What
shall we require of her? The answer comes, it seems, as quick and as
vague as the question. We require the highest. All that can be demanded
of any spiritual activity of man we must demand of poetry. It must be
adequate to all our experience; it must be not a diversion from, but a
culmination of life; it must be working steadily towards a more complete
universality.
Suddenly we may turn upon ourselves and ask what right we have to demand
these things of poetry; or others will turn upon us and say: 'This is a
lyrical age.' To ourselves and to the others we are bound to reply that
poetry must be maintained in the proud position where it has always
been, the sovereign language of the human spirit, the sublimation of all
experience. In the past there has never been a lyrical age, though there
have been ages of minor poetry, when poetry was no longer deliberately
made the vehicle of man's profoundest thought and most searching
experience. Nor was it the ages of minor poetry which produced great
lyrical poetry.
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