ABSTRACT
The novel is only the youngest of artistic forms, and it is easy to imagine that even its commercial varieties may decay in the next fifty years, destroyed by the competition of television and the televised film. Tolstoy was the outstanding literary influence behind the rowan fleuve – in its English form the novel of generations – with its broad picture of the family or social unit confronting history. In poetry, therefore, remains the hope for literature's survival; and since poetry is at present only read by small numbers, it may well remain for some time, as it now is, private in its form and language. Imaginative literature as the expression of a deeply apprehended truth, poetry which interprets to a man the myth of his own age, can in the hands of Dante, of Shakespeare, of Cervantes, of CamSes and of Goethe, help to raise the level of a whole civilization.
