Here too, the imaginatively sensitive minds who interpret life through
poetry, and most of all the youngest and freshest among them, themselves
shared in the glories and the throes of the fight as hardly one of the
signers of our most stirring battle poetry had ever done before. How did
this new and amazing experience react upon their poetry? This, our final
question, is perhaps the crucial one in considering the tendencies of
recent European poetry.

In the first place it enormously stimulated and quickened what was
deepest and strongest in the energies and qualities which had been
apparent in our latter day poetry before. They had sought to clasp life,
to live, not merely to contemplate, experience; and here indeed was
life, and death, and both to be embraced. Here was adventure indeed, but
one whose grimness made romance cheap, so that in this war-poetry, for
the first time in history, the romance and glamour of war, the pomp and
circumstance of military convention, fall entirely away, and the
bitterest scorn of these soldier-poets is bestowed not on the enemy, but
on those contemplators who disguised its realities with the camouflage
of the pulpit and the editorial arm-chair. Turn, I will not say from
Campbell or from Tennyson, but from Rudyard Kipling or Sir H. Newbolt,
to Siegfried Sassoon, and you feel that you have got away from a
literary convention, whether conveyed in the manners of the barrack-room
or of the public-school, to something intolerably true, and which holds
the poet in so fierce a grip that his song is a cry.

But if the war has brought our poets face to face with intense kinds of
real experience, which they have fearlessly grasped and rendered, its
grim obsession has not made them cynical, or clogged the wings of their
faith and their hope. I will not ask how the war has affected the
idealism of others, whether it has left the nationalism of our press or
the religion of our pulpits purer or more gross than it found them. But
of our poetry at least the latter cannot be said. In Rupert Brooke the
inspiration of the call obliterated the last trace of dilettante youth's
pretensions, and he encountered darkness like a bride, and greeted the
unseen death not with a cheer as a peril to be boldly faced, but as a
great consummation, the supreme safety. How his poetry would have
reacted to the actual experience of war we can only guess. But in
others, his friends and comrades, the fierce immersion in th