Chapter IX

The Course of English Poetry – 1

Chaucer and the Poetry of External Life

T

HE SPIRIT and temper that have stood behind the cre-
ative force and come to the front in a literature are the
one essential thing that we must discern, for it is these
that predestine the course the poetry of a people will take and
the turn it gives to its forms. For if the field which poetry
covers is common ground and its large general lines the same
everywhere, yet each nation has its own characteristic spirit and
creative quality which determine the province in which it will
best succeed, the turn or angle of its vision and the shape of its
work. The genius of English poetry was evidently predestined
by the complexity of its spirit and its union of opposite powers
to an adventurous consecutive seeking over the whole field, and
this is in fact the first character of it that strikes the eye, a series
of bold and powerful creative adventures, each quite different
in spirit from its predecessor. But in its first natural potentiality
certain pronounced limitations point to a facile and vigorous
success in a forcefully accurate or imaginative presentation of
life and a more difficult and incomplete success in the intellectual
or spiritual interpretation of life; most difficult for it would be
a direct presentation of the things beyond, a concrete image
of mystic realities, a poetic approach to the higher truths of
the spirit. Yet on the other hand if this difficulty could once
be overcome, then because of the profounder intensity of the
power of poetical speech which this literature has developed,
the very highest and most penetrating expression of these pro-
foundest things would be possible. A nearer significant imaging
of them would be close to the hand here than could easily be
achieved without much new fashioning of language in the Latin
tongues whose speech has been cast in the mould of a clear