Recent English Poetry – 1 161of language, rhythm, form, because a subtler and vaster life is
in birth, there are deeper and more significant things to be said
than have yet been spoken, and poetry, the highest essence of
speech, must find a fitting voice for them. The claim of tradition
is still strong, but even those who keep most in the old ways, are
impelled to fill in their lines with more searching things of a more
compelling substance, to strike from their instrument sounds,
variations, meanings for which it had not before the capacity.
The attempt has not yet been supremely successful in its whole
purpose, in spite of some poetic achievement of considerable
beauty, originality and compass, but it has liberated at least
with some initial force novel powers and opened fresh paths; a
few bright streams of initiation meet the eye running to form
some mighty Brahmaputra or Ganges which is not yet in sight,
though we get here and there a blue Yamuna or white Saraswati
or some large impetuous torrent making its way through open
plain or magic woodland towards the great unseen confluence.
There are many widely separate attempts, some fine or powerful
beginnings, as yet no large consummation.
The straining for a new power of rhythm is the first in-
dication of the coming change. Not quite so marked, not by
any means so successful as the change in the type and power
of poetical expression, it is still indicative; rhythm is the subtle
soul of poetry and a change in the spirit of the rhythm must
come if this change in the spirit of the poetry is fully to discover
itself and altogether realise its own characteristic greatness and
perfection. Mankind is moving to another spirit in its thought
and life founded on another and deeper and larger truth of its
inner being than it has yet in the mass been able to see, hold
and put into form of living. This change must find its echo
and interpretation or even some of its power of revelation and
initiation in poetry, and poetry to express this greater spirit must
find out a deeper, larger, more flexible, or, if one may say so, more
multitudinously expressive rhythm than the great poets of the
past were under the necessity of using; something of the same
change has to be achieved as has been successfully accomplished
in music. We see accordingly some attempt to break or enlarge,