designer, how banal a metrician, how unscrupulous and inartistic a poetaster has Indignation generally proved herself to be. Few satires survive the ephemeral social follies that provoked them, because, being by nature parasites, when that which supported their growth decays and perishes, they too must perish, unless indeed they are rooted deeply in the unchanging soil of imagination and poetry. Truly great satire will always be very rare. It is still possible to read with delight Byron’s Vision of Judgment, and portions of his Age of Bronze; and there are passages[Pg 65] in Pope and Dryden that fully deserve their reputation. But it is perhaps only in parts of the Divina Commedia, and in the last three hundred lines of the fourth book of Lucretius, and occasionally in Leopardi, that satire may be found mingled as the dominating element in poetry of the highest order. Its taste even there is bitter, but with the divine bitterness of passion and sincerity. [Pg 65] In the enchanted kingdom of fantasy and the mock-heroic, Pope’s Rape of the Lock and Lear’s poems still reign supreme. It is perhaps because they are ostensibly written for the delight of children, that The Owl and the Pussycat, The Dong, and the Quangle-Wangle have never, so far as I know, found their way into serious adult anthologies. Yet if we are really sincere in our quest for lyrical beauty, verbal euphony and metrical invention, we should not have tolerated without protest the absence of these poems from the[Pg 66] Oxford Book of Verse, where they would more than hold their own in the company of Annabel Lee, The Lady of Shalott, and The Blessed Damozel. [Pg 66] [Pg 67] [Pg 67] CHAPTER V Miscellaneous Miscellaneous The main trouble with all attempts at literary classification is that they are bound to exclude many intermediate types. Much of the most memorable English poetry is neither in a strict sense lyrical, nor philosophic, nor anything else than beautiful and shapely verse. No other literature is so rich as ours in quasi-lyrical poetry, such as the sonnets of Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Gray’s Elegy and Keats’ Odes. Future writers will doubtless invent other similar forms for their new purposes; but it would be a disastrous error to suppose that, because an art-form has once become classical, it therefore can no longer be used,
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