Recent English Poetry – 3 187fit instrument of the poetical imagination. But it lost this Shake-
spearian directness of intuitive vision and spontaneous power of
utterance. Gray in a notable passage observes and laments the
loss, without penetrating into its cause and nature, and he tried
sometimes in his own way, within the cadre of an intellectualised
language, to recover something of the power. The later poets
get a compensation in other directions by a heightening of the
clarified thought and imagination, but the basic substance of
the speech seems to have irrecoverably changed and its more
tenuous spirit and make impose on the searching audacities of
the intuition the curbing restraints and limits of the imaginative
intelligence. Shelley’s
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,Keats’
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,or his
To that large utterance of the early Gods,or Wordsworth’s
the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,give the force and pitch and measure of this often clear, strong,
large and luminous, but less intensely surprising and uplifting
manner. English poetry has got away from the Elizabethan out-
break nearer to a kinship with the mind and manner of the
Greek and Latin poets and their intellectual descendants, though
still, it is to be noted, keeping something, a subtle and intimate
turn, a power of fire and ether which has become native to it,
a legacy from the Shakespearian speech which was not there
in its beginnings. This imaginatively intellectual basis of speech
remains constant down to the end of the Victorian era.
But at the same time there emerges, at times, a certain effort
to recapture the Shakespearian potency and intensity accompa-
nied by a new and higher element in the workings of the poetic