lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICAL POETRYmight be, an escape from themselves, is to the averageBriton something of an exotic whether he regardit from the point of view of traditional prejudice or ofmore modern " enlightenment." Mr Yeats's sublimateddisassociation of love from the more normal "way ofa man with a maid," his strange pagan otherworldliness,if it excited less prejudice, was quite as much of anexotic to the many readers who could easily understandMandalay. An exotic, too, for the Englishmanbred in the tradition of Macaulay and the Whigs,was such a poem as Lionel Johnson's By the Statue ofKing Charles at Charing Cross:Our wearier spirit faints,Vexed in the world's employ :His soul was of the saints ;And art to him was joy.Sir William Watson, if laureated, might have beentrusted to diverge into no such heresies. His hero isM acaulay's:That worn face in camps and councils bred,The guest who brought us law and liberty,Raised well-nigh from the dead.Decadent in a more ordinary sense of the term werethe few whose disassociations brought them into disastrouscollision with the laws of health or with prejudicestoo firmly rooted to be assailed with impunity.But my concern is with their lyrical poetry. It seemsto me that the work of three of them has the unmistakablelyrical inspiration which I have tried tomake my guiding star while selecting, as for a sketchlike this I had to do, from among many gifted, scholarly,and accomplished poets in every decade on which I142