BEHOLD a phenomenon in our time, a poet who is popular, a poet who has descended from Parnassus to sit in the market place and sing for the mob, a poet who, damned by the litterati, has restored to the despised word “poetry,” some of the pristine glory it enjoyed in the morning of the world when the blind man of >Scios’ rocky isle was singing of the ten years war in Troy. I refer, of course, to Mr. Edgar Guest, whose effusions appear daily in I do not know how many hundred newspapers and whose books of verse actually find publishers to publish them and a public to buy them after they are published. A hardened old bookseller told me recently that no novel that he can recollect has had anything like the sale of Guest’s verse.

Let me placate the litterati at once by remarking that Mr. Guest’s poetry is of no more use to me than life insurance to a mummy. I have read a considerable quantity of it and am not going to attempt any critical analysis though I fancy this would be all too easy. I can quite understand why it appeals powerfully to yokels and waitresses and small clerks and plumbers. It deals with a few common and fundamental things such as birth and death, getting married and getting religion. It touches the primal emotions. It employs a few simple images, such as dolls and cradles and buggies and old dresses folded up in lavender. It clothes these things in words as simple and direct as the statement that pigs are pigs and it is sincere, make no mistake about that. Mr. Guest may not be a good poet, according to the standards of the litterati, he may even not be a poet at all, but he is not a conscious and deliberate charlatan.

Let me leave Mr. Guest to go his ain gait for awhile and run back over three centuries of English poetry. Perhaps I may discover what is wrong with poetry. I know one thing that is wrong with contemporary poetry: Poets, like women, are becoming much too intelligent. Now a poet has no more business being intelligent than a cow has to wear spats. I believe it is generally conceded that England has produced more good poetry than any of the continental nations, perhaps more than all of them put together. I will undertake to pack all the really first-class poetry in the English language, outside of Shakespeare, into a volume much smaller than the Golden Treasury. Of verse there is a plethora, a flood that makes the Mississippi look like a creek, but of poetry in the true sense there is remarkably little.

Speaking of Mr. Guest’s popularity, 1 can recall only two modern English poets who enjoyed a similar popularity; Kipling, a sort of sublimated Guest, who descended upon England out of the East, like some strange tropical bird, and sang himself into popularity by dressing what the average Englishman felt about a number of things, such as war and colonies and Russians and Hindoos, in vivid words arranged to rhythms that set the blood dancing, and Tennyson, who gave magnificent expression to the Englishman’s incurable fondness for morality. At the risk of being flayed alive by some surviving Victorian let me say boldly that two-thirds of Tennyson’s verse is neither better nor worse than Edgar Guest’s. To be sure the remaining third is quite splendid. Anyone who can read Marianne at the Haunted Grange, The Lotus Eaters, The Lady of Sha-lot, Rizpah, The Brook, Revenge and Ulysses, without feeling all the strange thrills that poetry was meant to produce is a “finished and finite clod, untroubled by a spark.” But it was not these lovely things that gave Tennyson his immense hold on the English middle class; it was the banal puerilities of Enoch Arden, the sentimental twaddle of In M emori an and the more than dubious mediaevalism of the Idylls.

Did Queen Victoria ever read The Idylls of the King? I doubt it. That wise and skeptical old sphinx had many a mental reservation that neither her ministers or the public knew anything about. I wonder why all her biographers, including Mr. Strachey, missed the true significance of her friendship for Disraeli? Dizzy’s outrageous flattery will not entirely account for it. There is enough evidence in the Queen’s letters and diaries to convince anyone with an atom of com-m^nsense that flattery alone would not have made her anybody’s friend. I suspect that she had few real friends. There is a note of insincerity in her “Dear Uncle Leopold,” and dear this and dear the other, but her friendship for Dizzy was genuine. I refuse to believe that a woman who could pick the Earl of Beaconsfield for a friend was stupid. It was the impact of a dominating intellect that drew the queen to the great Jew. To appreciate intelligence you must have a little of your own. Victoria may have had a narrow mind, a small mind, if you like, but she was far from being a fool. She made Tennyson a peer and by that step vastly increased his and her own popularity. I fancy there was a cynical smile at the corners of her heavy mouth when she signed the patent. Why did she never offer Browning a peerage? Because Browning never could have been popular and the queen was both a woman and a politician. Oh, I know exactly how peers are made, but do you suppose the Sovereign cannot honor a subject when he chooses?

Are there a hundred people in Canada who read Browning? Apart from students and college professors are there fifty? I enjoy him in moderation. I know my Browning from the first halting line of Pauline to the final Salvation Army-outburst of As-ollando. With the exception of such poems as May and Death, Evelyn Hope, Youth and Art and the Ride from Ghent to Aix, I could never read anything of Browning’s without fancying myself in a vaudeville theatre watching a skilful performer keep sixteen balls in the air and all in rapid motion at once. He is amazingly clever but of the strange intoxication that real poetry produces he gives me scarcely the premonitory symptoms. He is a splendid example of what the curse of too much intellect can do for a genuine poet. I used to enjoy watching him pull rabbits and roses out of a top hat as much as a boy enjoys his first circus, but the performance has grown stale. I have learned how to do the trick passably well myself, and it is seldom worth doing.

Is Matthew Arnold popular? I have a suspicion that both in his prose and his verse that melancholy gentleman will outlive all other other Victorians, big and little, except perhaps Newman, and be “found of angel eyes in earth’s recurring paradise.” His poetry at its best is lovely, both in form and substance, and if there is anything better of its kind than ‘ ‘ On how to translate Homer.” I have not come across it. The whole of Arnold’s work is permeated by a serene, classical radiance, like the light of a winter full moon, and most of it is as depressing as a wet blanket on a cold morning. If I ever make up my mind to commit suicide I shall almost certainly spend the last thirty minutes before turning off reading the Scholar Gypsy and Thyrsis. The world needs Arnold at this minute and will have to return to him later, when the present hullabaloo has subsided. To borrow a remark about Gibbon, he was exactly the sort of person that any Bolshevik would certainly want to kill, because he was civilized.

Wordsworth is another great poet who owed a measure of his popularity to his bad poetry. It was not Tintern Abbey, Michael, Daffodils and the exquisite little Lucy poems that gave Wordsworth his hold on the great, moral middle class, but the stale nonsense of the ecclesiastical sonnets and the dismal balderdash of the Excursion.

A greater poet than either Tennyson or Wordsworth, Coleridge, has never been popular and is scarcely known today, save as the author of the hackneyed “Ancient Mariner.”

Keats is popular chiefly with anaemic school-ma’ams and young college professors, to which one might add young poets, who mistake the delicate, frosty Wedgewood of the odes for genuine Greek work which it resembles as much as a sermon by Billy Sunday resembles one by Jeremy Taylor.

Strangely enough Shelley, -whose wings of flame make the pinions of all other modern poets look like goose feathers, is still popular with the mob. You do not believe it? It is true none the less, my dear. I often, go into the public library and catch a bricklayer or a steamfitter sitting on the radiator reading the Witch of Atlas or Adonais. I don’t know what he finds in them to satisfy his yearning for what he calls a kick. It may be the note of revolt or the strange, unearthly beauty, but the fact of Shelley’s continued popularity is indubitable.

Another poet who is still popular with the great unwashed is Blake, and this is all to the good, for the Songs of Innocence and Experience contain some of the purest and most natural poetry ever written. By natural poetry I mean the kind that sings itself straight out of the poet’s own heart without having to be put together with a monkey-wrench and a pair of pliers. A good deal of contemporary verse must require a whole set of steamfitter’s tools to construct its complex blather and it is not worth the trouble.

Thanks be to God, all the tame, reasonable poets of the eighteenth century are as dead as their reasonableness. They are dead for the same reason that a still-born child is dead; they were never alive. A poet has no more to do with reason than a bootlegger has with the ten commandments.

And now we come to the great, turbulent, fruitful seventeenth century. What made Milton popular, his theology or his poetry? His theology, of course. It was the worst parts of the Paradise Lost, the debate between the Father.and Son and that appalling piece of poetic wholesale murder, the battle between the good and the bad angels, that won the greater number of admirers, not the magnificent figure of Satan, the terrific picture of the lazar-house or the overpowering beauty of Eve and her bridal bower. As for poor Dryden I would like to lay a wager that he is less known outside of university circles than any other great English poet in spite of his superb knowledge of English and his fine technique.

What about Herrick? At last we come to a name upon which the blight of Puritanism has not fallen, a bit of the real old merry England. I wonder the Puritans did not kill Herrick. He was the supreme embodiment of everything those sour and gloomy fanatics most hated: plum pudding, turkey, wine, laughter, generosity and all the gentlemanly virtues. He had no more morals than a politician. The Puritans ruined English poetry and a good many other things. An intense conviction of sin usually leads first to a bogus repentance and then to an intense conviction that other people have sinned. The Puritans were the original snooters of the morality squad and we are not rid of them yet, not by a long shot. But Herrick was as free from Puritan morality as he was from Puritan prejudices. He was a flamen of Jupiter Capitolinus, born twenty-two hundred years too late, swaddled in the robes of an Episcopal clergyman and as little hampered by them as a prohibition-enforcement officer is by any gentlemanly reserve. Nothing can be sweeter, less artificial or more absolutely spontaneous than the best of Herrick’s lyrics, yet they are the perfection of art.

Of Shakespeare’s great name I need say nothing here. A hundred years beyond Shakespeare we come to Dan Chaucer, as true a poet as ever trolled a lay, with a marvellous eye for all the types of human character. One may read a hundred volumes of history and learn less about the middle ages than it is possible to gain from a single careful perusal of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer is as free as a bird from the modern curse of too much intellect. Yes, too much intellect and too complete a divorce from the ordinary life of men and women. There you have in a nutshell a diagnosis of the disease that has eaten the heart out of poetry.

And now what shall we do about it? I propose that two or three of our talented male poets, of the younger generation, lay aside their college gowns, lock up their libraries and ride the bumpers, preferably late in the fall, from Halifax to Vancouver. Let them do a little cub reporting, interview a few politicians and business men, peel potatoes in a luinber camp for a couple of weeks, keep time for a railroad gang, get themselves thrown out of a couple of Socialist meetings and learn with what obscene fury a man of the workers can turn and rend the intellectual classes and all their ways and works. Let them feel the film of hatred that still divides the educated from the uneducated and sense the near presence of that abyss into which the proletariat may some day precipitate the whole of civilization. Then having gained experience of life and mastered their technique let them give us a few poems that will cut to the heart of things and set the blood spurting. I do not, mean crude; realistic poems. Every once in awhile some little, lonely bard writes a horrible screed about raw butcher’s meat and purple moons and the world soul and the strange delights of adultery. Instantly there is a howl from the morality squad and the ancient twaddle about artists being immoral takes on a fresh lease of life. But the poor little poet is not immoral. He is merely trying to give expression to his vague yearning for a spree. If a real street-walker accosted him he would drop dead and the cork out of a bottle of Seagram’s whiskey would knock him cock-eyed.

No, if poetry is ever to have a rebirth it must shake off all the false and vapid trumpery of the schools and return for its inspiration to where the first poets got theirs, to the very heart of the great, toiling, moil ing masses of yokels and railroad men and steel workers and fishermen and plain women. It must learn again how to touch these people with the dynamic of an unearthly beauty, clothed in language as simple, direct and vivid as the language of Homer or the old testament.

In conclusion, since I am in the humor for constructive criticism, let me give the young poets one more bit of advice. At whatever sacrifice of time, comfort and effort, know your Greek. One line of Greek poetry of the great age, the age of Homer and Aeschylus, is worth ten lines of English. In the best early Greek work there is a central core of fire, a stark simplicity of phrase, a vivid and startling directness of expression and a merciless sincerity that you will search for in vain in English poetry outside of Shakespeare, Blake, Shelley and Burns. Remember that to an ancient Greek, Venus was as real as the sea she rose from and that both were, for him, clothed with a terrible beauty of which we, poor grubs, can see not a trace anywhere.

Instead of sneering at Edgar Guest let us do what he has done and do it better, or shut up. Since the mob will not ascend Parnassus, let us come down from the cold seclusion of the mountain top and sit in the market place. Let us once more sing songs for the people and if they are good enough I believe the people will listen, but they will have to be very good indeed.