I think the pleasure which it gives us is due to the fact that it is so entirely sane and normal and natural; so solidly and massively within the circle of our average apprehension; so expressive of what the common flesh and blood of our elemental humanity have come to feel as permanent in their passions and reactions. It gives us a thrilling shock of surprise when we come upon it unexpectedly—this kind of thing; the more so because the poetry we have grown accustomed to, in our generation, is so different from this; so mystical and subjective, so remote from the crowd, so dim with the trailing mists of fanciful ambiguity.
It is very unfortunate that one "learned by heart," as a child, so much of Byron's finest poetry.
I cannot imagine a more exciting experience than a sudden discovery at this present hour, with a mind quite new and fresh to its resounding grandeur, of that poem, in the Hebrew Melodies, about Sennacherib.
"And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee."
Have not those lines the very wonder and terror and largeness of ancient wars?
"And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
And thro' it there rolled not the breath of his pride,
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf!"
Our modern poets dare not touch the sublime naïveté of poetry like that! Their impressionist, imagist, futurist theories make them too self-conscious. They say to themselves—"Is that word a 'cliché' word? Has that phrase been used several times before? Have I been carefully and precisely original in this? Is that image clear-cut enough? Have I reverted to the 'magic' of Verlaine and Mallarmé and Mr. Yeats? Do I suggest the 'cosmic emotion' of Walt Whitman'?"
It is this terror of what they call "cliché words" which utterly prevents them from writing poetry which goes straight to our heart like Byron's; poetry which refreshes our jaded epicurean senses with a fine renaissance of youth.
Their art destroys them. Their art enslaves them. Their art lames and cripples them with a thousand meticulous scruples.
Think what it would be, in this age, suddenly to come upon a poet who could write largely and carelessly, and with a flaming divine fire, about the huge transactions of life; about love and war and the great throbbing pulses of the world's historic events! They cannot do it—our poets—they cannot do it; and the reason of their inability is their over-intellectuality, their heavily burdened artistic conscience. They are sedentary people, too, most unhealthily sedentary, our moderns who write verse; sedentary young people, whose environment is the self-conscious Bohemia of artificial Latin Quarters. They are too clever, too artistic, too egotistic. They are too afraid of one another; too conscious of the derisive flapping of the goose-wings of the literary journal! They are not proud enough in their personal individuality to send the critics to the devil and go their way with a large contempt. They set themselves to propitiate the critics by the wit of technical novelty and to propitiate their fellow craftsmen by avoiding the inspiration of the past.