Recent English Poetry – 2 173to supernature, to the cosmic, the universal and the eternal, but
without any loosing of the hold on life and earth, which is likely
to survive and govern thought and creation and the forms of
our living when the present multitude of standpoints, all the
conflict and chaos of a manifold seeking and new formation,
have resolved themselves into the harmony of a centralising and
embracing outlook. That infinite self-discovery would be the
logical outcome of the movement of the past and the present
century and the widest possibility and best chance open to the
human spirit: taking up the thought of the ages into a mightier
arc of interpretation and realisation, it would be the crowning
of one and the opening of a new and greater cycle.
The poets of yesterday and today, Whitman, Carpenter, the
Irish poets, Tagore, but also others in their degree are forerun-
ners of this new spirit and way of seeing, prophets sometimes,
but at others only illumined by occasional hints or by side rays of
a light which has not flooded all their vision. I may take for my
purpose four of them whose names stand behind or are still with
us and their station already among those whose work endures,
Meredith and Phillips among recent English poets, A. E. and
Yeats of the Irish singers.^1 There is a very great difference of the
degree and power with which the spirit has opened to them its
secret and a great difference too in the turn which they give to its
promptings. The two English poets have it at moments in a high
clarity, but at others it is only a suggestion behind which gives
a penetrating, original and profound tone to their work. This is
their native secret when they go deepest into themselves, a thing
they get sometimes into clear speech perhaps by right of their
Celtic inheritance; but they work in the English tradition, follow
other attractions, bear the burden of a tendency of aesthetic
feeling, form and treatment which lead away from the pursuit
of the direct seeking and the perfect manner. The consistent note
we get more constantly in the Irish poets who, freer in mind from
(^1) I take most of my citations from Mr. Cousins’ book, the only source I have at present
before me; but though few, they are made from the same standpoint and selected with
singular felicity and serve fully my purpose.