But like
reader like poet. Both show the effects of having come into an estate
they have not earned. A nation of readers has required of its poets a
diction and symmetry of form equal to that of an old literature like
that of Great Britain, which is also theirs. No ruggedness, however
racy, would be tolerated by circles which, however superficial their
culture, read Byron and Tennyson."
The English critic, though a gentleman and a scholar, and friendly
withal, is evidently not altogether satisfied, (perhaps he is
jealous,) and winds up by saying: "For the English language to have
been enriched with a national poetry which was not English but
American, would have been a treasure beyond price." With which, as
whet and foil, we shall proceed to ventilate more definitely certain
no doubt willful opinions.
Leaving unnoticed at present the great masterpieces of the antique, or
anything from the middle ages, the prevailing flow of poetry for the
last fifty or eighty years, and now at its height, has been and is
(like the music) an expression of mere surface melody, within narrow
limits, and yet, to give it its due, perfectly satisfying to the
demands of the ear, of wondrous charm, of smooth and easy delivery,
and the triumph of technical art. Above all things it is fractional
and select. It shrinks with aversion from the sturdy, the universal,
and the democratic.
The poetry of the future, (a phrase open to sharp criticism, and not
satisfactory to me, but significant, and I will use it)--the poetry of
the future aims at the free expression of emotion, (which means far,
far more than appears at first,) and to arouse and initiate, more than
to define or finish.
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