aker of the both
wants, is a poet who shall begin by confessing that he is as other men
are, and sing about things which concern all men, in language which all
men can understand. This is the only road to that gift of prophecy which
most young poets are nowadays in such a hurry to arrogate to
themselves....

There is just now as wide a divorce between poetry and the commonsense
of all time, as there is between poetry and modern knowledge. Our poets
are not merely vague and confused, they are altogether fragmentary--
_disjecta membra poetarum_; they need some uniting idea. And what idea?

Our answer will probably be greeted with a laugh. Nevertheless we answer
simply. What our poets want is faith. There is little or no faith
nowadays. And without faith there can be no real art, for art is the
outward expression of firm, coherent belief....

In the meanwhile, poets write about poets, and poetry, and guiding the
age, and curbing the world, and waking it, and thrilling it, and making
it start, and weep, and tremble, and self-conceit only knows what else;
and yet the age is not guided, or the world curbed, or thrilled, or
waked, or anything else, by them. Why should it be? Curb and thrill the
world? The world is just now a most practical world; and these men are
utterly unpractical. The age is given up to physical science: these men
disregard and outrage it in every page by their false analogies....

Let the poets of the new school consider carefully Wolfe's "Sir John
Moore," Campbell's "Hohenlinden," "Mariners of England," and "Rule
Britannia," Hood's "Song of the Shirt" and "Bridge of Sighs," and then
ask themselves, as men who would be poets, were it not better to have
written any one of these glorious lyrics than all which John Keats has
left behind him; and let them be sure that, howsoever they may answer
the question to themselves, the sound heart of the English people has
already made its choice, and that when that beautiful "Hero and
Leander," in which Hood has outrivalled the conceit-mongers at their own
weapons, by virtue of that very terseness, clearness, and manliness
which they neglect, has been gathered to the limbo of the Crashawes and
Marines, his "Song of the Shirt" and his "Bridge of Sighs," will be
esteemed by great new English nations far beyond the seas, for what they
are--two of the most noble lyric poems ever written by an English pen.
If our poetasters talk with Wordsworth of the dignity and pathos