i8 7 



Trench (b. 1865) and " A.E." (George W. Russell), a mystical poet and patriot who is 

 in a sense the hero of George Moore's wonderful impressionist portrait group. 



A remarkable feature of much of this verse is that although written in English it 

 derives its inspiration from Gaelic themes and often reproduces the dialect of speakers 

 who have retained the expiring habit of thinking in Gaelic. The whole movement fits 

 in with a latent conviction, parallel to that of the Ossianic and Chatterton period, 

 initiated by Gray, that vital poetry must be sought among the solitary places and 

 primitive folk of the earth, that legendary lore must be re-explored and romance redeemed 

 from old crones at the spinning wheel or a remote provincial peasantry crooning over 

 old-world poetry by a peat fire. The poetic idiom of England, it was held, showed 

 signs of being exhausted. New fountains were in request which might peradventure 

 be discovered in old Irish. Literature was sick of the polished speech of the academies 

 and needed refreshment to be sought in a renewed contact with mother earth, nature, 

 primitive people and prehistoric fragments like those exhumed by Irish mediaevalists 

 such as Dr. Kuno Meyer. Mr. George Moore commits himself to the movement with 

 the ardour of an agnostic realist turned Catholic neophyte, and chronicles his sensations 

 in the confessions of a literary Rousseau in whose regenerate conception Art and Nature 

 have become mystically reconciled only to be confronted in the end with a terrible 

 dilemma: Ireland stood revealed as the proper cradle for this rebirth of letters, but 

 Ireland was Catholic in the modern narrow, post-Tridentine sense, and Catholic dogma 

 was antipathetic to literature. Catholic Ireland must be regarded as stony ground. 



Meanwhile the poetic soil of England has exhibited an unexpected richness. The 

 daring of Synge in delineating the live human soul has been at least equalled by Mr. 

 John Masefield (author of that intense drama of Nan), whose strangely imaginative yet 

 realistic poems, contributed to the English Review, have renewed the faith of the most 

 sceptical in the compelling power of poetry. Putting aside the folk-song, chanty or lyric, 

 in which his earlier experiments at verse were mostly made, Mr. Masefield (b. 1875) has 

 astonished every one by the powerful thrust of his narrative, a narrative thrown in 

 the unlikely medium of the old eighteenth century rhyming heroic to which he has lent 

 a vitality wholly unexpected in poems such as " The Everlasting Mercy," " The Widow 

 in the By-Street " and " Dauber." In lyric spontaneity and charm, again, these last 

 years have found nothing to surpass the bird-like lyrics of Mr. H. Da vies, " the super- 

 tramp," unless it be in the delicate, spritish and faerie songs and poems of Mr. Walter 

 De la Mare (b. 1873). His intonation in his Songs of Childhood and The Listeners and 

 other Poems has a bitter sweet of this writer's unaccountable own, haunting and 

 strangely original, but the mould is essentially of folk origin. The workings of his 

 fancy are to be seen in their richest luxuriance in the singular and delightful fantasy 

 known as " The Mullah Mulgars," in which are embedded some perfect little nuggets 

 of enchanted verse. Katharine Tynan and Lascelles Abercrombie have increased their 

 poetic reputations in New Poems and Emblems of Love. Sidney Royse Lysaght 

 has given a fine " Jean Christophe " type of poem in Horizons and Landmarks, character- 

 ised by real beauty of retrospective picturing. Maurice Baring (b. 1874), the clever 

 parodist, has produced some pensive Collected Poems, French perhaps in their inspiration, 

 but of sincerity and beauty. Mr. Sturge Moore has not quite sustained his claim to a 

 massive simplicity in A Sicilian Idyll. A poet emerges from the Fifty Poems of John 

 Freeman. The grave satirist and studious social reformer John Galsworthy (b. 1867), 

 though, having established himself as novelist (The Man of Property, 1906; The Country 

 House, 1907; Fraternity, 1909), he has concentrated his best attention lately on the 

 drama (The Silver Box, 1906; Strife, 1909; Justice, 1910), has also aspired to lyric 

 honours and has written one or two stanzas of rare beauty, almost lost it is true in 

 pallid speculations, to gladden the heart of the anthologist. Mr. Henry Newbolt, 1 

 in Songs of Memory and Hope, and Mr. Alfred Noyes (b. 1880) in his Collected Poems, 

 have on the whole well sustained their positions as foremost among writers of ballads 

 and of patriotic, heroic, occasional and rhetorical verse. Mr. Hilaire Belloc (b. 1870), 



1 B. 1862; see E. B. xix, 463. 



