Were I put to select the four or five poets who are most typically modern—most essentially of our own time, I think I should name Kipling, Hardy, Wilfrid Gibson, Siegfried Sassoon and John Masefield, and Masefield perhaps before all. There are others who have written poetry as fine, or even finer, but nearly all of them, had they been contemporary with Tennyson, Wordsworth, Keats, Blake, might have written very much as they are writing now without seeming to have been born out of their due period. The five I have named could not have done this: either in theme or manner their poems are too intimate a growth of our own generation, as unmistakably of to-day as the motor-bus or as wireless is. I am not forgetting Crabbe, the father of modern realistic poetry, but he mitigated his unorthodoxies by observing a respectable reticence of phrase, by subscribing to poetical conventions of language, and clothing his newness in the old-fashioned mantle of Pope.
The philosophy of my chosen five may be sometimes akin to that of Fitzgerald’s Omar, but the old wine is in aggressively new bottles. And I am not forgetting that Hardy was Tennyson’s contemporary, and not a little of his poetry was written in the 60’s and 70’s, though it was not published then. If it had been published, the tastes and standards of that formal age would have found it so wanting that it never would have won for Hardy then the fame it has given him now. Think of Tennyson, with his conviction that
“the form, the form alone is eloquent,”
trying with his hyper-sensitive ear the wingless, rugged lyrics of Hardy, setting himself to read them aloud, like the poet in his own “English Idyls,”
“mouthing out his hollow oes and aes,”
and finding it couldn’t be done, for here was a poetical nonconformist who sacrificed verbal beauty to naked truth and was more earnest about what he had to say than about mouthing it in grandiose orotundities of phrase.
Certainly, by the time Tennyson had done with it, poetry was becoming too much a matter of phrase-making; the poet himself was contracting a sort of sentimental snobbery, segregating himself from the crowd, losing touch with common life, and for their own sakes and that of their art, many of us felt, as Dixon Scott put it, that we wanted to “flatten out Parnassus. For poetry has been looked up to far too long; it is time the reader looked down on it; nothing is doing its dignity more damage than the palsying superstition that it is something excessively sublime. The reader picks out his prose-men; he is familiar with philosophers; but the moment he mentions verse he remembers the proprieties; up go his eyes and down drops his voice; and from what is no doubt just a nice, natural desire to do nothing offensive to refinement, he invariably speaks of the specially simple, jolly, frank and friendly souls who make it as though they were wilted priests. Whereas, in reality, of course, they are of all writers, exactly the men whom it is most needful to see as human beings; for of all forms of writing theirs is the most personal, intimate, instinctive—poetry being, after all, simply essence of utterance—speech with the artifice left out.”
To this it now approximates, but it was not this, nor were the poets such simple, unaffected souls until Kipling had begun to outrage their delicacies, shock their exquisite, artistic refinements with the noise and dazzle of his robust magic, and others, like Hardy, Gibson and Masefield, had brought poetry out of her sacred temple and made her at home in inns, and kitchens, and workshops, cottages and mean streets and all manner of vagabond places, restored her to plain nature and human nature and taught her to sing her heart out in the language of average men—sometimes in the language of men who were quite below the average. But even this was better than limiting her to expressing her thoughts and emotions in artificial elegancies that no man ever uses except when he is posing and perorating on public platforms.
In his beginnings Masefield was not unaffected by the Kipling influence; you can trace it in the lilting measures of some of his early “Salt Water Ballads”; perhaps here and there in his early prose stories and sketches, “A Tarpaulin Muster,” “A Mainsail Haul.” He was realizing and naturalizing the seamen there, as Kipling had realized and naturalized the soldier. But he was already doing more than that; he put into those first Ballads, and the “Poems and Ballads” that soon followed them, a grace of fancy, a charm and beauty, also true to the life he pictured, that do not come within the range of Kipling’s genius. He was feeling after and foreshadowing there, too, his own special mission as a poet—if one may use so portentous a word as mission without having it taken in any but its artistic significance. His business was not to be with dignitaries and classical heroisms, he says in “Consecration,” but with sailors and stokers and men of no account—
“Not the rulers for me, but the rankers, the tramp of the road,
The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with the goad,
The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load ...
Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold—
Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told.”