this may be true. Yet it is well to remember that Chaucer was the immediate successor on the one hand of the English and French minstrels, and on the other of Dante and Boccaccio, whose art in its turn grew directly out of that of the troubadours and the Italian minstrels. And who have been the inheritors of Chaucer’s art? Spenser, let us say, and in our time William Morris. Is it not possible that both Chaucer and Dante were peculiarly fortunate, in that their art had only quite recently emerged from the discipline of a more primitive musical stage? Their successors may be said to have deteriorated, the more purely literary they became, and the further removed from the Pierian fountain-head of minstrelsy. Then again Milton, though more than any other English poet he was consciously the heir to all the ages, inherited his medium[Pg 10] and his metrical technique directly from Shakespeare’s verse that was written, not for reading, but for dramatic performance, although no doubt Milton modified it considerably for his own undramatic purposes. As to the inheritors of Milton’s art, such as Wordsworth and Keats, Matthew Arnold and Mr. Bridges, considerable as have been their achievements, are there not some signs, even in their own work, and still more in the tendency of recent experiments, of an impulse to break away from Miltonic and Shakespearian usage, as though the medium of blank verse could no longer be profitably explored, not at least in its old traditional form?

[Pg 9]

[Pg 10]

Nevertheless it might plausibly be maintained that although the poets of the future are not likely to repeat the particular successes of Chaucer and Milton and their school, there is no reason why they should not exploit the medium of spoken verse in quite new[Pg 11] ways, just as successfully as did their predecessors. First however it would be as well to become somewhat clearer as to the nature of this medium of spoken and silently read verse, and how it differs from more primitive poetry.

[Pg 11]

[Pg 13]

[Pg 13]

CHAPTER II The Medium of Spoken Verse

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