The Winged Horse
by and . Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Co. 1927. 8vo. xv+451 pp. Illus. $3.50.
THIS is a work of affection and enthusiasm. ‘We wrote this book because we wanted to write it. declare the authors, and their text is the best voucher for the honesty of the statement. They have come to their task with exhilaration and respect, with wide knowledge and long familiarity; and these qualifications, happily embodied in the volume, are its proper apologia. For the authors tell us also that they wished to record the story of poetry, first, for two particular children who stand at the threshold of its pleasures, and then for all those potential readers of poetry who look toward it interested and curious, but baffled by ignorance, misunderstanding, or lack of confidence.
Accordingly the book is elementary. Its language is often such as a child might be expected to understand, although it is quite as often adult. The lives and work of the poets are abbreviated sometimes to the point of violence, and of course are selectively treated with an eye to the special audience for whom the book was framed. The names of Polyphemus, Circe, and the Sirens receive not even an allusion, although they are the natural property of children if anything in the story of poetry can be. The Arthurian cycle is dismissed in a sentence or two; and of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries much less is told than might as easily be brought home to the untutored reader as the stories of Blake or Walt Whitman.
Yet even these examples are cited, not as complaints, but rather as evidence of the strain to which the authors were subjected in compressing within one readable volume so vast a story. The striking impression of the book as a whole is the fairness with which the history of the poets and of poetry has been represented and the success with which nearly all the important aspects of the story have been reflected or suggested when completeness was of course impossible. Greek tragedians, Horace, Petrarch, Shakespeare, the poets of the romantic movement, have received able, enthusiastic, and wise treatment in this admirable volume.
Were this book no more than an outline of poetry for beginners, it would scarcely be appropriate to give it separate notice in these columns. But grace and enthusiasm of style, the affection of the authors for their work, their sympathy, skill, and knowledge of both poetry and the poets, have made it a volume which any lover of poetry, or indeed of excellent writing, filled with freshness and imagination and poetic gifts of expression, must thoroughly enjoy and approve. Notable are many of the fragments of translation contained in it — some from already published sources, some original with this book. Often the translations are themselves English poetry of unusual excellence, giving fresh poetic pleasure to the reader of the book.
In their final chapter the authors discuss interestingly and sensibly the future of poetry. They discern several losses which the domain of poetry has suffered since its origin — losses coincident with the rise of other arts and of the sciences and with the development of prose. They observe reluctantly the extent to which poetry has fallen into neglect, and declare that a new attitude toward it must await ‘the shock of a great poet’s personality.’ But the office of poetry still lives and enjoys its privilege. ‘ Poetry speaks most fully and briefly as much of the high mystery and meaning of life as man can utter. To speak in its fashion is the most difficult way of talking. It is also the most glorious.’
THEODORE MORRISON