Poetry, in these cases, wins perhaps at most a Pyrrhic victory over
reluctant matter. It is otherwise with the second of the great Belgian
poets.

In the work of Verhaeren, the modern industrial city, with its spreading
tentacles of devouring grime and squalor, its clanging factories, its
teeming bazaars and warehouses, and all its thronging human population,
is taken up triumphantly into poetry. Verhaeren is the poet of
'tumultuous forces', whether they appear in the roar and clash of 'that
furnace we call existence', or in the heroic struggles of the Flemish
nation for freedom. And he exhibits these surging forces in a style
itself full of tumultuous power, Germanic rather than French in its
violent and stormy splendour, and using the chartered licence of the
French 'free verse' itself with more emphasis than subtlety.


4. _The Cult of Force_

In Verhaeren, indeed, we are conscious of passing into the presence of
power more elemental and unrestrained than the civil refinement of our
Georgians, at their wildest, allows us to suspect. The tragic and heroic
history of his people, and their robust art, the art of Rembrandt, and
of Teniers, vibrates in the Flemish poet. He has much of the temperament
of Nietzsche, and if not evidently swayed by his ideas, or even aware of
them, and with a generous faith in humanity which Nietzsche never knew,
he thinks and imagines with a kindred joy in violence:

'I love man and the world, and I adore the force
Which my force gives and takes from man and the universe.'