except[Pg 68] for academic pastiche. No form is ever superannuated if it be the best possible vehicle for expressing a new artistic idea. A poet need be no more afraid of using the Shakespearian or Petrarchian sonnet, than a musician need be ashamed of composing a classical fugue, provided his inspiration be genuine; and its genuineness will not be obscured or destroyed by being cast into some old and well-tried mould. Indeed the most truly academic works are often those in which some ephemerally fashionable formula has been blindly adopted without being understood. The mental habits of poets are as various as those of scientists or politicians. Wordsworth, who far more than most poets drew his material from his own experience, was nevertheless inspired to invent his most felicitous work by such traditional forms as the sonnet or the common ballad stanza: his Ode to Duty is exactly modelled on a metrical invention of Gray, and the pattern[Pg 69] of his Leech-Gatherer, but for one slight variation, is the same as that of Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece. On the other hand Walt Whitman spent many years laboriously floundering in search of a poetic method, and it was only late in life that his unconscious sense of form led him to write a few poems that are as perfect in design and as moving as any fragment of Alcman.

[Pg 68]

[Pg 69]

In every fertile and creative age of literature, it will generally be found that there were two main stimulating influences at work: in the first place naturalism, or an awakened sensitiveness to the suggestive beauty of the actual world; and secondly the fascination exercised by the masterpieces of earlier periods and alien cultures. By this I do not mean the direct inheritance of a poetic medium. Milton no doubt learnt his metrical technique from Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, but in everything else he owed far more to his loving study of Homer, Euripides,[Pg 70] Virgil and the Bible. Thus too the spiritual presence of Homer is felt everywhere in the Greek lyrical and dramatic writers, and even in Theocritus; and thus emulous idolatry of Greek and Alexandrine masterpieces quickened into life all that was best in Latin poetry; while Virgil and Ovid in their turn became the schoolmasters of Dante and the Renaissance. The tyranny of Latin over English poetry only began to wane towards the end of the eighteenth century; then suddenly in Shelley and Keats, and later in Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, Mr. Bridges, and even Browning, the Hellenic spirit becomes a veritable Castalian fountain of inspiration. Now that the knowledge of Greek is likely to become a rare accomplishment, it is possible that its influence will die away 

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