The Poets of the Dawn – 2 129and Nature and things, behind intellectual and emotional and
vital perception is sought to be seized by a pressure upon these
things themselves, and the highly intellectualised language and
way of seeing developed by this age is either used as it is with
more meaning or strained or moulded anew or given some turn
or transformation which will bring in the intensity of the deeper
truth and vision. An intellectualism which takes this turn can
choose one of three methods. It may prolong the language and
forms it already possesses and trust to the weight of the thing it
has to say and the power of its vision to inform this vehicle with
another spirit. It may strain, heighten, transfigure the language
and forms into a more intensive force of image, mould and
expression. Or it may strive for some new and direct tone, some
sheer cry of intuitive speech and sound born from the spirit itself
and coming near to its native harmonies. The moulds too may
either be the established moulds turned or modified to a greater
and subtler use or else strange unprecedented frames, magical
products of a spiritual inspiration. On any of these lines the
poetry of the future may arrive at its objective and cross the
borders of a greater kingdom of experience and expression.
But these earlier poets came in an age of imperfect, unen-
riched and uncompleted intellectuality. The language which they
inherited was admirable for clear and balanced prose speech,
but in poetry had been used only for adequate or vigorous state-
ment, rhetorical reasoning, superficial sentimentalising or ornate
thought, narrative, description in the manner of a concentrated,
elevated and eloquent prose. The forms and rhythmical move-
ments were unsuitable for any imaginative, flexible or subtly
feeling poetry. The new writers dealt with the forms of the
preceding literary age by a clear and complete rejection; they
swept them aside and created new forms or took old ones from
the earlier masters or from song and ballad moulds modified or
developed to serve a more fluid and intellectualised mind and
imagination. But the language was a more difficult problem and
could not be entirely solved by such short cuts as Wordsworth’s
recipe of a resort to the straightforward force of the simplest
speech dependent on the weight of the substance and thought