1918] on Poetry and Modern Life 325 



asserts the continuity of human history, just as, in the h'ght of 

 science, confirming his own intuitions, he will assert more and more, 

 I believe, the continuity of all life, the continuity of the universe. 



I may seem to have expressed a despondent view on the possi- 

 bilities in England for a poet who seeks to create on a large scale a 

 work that shall be no refuge of romance, no product of a cloistered 

 studio, however beautiful, but something essentially related to his own 

 age. But poets have their ways of discovering themes. I believe in 

 the future of Enghsh poetry. Only the other day a long poem was 

 published which found a theme at once new and relative to the age — 

 I mean the "Song of the Plow," by Mr. Maurice Hewlett— a poem 

 sustained with so intense an energy that it conquered matter the most 

 intractable, a poem of good augury and fine incentive, telling of the 

 past and breathing of the present. 



Mr. Bradley, in the lecture I referred to, tentatively suggested 

 one hampering condition for the modern poet who w^ould celebrate 

 great actions — that his life was private and sequestered and un- 

 acquainted Avith the world of action. Of our younger generation that 

 can no longer be said. Rather it might be said that the world of 

 action and stress is too much with us, that poets lack the stillness in 

 which, according to Ooethe, genius grows best. But let us have 

 faith. We cannot predict what forms poetry will take, nor what 

 themes it will choose. Poetry, genuine poetry, will always be new, 

 because it brings — what is so much more precious than novelty of 

 subject — the eternal freshness of unique personality, the poet himself. 



[L.B.] 



Vol. XXII. (No. 112) 



