f life, these
poems, uniting old and new manners, responded to Synge's proclamation
that "the strong things of life are needed in poetry also ... and it
may almost be said that before verse can be human again it must be
brutal."

Masefield brought back to poetry that mixture of beauty and brutality
which is its most human and enduring quality. He brought back that
rich and almost vulgar vividness which is the very life-blood of
Chaucer, of Shakespeare, of Burns, of Villon, of Heine--and of all
those who were not only great artists but great humanists. As a purely
descriptive poet, he can take his place with the masters of sea and
landscape. As an imaginative realist, he showed those who were
stumbling from one wild eccentricity to another to thrill them, that
they themselves were wilder, stranger, far more thrilling than
anything in the world--or out of it. Few things in contemporary poetry
are as powerful as the regeneration of Saul Kane (in _The Everlasting
Mercy_) or the story of _Dauber_, the tale of a tragic sea-voyage and
a dreaming youth who wanted to be a painter. The vigorous description
of rounding Cape Horn in the latter poem is superbly done, a
masterpiece in itself. Masefield's later volumes are quieter in tone,
more measured in technique; there is an almost religious ring to many
of his Shakespearian sonnets. But the swinging surge is there, a
passionate strength that leaps through all his work from _Salt Water
Ballads_ (1902) to _Reynard the Fox_ (1919).

"THE GEORGIANS" AND THE YOUNGER MEN

There is no sharp statistical line of demarcation between Masefield
and the younger men. Although several of them owe much to him, most of
the younger poets speak in accents of their own. W. W. Gibson had
already reinforced the "return to actuality" by turning from his first
preoccupation with shining knights, faultless queens, ladies in
distress and all the paraphernalia of hackneyed mediaeval romances, to
write about ferrymen, berry-pickers, stone-cutters, farmers, printers,
circus-men, carpenters--dramatizing (though sometimes theatricalizing)
the primitive emotions of uncultured and ordinary people in
_Livelihood_, _Daily Bread_ and _Fires_. This intensity had been
asking new questions. It found its answers in the war; repressed
emotionalism discovered a new outlet. One hears its echoes in the
younger poets like Siegfried Sassoon, with his poignant and unsparing
poems of conflict; in Robert Graves, who refle