From the smooth-flowing imitations of Tennyson and Swinburne,
we passed into a false freedom that had at its heart a repudiation
of all law and standards, for a parallel to which one turns instinctively
to certain recent developments in the political world. We may hope
that the eager search for novelty of form and subject may have its influence
in releasing us from our old bondage to the commonplace and in broadening
the scope of poetry; but we cannot blind ourselves to the fact
that it has at the same time completed that estrangement
between the poet and the general public which has been developing
for half a century. The great mass of the reading world,
to whom the arts should minister, have now forgotten that poetry
is a consolation in times of doubt and peril, a beacon,
and "an ever-fixed mark" in a crazed and shifting world. Our poetry --
and I am speaking in particular of American poetry -- has been centrifugal;
our poets have broken up into smaller and ever smaller groups.
Individualism has triumphed.

To the general confusion, critics, if they may be said to have
existed at all, have added by their paltry conception of the art.
They have deemed it a sufficient denunciation of a poet to accuse him
of imitating his masters; as though the history of an art were rather
a series of violent rebellions than a growth and a progressive illumination.
Not all generations are privileged to see the working of a great
creative impulse, but the want, keen though it be, furnishes no reason
for the utter rejection of

A tremulous murmur from great days long dead.

But this fear of echoing the past may work us a yet greater misfortune.
In the rejection of the manner of an earlier epoch may be implicit also