The Course of English Poetry – 3 89work with the emotional life-mind as their instrument or rather
work in it as a medium, accepted as the very form of their being
and the very force of their nature.
Great poetry is the result, but there are other powers of the
human consciousness which have not yet been mastered, and to
get at these is the next immediate step of English poetry. The way
it follows is to bring forward the intellect as its chief instrument;
the thought-mind is no longer carried along in the wave of life,
but detaches itself from it to observe and reflect upon it. At first
there is an intermediate manner, that of Milton’s early work and
of the Carolean poets, in which something of the Elizabethan
impulse, something of its intense imaginative sight or its charm
of emotion, prolongs itself for a while, but is fast fading away
under the stress of an increasing intellectuality, a strong dryness
of the light of the reason and a growing hardness of form and
concentrated narrowness of the observing eye. This movement
rises on one side into the ripened classical perfection of Milton,
and falls away on the other through Waller into the reaction in
Dryden and Pope.