Any reader who is sensitive enough to care to read
poetry is sensitive enough to hear it with his inward ear even as he
sees it with his outward eye, and his after-pleasure, as it were, his
lingering delight, will be in proportion as his ear retains the echo
of the song. All poets are minstrels, still. Such a creed is
defective, in the second place, because it has always been the mission
of genuine poets to impress their vision of the world vividly on
mankind, though their vision included more, sometimes, than what the
realists choose to consider reality. There is nothing new in such an
effort. In slack ages of poetic inspiration, however, the versifiers
have no vision of the world, but only of its pale mirrored reflections
in visions dead and gone, and some jolt is needed to bring the poets
back to first-hand observation. Such a jolt are the new poets. _Spoon
River_ is a medicine, a splendid tonic. But the form of _Spoon River_
is not conditioned by eternal needs, only by temporary ones. Its
complete absence of loveliness, of lines that linger, will be its
greatest handicap to immortality--for poetic immortality to-day as
much as ever is not in the pages of a book on a library shelf, but on
the lips of men and women. A poem from which nobody ever quotes is a
poem forgotten.

Tennyson was something of an Imagist at times, presenting his mood or
picture with a Flaubertian precision of epithet that even Amy Lowell
could not criticise. Consider, for example, his famous _Fragment_ on
the eagle:

He clasps the crag with crooked hands
Close to the sun in distant lands,
Ringed with the azure world he stands.

Beneath, the wrinkled ocean crawls,
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

The precision of wording here, the tremendousness of scene evoked with
stark economy of means, the triumphant vividness of the adjective
"wrinkled," transporting the reader at once to a great height above
the plain of the sea, the complete absence of any touch of the
"poetic" (surely the beautiful word _azure_ may be admitted in modern
company), make this poem a masterpiece without date or time. It is as
"new" as the latest Imagist anthology. And, be it noted, I have quoted
it correctly, I feel confident, from memory. My copy of Tennyson is in
storage, and I have not read the fragment probably in ten or a dozen
years. Yet whenever I wish to relive its mood, to see again its
incomparable