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

102 John Drinkwaterin a positive clarity about which there can no longer beany dispute even among the most conflicting witnesses.It is, for example, safe to say that all critics of poetryto-day, however violent they may be in their differenceson contemporary topics, are agreed on the simple propositionthat Keats was a good poet—a view, it must beremembered, that was once hotly questioned by honestand reputable opinion. There is, as I say, no principle bywhich we can decide as to the moment when this elucidatingprocess takes place. We can only speak arbitrarily aseach instance arises; and for our present purposes we maysay that, while the issues of the 'nineties are still undecided,we ought, with the material before us, to be ableby now to reach some general agreement as to the poetryof the 'seventies.And it must be confessed that we shall reach it by wayof an examination that affords no great excitement. Themajor Victorian impulse was waning, and the new poetsof its dying fall were for the most part expressly minor.No one has, I think, ever given a satisfactory explanationof what is meant by a ' minor poet', and we are each ofus apt to invest the term more or less vaguely with ameaning of our own. For myself, I think of a minor poetnot as one who does some small thing of his own extremelywell, but as one who produces, often with considerablefertility, not from the resources of his ownnature but from the overflow, or perhaps the backwash,of a poetic movement with which he happens to be incontact. The greatest poets may be, indeed must be, influencedboth by tradition and by their contemporaries,but the influence is a condition and not the foundationof their art, while with the minor poet the influence israther the source of his work than a subsequent condition.A minor poet may be charmingly gifted, but he has nooriginality. On the other hand, an original poet, who need