A QUESTION OF STANDARDS

As if it were not bad enough to have one's intellect weighed, measured, and neatly pigeon holed at the hands of leering psychologists, two university professors have now undertaken to prove that one's poetic discrimination can be dissected and catalogued in the same way. The test, as set forth in the "New Republic" is simplicity itself. The student is shown a bit of verse by a reputable poet, who may be any one of a number ranging from Mother Goose to Carl Sandberg, and three artistically mutilated versions of the same. If he has a keen discrimination in poetry, he can pick out the original.

A test of this sort is undeniably interesting and always entertaining, but about all it proves in the testee is the extent of his education. Any person who has received a reasonably thorough drill in the fundamental qualities of good verse, according to the standards of his day, should perform creditably. The present generation, for example, has been trained to recognize the terseness and restraint that makes good free verse without destroying its poetic connotation. It can therefore assert with confidence that Carl Sandberg did not write such lines as

"Who sends the fog

So still and gray?

I fondly ask

And Echo answers

'E'en the same all-seeing Eye

That sends the still gray cat.'"

If a university student of 1850 were asked to choose the version he considered best by prevailing standards, however, he would probably not select

"The fog comes

On little cat feet.

It sits looking

Over harbor and city

On silent haunches

And then moves on."

Other times, other criteria. The tests devised by Professors Abbott and Trabue cannot measure or even indicate intuitive poetic discrimination, which is something indefinable and intangible. The most they can accomplish is to determine whether or not the person being examined is sufficiently intelligent to assimilate what has been told him in the lecture room. A good memory is a very different thing from a sense of poetic values.