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

The Poetry of the 'Seventies 101it was not until well on in the 'eighties that he appearedagain as a poet; and that although in 1871 ThomasHardy was to come before the public as a novelist withDesperate Remedies, he was not to announce himself as apoet until towards the turn of the century.It is difficult to say at what distance of time criticismbegins to liberate itself from the mist of error and prejudicethat notoriously impedes contemporary judgment.Does any summary that has yet been made of the literaryachievement of the past thirty years, or, say, the firstquarter of the twentieth century, bear the stamp ofauthority on its critical conclusions? Many individualwriters of that period have been carefully and wiselyassessed, but we may be sure that nothing like a truebalance of the general account has yet been struck. Ifwe push our date back a decade or two, it remains doubtfulat least whether we can declare the truth with anycertainty of vision. A great deal has yet to be adjustedin the final perspectives of a period when such poets asLionel Johnson, Mary Coleridge, Ernest Dowson, JohnDavidson, Francis Thompson, with others who workedon well into the new century—Alice Meynell, RobertBridges, William Watson and W. B. Yeats—were in thefull exercise of their powers. Some of these poets werealready out of childhood in the 'seventies, and here andthere we find one of their names on a title page bearingso early a date; but they belong representatively to thelater time, and it is a time still too near to us for decisiverecords to be made in the critical high court. That courtis curiously constituted. No single mind ever governs it,nor is it quite under popular control. The truth seems tobe that, while individual critics may be greatly atvariance in their moods and tastes, there comes a timewhen a given object of criticism is absolved of all thecircumstances that provoke disagreement and stands out