Sherry Chandler » Let’s talk about poetry
Let’s talk about poetry
“…Shall we now talk about something else?”
“Willingly. What subject?”
“Poetry,” [Aziz] said, with tears in his eyes. “Let us discuss why poetry has lost the power of making men brave. My mother’s father was also a poet, and fought against you in the Mutiny. I might equal him if there was another mutiny. As it is, I am a doctor, who has won a case and has three children to support, and whose chief subject of conversation is official plans.”
“Let us talk about poetry.” [Fielding] turned his mind to the innocuous subject. “You people are sadly circumstanced. Whatever are you to write about? You cannot say, ‘The rose is faded,’ for evermore. We know it’s faded. Yet you can’t have patriotic poetry of the ‘India, my India’ type, when it’s nobody’s India.”
—E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (Harcourt, Brace, 1922)
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