intellectual perception is realized. But it is, I think, in this business of diction that the true poet is most likely to find himself in the toils with tradition. In his instinct about metrical form he may be relied on to keep, with but momentary lapses, a just balance between example and invention; he will find ample freedom in moving with his own modulations to measures which, in accepting them from the close deliberation of many ages, he truly discovers and recreates. Of his intellectual perceptions we may be equally assured, since the process of preparing these for poetic shape is so deliberate and intense that he cannot mistake what is stolen for his own without failing altogether to be a poet, and it is of the poet that we are speaking. But in his choice of diction he has not, in anything like the same degree, the guidance of a conditional instinct on the one hand, or of obvious obligation on the other, and it is here that he has to use his most unrelaxing wariness. The cumulative practice of poetry from one age to another creates a great volume of verbal expression that, having certain fundamental properties of fitness and passing into the common stock, makes the most seductive appeals to every new writer as he comes along. Upon the tact and wisdom with which he responds to these appeals, his success as a poet largely depends. To listen without discretion is quickly to become altogether insensible to the living qualities of lan

guage; to reject them out of hand is the same kind of error as his who thinks he can discard metrical tradition. This volume of expression may conveniently be divided into four groups, which may be called (a) description through salient qualities, (b) figures of speech, (c) images, (d) poetic conventions. As an example of description through salient quality let us take, very simply, 'the blue sky'; as an example of a figure of speech, 'he burns with rage'; of an image, 'the wings of time'; of a poetic convention, the use of 'thou' or 'thee' or 'thy' or 'thine' in any connection, or, more elaborately, such a phrase as 'methinks he hath a steed.' Of the first, second, and third of these exemplary phrases, it is immediately clear that they are in themselves notably appropriate and significant. Nothing is more profoundly and durably characteristic of the sky than its blueness; fire being the most fiercely consuming of the elements, what more natural when a man experiences so consuming an emotion as rage than to say that he burns with it? And since of all swift things nothing is so daily and beautifully present to our senses as the wings of a bird, and since of time we are conscious of nothing more urgently than its swift passing, to speak of the wings of time is to achieve finely imaginative truth at a word. Further, not only are these phrases appropriate and significant - they touch experience which everyone who considers

any

the matter concerned with intentness is very likely, if not certain, to realize for himself. A man can hardly think about the sky at all without thinking about its blueness; 'to burn with rage' is a figure that any poet might invent in the simplest process of his imagination, as he might associate the swift passing of time with flight and wings. Thus the poet, although he finds such phrases as these ready to his pen, may conceivably use them when his creative mood is active and not lethargic, and yet, unless he uses them with the greatest tact and economy, lethargy of the imagination will certainly be imputed to him, and it is a charge that carries conviction with it, against appeal. We find suggested here, indeed, a curiously subtle test of a poet's quality. It would be safe to say at a venture that every man who has written any considerable volume of verse has used, for example, the juxtaposition of 'blue' and 'sky,' and the decision as to whether we find in his use of the words personal vision or merely loose generalization, will be no negligible evidence as to the quality of his work as a whole. It is as fine a thing for the poet to call the sky blue because he is profoundly aware of its blueness, as it is weak of him to call it so because he has heard someone else doing so and he cannot think of anything else to say. And every reader of poetry knows how thrilling and newly charming such a phrase as 'the blue sky' may be in the hands of a

fine poet, how cloying when used by the lazy poetaster. Nevertheless, few, perhaps none, even of the most vigilant poets are wholly blameless in this matter; if any is, it is certain that here his vigilance has been most closely exercised. Of the fourth group, poetic conventions in diction, it need only be observed that it is clearly ill-judged to perpetuate in verse a manner of speech that once drew its authority from the language of daily use but can no longer do so. It was once in certain communities natural to say 'thou' and 'thee' instead of 'you,' but it is so no longer, just as it is mere attitudinizing to-day to say 'methinks he hath a steed' instead of 'I think he has a horse,' while once it was but to follow a common habit of speech. It is an error to suppose that the language of poetry should be the language of daily speech and no more; it is the poet's business to create for himself a speech that is a concentrated and quickened and enriched form of the speech that is habitual to the world in which he lives, but at the same time it is essential, if his language is to have living force, that it should not violate the idiom of common use by drifting into an outworn mode in the delusion that to be detached and remote is to be distinguished. To be detached in this kind is to perish in an airless world. The word of poetry is the fine flower of language, but the only soil from which it can spring is the common speech of its

time. When a great poet like William Morris seems in his practice to deny this condition, it is but that he does in a particular and strangely impressive way actually live through his imagination in an age that is only not his own by an accident of time. And I do not think that his example can be matched.

The final aspect of my subject is, perhaps, the most important, since it concerns the origin of the poet's work the content matter of his poetry. We touch at once a question upon which, I think, there is more misunderstanding in the approach to poetry than upon any other. In a world where the acquisition of knowledge is momently extolled as being commercially profitable, and where spiritual timidity is so prevalent that not one man in a hundred dare advance one step in his thought without a guide, poetry, like any other manifestation of individual life, is continually being tested by its power to tell us something that will help us towards solving the many riddles that perplex us as though we hoped that some day we might come upon a poet who should resolve the universe of our own spiritual experience into an exact and easy phrase. It is a test under which poetry inexorably refuses to reveal its secret. And yet this content matter, this opinion, far from being of little moment to the poet himself, must absorb and compel his whole being, or his poetry can come to nothing.