IN England, since—shall we name the convenient date 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition?—the educated reading public has developed analytic powers which have not been generally matched by a corresponding development of the co-ordinating arts of the poet. Old charms will no longer hold, old baits will no longer be taken; the reader has become too wary. The triumph of the analytic spirit is nowhere better shown than in these histories of Poetry just mentioned, where the interest in fake poetry is just as strong or even stronger than the interest in poetry itself.

As Religions inevitably die with their founders, the disciples having either to reject or formularize their master’s opinions, so with Poetry, it dies on the formation of a poetic school. The analytic spirit has been, I believe, responsible both for the present coma of religion among our educated classes and for the disrespect into which poetry and the fine arts have fallen. As for these histories of poetry, the very fact that people are interested in failures of the various “Schools” to universalize the individual system of a master, is a great discouragement to a poet trying by every means in his power to lay the spirit of sophistication.

But the age of poetry is not yet over if poets will only remember what the word means and not confuse it with acrostic-making and similar ingenious Alexandrianisms. Earlier civilizations than ours have forgotten the necessarily spontaneous nature of the art, and have tried (for lack of any compelling utterance) to beat the sophisticated critics of their day by piling an immense number of technical devices on their verses, killing what little passion there was, by the tyranny of self-imposed rules. The antithetical couplet of Pope or the Ovidian hexameter-and-pentameter are bad enough, but the ancient Irish and Welsh bards were even more restricted by their chain-rhymes and systems of consonantal sequence, the final monstrosity being the Welsh englyn of four lines, governed by ninety-odd separate rules. The way out for Poetry does not lie by this road, we may be sure. But neither on the other hand do we yet need to call in the Da-da-ists.