contribution to the advance of poetry.

Poets are the Great Exceptions. Poets are for ever performing the
impossible. "No man putteth new wine into old bottles ... new wine
must be put into new bottles." But putting new wine into old bottles
has been the steady professional occupation of John Masefield. While
many of our contemporary vers librists and other experimentalists have
been on the hunt for new bottles, sometimes, perhaps, more interested
in the bottle than in the wine, John Masefield has been constantly
pouring his heady drink into receptacles five hundred years old. In
subject-matter and in language he is not in the least "traditional,"
not at all Victorian; he is wholly modern, new, contemporary. Yet
while he draws his themes and his heroes from his own experience, his
inspiration as a poet comes directly from Chaucer, who died in 1400.
He is, indeed, the Chaucer of today; the most closely akin to
Chaucer--not only in temperament, but in literary manner--of all the
writers of the twentieth century. The beautiful metrical form that
Chaucer invented--rime royal--ideally adapted for narrative poetry, as
shown in _Troilus and Criseyde_, is the metre chosen by John
Masefield for _The Widow in the Bye Street_ and for
_Dauber_; the only divergence in _The Daffodil Fields_
consisting in the lengthening of the seventh line of the stanza, for
which he had plenty of precedents. Mr. Masefield owes more to Chaucer
than to any other poet.

Various are the roads to poetic achievement. Browning became a great
poet at the age of twenty, with practically no experience of life
outside of books. He had never travelled, he had never "seen the
world," but was brought up in a library; and was so deeply read in the
Greek poets and dramatists that a sunrise on the Aegean Sea was more