As something in itself, and not an image,
A something that is not, surpasses them
As substance shadow.
[Footnote: _Michael Angelo_.]

Yet it may be that the homeliness of Plato's illustration has misled us
as to the seriousness of the problem. Let us forget about beds and
buildings and think of actual life in the more dignified way that has
become habitual to us since the war. Then it must appear that Plato's
charge is as truly a live issue here and now as it ever was in Athens.
The claims for the supremacy of poetry, set forth by Aristotle, Sidney
and the rest, seem to weaken, for the time being, at least, when we find
that in our day the judgment that poetry is inferior to life comes, not
from outsiders, but from men who were at one time most ardent votaries
of the muse. Repudiation by verse-writers of poetry's highest claims we
have been accustomed to dismiss, until recently, as betrayal of a streak
of commonness in the speaker's nature,--of a disposition to value the
clay of life more highly than the fire. We were not, perhaps, inclined
to take even so great a poet as Byron very seriously when he declared,
"I by no means rank poets or poetry high in the scale of the intellect.
It is the lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an
earthquake. I prefer the talents of action." But with the outbreak of
the world war one met unquestionably sincere confession from more than
one poet that he found verse-writing a pale and anemic thing. Thus "A.
E." regretted the time that he spent on poetry, sighing,

He who might have wrought in flame
Only traced upon the foam.
[Footnote: _Epilogue_]