Chapter XXIII

Recent English Poetry – 4

T

HE INSPIRING spirit and shaping substance of this new
poetry, that which gives it its peculiar turn, raises the
power of its style to the intuitive closeness or directness
and presses on it to bring in another law of its movement, has
been indicated to some extent in the core of its meaning, but it is
necessary to dwell on it more perusingly, that we may get a closer
glimpse of the things towards which we are moving. The change
that is coming or at least striving to come, might be described
on the surface as a great and subtle deepening and enlarging
of the thought-mind in the race and a new profounder, closer,
more intimate way of seeing, feeling, appreciating, interpreting
life and Nature and existence. The thought of the middle and
even the later nineteenth century was wide in its way, especially
in its range and breadth of surface or in comparison with the
narrower thought of the preceding ages, but it was acute rather
than profound, superficial even in its attempt at penetration. It
sought for its food over a great country, but it did not wing
high in the breadth of the altitudes or plunge down into the
largeness of the depths. Perhaps the distinction is best marked
by that significant movement of philosophic thought which now
repelled by these limitations rejects the supremacy of the intellect
and seeks for the secret of things in the intuition, in the inmost
suggestions of life, in the innate will and principle of action and
points more or less obscurely through these things to a spirit or
self or nameless somewhat superconscient to or at least greater
than our intellectual mind and reason. The nineteenth century
was intellectual, not intuitive, critical rather than creative, or
creative mostly by the constructive force of the critical mind, —
critically constructive, we may then say, rather than creative by
any direct insight and interpretation, — curiously observative
of the phenomenon of life and Nature, concerned with many