It was a great relief to me, personally, who had lived in the
palace of Irish art for a time, and had even contributed a little
to its dimness, to hear outside the walls a few years ago a sturdy
voice blaspheming against all the formula, and violating the tenuous
atmosphere with its "Insurrections." There are poets who cannot
write with half their being, and who must write with their whole
being, and they bring their poor relation, the body, with them
wherever they go, and are not ashamed of it. They are not at
warfare with the spirit, but have a kind of instinct that the clan
of human powers ought to cling together as one family. With the
best poets of this school, like Shakespeare and Whitman, one rarely
can separate body and soul, for we feel the whole man is speaking.
With Keats, Shelley, Swinburne, and our own Yeats, one feels that
they have all sought shelter from disagreeable actualities in the
world of imagination. James Stephens, as he chanted his Insurrections,
sang with his whole being. Let no one say I am comparing him with
Shakespeare. One may say the blackbird has wings as well as the eagle,
without insisting that the bird in the hedgerows is peer of the winged
creature beyond the mountain-tops. But how refreshing it was to find
somebody who was a poet without a formula, who did not ransack
dictionaries for dead words, as Rossetti did to get living speech,
whose natural passions declared themselves without the least idea
that they ought to be ashamed of themselves, or be thrice refined
in the crucible by the careful alchemist before they could appear
in the drawing-room. Nature has an art of its own, and the natural
emotions in their natural and passionate expression have that kind
of picturesque beauty which Marcus Aurelius, tired, perhaps, of the
severe orthodoxies of Greek and Roman art, referred to when he spoke
of the foam on the jaws of the wild boar and the mane of the lion.