erved. If I could suddenly present to you
some characteristic passages of the best English poetry of 1963, I doubt
extremely whether I should be able to persuade you of their merits. I am
not sure that you would understand what the poet intended to convey, any
more than the Earl of Surrey would have understood the satires of Donne,
or Coleridge have enjoyed the odes of George Meredith. Young minds
invariably display their vitality by attacking the accepted forms of
expression, and then they look about for novelties, which they cultivate
with what seems to their elders to be extravagance. Before we attempt to
form an idea, however shadowy, of what poetry will be in the future, we
must disabuse ourselves of the delusion that it will be a repetition of
what is now produced and accepted. Nor can we hope by any exercise of
philosophy to do away with the embarrassing and painful, but after all
perhaps healthful antagonism between those who look forward and those who
live in the past. The earnestness expended on new work will always render
young men incapable of doing justice to what is a very little older than
themselves; and the piety with which the elderly regard what gave them
full satisfaction in their days of emotional freshness will always make it
difficult for them to be just to what seems built on the ruins of what
they loved.

If there is any feature which we can scarcely be wrong in detecting in our
vision of the poetry of the future it is an elaboration which must follow
on the need for novelty of which I have spoken. I expect to find the
modern poet accepting more or less consciously an ever-increasing symbolic
subtlety of expression. If we could read his verses, which are still
unwritten, I feel sure that we should consider them obscure. That is to
say, we should find that in his anxiety not to repeat what had been said
before him, and in his horror of the trite and the superficial, he will
achieve effect and attach interest _obscuris vera involvens_--wrapping the
truth in darkness. The 'darkness' will be relative, as his own
contemporaries, being more instructed and sophisticated than we are, will
find those things transparent, or at least translucent, which remain
opaque enough to us. And, of course, as epithets and adjectives that seem
fresh to us will smell of the inkhorn to him, he will have to exert his
ingenuity to find parallel expressions which would startle us by their
oddity if we met with them now.