south, and
on the east by the shadowiness of all things human, and on the west by
everything that was infinite, without form, and void.

It was a great relief to me, personally, who had lived in the palace of
Irish art for a time, and had even contributed a little to its dimness,
to hear outside the walls a few years ago a sturdy voice blaspheming
against all the formula, and violating the tenuous atmosphere with its
"Insurrections." There are poets who cannot write with half their being,
and who must write with their whole being, and they bring their poor
relation, the body, with them wherever they go, and are not ashamed of
it. They are not at warfare with the spirit, but have a kind of instinct
that the clan of human powers ought to cling together as one family.
With the best poets of this school, like Shakespeare and Whitman,
one rarely can separate body and soul, for we feel the whole man is
speaking. With Keats, Shelley, Swinburne, and our own Yeats, one feels
that they have all sought shelter from disagreeable actualities in the
world of imagination. James Stephens, as he chanted his Insurrections,
sang with his whole being. Let no one say I am comparing him with
Shakespeare. One may say the blackbird has wings as well as the eagle,
without insisting that the bird in the hedgerows is peer of the winged
creature beyond the mountain-tops. But how refreshing it was to
find somebody who was a poet without a formula, who did not ransack
dictionaries for dead words, as Rossetti did to get living speech, whose
natural passions declared themselves without the least idea that they
ought to be ashamed of themselves, or be thrice refined in the crucible
by the careful alchemist before they could appear in the drawing-room.
Nature has an art of its own, and the natural emotions in their natural
and passionate expression have that kind of picturesque beauty which
Marcus Aurelius, tired, perhaps, of the severe orthodoxies of Greek and
Roman art, referred to when he spoke of the foam on the jaws of the wild
boar and the mane of the lion.

There were evidences of such an art in Insurrections, the first book of
James Stephens. In the poem called "Fossils," the girl who flies and the
boy who hunts her are followed in flight and pursuit with a swift energy
by the poet, and the lines pant and gasp, and the figures flare up and
down the pages. The energy created a new form in verse, not an orthodox
beauty, which the classic artists