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032 - The Children of the Poets · Reviews

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  Speaker 1: Section thirty one of reviews by Oscar Wilde. This is
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  Speaker 1: a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
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  Speaker 1: For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox dot org.
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  Speaker 1: Reviews by Oscar Wilde, edited by Robert Ross, Section thirty one.
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  Speaker 1: The Children of the Poets Paul Malt Gazette, October fourteenth,
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  Speaker 1: eighteen eighty six. The idea of this book is exceedingly charming,
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  Speaker 1: as children themselves are the perfect flowers of life, so
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  Speaker 1: a collection of the best poems written on children should
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  Speaker 1: be the most perfect of all anthologies. Yet the book
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  Speaker 1: itself is not, by any means a success. Many of
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  Speaker 1: the loveliest child poems in our literature are excluded, and
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  Speaker 1: not a few feeble and trivial poems are inserted. The
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  Speaker 1: editor's work is characterized by sins of omission and of commission,
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  Speaker 1: and the collection consequently is very incomplete and very unsatisfactory.
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  Speaker 1: Andrew Marvel's exquisite poem The Picture of Little t C,
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  Speaker 1: for instance, does not appear in mister Robinson's volume, nor
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  Speaker 1: the Young Love of the same author, nor the beautiful Elegy.
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  Speaker 1: Ben Jonson wrote on the death of Salatheal Pavey, the
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  Speaker 1: little Boy actor of his plays. Waller's verses also to
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  Speaker 1: my young Lady Lucy Sidney, deserve a place in an
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  Speaker 1: anthology of this kind, and so do mister Matthew Arnold's
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  Speaker 1: lines to a Gipsy Child and at Garland pose Annabel
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  Speaker 1: Lee a little lyric full of strange music and strange romance.
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  Speaker 1: There is possibly much to be said in favor of
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  Speaker 1: such a poem as that which ends with and I
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  Speaker 1: thanked my God with falling tears for the things in
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  Speaker 1: the bottom drawer. But how different it is from I
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  Speaker 1: was a child and she was a child in this
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  Speaker 1: kingdom by the sea. But we loved with a love
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  Speaker 1: that was more than love, I and my Annabel Lee,
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  Speaker 1: with a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven coveted
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  Speaker 1: her and me. The selection from Blake again is very incomplete,
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  Speaker 1: many of the loveliest poems being excluded, such as those
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  Speaker 1: on the Little Girl Lost and the Little Girl Found,
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  Speaker 1: the Cradle Song, Infant Joy, and others. Nor can we
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  Speaker 1: find Sir Henry Woten's Hymn upon the Birth of Prince Charles,
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  Speaker 1: Sir William Jones's Dainty four line epigram on the Babe,
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  Speaker 1: or the delightful lines to T L H a Child
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  Speaker 1: by Charles Lamb. The gravest omission, however, is certainly that
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  Speaker 1: of Herrick. Not a single poem of his appears in
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  Speaker 1: mister Robertson's collection. And yet no English poet has written
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  Speaker 1: of children with more love and grace and delicacy. His
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  Speaker 1: ode on the Birth of Our Savior, his poem to
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  Speaker 1: his Savior a Child, a present by a child, his
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  Speaker 1: graces for children, and his many lovely epitaphs on children
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  Speaker 1: are all of them exquisite works of art, simple, sweet
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  Speaker 1: and sincere. An English anthology of child poems that excludes
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  Speaker 1: Herrick is an English garden without its roses, and an
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  Speaker 1: English woodland without its singing birdords. And for one verse
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  Speaker 1: of Herrick we would gladly give an exchange, even those
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  Speaker 1: long poems by mister Ashby Steery, Miss Manella Smedley, and
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  Speaker 1: mister Lewis Morris of Penryn, to which mister Robertson has
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  Speaker 1: assigned a place in his collection. Mister Robertson also should
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  Speaker 1: take care when he publishes a poem to publish it correctly.
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  Speaker 1: Mister Brett Hart's Dickens in Camp, for instance, is completely
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  Speaker 1: spoiled by two ridiculous misprints. In the first line, dimpling
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  Speaker 1: is substituted for drifting to the entire ruin of rhyme
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  Speaker 1: and reason, and in the ninth verse, the pensive glory
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  Speaker 1: that fills the Kentish Hills appears as the Persian glory
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  Speaker 1: with a large capital P. Mistakes such as these are
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  Speaker 1: quite unpardonable, and make one feel that perhaps, after all,
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  Speaker 1: it was fortunate for Herrick that he was left out.
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  Speaker 1: A poet can survive everything but a misprint. As for
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  Speaker 1: mister Robertson's preface, like most of the prefaces in the
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  Speaker 1: Canterbury series, it is very carelessly written. Such a sentence,
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  Speaker 1: as I believe that missus Piat's poems in particular will
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  Speaker 1: come to many readers fresh as well as delightful contributions
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  Speaker 1: from across the ocean, is painful to read, nor is
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  Speaker 1: the matter much better than the manner. It tis fantastic
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  Speaker 1: to say that Raphael's pictures of the Madonna and Child
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  Speaker 1: dealt a deadly blow to the monastic life, and to say,
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  Speaker 1: with reference to Greek art, that Cupid by the side
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  Speaker 1: of Venus enables us to forget that most of her
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  Speaker 1: size are hunt is a very crude bit of art criticism. Indeed,
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  Speaker 1: Wordsworth again should hardly be spoken of as one who
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  Speaker 1: was not, in general a man from whom human sympathies
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  Speaker 1: welld profusely. But this criticism is as nothing compared to
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  Speaker 1: the passage where mister Robertson tells us that the scene
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  Speaker 1: between Arthur and Hubert in King John is not true
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  Speaker 1: to nature, because the child's pleadings for his life are
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  Speaker 1: playful as well as piteous. Indeed, mister Robertson, forgetting Mammilius
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  Speaker 1: as completely as he misunderstands Arthur, states very clearly that
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  Speaker 1: Shakespeare has not given us any deep readings of child nature.
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  Speaker 1: Paradoxes are always charming, but judgments such as these are
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  Speaker 1: not paradoxical. They are merely provencial. On the whole, mister
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  Speaker 1: Robertson's book will not do. It is we fully admit
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  Speaker 1: an industrious compilation, but it is not an anthology. It
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  Speaker 1: is not a selection of the best, for it lacks
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  Speaker 1: the discrimination in good taste, which is the essence of selection,
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  Speaker 1: and for the want of which no amount of industry
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  Speaker 1: can atone. The child poems of our literature have still
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  Speaker 1: to be edited. The Children of the Poets and Anthology
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  Speaker 1: from English and American writers of three generations, edited with
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  Speaker 1: an introduction by Eric S. Robertson Walter Scott, end of
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  Speaker 1: section thirty one, read by Dennis Sayers in Modesto, California,
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  Speaker 1: for LibriVox Spring two thousand and seven,