conceivable that, although the public of the commercial theatre will not tolerate poetry on the stage, satisfactory amateur productions of verse plays may become more common. I have never heard verse spoken on the stage more beautifully than by Ulysses and Agamemnon in the Cambridge Marlowe Society’s Troilus. If such successes were to become more frequent, we might hope in time to establish a tradition for performing verse plays, and to create a fit audience for them, which would encourage poets to take poetical drama seriously. But if that is to happen, then modern experiments will have to be risked, and produced as carefully and as frequently as classical revivals are now.

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But though in this direction we may see a kind of dawning hope for poetical drama, yet I fear it is no more than a dubious glimmering. Poetry will still have to be written in the main for readers. And if poets are to continue to find readers, in spite of the growing competition of the more popular arts of music, the prose drama, the cinema, and the novel, they will have, I fancy, to take thought how they may put away childish things, and become, not perhaps more serious, but more rational, more daring, in fact more interesting. The material for poetry is the whole realm of the sensuous and intellectual imagination, and that is infinite. At present poets seem to be somewhat timid and unenterprising explorers. And I would suggest that experiments and innovations in technique are likely to be the most hopeful means of extending the range of expression and of discovering new material. In every art changes and developments of the[Pg 33] medium require and call forth the invention of appropriate subject-matter; and the greatest art has always been produced where inspiration has been refreshed and quickened by technical changes, which have made possible the exploitation of unfamiliar themes. It would be rash to foretell with any confidence the directions in which poetical technique will develop in the future. The poets themselves will go their own ways, for better or for worse. But I may perhaps venture to indicate what seem to me the most natural and profitable lines of development.

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Whatever may be our theory as to the true æsthetic and emotional function of metre, the conscious governing principle, according to which English verse has been written from the time of Chaucer until recent years, has been that of syllable-counting. Wherever a decasyllabic line contained more than ten syllables, 

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