Chapter VI

The National Evolution of Poetry

T

HE WORK of the poet depends not only on himself and
his age, but on the mentality of the nation to which he
belongs and the spiritual, intellectual, aesthetic tradition
and environment which it creates for him. It is not that he is
or need be entirely limited or conditioned by his environment
or that he must regard himself as only a voice of the national
mind or bound by some past national tradition and debarred
from striking out a novel and original road of his own. In
nations which are returning under difficulties to a strong self-
consciousness, like the Irish or the Indians at the present mo-
ment, this kind of conscious nationalism in literature may be for
some time a living idea and a powerful motive. In others which
have had a vivid collective life that has exercised a common
and intimate influence on all its individuals or in those which
have cherished an acute sense of a great national culture and
tradition, the more stable elements of that tradition may exert
a very conscious influence on the mind of the poets. At once
sustaining and limiting the weaker spirits, they give to genius an
exceptional power for sustained beauty of form and a satisfying
perfection. But this is no essential condition for the birth of
great poetry. The poet, we must always remember, creates out
of himself and has the indefeasible right to follow freely the
breath of the spirit within him, provided he satisfies in his work
the law of poetic beauty. The external forms of his age and his
nation only give him his starting-point and some of his materials
and determine to some extent, by education, by a subconscious
and automatic environmental pressure, the room he finds for the
free play of his poetic spirit.
Nor is it necessary to subscribe to the theory of the man and
his milieu or the dogma of the historical school of criticism which
asks of us to study all the precedents, circumstances, influences,