"Heart of the World"

Attentive Welshmen gathering last week in Wrexham for the national festival or Eisteddfod of Wales politely honored a bleak, grey-mustached, sensitive man who as a youth polished cuspidors and the brass rail of Luke O'Connor's bygone saloon in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. Later in Yonkers, N. Y. sensitive John Masefield learned to abhor the Machine Age by working in a rug mill. Last week as the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom he told Welshmen that "the world subconsciously longs for poetry but it now invents substitutes, such as speed, to obtain the excitement which poetry would give."

Poet Masefield has often confessed that the excitement of strong emotion is his chief aid in producing poetry, but the excitement must be definitely nonmechanical. To escape the sound of airplanes flying over his home at Boar's Hill, Oxford he moved this year into the countryside of Gloucestershire (TIME, Jan. 2). Sadly last week the Poet Laureate summed up: "Poets have begun to think they are no longer wanted by the world. Poetry has been separated from the heart of the world."

More to the taste of local Welsh coal miners who had gathered for the festival by hundreds, was Poet the Rev. Simon Bartholomew Jones, son of a Cardigan farmer. "I have six brothers." cried Poet Jones, "and every one is like myself a poet!"

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