I agree with
William Morris that art is the one thing we all want, the
expression of man's joy in his work. And the more that art retires
into fine nuances and intellectual subtleties, the more that it
becomes something esoteric and mysterious, the less I care about
it. When Tennyson said to the farmer's wife, 'What's the news?' she
replied, 'Mr. Tennyson, there's only one piece of news worth
telling, and that is that Christ died for all men.' Tennyson said
very grandly and simply, 'Ah, that's old news and good news and NEW
news!' And that is exactly what I want the poets to tell us. It is
a common inheritance, not a refined monopoly, that I claim."
He laughed at this, and said:
"I think that's rather a mid-Victorian view; I will confute you out
of the Tennyson legend. When Tennyson called Swinburne's verse
'poisonous honey, brought from France,' Swinburne retorted by
speaking of the laureate's domestic treacle. You can't have both.
If you like treacle, you must not clamour for honey."
"Yes, I prefer honey," I said, "but you seem to me to be in search
of what I called LITERARY poetry. That is what I am afraid of. I
don't want the work of a mind fed on words, and valuing ideas the
more that they are uncommon. I hate what is called 'strong' poetry;
that seems to me to be generally the coarsest kind of romanticism--
melodrama in fact. I want to have in poetry what we are getting in
fiction--the best sort of realism.
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