There’s no harm in that. It’s good exercise for the mind, and of it comes much interesting verse. But it is not the way in which the sum of the world’s literature is increased.
Could anything, for example, be less studied, be more clearly marked with the stigmata of that noble spontaneity we call inspiration, than the passionate, rushing, irresistible lines “To the Balliol Men Still in Africa”? Like Gilbert K. Chesterton and many another English democrat, Hilaire Belloc deeply resented his country’s war upon the Boers. Yet his heart went out to the friends of his university days who were fighting in Africa. They were fighting, he thought, in an unjust cause; but they were his friends and they were, at any rate, fighting. And so he made something that seems (like all great writing) an utterance rather than a composition; he put his love of war in general and his hatred of this war in particular, his devotion to Balliol and to the friends of his youth into one of the very few pieces of genuine poetry which the Boer War produced. Nor has any of Oxford’s much-sung colleges known praise more fit than this
“House that armours a man With the eyes of a boy and the heart of a ranger, And a laughing way in the teeth of the world, And a holy hunger and thirst for danger.”
But perhaps a more typical example of Hilaire Belloc’s wanton genius is to be found not among those poems which are, throughout, the beautiful expressions of beautiful impressions, but among those which are careless, whimsical, colloquial. There is that delightful, but somewhat exasperating _Dedicatory Ode_. Hilaire Belloc is talking--charmingly, as is his custom--to some of his friends, who had belonged, in their university days, to a youthful revolutionary organization called the Republican Club. He happens to be talking in verse, for no particular reason except that it amuses him to talk in verse. He makes a number of excellent jokes, and enjoys them very much; his Pegasus is cantering down the road at a jolly gait, when suddenly, to the amazement of the spectators, it spreads out great golden wings and flashes like a meteor across the vault of heaven! We have been laughing at the droll tragedy of the opium-smoking Uncle Paul; we have been enjoying the humorous spectacle of the contemplative freshman--and suddenly we come upon a bit of astonishingly fine poetry. Who would expect, in all this whimsical and jovial writing, to find this really great stanza?