Critics like Henry Newbolt are supporting the view that poetry must be in touch with life. Though he clings to the idea that poetry and rhythm go together he thinks that the natural tendency of poetic rhythm will be towards perpetual change; the value of his book, however, consists especially in a chapter on "Poetry and Politics." He recognizes that both reason and intuition play a part in poetry; men are not divided into men of thought and men of feeling, the one speaking the language of science, the other that of poetry. If man is a reasoning animal, he also is a creature of instinct as well as of thought. Hence poetry depends on science, the facts of which become part of our imagination. The poet builds a more livable world; he may write great political poetry if he does not become a partisan. Poetry seeks to change human feeling; that is what the Prophets did, and they were in a sense political poets. "Great poetry," says Newbolt, "is the poetry which has the power to stir many men and stir them deeply," but is especially great when it "is the expression of our consciousness of this world, tinged with man's universal longing for a world more perfect, nearer to the heart's desire."
Newbolt finds that the reason so much religious poetry is futile is because it is remote from earth. But he finds in the Psalms a fervor of patriotism and moral enthusiasm that he compares to the common liturgical poetry "as a great and sonorous bell to the vague whistle of the
wind." They preach no dogma, they are remote from practical politics, they are rooted in human emotions, and are the product of no particular church. That is why they always move.
Incidentally one may add that is why the great medieval Hebrew poets like Solomon Ibn Gebirol, Jehudah Ha Levi and Moses Ibn Ezra, are great poets.[172-A]
Heine in his poem on Jehuda Ben Halevi deplores the fact that these three poets are not well known to Aryan peoples. In fact the liturgical poetry of the medieval Hebrew poets is non-sectarian and can be appreciated by any lover of the literature of ecstasy. Any reader of poetry may be moved by Jehudah Ha Levi's Ode to Zion, or Bachya Ibn Pakuda's My Soul. There are able prose translations of these in B. Halper's Post-Biblical Hebrew Literature. An Anthology, Vol. II.
Any one who reads the history of the poetry of a country, that is, of the poetry in verse, will find much to amuse him in the alleged progress made in the conventions of poetry. One poet dethrones another and the reader gets the impression that the later poet is always superior to the earlier one because he has destroyed convention, and introduced what is often a minor change. The eighteenth century rated Chaucer and Spenser rather low, the nineteenth century killed off Dryden and Pope, Tennyson and Browning were assumed to have advanced upon Byron and Shelley, and the mid-Victorians in turn were deemed to have been supplanted by the poets of "the nineties." Though a later age may make some technical improvements in the art of writing poetry, it is genius that counts. Many problems about poetry have
disturbed critics since Byron died, but none of the succeeding generations have been able to detract from the quality of poets like Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. For a poet is such by virtue of his ability to convey great emotion and thought, and he does not become obsolete solely by the technical innovations of a later age.
Many poets are praised for the "note of revolt" in their poetry, because they have brought about some changes in the technical art of writing poetry, or have written their poetry in a manner different from the ancients only in form. But let us never lose sight of the fact that these changes which are considered tokens of great courage on the part of the innovators, amount to very little when these so-called audacious poets remain on an intellectual and moral level with the masses and do not rise as high as the older poet whose vision soared ahead of his time.
A poet may be great even though he uses the old machinery of the supernatural, even though he indulges in artificial diction, clichés and stereotyped metres, for what counts in poetry is the greatness and power of a human soul and personality, the ecstatic presentation of an advanced point of view, his share as a battler for truth, freedom and justice, the intensity and importance of his emotion. People are under the impression that all the martyrs for human liberty perished in the medieval ages; that the world has been set free by those who gave up their lives to liberate humanity from kings and priests, and that there is no more work to be done by poets to-day in championing human liberty. Critics who admire Milton and Shelley as champions of liberty attack to-day's unpopular champions of it. It amuses one to read of the epithets, revolutionary and radical, applied to versifiers
because they have arranged a system of vowel-sounds combination in their poems, or imported a metre, or broken with an old conventional metre, while the substance of their poetry remains far below the intellectual and aesthetic level of poets who lived many centuries ago.