Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/13



HEN Byron and Shelley died, the impulse given to poetry by the ideas concerning man, which we now call democratic, was exhausted for a time in English poetry. At the same time the impulse given to poetry by the hatred of them had also been exhausted. There was no passion for or against these ideas left in the nation. And England, thus deprived of animating conceptions concerning man—derived either from the far past or from the present—sank into a dreary commonplace.

Then Keats, who had felt this exhaustion before the death of Bryon and Shelley, finding no ideas in the present, recovered for poetry the ideas of the past. He called on England to live for beauty, and bade her find it in the myths of Greece, and in the stories of romance. In these, he thought—recast so as to manifest the power of love, truth, and beauty—the poet would receive into his heart the impassionating ideas of the past, realise the deep emotion he needed for his work,