Poetry for You

“PERHAPS some of you will become poets when you’re grown up, and I expect most of you one time or another will try to write in verse. I can’t give you much help there. What I do hope is that this book will help you to enjoy reading poetry, will persuade you that poetry is one of the great things in life which it would be a shame to miss.”

The well-known English poet, C. Day Lewis, doesn’t mean that he can't give help about writing poetry, but that in the ten short and delightful chapters of this book, now returned to print after three years, he proposes to tell boys and girls how to understand and like the poetry they read. His audience was expected to be British — Lewis is a schoolmaster, and a parent — and the tone and the examples are unmistakably British. It puzzles an American who is also a teacher and parent, to know at what age British children write poetry — and would read this book. In this country there is some poetry written in good high schools and preparatory schools, more in the colleges, but our youngsters would find this book too patiently easy, too kind. Or would they?

Taught by young instructors and professors full of Brooks and Warren, Tate, I. A. Richards, and the cerebrotonic quarterlies, our students, I’m afraid, would not be challenged by this little volume. The first two chapters deal pleasantly with the objections to poetry (it is silly; it is soft) and the excitements of poetry (to make the world your friend; bright is the ring of words) and with the supposed beginnings of poetry in myth and mimicry. The next five chapters present in an amiable and familiar way the materials of poetry and the varieties of poetry. In these and the two closing chapters the examples are fresh, all British, and all excellent. Mr. Lewis, in offering a pair of poems for a test of young judgment, uses a gnarled and memorable Lancashire ballad, and a properly stuffy piece by a minor Georgian. The last chapter, on reading aloud, solo and in chorus, is promising in suggestion. But for the rest, the book is too much a restatement, actually not condescending but really delightful, of all that all the other books say on the enjoyment of poetry.

In spite of Mr. Lewis’s remark in the Preface that he can’t give much help here about writing poetry, this modest effort, like any book that illuminates the subject, might be just the thing for the younger writer. And after all, there is the Lancashire ballad about Micky Thumps’s wake!

JOHN HOLMES