lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

'THE NINETIES"by the life and the poetry of Shelley and Keats, bythe splendours of Poems and Ballads. And there is asignificance in his feeling for these poets. With allhis realism, his distrust of the dreams of the century,his poetry of the truth as he sees it, and of his ownreactions to the facts of life, there is a suppressedromanticism in Hardy's poetry of life and nature. Hisheart and imagination are on the side of the dreamersfrom Blake to Wordsworth and from Shelley and Keatsto Swinburne and Meredith, if his sensitiveness toexperience and to the thought of his day make him apoet, but a wistful poet, of disillusionment. His minorkeyedpoetry and its hesitating music are a strange butnot entirely inappropriate close to the ardours andaspirations and dreams and joys and sorrows and allthe manifold virtuosity of what is, when all is said,the greatest century in the history of English lyricalpoetry. It is so in virtue both of its content andthe rich variety of the form it has taken. I haveused the word "metaphysical" more than once, andthat because the seventeenth century has given to theword, in relation to poetry, a somewhat differentmeaning from "philosophical"; suggests, not so mucha cold, lofty poetry of systematic thought, like that ofLucretius in parts, or of Sir Fulke Greville, or ofLeconte de Lisle, but a poetry in which thought andpassion are in a strange way blended. But the metaphysicalpoetry of the seventeenth century begins andends, in truth, with Donne and some of his religiousdisciples. The sharp separation between the secularand the dfevout of that epoch prevented the metaphysicalpoetry of love which Donne inaugurated beingfurther developed. The love-poetry of his successorsdegenerated into conceit and cynicism. The century157