174 The Future Poetry
this past tradition, though something of it must cling perhaps to
all who write in the English tongue, unless they start with the
superb revolutionary defiance of Whitman, — are able to strike
out with a less encumbered gait into new paths of thought and
movement. They have too an original well of inspiration in the
Celtic spirit, temperament and tradition from which they draw
a magical and delicate draught of other air naturally stimulative
of a subtler and more spiritual vision: they escape, and that is
another supreme advantage, from the overstress of the intellec-
tual and vital notes which in their English kindred and compeers
take from the direct purity of utterance of their spirit. None of
them has indeed the large and puissant voice of Whitman or
his dominant force of poetic personality, though they have what
he has not or did not care to evolve, the artistic faculty and
genius, but each has a high peculiar power in his own way of
light, is at his best, and the best is not infrequent even in the
least of them, a poet of the first rank. The greatness of scope
and unified plenitude of power is absent which would have been
needed to make any one of them a grand representative voice
of the time. But they lead and prepare, they strike great new
notes, open or at least give hints of great new ways for a future
poetry.
One thing that comes home to us when we take a compar-
ative view of this poetry, when we look at the inmost strands
of the expression at which it arrives in these four poets, all of
them among its boldest and most original and therefore most
revealing representatives, is a certain common element behind
their differences; this we find in a novel use of rhythmic move-
ment, a sudden new moving force, turn, stamp and fashion in
the minting of the gold and silver of their language and as the
secret of this departure a quite other innate or conscious aim, not
always manifest in the visible form of the substance, though that
too is there in plenty, but in the way of seeing the object on which
the inner eye is turned, whether it be idea, thing or person, signif-
icant emotion or glint of soul-power in man or revealing object
or suggestive hint in Nature. This aim we may perhaps best
express if we take up and modify a phrase of Meredith’s when