Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE POETRY OF THE DE VERES The Wordsworthian tradition has fared ill in poetry since 1850. That tradition lays emphasis upon the attitude and habit of mind involved in poetic composition, and thus upon its substance; to language, however skilfully handled, it denies any sufficient virtue to elevate or of itself make poetic the ordinary material of thought. With Wordsworth it was the impassioned and truthful view of things that was essential; when that was lacking, the ' accomplishment of verse' was a trivial copy-book matter. Poetry for him was ' the breath and finer spirit of knowledge, the impassioned expression that was on the face of science,' and against all theories of ' poetic diction,' against any effort to construct poetry out of words in the absence of the inspiring idea he had set his face from the first. The root-conception in the Wordsworthian, as in the classical theory of poetry, is that the employment of rhythm, and more especially of the complex rhythms of lyric verse, presupposes some depth of meaning, some intensity of emotion which prose at its best can but imperfectly and inadequately render. It is certain that verse attracts because verse is an intense and emphatic form of expression. It is equally certain that verse disappoints and wearies, save in the way of parody or comedy, when there is nothing intense or emphatic to express; when an attempt is made to transmute the trite, the fanciful, or the commonplace, to disguise them in the robes of sovereign thought, or of sovereign emotion, by tricking them out in metrical dress. If it were possible to constitute a Supreme Court of Appeal in matters poetic before which aspirants for the poet's bays were compelled to appear, such a court would perhaps do no great injustice by requiring from each candidate some ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.