wants, is a poet who shall begin by confessing that he is as other
men are, and sing about things which concern all men, in language
which all men can understand. This is the only road to that gift of
prophecy which most young poets are nowadays in such a hurry to
arrogate to themselves. We can only tell what man will be by fair
induction, by knowing what he is, what he has been.

And it is most noteworthy that in this age, in which there is more
knowledge than there ever was of what man has been, and more
knowledge, through innumerable novelists, and those most subtle and
finished ones, of what man is, that poetry should so carefully avoid
drawing from this fresh stock of information in her so-confident
horoscopes of what man will be.

There is just now as wide a divorce between poetry and the common-
sense of all time, as there is between poetry and modern knowledge.
Our poets are not merely vague and confused, they are altogether
fragmentary--disjecta membra poetarum; they need some uniting idea.
And what idea?

Our answer will probably be greeted with a laugh. Nevertheless we
answer simply, What our poets want is faith.

There is little or no faith nowadays. And without faith there can be
no real art, for art is the outward expression of firm coherent
belief. And a poetry of doubt, even a sceptical poetry, in its true
sense, can never possess clear and sound form, even organic form at
all. How can you put into form that thought which is by its very
nature formless? How can you group words round a central idea when
you do not possess a central idea? Shakespeare in his one sceptic