Chapter XVIII

The Poets of the Dawn – 3

I

FWORDSWORTHandByronfailedbyanexcessoftheal-
loy of untransmuted intellect in their work, two other poets
of the time, Blake and Coleridge, miss the highest great-
ness they might otherwise have attained by an opposite defect,
by want of the gravity and enduring substance which force of
thought gives to the poetical inspiration. They are, Coleridge in
his scanty best work, Blake almost always, strong in sight, but
are unable to command the weight and power in the utterance
which arises from the thinking mind when it is illumined and
able to lay hold on and express the reality behind the idea. They
have the faculty of revelatory sense in a high degree, but little
of the revelatory thought which should go with it; or at least
though they can suggest this sometimes with the intense force
which comes from spiritual feeling, they cannot command it
and constantly give it greatness and distinctness of body. And
their sight is only of the middle kind; it is not the highest things
they see, but only those of a borderland or middle region. Their
poetry has a strange and unique quality and charm, but it stops
short of something which would have made it supreme. They are
poets of the supernatural and of such spiritual truth as may be
shadowed by it or penetrate through it, but not of the greatest
truths of the spirit. And this supernature remains in them a
thing seen indeed and objectively real, but abnormal; but it is
only when supernature becomes normal to the inner experience
that it can be turned into material of the very greatest poetry.
Coleridge more than any of his great contemporaries missed
his poetic crown; he has only found and left to us three or
four scattered jewels of a strange and singular beauty. The rest
of his work is a failure. There is a disparateness in his gifts,
an inconsequence and incoherence which prevented him from
bringing them together, aiding one with the other and producing