New Outlook Volume 55 - Softcover

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1897 edition. Excerpt: ...there are none of the party who believe in the salutary effect of fact unheightened by imagination. But there is a steady gain on the side of those whe believe that, without this additional transfusing gift of imagination, education is of little advantage, even a positive evil. The new spirit is shown in many ways. One sees it in the discussions in faculty meetings, one finds it in the classes, one meets it in personal conversation with students. I have read much of the written work of the students in the higher In this there is, from year to year, steady increase in appreciation of literature, in sympathy with nature, in eagerness to comprehend human character and to attempt the problems of human existence. There are literary enthusiasms--the best evidence of literary salvation. There is the morbid pessimism that so often accompanies imaginative adolescence. There are literary clubs, circles that have ambitions, that compare work, that argue over authors. Finally, there are college papers and magazines. Some critics, I know, regard the student poem as a thing to be discouraged. The poems may be trash--I have seen some that are not--but the fact remains that through these, and only through these, will the boy rhymer of to-day become the poet of tomorrow. In any college, as the world is constituted, there must be a certain number of instructors to whom all imaginative development is mere waste of energy, who will form a steadfast reserve, perhaps in some respects valuable, on the side of the material. And there will always be a certain number of students to whom poetry will be " rot," classical music " noise," and meditative, imaginative literature mere amplification of vacuity. This class exists in the West....