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2.

Listen to this also. It is on the subject of Lady Jane Grey -

"Like her most gentle, most unfortunate,
Crown'd but to die - who in her chamber sate
Musing with Plato, though the horn was blown,
And every ear and every heart was won,
And all in green array went chasing down the sun."

That is the work of Samuel Rogers, a banker and a minor poet at
the beginning of last century, whom Lord Rosebery has described,
not unfairly, as a "hedgehog soul".

But tonight I want to emphasise the other side. The
backwaters have their charm, but we must not forget the main
stream, the central tide of poetry. My plea is for a return to a
proper respect for, and a more intimate knowledge of, the great
masterpiece, the work of the primary creative minds.

I propose to take the narrower definition of poetry.
Poetry and prose are not antithetical words, for there may be great
poetry in great prose. The French word poesie is frequently applied
to prose compositions. You remember Sir Philip Sidney's words, "It
is not rhyming and versifying that maketh poesy. One may be a
poet without versing, and a versifier without Poetry". The true
differentiation is between prose on the one hand and verse or metre
on the other. But for our purpose today I propose to take poetry
in the narrower sense, as involving some kind of ordered rhythmical
pattern - what, if printed in the ordinary prose fashion, would
lose something of its effect.

How shall we define a masterpaece, a classic? I suppose