The Mantra 9masters of the past, our present business is to go beyond and
not to repeat them, and it must always be the lyrical motive and
spirit which find a new secret and begin a new creation; for the
lyrical is the primary poetical motive and spirit and the dramatic
and epic must wait for it to open for them their new heaven and
new earth.
I have referred to these points which are only side issues
or occasional touches in Mr. Cousins’ book, because they are
germane to the question which it most strongly raises, the future
of English poetry and of the world’s poetry. It is still uncertain
how that future will deal with the old quarrel between idealism
and realism, for the two tendencies these names roughly rep-
resent are still present in the tendencies of recent work. More
generally, poetry always sways between two opposite trends,
towards predominance of subjective vision and towards an em-
phasis on objective presentation, and it can rise too beyond
these to a spiritual plane where the distinction is exceeded,
the divergence reconciled. Again, it is not likely that the po-
etic imagination will ever give up the narrative and dramatic
form of its creative impulse; a new spirit in poetry, even though
primarily lyrical, is moved always to seize upon and do what it
can with them, — as we see in the impulsion which has driven
Maeterlinck, Yeats, Rabindranath to take hold of the dramatic
form for self-expression as well as the lyrical in spite of their
dominant subjectivity. We may perhaps think that this was not
the proper form for their spirit, that they cannot get there a
full or a flawless success; but who shall lay down rules for
creative genius or say what it shall or shall not attempt? It
follows its own course and makes its own shaping experiments.
And it is interesting to speculate whether the new spirit in po-
etry will take and use with modifications the old dramatic and
narrative forms, as did Rabindranath in his earlier dramatic
attempts, or quite transform them to its own ends, as he has
attempted in his later work. But after all these are subordinate
issues.
It will be more fruitful to take the main substance of the
matter for which the body of Mr. Cousins’ criticism gives a