ascending spirit of humanity can find a better means of
self-expression. Out of the writing which aimed at simplicity and truth
to nature grew "Poetic Diction," a special treasury of words and phrases
deemed suitable for poetry, providing poets with a common stock of
imagery, removing from them the necessity of seeing life and nature each
one for himself. The poetry which Dryden and Pope wrought out of their
mental vigour, their followers wrote to pattern. Poetry became reduced,
as it never was before and has never been since, to a formula. The
Elizabethan sonneteers, as we saw, used a vocabulary and phraseology in
common with their fellows in Italy and France, and none the less
produced fine poetry. But they used it to express things they really
felt. The truth is it is not the fact of a poetic diction which matters
so much as its quality--whether it squares with sincerity, whether it is
capable of expressing powerfully and directly one's deepest feelings.
The history of literature can show poetic dictions--special vocabularies
and forms for poetry--that have these qualities; the diction, for
instance, of the Greek choruses, or of the Scottish poets who followed
Chaucer, or of the troubadours. That of the classic writers of an
Augustan age was not of such a kind. Words clothe thought; poetic
diction had the artifice of the crinoline; it would stand by itself. The
Romantics in their return to nature had necessarily to abolish it.

But when all is said in criticism the poetry of the earlier half of the
eighteenth century excels all other English poetry in two respects. Two
qualities belong to it by virtue of the metre in which it is most of it
written--rapidity and antithesis. Its antithesis made it an incomparable
vehicle for satire, its rapidity for narrative. Outside its limits we
have hardly any even passable satirical verse; within them there are
half-a-dozen works of the highest excellence in this kind. And if we
except Chaucer, there is no one else in the whole range of English
poetry who have the narrative gift so completely as the classic poets.
Bentleys will always exist who will assure us with civility that Pope's
_Homer_, though "very pretty," bears little relation to the Greek, and
that Dryden's _Vergil_, though vigorous and virile, is a poor
representation of its original. The truth remains that for a reader who
knows no ancient languages either of those translations will probably
give a better idea of thei