Chapter XXII

Recent English Poetry – 3

T

HE RHYTHMIC change which distinguishes the new
poetry, may not be easy to seize at the first hearing, for
it is a subtle thing in its spirit more than in its body,
commencing only and obscured by the outward adherence to
the apparent turn-out and method of older forms; but there
is a change too, more readily tangible, in the language of this
poetry, in that fusion of a concentrated substance of the idea
and a transmuting essence of the speech which we mean by
poetic style. But here too, if we would understand in its issues
the evolution of poetic speech in a language, it is on the subtler
things of the spirit, the significant inner changes that we must
keep our eye; for it is these that determine the rest and are the
heart of the matter. We take little account of the psychology of
poetic genius and are content with saying that the word of the
poet is the speech of the imagination or that he works by an
inspiration. But this is an insufficient account; for imagination
is of many different kinds and inspiration touches the mind at
different levels and breaks out through different media before it
issues through the gates of the creative imagination. What we
mean by inspiration is that the impetus to poetic creation and
utterance comes to us from a superconscient source above the
ordinary mentality, so that what is written seems not to be the
fabrication of the brain-mind, but something more sovereign
breathed or poured in from above. That is the possession by
the divineenthousiasmosof which Plato has spoken. But it is
seldom that the whole word leaps direct from that source, that
cavern of natal light ready-shaped and with the pure stamp of
its divine origin, — ordinarily it goes through some secondary
process in the brain-mind itself, gets its impulse and unformed
substance perhaps from above, but subjects it to an intellectual
or other earthly change; there is in that change always indeed