The Poets of the Dawn – 1 125or tracing it to the deep and luminous fountains from which
it welled. Taine’s grotesquely misproportioned appreciation in
which Byron figures as the colossus and Titan of the age while the
greater and more significant work of Wordsworth and Shelley
is dismissed as an ineffective attempt to poetise a Germanic
transcendentalism, Carlyle’s ill-tempered and dyspeptic depre-
ciation of Keats, Arnold’s inability to see in Shelley anything
but an unsubstantially beautiful poet of cloud and dawn and
sunset, a born musician who had made a mistake in taking hold
of the word as his instrument, are extreme, but still charac-
teristic misunderstandings. In our own day we see the singers
who lead the van of the future entering with a nearer inti-
macy into the domains of which these earlier poets only just
crossed the threshold, but the right art and technique of this
poetry have been rather found by the intuitive sense of their
creators than yet intellectually understood so as to disengage
their form from the obstruction of old-world ideas and standards
of appreciation.
Each essential motive of poetry must find its own char-
acteristic speech, its own law of rhythms, — even though
metrically the mould may appear to be the same, — its own
structure and development in the lyric, dramatic, narrative
and, if that can still be used, the epic form and medium.
The objective poetry of external life, the vital poetry of the
life-spirit, the poetry of the intellect or the inspired reason,
each has its own spirit and, since the form and word are
the measure, rhythm, body of the spirit, must each develop
its own body. There may be a hundred variations within the
type which spring from national difference, the past of the
civilisation, the cultural atmosphere, the individual idiosyn-
crasy, but some fundamental likeness of spirit will emerge.
Elizabethan poetry was the work of the life-spirit in a new,
raw and vigorous people not yet tamed by a restraining and
formative culture, a people with the crude tendencies of the
occidental mind rioting almost in the exuberance of a state
of nature. The poetry of the classical Sanskrit writers was
the work of Asiatic minds, scholars, court-poets in an age of