POETRY AND PROGRESS ALLIED

"Even in this hour of wide-spread disillusionment and reaction," said Professor Bliss Perry in his address before the University chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in Sanders Theatre yesterday noon, "I venture to select a few ideals for society which have been proclaimed by poetry. Let us ask ourselves whether these ideals still persist and whether the poets think that there is any measurable progress towards their attainment."

"Professor Perry in his oration on "Poetry and Progress," traced the relation of several fundamental ideas developed in the course of individual and social progress to the are of poetry. He showed first how the conception of right easiness has been fostered by the poets. Another ideal, scarcely less noble, he found to be the ideal of justice.

"If the poets cannot always, declare with Carlyle that there is nothing else but justice in the universe, they can at least assert the ultimate triumph of justice. They believer that whether you or I win or lose, the "forts of folly" will one day fall. If beaten in the lower court of the understanding, they made their proud appeal to Caesar, to the imperial rights of the imagination."

War Poetry of Inestimable Service.

The speaker went on to test the attitude of poets towards the ideal of liberty, and the desire for peace. "The war poetry of the last five years have wrought one inestimable service: it has told the pities truth, not only about the battlefield, but about the wrath and hate and greed that are coiled around the foundations of Europe. It says little of the pomp and circumstances of glorious war; it goes straight to the human facts underlying war; it shows that worldwide peace is conditioned upon the concrete and fundamental issues of justice, liberty, and fellowship.

"When you and I, brethren of the Phi Beta Kappa, are depressed over the prevalent violence of the educated classes, over their lack of serenity and poise, their easily wounded, vanity, their distrust of idealism, their disloyalty to moral leadership. we may find comfort in the words of Harvard's most distinguished graduate:

"In all the encounters that have yet chanced, I have not yet been weaponed for that particular occasion, and have been historically beaten; and yet I know all the time that I have never been beaten; never yet fought, shall certainly fight when my hour comes, and shall beat.' Emerson wrote that in a prose way, but he never wrote more like a poet, for he wrote with the long view.

"And seventy years hence, as Harvard men meet here, what will they say of our present American effort to ensure the peace of the world through a League of Nations? Will they call it right or wrong? Poetry, we may be sure, will take the long view of it."