iolet is blue. All schemes of art
become mechanical and insipid, and even their _naivetes_ lose their
savour. Verse of excellent quality, in this primitive manner, can now be
written to order by any smart little boy in a Grammar-school.

We have agreed, however, to believe that poetry, as an art, in one shape
or another, will escape from the bankruptcy of language, and that
Pegasus, with whatever strange and unexpected gambollings, will continue
to accompany us. But of one thing we may be quite sure, that it will
only be at the cost of much that we at present admire and enjoy that the
continuity of the art of verse will be preserved. 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 merit. 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