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5.

There is a third reason, and a more honourable one.
Those iconoclasts are not as a rule very well educated, and therefore
they have not the just perspective which is given by a wide
acquaintance with great literature. But they feel acutely. They
are highly sensitive to the difficulties and discontents of our
time. They demand in poetry a personal and topical note, an immediate
contemporary appeal. They see no value ih what they call the
poetry of "escape". So we find in our younger school of poets at
home two interesting features. We live, they say, in a mechanical
age, so they crowd their verse with technological phrases and exult
in the complexities of machinery. Again, they say, we live in an age
of social unrest, and unless a poet has on this point a direct message,
a new gospel of social regeneration, he is a mere cumberer
of the ground.

I feel a good deal of sympathy with their view. No great
poetry can be deaf to the "still sad music of humanity". It cannot
ignore what Wordsworth calls

"the fierce confederate storm
Of sorrow barricadoed evermore
Within the walls of cities."

It must have some gospel for mortal needs and mortal aspirations.
But to ask from it a narrow political or economic faith is to wrong
its majesty. What is proudly called "left-wing poetry" should often,
to my mind, be more properly described as "half-baked poetry". Those
writers, as Dr. Chalmers said of Thomas Carlyle, "prefer seriousness
to truth", and they have the wrong definition of seriousness. Their