80)

Two eminent English poets who must be reckoned moderns though each
produced characteristic verse before the end of the eighteenth century,
George Crabbe and William Wordsworth, have shared the common fate of
those writers who, possessing a very moderate power of self-criticism,
are apparently unable to discriminate between their good work and their
bad. Both have suffered, and still suffer, in public estimation from
this cause. The average reader of poetry does not care to have to search
and select for himself, and is prone summarily to dismiss a writer
(especially a poet) on the evidence of his inferior productions.
Wordsworth, by far the greater of the two poets, has survived the
effects of his first offence, and has grown in popularity and influence
for half a century past. Crabbe, for many other reasons that I shall
have to trace, has declined in public favour during a yet longer period,
and the combined bulk and inequality of his poetry have permanently
injured him, even as they injured his younger contemporary.

Widely as these two poets differed in subjects and methods, they
achieved kindred results and played an equally important part in the
revival of the human and emotional virtues of poetry after their long
eclipse under the shadow of Pope and his school. Each was primarily made
a poet through compassion for what "man had made of man," and through a
concurrent and sympathetic influence of the scenery among which he was
brought up. Crabbe was by sixteen years Wordsworth's senior, and owed
nothing to his inspiration. In the form, and at times in the technique
of his verse, his controlling master was Pope. For its subjects he was
as clearly indebted to Goldsmith and Gray. But for _The Deserted
Village_ of the one, and _The Elegy_ of the other, it is conceivable
that Crabbe, though he might have survived as one of the "mob of
gentlemen" who imitated Pope "with ease," would never have learned where
his true strength lay, and thus have lived as one of the first and
profoundest students of _The Annals of the Poor_. For _The Village_, one
of the earliest and not least valuable of his poems, was written (in
part, at least) as early as 1781, while Wordsworth was yet a child, and
before Cowper had published a volume. In yet another respect Crabbe was
to work hand in hand with Wordsworth. He does not seem to have held
definite opinions as to necessary reforms in what Wordsworth called
"poetic diction." Indeed he wa