The Course of English Poetry – 5 105solitary voice from the north in the evolution, apart from the
intrinsic merits of his poetry. His work has its limitations; the
language is often too intellectualised to give the lyrical emotion,
though it comes from the frank, unartificial and sturdy intellect
of a son of the soil; the view on life is close, almost too close to
give the deeper poetic or artistic effect, but it deals much with
outsides and surfaces and the commonnesses and realisms of
action, sometimes only does it suggest to us the subtler some-
thing which gives lyrical poetry not only its form and lilt and its
power to stir, — all these he has, — but its more moving inmost
appeal. Nevertheless, Burns has in him the things which are
most native to the poetry of our modern times; he brings in the
new naturalness, the nearness of the fuller poetic mind, intel-
lectualised, informed with the power of clear reflective thought
awake to life and nature, the closely observing eye, the stirring
force of great general ideas, the spirit of revolt and self-assertion,
the power of personality and the free play of individuality, the
poignant sentiment, sometimes even a touch of psychological
subtlety. These things are in him fresh, strong, initial as in a
forerunner impelled by the first breath of the coming air, but not
in that finished possession of the new motives which is to be the
greatness of the future master-singers. That we begin to get first
in Wordsworth. His was the privilege of the earliest initiation.
This new poetry has six great voices who fall naturally in
spite of their pronounced differences into pairs, Wordsworth and
Byron, Blake and Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. Byron sets out
with a strangely transformed echo of the past intellectualism, is
carried beyond it by the elemental force of his personality, has
even one foot across the borders of the spiritual, but never quite
enters into that kingdom. Wordsworth breaks away with delib-
erate purpose from the past, forces his way into this new realm,
but finally sinks under the weight of the narrower intellectual
tendencies which he carries with him into its amplitudes. Blake
and Coleridge open magical gates, pass by flowering sidelanes
with hedges laden with supernatural blooms into a middle world
whence their voices come to us ringing with an unearthly melody.
In Shelley the idealism and spiritual impulse rise to almost giddy