58 The Future Poetry
into a new way which has nothing to do with the finer spirit of
the preceding poets. Descending it fell away into an intellectual,
half-artistic, carefully but not finely or sovereignly wrought and
mostly superficial and external poetry. And afterwards we have
this age which is still trying to find itself, but in its most charac-
teristic tendencies seems to start from a summary rejection of the
Victorian forms and motives. These reversals and revolutions of
the spirit are not in themselves a defect or a disability; on the
contrary, they open the door to large opportunities and unfore-
seen achievements. English poetical literature has been a series
of bold experiments less shackled by the past than in countries
which have a stronger sense of cultural tradition. Revolutions
are distracting things, but they are often good for the human
soul; for they bring a rapid unrolling of new horizons.
Here comes in the side of success and greatness in this poetry.
There is a force which overrides its defects and compensates
richly for its limitations; its lapses and failures are the price it
pays for its gains. For nowhere else has individual genius found
so free a field; nowhere has it been able to work so directly out of
itself and follow so boldly its own line of poetic adventure. Form
is a great power, but sureness of form is not everything. A strong
tradition of form gives a firm ground upon which genius can
work in safety, protected from its own wanderings; but it limits
and stands in the way of daring individual adventure. The spirit
of adventure, if its path is strewn with accidents, stumblings or
fatal casualties, brings, when it does succeed, new revelations
which are worth all the price paid for them. English poetry is
full of such new revelations. Its richness, its constant freshness,
its lavish expenditure of genius exulting in chainless freedom,
delivered from all meticulous caution, its fire and penetrating
force of imagination, its lambent energy of poetic speech, its
constant self-liberation into intensest beauty of self-expression
are the rewards of its courage and its liberty. These things are
of the greatest value in poetry. They lead besides to possibilities
which are of the highest importance to the poetry of the future.
We may briefly anticipate and indicate in what manner. We
have to accept one constant tendency of the spirit of English