Has the author many dramatic devices for gaining or holding attention? Does he employ many figures? Is he fond of climax and contrast? Does he indulge in humor, irony, paradox? Has he epigrammatic power? Does he try to surprise the reader? tantalize him? dazzle him? Is he too fond of displaying his craft, or does he prefer plain statement? Is he most intent on conveying his thought without loss, or upon giving his thought artistic expression? Have you learned anything, through studying the essay, in regard to literary craft-anything that you can employ in your own writing? THE AUTHOR'S PERSONALITY Judging solely by what the essay reveals, what kind of man is the author? Is he a deep thinker? Is he a castle builder? Has he strong likes and dislikes? What are his prevailing moods? Would he make a good neighbor? an agreeable companion? Do you envy him? Has he traits which you do not admire? Is he a reading man? a man of affairs? Is the charm of the essay in the thought it contains, in the manner in which the thought is expressed, in the author's personality, or in all three? NOTE.-See Appendix for questions on the De Coverley papers and Macaulay's Life of Samuel Johnson. Poetry little read CHAPTER XIX THE STUDY OF POETRY Poetry, which Coleridge has called "the blossom and fragrance of all human knowledge, human thought, human passions, emotions, language," is, notwithstanding the high place it holds in the realm of letters, least read today of all forms of literature. For proof of this statement we need not turn to the testimony of booksellers and librarians; it is sufficient to note that popular magazines, which survive only through furnishing what the public is willing to buy, print almost no verse. Had we living poets of such rare excellence as Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, whose works appeared in the earlier half of the nineteenth century, no doubt they would command readers. But these are lacking. We have no Tennyson, no Browning. None have arisen to fill the places left vacant by Bryant, Poe, Longfellow, Whittier, Emerson, Lowell, and Holmes. Our successful authors are writers of fiction, or busy in the fields of history, science, and allied subjects. More and more the demand is for books that may be read for practical purposes, or for mere entertainment and recreation such as are provided by novels and short stories. The present dearth of great poets explains but in part, however, why poetry-reading is so generally neglected. In some measure, no doubt, the neglect is traceable to the fact that to read poetry as it should be read takes more time and a greater mental effort than most are willing to bestow. Poetry difficult to read How easily, by way of contrast, does the playgoer receive his pleasure! The actors who interpret with voice and gesture the dramatist's every word do nearly all the real work required, and much of the little that remains is attended to by the scene-painter. Playgoing is, or can be made, as lazy a form of recreation as attending a ball game. Novel reading is almost as easy, so clever have our story writers become in the questionable art of so constructing narratives that they cause the reader no fatigue and next to no intellectual exertion. Training necessary Very different is the case with poetry-reading. It takes two to make a poem-a poet and a trained, appreciative reader. Or, expressing the idea in another way, the poet's words do not become a poem to me until I have made them mine, and they do not become mine until I have done that which they invite me to do: the thinking, the imagining, the feeling. Even masters like Shakespeare and Milton, whose genius seems heaven-sent, passed through an apprenticeship stage. In much the same manner is it necessary that those who would learn to read poetry with full appreciation submit patiently to disciplinary training. Characteris The best way, perhaps, to gain a clear notion of how poetry should be read will be to review certain of its characteristics, taking them up tics of poetry in somewhat the same order that the young reader is likely to be impressed by them. 1. The poet often employs unusual sentence-structure. A predicate sometimes precedes its subject, Unusual modifiers appear out of their natural places, and relatives are widely separated from their sentence structure antecedents. Note, for example, the opening lines of one of Drummond's sonnets: Of this fair volume which we World do name We clear might read the art and wisdom rare Although this is not extremely difficult to understand, yet the meaning is somewhat clearer when the sentence is changed to a natural prose sequence thus: If we could turn with care the sheets and leaves of this fair volume which we do call World, we might read clear the rare art and wisdom of Him who corrects it and did frame it. But frequently the poet's practice of twisting sentences about is a source of no little trouble. The words do not surrender their meaning without a siege on the part of the reader, who prefers to hurry on as he may when reading ordinary prose. In his impatience he may feel that the poet is purposely obscure, not realizing that unusual sentence arrangement is oftentimes necessary for rhyme and meter, for melody, variety, and emphasis. With practice, however, the difficulty of transposing grows less and less, and increasing pleasure is gained through noting how, by this slight change and that, a passage has been given strength and beauty. Unusual words 2. The poet's vocabulary contains unusual words, and also familiar words employed in unusual senses. This is not strange. Through constant effort to find terms that express nice shades of thought or feeling and at the same time provide a desired melody, poets not only acquire large vocabularies but become acquainted with the less familiar meanings of common words. It is estimated that Wordsworth, though he believed that the language of poetry should be that of everyday life, employed about 20,000 distinct meanings, a very large number compared with the vocabulary of the average individual. Illustrations of a characteristic so common are hardly necessary, yet let us note a few examples. Milton speaks of "the rathe primrose," where the prose writer would say the early primrose; and of "Meadows trim with daisies pied," employing pied rather than the more familiar variegated, which contained too many syllables and did not supply the melody that his line needed. A pathetic little lullaby of long ago begins "Come, little babe, come silly soul." Silly seems a highly inappropriate term till we learn that one of its earlier meanings is innocent. The poet chose it, we may imagine, not alone because it contained the desired number of syllables, but because his ear told him that the soft sound of I was appropriate for lullaby music. In the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, occurs the expression "silly buckets." Here, plainly, there is no thought of innocence but rather of uselessness. The entire crew, save one poor soul, are dead; how useless are the buckets! Although as a rule it requires but a moment's thought to see what each word means, yet there are cases not a few where it is necessary to linger and still linger, considering with great care the appropriateness of all possible meanings, lest the right significance of a term be lost. Compactness 3. The poet exercises great economy, expressing much in a few words. A simple illustration of this is the elliptical sentence, or one that is shortened by the omission of words. The pronoun he is needed to make clear the line Who steals my purse steals trash, and like must be supplied twice in She moves a goddess, and she looks a queen. Economy is strikingly shown in the wisdom with which, oftentimes, all save bare essentials are excluded. Note the abrupt beginning of Coleridge's Rime: It is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three. "By thy long gray beard and glittering eye, |