The Poets of the Dawn – 3 139great work rich in all the elements of his genius. Intellectuality
he had in abundance, a wide, rich and subtle intellect, but he
squandered rather than used it in discursive metaphysics and
criticism and was most at home when pouring it out in the
spontaneity of conversation or rather monologue, an outlet in
which the labour of giving it the firmness of an enduring form
could be avoided. The poet in him never took into himself the
thinker. The consequence is that very much the greater part of
his poetry, though his whole production is small enough in bulk,
is unconvincing in the extreme. It has at best a certain eloquence
or a turn of phrase and image which has some intellectual finish
but not either force or magic, or a fluidity of movement which
fails to hold the ear. But there are three poems of his which
are unique in English poetry, written in moments when the too
active intellect was in abeyance, an occult eye of dream and
vision opened to supraphysical worlds and by a singular felicity
the other senses harmonised, the speech caught strange subtleties
and marvellous lights and hues and the ear the melodies of other
realms. It is indeed only just over the mystic border that his sight
penetrates and to its most inferior forms, and he does not enter
into these worlds as did Blake, but catches only their light and
influence upon the earth life; but it is caught with a truth and
intensity which makes magical the scenes and movements of the
earth life and transforms light of physical nature into light of
supernature. This is to say that for the first time, except for rare
intimations, the middle worlds and their beings have been seen
and described with something of reality and no longer in the
crude colours of vulgar tradition or in the forms of myth. The
Celtic genius of second sight has begun to make its way into
poetry. It is by these poems that he lives, though he has also
two or three others of a more human charm and grace; but here
Coleridge shows within narrow limits a superlative power and
brings in a new element and opens a new field in the realms of
poetic vision.
Blake lives ordinarily far up in this middle world of which
Coleridge only catches some glimpses or at most stands occa-
sionally just over its border. Blake’s seeing teems with images of