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

The Poetry of the 'Seventies 103by no means be a great poet, may work within a very tinycompass. John Banister Tabb, for example, is an originalpoet, though no one would claim that he is a great one.Similarly, Richard Barnefield, and Christopher Smart,and George Darley, and Robert Hawker and MaryColeridge are original poets. It would be easy to namehalf-a-dozen poets now writing who, with a very unambitiousscope, have this originality. It is not for us todecide whether we have or have not great poets amongus, but we certainly have original poets whose claims togreatness are never likely to be advanced, and it is, inmy view, a confusion of terms to call them 'minor'. Thatwe have our minor poets too is abundantly evident.In the 'seventies, then, the new poets who took up theVictorian note were mostly destitute of this savingoriginal grace. Verse writers like John AddingtonSymonds and Philip Bourke Marston had talent andsensibility, they came to no little mastery of their craft,and they wrote a few things that can still be read withpleasure. But they were, first and last, minor poets of theVictorian era. Their best has worthily secured for thema modest place in the great record which is Englishpoetry, and this is no small thing to have attained. Buttheir best hardly ever fails to remind us of the men whohad done better. We look in vain, or nearly always invain, for the personal accent that, however slight, maygive even the most traditional little poem a place in thememory for ever. It is not that these men are consciouslyimitating their masters as an exercise. Amongthe hundreds of people who at that time, as at any other,were writing verse, only a very few could write it as wellas Symonds or Marston, who remind us that after allminor poets may be poets. Nevertheless, the subjection,little though they may have been aware of it, was onefrom which they managed hardly any moments of escape.