APPENDIX A LVII 



Of a truth the ideals of our contemporary poets are not those of 

 the masters of the past, — neither their ideals of matter, of manner, 

 of content or of form. Tennyson's thought "of one far off divine 

 event to which the whole creation moves" is not only inadequate to 

 express what a poet of the present day feels about the destiny of man 

 and about the universe; it fails in appeal, it is merely uninteresting 

 to him; and no modern poet would say as Matthew Arnold said: 

 "Weary of myself, and sick of asking what I am and what I ought to 

 be". Tennyson and Arnold are comparatively recent leaders of 

 thought and we are more akin to the Elizabethans with their spirit 

 of quest than we are to Wordsworth and Arnold. In our ideals of 

 technique we are farther removed from the eighteenth century, from 

 Pope and Gray, than from Donne and Herrick and Vaughan. Our 

 blank verse at its best shuns all reference to Milton and has escaped 

 once again into the freedom of Shakespeare and the wilderness of 

 natural accent. The best of the work shows it, and from the mouths 

 of the poets themselves we sometimes gather their perception of 

 kinship with masters whose influence was unfelt by the Victorians. 

 I remember well an observation Rupert Brooke made to me one even- 

 ing during his visit to Ottawa in August, 1913, as we strolled over the 

 golf links. There was a heavy dew on the grass, I remember, — one 

 could feel it in the air, and the sky was crowded full of stars; the 

 jiight, and peculiarly the coolness of the dew-saturated air recalled 

 some line of Matthew Arnold. "How far away that seems", Brooke 

 said, "far away from what we are trying to do now,- — -John Donne 

 seems much nearer to us". It is the intensity of Donne that fascinated 

 Brooke. It was that intensity that he was endeavouring to reach in 

 his poem "The Blue Room", or in the stillness of arrested time 

 portrayed in "Afternoon Tea". The diffuseness in Wordsworth and 

 Arnold was the quality that made them remote. Brooke was fated 

 for other things than to pursue the cult of intensity. Now we think 

 of him as the interpreter of certain emotional states that arose from 

 the war, and we may select Wilfred Owen as the exponent of certain 

 other sharply hostile states. 



The contrast between these typical natures is the contrast 

 between the traditional feeling for glory and the personal feeling of 

 loss and defeat to be laid to the national debit. Brooke identifies 

 himself with the magnificence of all the endeavour that has gone to 

 create national pride; his offering is one of joy, all is lost in the 

 knowledge that he continues the tradition of sacrifice for the national 

 ideal. Wilfred Owen feels only the desperate personal loss, loss of 

 the sensation of high living, the denial by the present of the right of 



