The Future Poetry

Recent English Poetry – 3 189

or

The journey homeward to habitual self.

These lines of Keats are Shakespearian in their quality, they have
recovered the direct revealing word and intimate image of the
full intuitive manner, but they enter into a world of thought and
inner truth other than Shakespeare’s; by the passage through the
detaching intellect and beyond it they have got to the borders of
the realm of another and greater self than the life-self, though
there we include and take up life into the deeper self-vision. In
the Victorian poets we get occasionally the same tendency in
a stronger but less happy force; for it is weighted down by an
increased intellectuality, in Browning by the robust strenuous-
ness of the analytic intelligence, in Tennyson by the tendency
to mere trimming of expression or glitter and wealth of artistic
colour; but we have its voice sometimes, as in this line of the
Lotos-Eaters,—

Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.

But it has not yet arrived, it is still seeking for itself, beating
fitfully at the gates of the greater intuitive vision and expression.
But in more recent work it is precisely the recovery of this
supreme power of speech on that loftier and subtler level which
to one who comes freshly to this poetry breaks out with a sense
of satisfying surprise and discovery. It is not complete; it is not
everywhere; it is only just rising from the acquired basis of the
previous heights of expression to its own realm; but it is there
in a comparative abundance and it is the highest strain of its
intensities. We find it in Meredith; when he writes of “Colour,
the soul’s bridegroom,” he has got the intimate revealing image
of this fuller and higher intuitive manner, or in his lark’s

silver chain of sound

Of many links without a break:

when he writes, again,