Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Way of Poetry, Vol. 4
Pope by men such as Thomas Gray and William Blake through a time not very rich in poetry, we have a second great ?owering of English song, as wonderful almost as that other one of Elizabethan days. Here we find William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Robert Burns, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats, with others whose names are hardly less famous. These men, it need not be said, wrote each in his own strongly distinctive way, but they all worked, under some common impulse and without realising that they were working to the same end, towards taking poetry back from the conventional habits of an artificial society to the simplicity of nature and the fundamental emotions of life. They belonged to an older country than the Elizabethans, and the fierce tragic passion of the earlier poets seems perhaps to give way to a deep and wistful but always splendidly courageous tenderness in these later men, but the inspira tion of poetry runs as strongly as ever and there is no weariness, nothing but magnificently renewed vigour.
And then came the poets of yesterday, poets whom your fathers and grandfathers can remember as being alive Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the rest, all of them increasing the riches of English poetry down to our own time. Nor, as you will have found in reading these books, did the making of poetry stop yesterday. It still goes on to-day, and there are poets writing now whose names you will remember when you are old men and women, as those other names have been remembered by our fathers before us. And when they too have gone, poetry will find new imagina tions in which to work its never-dying will.
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