s so different from this; so
mystical and subjective, so remote from the crowd, so dim with the
trailing mists of fanciful ambiguity.

It is very unfortunate that one "learned by heart," as a child, so much
of Byron's finest poetry.

I cannot imagine a more exciting experience than a sudden
discovery at this present hour, with a mind quite new and fresh to its
resounding grandeur, of that poem, in the Hebrew Melodies, about
Sennacherib.

"And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee."

Have not those lines the very wonder and terror and largeness of
ancient wars?

"And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
And thro' it there rolled not the breath of his pride,
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf!"

Our modern poets dare not touch the sublime naivete of poetry like
that! Their impressionist, imagist, futurist theories make them too
self-conscious. They say to themselves--"Is that word a 'cliche' word?
Has that phrase been used several times before? Have I been
carefully and precisely _original_ in this? Is that image clear-cut
enough? Have I reverted to the 'magic' of Verlaine and Mallarme
and Mr. Yeats? Do I suggest the 'cosmic emotion' of Walt
Whitman'?"

It is this terror of what they call "cliche words" which utterly
prevents them from writing poetry which goes straight to our heart
like Byron's; poetry which refreshes our jaded epicurean senses with
a fine renaissance of youth.

Their art destroys them. Their art enslaves them. Their art lames and
cripples them with a thousand meticulous scruples.

Think what it would be, in this age, suddenly to come upon a poet
who could write largely and carelessly, and with a flaming divine
fire, about the huge transactions of life; about love and war and the
great throbbing pulses of the world's historic events! They cannot do
it--our poets--they cannot do it; and the reason of their inability is
their over-intellectuality, their heavily burdened artistic conscience.
They are sedentary people, too, most unhealthily sedentary,
ourmoderns who write verse; sedentary young people, whose
environment is the self-conscious Bohemia of artificial Latin
Quarters. They are too clever, too artistic, too egotistic. They are too
afraid of one another; too conscious of the derisive flapping of the
goose-wings of the liter