small in quantity, was a minor occupation with him and yet the quality and power of it is unmistakable. Its content is never great but the raw vigor in it was to serve as a bold banner-a sort of brilliant Jolly Roger -for the younger men of the following period. It is not only this dramatist's brief verses and his intensely musical prose but his sharp prefaces that have exercised so strong an influence.

Synge's poetic power is unquestionably greatest in his superb plays. In The Well of the Saints, The Playboy of the Western World and Riders of the Sea there are more poignance, beauty of form and richness of language than in any piece of dramatic writing since Elizabethan times.

But although Synge's poetry was not his major concern, numbering only twenty-four original pieces and eighteen translations, it had a surprising effect upon his followers. It marked a point of departure, a reaction against both the too-polished and over-rhetorical verse of his immediate predecessors and the dehumanized mysticism of many of his associates. In that memorable preface to his Poems he wrote what was a slogan, a manifesto and at the same time a classic credo for all that we call the "new" poetry. "I have often thought," it begins, "that at the side of poetic diction, which everyone condemns, modern verse contains a great deal of poetic material, using 'poetic' in the same special sense. The poetry of exaltation will be always the highest; but when men lose their poetic feeling for ordinary life and cannot write poetry of ordinary things, their exalted poetry is likely to lose its strength of exaltation in the way that men cease to build beautiful churches when they have lost happiness in building shops. . . . Even if we grant that exalted poetry can be kept successfully by itself, the strong things

of life are needed in poetry also, to show that what is exalted or tender is not made by feeble blood."

RUDYARD KIPLING

New tendencies are contagious. But they also disclose themselves simultaneously in places and people where there has been no point of contact. While Synge was publishing his proofs of the keen poetry in everyday life, Kipling was illuminating, in a totally different manner, the wealth of poetic material in things hitherto regarded as too commonplace for poetry. Before literary England had quite recovered from its surfeit of Victorian priggishness and pre-Raphaelite delicacy, Kipling came along with high spirits and a great tide of life, sweeping all before him. An obscure Anglo-Indian journalist, the publication of his Barrack-room Ballads in 1892 brought him sudden notice. By 1895 he was internationally famous. Brushing over the pallid attempts to revive a pallid past, he rode triumphantly on a wave of buoyant and sometimes brutal joy in the present. Kipling gloried in the material world; he did more-he glorified it. He pierced the coarse exteriors of seemingly prosaic things-things like machinery, bridge-building, cockney soldiers, slang, steam, the dirty by-products of science (witness "M'Andrews Hymn" and "The Bell Buoy")-and uncovered their hidden glamour. "Romance is gone," sighed most of his contemporaries,

"6 . . and all unseen

Romance brought up the nine-fifteen."

That sentence (from his poem "The King") contains the key to the manner in which the author of The Five Nations helped to rejuvenate English verse.

Kipling, with his perception of ordinary people in terms of ordinary life, was one of the strongest links between the Wordsworth-Browning era and the latest apostles of vigor, beginning with Masefield. He has had a score of imitators, ranging from the facile Cicely Fox Smith to the glibly uninspired Robert W. Service, but none of them has captured anything of his quality except his characteristic beat and rhythms. There are occasional and serious defects in Kipling's work. Frequently he falls into a journalistic ease that tends to turn into jingle; he is fond of a militaristic drum-banging that is as blatant as the insularity he condemns. But a burning if sometimes too fatuous faith shines through his achievements. His best work reveals an intensity that crystallizes into beauty what was originally tawdry, that lifts the vulgar and incidental to the place of the universal.

JOHN MASEFIELD

All art is a twofold revivifying—a recreation of subject and a reanimating of form. And poetry becomes perennially "new" by returning to the old-with a different consciousness, a greater awareness. In 1911, when art was again searching for novelty, John Masefield created something startling and new by going back to 1385 and The Canterbury Pilgrims! Employing both the Chaucerian model and a form similar to the practically forgotten Byronic stanza, Masefield wrote, in rapid succession, The Everlasting Mercy (1911), The Widow in the Bye Street (1912), Dauber (1912), The Daffodil Fields (1913)-four astonishing rhymed narratives and four of the most remarkable poems of our generation. Expressive of every rugged phase of life, these poems, uniting old and new manners, responded to Synge's proclama

tion that "the strong things of life are needed in poetry also . . . and it may almost be said that before verse can be human again it must be brutal."

Masefield brought back to poetry that mixture of beauty and brutality which is its most human and enduring quality. He brought back that rich and almost vulgar vividness which is the very life-blood of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, of Burns, of Villon, of Heine-and of all those who were not only great artists but great humanists. As a purely descriptive poet, he can take his place with the masters of sea and landscape. As an imaginative realist, he showed those who were stumbling from one wild eccentricity to another to thrill them, that they themselves were wilder, stranger, far more thrilling than anything in the world-or out of it. Few things in contemporary poetry are as powerful as the regeneration of Saul Kane (in The Everlasting Mercy) or the story of Dauber, the tale of a tragic sea-voyage and a dreaming youth who wanted to be a painter. The vigorous description of rounding Cape Horn in the latter poem is superbly done, a masterpiece in itself. Masefield's later volumes are quieter in tone, more measured in technique; there is an almost religious ring to many of his Shakespearean sonnets. But the swinging surge is there, a passionate strength that leaps through all his work from Salt Water Ballads (1902) to Reynard the Fox (1919).

THE WAR AND "THE GEORGIANS"

There is no sharp statistical line of demarcation between Masefield and the younger men. Although several of them owe much to him, most of the younger poets speak in accents of their own. W. W. Gibson had already reinforced the "return to actuality" by turning from his first preoccupation with shining knights, fault

less queens, ladies in distress and all the paraphernalia of hackneyed mediæval romances, to write about ferrymen, berry-pickers, stone-cutters, farmers, printers, circus-men, carpenters dramatizing (though sometimes theatricalizing) the primitive emotions of uncultured and ordinary people in Livelihood, Daily Bread and Fires. This intensity had been asking new questions. It found its answers in the war; repressed emotionalism discovered a new outlet.

The war caught up the youth of the country in a great gust of national fervor. But after the first flush of false romanticism passed, the consequent disillusion made itself heard. The fierce war-poems of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves are the very opposite of the jingo journalistic verse that attempted to paint the world's greatest tragedy in bright and cheerful colors.

But this intensity was not confined to the martial or the anti-militarist poets. It manifests itself even in the less realistic poems of the romantic Rupert Brooke (who owes less to his immediate predecessors than he does to the passionately intellectual John Donne), in the dark introspections of D. H. Lawrence and the brooding nobility of Charlotte Mew. And, though the younger of these poets (John Freeman, W. J. Turner and others) are echoing traditional English landscape poetry with great persistence and little variety, magic has not disappeared from the world of the contemporary Englishman.

Magic lives in the moon-soaked wonder and nurseryrhyme whimsicality of Walter de la Mare, in the limpid and unperturbed loveliness of Ralph Hodgson, in the naïf and delicate lyrics of W. H. Davies, in the soil-flavored fantasies of James Stephens. Any one of these four singers would be an exquisite ornament to his decade.

All of the poets mentioned in this section (with the