104 The Future Poetry
to freer and richer moulds of verse. Some pale effort is made
to recover something of the Shakespearian wealth of language
or of the softer, more pregnant colour of the pre-Restoration
diction and to modify it to suit the intellectualised treatment of
thought and life which was now an indispensable element; for
the old rich vital utterance was no longer possible, an intellectu-
alised speech had become a fixed and a well-acquired need of a
more developed mentality. Romanticism of the modern type now
makes its first appearance in the choice of the subjects of poetic
interest and here and there in the treatment, though not yet quite
in the grain and the spirit. Especially, there is the beginning of a
direct gaze of the poetic intelligence and imagination upon life
and Nature and of another and a new power in English speech,
the poetry of sentiment as distinguished from the inspired voice
of sheer feeling or passion. But all these newer motives are only
incipient and unable to get free expression because there is still
a heavy weight of the past intellectual tradition. Rhetoric yet
loads the style or, when it is avoided, still the purer intensity of
poetic emotion is not altogether found. Verse form tends to be
still rather hard and external or else ineffective in its movement;
the native lyric note has not yet returned, but only the rhetorical
stateliness of the ode, not lyricised as in Keats and Shelley, or else
lyrical forms managed with only an outward technique but with-
out any cry in them. Romanticism is still rather of the intellect
than in the temperament, sentiment runs thinly and feebly and
is weighted with heavy intellectual turns. Nature and life and
things are seen accurately as objects and forms, but not with
any vision, emotion or penetration into the spirit behind them.
Many of the currents which go to make up the great stream of
modern poetry are beginning to run in thin tricklings, but still
in a hard and narrow bed. There is no sign of the swift uplifting
that was to come as if upon the sudden wings of a splendid
moment.
In Burns these new-born imprisoned spirits break out from
their bounds and get into a free air of natural, direct and living
reality, find a straightforward speech and a varied running or
bounding movement of freedom. This is the importance of this