lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

THENINETIES"tury was most clearly foreshadowed by the work ofthe second American poet who, after Edgar Allan Poe,has been an influence on this side of the Atlantic, WaltWhitman, and by the authors of Barrack-Room Ballads,The Shropshire Lad, and Wessex Poems. In their workone may study the gradual but final subsidence of theromantic wave which had traversed the century, thedislimning of those ideals, hopes, dreams, illusions,call them what you will, which had inspired a poetryof many tones and moods—the religion of Naturewhich "never did betray the heart that loved her,"and was even for Arnold and Meredith the great consoler;the worship of Liberty which had inspired somany pseans, from Byron's to Swinburne's. The dreamof the past, too, the past that never was a present, themagic of the Middle Ages, ages of Faith and also ofLove, not only "affecioun of holincsse" but "love asto a creature," that too dislimns, or lingers only in afew actual or potential Catholic poets. Not any ofthese dreams is the theme of Whitman, of Kipling orHousman or Hardy, but the actualities of modern life.Whitman and Kipling arc, indeed, still romantics,dreamers of dreams, but Whitman's romance isAmerican Democracy, Kipling's the British Empire.Mr Housman and Thomas Hardy have no suchillusions. For them, as for Leopardi,Amaro e noiaLa vita, altro mai nulla ; e fango e il mondo.But it is not alone the theme and the tone thatchanges; there is a change in the form, the technique,also. These poets have turned away from the elaboratevirtuosity of so much of the poetry of the century, ofwhich the revival at this time by Henley, Lang, and123