in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and
speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition
of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater
simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated,
and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life
germinate from those elementary feelings, and, from the necessary
character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended, and are
more durable; and, lastly, because in that condition the passions of
men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of
nature."

When Wordsworth wrote these dicta, he followed them up with some
explicit reservations, and made many more implicit ones. Mr.
Masefield, in the true manner of the twentieth century, makes none at
all. Taking the language of Wordsworth exactly as it stands in the
passage quoted above, it applies with precision to the method employed
by Mr. Masefield in the poems that have given him widest recognition.
And in carrying this theory of poetry to its farthest extreme in
_The Everlasting Mercy_, not only did its author break with
tradition, the tradition of nineteenth-century poetry, as Wordsworth
broke with that of the eighteenth, he succeeded in shocking some of
his contemporaries, who refused to grant him a place among English
poets. It was in the _English Review_ for October, 1911, that
_The Everlasting Mercy_ first appeared. It made a sensation. In
1912 the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature awarded
him the Edmond de Polignac prize of five hundred dollars. This aroused
the wrath of the orthodox poet Stephen Phillips, who publicly
protested, not with any animosity toward the recipient, but with the
conviction that true standards of literature were endangered.