate the presence of a concealed giant
who could pull loads, or is it a mere survival of
an old habit, like looking at a new moon over the
shoulder to see what the luck is to be?
A question will help to make the issue clear.
Is the function of poetry to create the emotion
by which the day's work is done, as well as to
serve as a relaxation for tired reformers when
work is ended? Should we read poetry upon
rising to get heart, or only at eventide to relax
the tired mind? Is poetry to be put in the class
with golf and solitaire, or with dynamos and
rapid-firing guns? Ornamental art belongs in
one class, functional art in the other. Poets who
continue to describe Amazons and mermaids and
bring us “news from nowhere” should write at
night to relieve the monotony of the day, and
what they write will have effect only by the relaxation
it makes possible. But truly functional
poetry shoots farther than any gun and cuts
deeper than the sharpest knife. It goes ahead
of the reformer and wakes the world to an appreciation
of what he is doing. It works while he
sleeps and enters a thousand minds into which
his dry details and monotonous lament could find
no entrance. And in this sense is not effectiveness
of thought a beauty as well as its form?
As we decide this question we take sides not only
in poetry but in every field where thought and
life are striving for expression.
The dominance of the older view is plain.
Millions of dollars are given to preserve old relics
and meaningless pictures, but scarcely a cent for
the artist whose soul throbs with American life.
When new buildings are erected the old conventions
are used; no attempt is made to picture the
new. The decorations of the public library of
Boston, for example, are a mass of symbols to be
deciphered only by the initiated. The one object
that can be recognized without the aid of a
guidebook is a telegraph pole. In the Congressional
Library at Washington the principal figures
of the mural decorations are short-skirted damsels,
who flit along the wall, such as War, Peace,
and other creatures of artistic fancy.
When will this epoch end, and art become related
to the day's work, furnishing a motive for
further output of energy? Not for a long time,
possibly, in decoration; but there is no reason
why its passing should be delayed in song-making.
Here the motive for new expression is
strong, and the avenues for reaching a public so
many, that no force can prevent good poetry from
reaching its audience. All virile thought, whether
poetic or not, is at first functional with a meaning
and an end. Only when this thought is expressed
and other advances are being made, does
its treatment become a mere avocation for those
left behind in the march of events.
Conventional art is too often merely a medley
of distorted, unusable concepts, whose only harmony
is that they make a good color scheme.
Poetry formed in the same manner becomes a collection
of mere platitudes, whose main virtue is
that they roll in the mouth. In the drama the
same spirit shows all sorts of paths toward degeneration,
but few by which men can rise. Are
color schemes, word pictures, frontal architecture,
and pathological plays all there is to art? If so,
art is a paradise for the lame and the lazy. But
to find a beauty in what one is doing makes it a
virile function in social movements. True art
comes when we are doing our best; when we are
in earnest; when we throw aside hindrances and
make every word, color, view, or line count. Today
cathedrals are ugly because they have no use,
and art galleries are dreary because artists think
only of color, legs, and weak-faced Madonnas.
The day of metaphor and word pictures is gone;
but the day of song has not passed. The new
poet must be more concise in expression and more
social in thought than his long-winded predecessors.
Song is the only means of appealing to the
love of musical harmony that is deep in every
breast.
There is no door to the soul so good as poetry.
This approach may be used by the reformer if he
will write poetry because he loves and needs it,
and not because his leisure hours are hard to fill.
His sentences must not merely roll along, but
must hit some object or arouse some deep emotion.
The end must dominate the form. It is
with these feelings that I have been looking
through the smoke, hoping that some one would
come in view to express what I feel. I think of
myself as a wordless poet—one who sees as a poet
should, but whose linguistic power is too limited
to express what I feel. I have said to myself
many times, “The coming generation will do
naturally, and do well, what we do with bungling
hands.” There are signs that this prayer will be
realized, and that the young are taking their
places on the firing-line with quickening zeal and
definite goals. Out of the rising generation must
come not only workers, but also singers; for who
can really work if he does not sing? This thought
is the basis of the hope that the verses of this
volume will help us feel, as well as help us work.
The smoke has its charm, as well as the clear sky,
and if its song is less articulate, it is more real.
The first poem of Mrs. Miller that I saw made
me feel that we had much in common. The present
volume more than convinces me that she has
opened up a new path for our emotions, through
which will come new life for all. May she not
only find readers, but may she be the forerunner
of poets who see through the smoke into the future
where all our treasures lie.
University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
March, 1914.
THE READING BLACKSMITH
FROM THE STATUE BY DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH,
NORTH SIDE, PITTSBURGH
