"Tell me, ye muses, what hath former ages
Now left succeeding times to play upon,
And what remains unthought on by those sages
Where a new muse may try her pinion?"

So Complained Phineas Fletcher in his Purple Island as long ago as 1633.
Three centuries have brought to the development of lyric passion no
higher form than that of the sonnet cycle. The sonnet has been likened
to an exquisite crystal goblet that holds one sublimely inspired thought
so perfectly that not another drop can be added without overflow. Cast
in the early Italian Renaissance by Dante, Petrarch and Camoens, it was
chased and ornamented during the Elizabethan period by Shakespere, and
filled with its most stimulating draughts of song and love during the
Victorian era by Rossetti, Browning and Meredith. And now, in this first
year of the new century, the historic cup is refilled and tossed off in
a radiant toast to Erato by Wallace Irwin.

The attribute of modernity is not given to every new age. The cogs in
the wheels of time slip back, at times. The classic revival may be
permeated with enthusiasm, but it is a second edition of an old work -
not a virile essay at expression of living thought. The later
Renaissance was but half modern in its spirit; the classic period of the
eighteenth century in England was half ancient in its mood. But the
twentieth century breaks with a new promise of emancipation to English
Literature, for a new influence has freshened the blood of conventional
style that in the decadence of the End of the Century had grown dilute.
This adjuvant strain is found in the enthusiasm of Slang. Slowly its
rhetorical power has won foothold in the language. It has won many a
verb and substantive, it has conquered idiom and diction, and now it is