R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

The Poetry of the 'Seventies 97and that this organisation is not so much a necessityforced upon criticism by the art of poetry, as a convenienceelaborated by criticism for its own purposes.Seen in long perspective, poetry may be said with somereason to assume this carefully regulated appearance, butwhen we return to the actual study of the poetry itself,poet by poet, we find that the sharp lines, to which wehave accustomed our critical thoughts, tend to readjustthemselves, to become blurred, and often to disappearaltogether. A very striking instance of this is to be foundin Wordsworth's poetic contact with the eighteenthcenturyschool of poetry against which his critical attackwas so memorably directed.. Nothing, our critical habittells us, could be more decisively established than therevolt shown by the poetic practice of Lyrical Balladsagainst the manner of the preceding age. And then a reexaminationof that book, quite properly termed epochmaking,reveals a strange intimacy between the newgospeller and such marks of his confessed disapproval asMatthew Green and John Armstrong and James Thomsonand William Shenstone. Why, even so stiff and dry aformalist as William Somerville has to be allowed hisgrain of influence upon the dawning ardours of' the returnto nature'.It is, therefore, no bad thing once in a while to fix uponsome quite arbitrarily chosen date, and see precisely whatwas then happening in the art to which our classificationsmay sometimes be too hastily applied. Those of us whocare for, and have taken some trouble to familiarise ourselveswith English poetry, if asked to define its conditionin the eighteen-seventies, would probably answer offhandthat it was then in the full tide of Victorianascendancy. Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne,Morris—these are the figures that would come instantlybefore us, dominating the scene. The Victorian Age, weB 7