are not printed to solve the "filler" problem alone.

And that's why-because we all love poetry that all of us read poetry upon occasion and should read it. That's why the classic poets never go out of fashion, why new ones come into fashion continually. Passing by all the stock (and standard) arguments for reading poetry because of its good effect upon prose writing, for its cultural value or other educational, bread and butter reasons we read poetry-yes, all of us at one time or another!-because we love it-unless, indeed, something is wrong with our loving apparatus.

We may not, of course, all love the same kinds of poetry; to do so would be as regrettable as for all to love the same kinds of food or friends. But if we don't love some kind of poetry it's because we're not normal or because we're not reading or choosing aright.

INVICTUS

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, yet the menace of the years

And

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the

scroll,

I am the master of my. fate:

I am the captain of

my soul.

William Ernest Henley.

CHAPTER II

WHAT DO WE SEEK IN POETRY?

NJOYMENT, of course.

ENJ

(Was it not

agreed in the beginning that only the "happy reasons" for reading poetry should be considered? Let those who will read poetry for purposes of education or culture or conversational utility. We are concerned alone with poetry reading for the sake of fun.)

Enjoyment, then, is our object in poetry, albeit, as J. B. Kerfoot sagely says, "One can learn more about poetry from watching its squirms than from all the pronouncements of all the pundits." And let it be said quickly, before countless puzzled or dissentient voices deafen with question or denial- enjoyment in the reading of poetry is possible to every man, woman, and child in existence. Not, of course, as previously suggested, the same kind of enjoyment, nor, for that matter, the same kind of poetry. Far from it. Enjoy

ment as dissimilar, as diverse, as infinitely. varied as human nature or as poetry itself.

One of the most potent causes of the long supposed unpopularity of poetry lies in the fact that poetry almost universally is read and studied with so little discrimination, such careless selection, such slight attention to personal tendencies and taste. Another lies in the fancy, frequent as absurd, that “good” poetry, of whatever nature, must prove equally pleasing to all tasteful readers, whereas, human nature being cast into an infinite variety of shapes and patterns, the exact reverse is and should be true.

There are as many good kinds of poetryor kinds of good poetry—as there are of good music or good pictures. The lilting ballad may be as fine in its way as a Beethoven sonata; the simplest of lyrics in its own field. may rank as high as, in another, Dante's "Inferno" or "Paradise Lost."

Who would condemn a beautiful landscape, an entertaining cartoon, because it was neither a portrait nor a still-life study? Where would be the sense of condemning art