Speaking Poetry

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degree of visual imagination. Our auditory imagination, on the other hand, is not so well developed as visual.
Lowell continues that printing has damaged poetry more than other arts. She says that the book is the only tangible substance which poetry has. If photography and colour-printing are the conventionalized symbols of pictures, how slighter, less adequate, are the conventionalized symbols of poetry. Printed words, of no beauty in themselves, of no value except to rouse the imagination and cause it to function. Unlike poetry that should be read nobody expects to read music notes everybody insists upon hearing it. Poetry is as much an art to be heard as is music. To read it off the printed pages without pronouncing it is to get only a portion of its beauty, and yet it is just this that most people do. Lowell considers words as the main tool of poetry and everyday speech. That's why it is treated with "a cavalier ease which music escapes''.
Poetry will come into its Paradise ...

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people trained to receive it as audible impression through the sense of sight have been able thoroughly to comprehend it. The few people who attempt to read it aloud are handicapped by the realization of the unusual quality of their task, and lose their sense of proportion and simplicity in the chaos of artistic theories of expression which have gradually come into being.
Then, Lowell examines some of these theories to see in what way they have hampered enjoyment of poetry. She compares speaking lines in modern play and reading poetry. In a play one can rely to a certain extent upon acting, and upon one's fellow actors. In reading, one is all alone, and must not act. After, she compares ...

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