130 The Future Poetry
for its one sufficient source of power. We find the tongue of this
period floating between various possibilities. On its lower levels
it is weighted down by some remnant of the character of the eigh-
teenth century and proceeds by a stream of eloquence, no longer
artificial, but facile, fluid, helped by a greater force of thought
and imagination. This turn sometimes rises to a higher level
of inspired and imaginative poetic eloquence. But beyond this
pitch we have a fuller and richer style packed with thought and
imaginative substance, the substitute of this new intellectualised
poetic mind for the more spontaneous Elizabethan richness and
curiosity; but imaginative thought is the secret of its power, no
longer the exuberance of the life-soul in its vision. On the other
side we have a quite different note, a sheer poetical directness,
which sometimes sinks below itself to poverty and insufficiency
or at least to thinness, as in much of the work of Wordsworth
and Byron, but, when better supported and rhythmed, rises to
quite new authenticities of great or perfect utterance, and out
of this there comes in some absolute moments a native voice of
the spirit, in Wordsworth’s revelations of the spiritual presence
in Nature and its scenes and peoples, in Byron’s rare forceful
sincerities, in the luminous simplicities of Blake, in the faery
melodies of Coleridge, most of all perhaps in the lyrical cry
and ethereal light of Shelley. But these are comparatively rare
moments, the mass of their work is less certain and unequal in
expression and significance. Finally we get in Keats a turning
away to a rich, artistic and sensuous poetical speech marvellous
in its perfection of opulence, resource and colour which prepares
us for the more various but lower fullnesses of the intellectual
and aesthetic epoch that had to intervene. The greatest intuitive
and revealing poetry has yet to come.
Byron and Wordsworth are the two poets who are the most
hampered by this difficulty of finding and keeping to the native
speech of their greater self, most often depressed in their ele-
vation, because they are both drawn by a strong side of their
nature, the one to a forceful, the other to a weighty intellectu-
alised expression; neither of them are born singers or artists of
word and sound, neither of them poets in the whole grain of their