Chapter XI

The Course of English Poetry – 3

T

HE ELIZABETHAN drama is an expression of the stir of
the life-spirit; at its best it has a great or strong, buoyant
or rich or beautiful, passionately excessive or gloomily
tenebrous force of vital poetry. The rest of the utterance of the
time is full of the lyric joy, sweetness or emotion or moved and
coloured self-description of the same spirit. There is much in it
of curious and delighted thinking, but little of a high and firm
intellectual value. Culture is still in its imaginative childhood
and the thinking mind rather works for the curiosity and beauty
of thought and even more for the curiosity and beauty of the
mere expression of thought than for its light and its vision. The
poetry which comes out of this mood is likely to have great
charm and imaginative, emotional or descriptive appeal, but
may very well miss that depth of profounder substance and
that self-possessing plenitude of form which are the other and
indispensable elements of a rounded artistic creation. Beauty of
poetical expression abounds in an unstinted measure, but for
the music of a deeper spirit or higher significance we have to
wait; the attempt at it we get, but not often all the success of its
presence.
Spenser, the poet of second magnitude of the time, gives us in
his work this beauty in its fullest abundance, but also the limited
measure of that greater but not quite successful endeavour. The
Faerie Queeneis indeed a poem of unfailing imaginative charm
and its two opening cantos are exquisite in execution; there
is a stream of liquid harmony, of curiously opulent, yet finely
tempered description, of fluid poetical phrase and minutely seen
image. For these are Spenser’s constant gifts, the native form
of his genius which displays more of descriptive vision than of
any larger creative power or narrative force. An inspired idea is
worked out; a little too much lost in detail and in the diffusion of