ABSTRACT

People who were prompted by Mr I. A. Richards' article 'Fifteen Lines from Landor' in his April number. The great age of poetry is over, the curtain has dropped on the scene and it is as futile to nourish such an ambition as to hope to bring back the vanished landscape when night has fallen. Certainly it is touching to watch Landor discover that he is not one of the great poets, but to deduce from that that great poetry is over seems puerile. The specific form of the metaphor here loads the statement with feelings of loss and inevitability the vanishing of a possibility of the mind. The fact is comprehensible enough if one reflects that all these images are amalgamated in the teaching of Universities and in consequence in the mind of undergraduates. Landor probably dreamed of being at once Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare and perhaps many other things as well.