literature at least, they are more
keenly aware of the nature of the abyss on the brink of which they are
trembling.

[FEBRUARY, 1920.

_Poetry and Criticism_

Nowadays we are all vexed by this question of poetry, and in ways
peculiar to ourselves. Fifty years ago the dispute was whether Browning
was a greater poet than Tennyson or Swinburne; to-day it is apparently
more fundamental, and perhaps substantially more threadbare. We are in a
curious half-conscious way incessantly debating what poetry is, impelled
by a sense that, although we have been living at a time of
extraordinarily prolific poetic production, not very much good has come
out of it. Having thus passed the stage at which the theory that poetry
is an end in itself will suffice us, we vaguely cast about in our minds
for some fuller justification of the poetic activity. A presentiment
that our poetic values are chaotic is widespread; we are uncomfortable
with it, and there is, we believe, a genuine desire that a standard
should be once more created and applied.

What shall we require of poetry? Delight, music, subtlety of thought, a
world of the heart's desire, fidelity to comprehensible experience, a
glimpse through magic casements, profound wisdom? All these things--all
different, yet not all contradictory--have been required of poetry. What
shall we require of her? The answer comes, it seems, as quick and as
vague as the question. We require the highest. All that can be demanded
of any spiritual activity of man we must demand of poetry. It must be
adequate to all our experience; it must be not a diversion from, but a
culmination of life; it must be working steadily towards a more complete
universality.

Suddenly we may turn upon ourselves and ask what right we have to demand
these things of poetry; or others will turn upon us and say: 'This is a
lyrical age.' To ourselves and to the others we are bound to reply that
poetry must be maintained in the proud position where it has always
been, the sovereign language of the human spirit, the sublimation of all
experience. In the past there has never been a lyrical age, though there
have been ages of minor poetry, when poetry was no longer deliberately
made the vehicle of man's profoundest thought and most searching
experience. Nor was it the ages of minor poetry which produced great
lyrical poetry. Great lyrical poetry has always been an incidental
achievement, a parergon, of great poets, and gre