Chapter XIV

The Movement of Modern

Literature – 1

M

ODERN poetry carrying in it the fullness of imagina-
tive self-expression of the entirely modernised mind
begins with the writers of the later eighteenth and the
early nineteenth century. Here are the free, impetuous but often
narrow sources of these wider flowings. Here we see the initial
tendencies which have undergone a rapid growth of meaning
and changes of form in the subsequent decades, until now all
their sense and seeking have reached in the early twentieth a
quite unprecedented subtle intensity, refinement and variety of
motives and even a tense straining on many lines to find in every-
thing some last occult truth and hitherto unimagined utterance,
to go beyond all that poetry has ever done. This is in its very
nature an effort which must end either in a lingering, a hectic
extravagant or dull exhausted decadence or in a luminous and
satisfied self-exceeding. At the very beginning and still more and
increasingly afterwards this modern movement, in literature as
in thought and science, takes the form of an ever widening and
deepening intellectual and imaginative curiosity, an insatiable
passion for knowledge, an eager lust of finding, a seeking eye of
intelligence awakened to all the multiform possibilities of an end-
less new truth and discovery. The Renascence was an awakening
of the life spirit to wonder and curiosity and reflection and the
stirred discovery of all that is brilliant and curious in the things
of the life and the mind on their surface; but the fullness of the
modern age has been a much larger comprehensive awakening of
the informed and clarified intellect to a wider curiosity, a much
more extensive adventure of discovery and an insistent need
to penetrate deeper and know and possess the truth of Nature
and man and the universe, — both their outer truth and process