The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century | Page 3

were the theme of such hot debate. There are thousands
of minor poets, but poetry has ceased to be a minor subject. Any one
mentally alive cannot escape it. Poetry is in the air, and everybody is
catching it. Some American magazines are exclusively devoted to the
printing of contemporary poems; anthologies are multiplying, not
"Keepsakes" and "Books of Gems," but thick volumes representing the
bumper crop of the year. Many poets are reciting their poems to big,
eager, enthusiastic audiences, and the atmosphere is charged with the
melodies of ubiquitous minstrelsy.
The time is ripe for the appearance of a great poet. A vast audience is
gazing expectantly at a stage crowded with subordinate actors, waiting
or the Master to appear. The Greek dramatists were sure of their public;
so were the Russian novelists; so were the German musicians. The
"conditions" for poetry are intensified by reason of the Great War. We
have got everything except the Genius. And the paradox is that
although the Genius may arise out of right conditions, he may not; he
may come like a thief in the night. The contrast between public interest
in poetry in 1918 and in 1830, for an illustration, is unescapable. At
that time the critics and the magazine writers assured the world that
"poetry is dead." Ambitious young authors were gravely advised not to
attempt anything in verse--as though youth ever listened to advice!
Many critics went so far as to insist that the temper of the age was not
"adapted" to poetry, that not only was there no interest in it, but that
even if the Man should appear, he would find it impossible to sing in
such a time and to such a coldly indifferent audience. And yet at that
precise moment, Tennyson launched his "chiefly lyrical" volume, and
Browning was speedily to follow.
Man is ever made humble by the facts of life; and even literary critics
cannot altogether ignore them. Let us not then make the mistake of
being too sure of the immediate future; nor the mistake of
overestimating our contemporary poets; nor the mistake of despising
the giant Victorians. Let us devoutly thank God that poetry has come

into its own; that the modern poet, in public estimation, is a Hero; that
no one has to apologize either for reading or for writing verse. An age
that loves poetry with the passion characteristic of the twentieth century
is not a flat or materialistic age. We are not disobedient unto the
heavenly vision.
In the world of thought and spirit this is essentially a fighting age. The
old battle between the body and the soul, between Paganism and
Christianity, was never so hot as now, and those who take refuge in
neutrality receive contempt. Pan and Jesus Christ have never had so
many enthusiastic followers. We Christians believe our Leader rose
from the dead, and the followers of Pan say their god never died at all.
It is significant that at the beginning of the twentieth century two
English poets wrote side by side, each of whom unconsciously waged
an irreconcilable conflict with the other, and each of whom speaks from
the grave today to a concourse of followers. These two poets did not
"flourish" in the twentieth century, because the disciple of the bodily
Pan was a cripple, and the disciple of the spiritual Christ was a
gutter-snipe; but they both lived, lived abundantly, and wrote real
poetry. I refer to William Ernest Henley, who died in 1903, and to
Francis Thompson, who died in 1907.
Both Henley and Thompson loved the crowded streets of London, but
they saw different visions there. Henley felt in the dust and din of the
city the irresistible urge of spring, the invasion of the smell of distant
meadows; the hurly-burly bearing witness to the annual conquest of
Pan.
Here in this radiant and immortal street
Lavishly and omnipotently as
ever
In the open hills, the undissembling dales,
The laughing-places
of the juvenile earth.
For lo! the wills of man and woman meet,

Meet and are moved, each unto each endeared
As once in Eden's
prodigal bowers befel,
To share his shameless, elemental mirth
In
one great act of faith, while deep and strong,
Incomparably nerved
and cheered,
The enormous heart of London joys to beat
To the
measures of his rough, majestic song:
The lewd, perennial,

overmastering spell
That keeps the rolling universe ensphered
And
life and all for which life lives to long
Wanton and wondrous and for
ever well.
The London Voluntaries of Henley, from which the above is a fair
example, may have suggested something to Vachel Lindsay both in
their irregular singing quality and in the direction, borrowed from
notation, which accompanies each one, _Andante con moto,
Scherzando, Largo e mesto, Allegro maestoso._ Henley's Pagan
resistance to Puritan morality and convention, constantly exhibited
positively in his verse, and