British - Poet | September 12, 1907 - September 3, 1963
The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises. Herein, poetry differs from the other arts. Everyone does not practise music or painting or even dancing, but everyone without exception puts together words poetically every day of his life.
Louis MacNeice
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All experiment is made on a basis of tradition; all tradition is the crystallization of experiment.
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Everyone is not able, or inclined, to write poetry in the narrower sense any more than everyone is qualified to take part in a walking race. But just as all of us can and do walk, so all of us can and do use language poetically.
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The poet has no greater number of muscles than the ordinary conversationalist; he merely has more highly developed muscles and better coordination. And he practises his activity according to a stricter set of rules.
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Nearly all children have a feeling for rhythm in words, for the delicate pattern of nursery rhymes. Many adults have lost this feeling and, if they read verse at all, demand a far cruder music than that which they once appreciated.
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The rules or 'laws' of poetry are only tentative devices, an approximate scheme. There is no Sinaitic recipe for poetry, for the individual poem is the norm.
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Broadcasting is plastic; while it can ape the press, it can also emulate the arts.
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All the arts, to varying degrees, involve some kind of a compromise. This being so, how far need the radio dramatist go to meet the public without losing sight of himself and his own standards of value?
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We are all fed from hundreds and thousands of hands. Often we do not know whose they are nor how they work. Only a few of us ever visualize the hands that grope in the coal mines or push levers in the mills or handle axes in the lumber camp.
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Democracy - or any improvement on it - will rest on the layman's right to criticize. His criticism will be often - very often - damn silly, but if, like Plato and the Fascists, we take away his right to criticize, we take away his right to appreciate.
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The teapot takes in water and gives out tea. So the human individual takes in anything you give him and promptly transforms it; he is ready to give you out again his own reactions - first, in thought and emotion, then in voice or action.
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As things may turn out in the future, people may (though I doubt it) find that their work gives them all the enjoyment - physical, intellectual or aesthetic - which they may require. That certainly is not so now.
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