The Course of English Poetry – 4 91and entirely new attempt with no roots in the past. In the end
not only was the preceding structure of poetry abolished, but all
its strong and brilliant Muses were expelled from their seats. A
stucco imitation classical temple, very elegant, very cold and very
empty, was erected in the vacant place, and the gods of satire
and didactic commonplace set up in a shrine which was built
more like a coffee-house than a sanctuary. A sterile brilliance, a
set polished rhetoric was the poor final outcome.
The age set out with a promise of better things; for a time
it seemed almost on the right path. Milton’s early poetry is the
fruit of a strong classical intellectuality still touched with a glow
and beauty which has been left by a fast receding tide of roman-
tic colour, spontaneous warmth of emotion and passion and
vital intuition, gifts of a greater depth and force of life. Many
softer influences wove themselves together into his high language
and rhythm and were fused in his personality into something
wonderfully strong, rich and beautiful. Suggestions and secrets
were caught from Chaucer, Peele, Spenser, Shakespeare, and
their hints gave a strange grace to a style whose austerity of
power had been nourished by great classical influences. A touch
of Virgilian beauty and majesty, a poise of Lucretian grandeur,
a note of Aeschylean sublimity, the finest gifts of the ancients
coloured or mellowed by richer romantic elements and subtly
toned into each other, entered in and helped to prepare the
early Miltonic manner. Magnified and exalted by the stress of
an original personality, noble and austere, their result was the
blending of a peculiar kind of greatness and beauty not elsewhere
found in English verse. The substance is often slight, for it is as
yet Milton’s imagination rather than his soul or his whole mind
that is using the poetic form; but the form itself is of a faultless
beauty. Already, in spite of this slenderness of substance, we
can see the coming change; the retreat of the first exuberant
life-force and a strong turning of the intelligence upon life to
view it sedately from its own intellectual centre of vision are
now firmly in evidence. Some of the Elizabethans had tried their
hand at this turn, but with no great poetical success; when they
wrote their best, even though they tried to think closely and