The Course of English Poetry – 5 103the line followed by the main stream of European thought and
culture, and to that too English poetry had eventually to turn in
the intellectual fullness of the nineteenth century. It was already
the indistinct and half-conscious drift of the slow transitional
movement which intervenes between Pope and Wordsworth;
but as yet this movement was obscure, faltering and poor in
its achievement. When a greater force came streaming in, the
influences that were abroad were those which elsewhere found
expression in the revolutionary idealism of the French Revolu-
tion and in German transcendentalism and romanticism. Intel-
lectual in their idea and substance, they were in the mind of
five or six English poets, each of them a remarkable individ-
uality, carried beyond themselves by the sudden emergence of
some half-mystical Celtic turn of the national mind into supra-
intellectual sources of inspiration. Insufficiently supported by
any adequate spiritual knowledge, unable to find except rarely
the right and native word of their own meaning, these greater
tendencies faded away or were lost by the premature end of the
poets who might, had they lived, have given them a supreme
utterance. But still theirs was the dawn of whose light we shall
find the noon in the age now opening before us if it fulfils all
its intimations. Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth were first explorers
of a new world of poetry other than that of the ancients or
of the intermediate poets, which may be the familiar realm of
the aesthetic faculty in the future, must be in fact if we are not
continually to describe the circle of efflorescence, culmination
and decay within the old hardly changing circle.
Certain motives which led up to this new poetry are already
visible in the work of the middle eighteenth century. There is,
first, a visible attempt to break quite away from the prison of the
formal metrical mould, rhetorical style, limited subject-matter,
absence of imagination and vision imposed by the high pontiffs
of the pseudo-classical cult. Poets like Gray, Collins, Thom-
son, Chatterton, Cowper seek liberation by a return to Miltonic
blank verse and manner, to the Spenserian form, — an influence
which prolonged itself in Byron, Keats and Shelley, — to lyrical
movements, but more prominently the classical ode form, or