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378 tradition. Some of them, had they lived a thousand years ago, when the inherited poetic consciousness might be said to have stood in ratio to ours as one to five, might have been great: to-day they are overwhelmed. Most of them would have been as unsuccessful then as now, temperaments in which not even the most favourable of environments could arouse the extra iota of sensibility which results in the new contribution. There was a time when merely to be a poet was, ipso facto, to be "original," since unexplored poetic continents lay on every hand, and merely to hoist sail was to find India. Nowadays the poet who is "original" is the exception. It would seem, therefore, that the number of poetic precipitates inducible from the various arrangements of sensibility and environment is not infinite. And it might be further contended that we have already obtained a seriously large proportion of such possible precipitates, and perhaps, also, those that are of greatest value.

Assuming at any rate that this situation is true, and leaving out of account the occasional "great" or approximately "great" or saliently successful poet (the poet who finds a relatively broad new area of the potential awareness, or sheds across an "old" broad area a sharp light from a new quarter), let us perceive with sympathy the predicament of the lesser but genuine poet who faces it. He lacks the power for re-shaping any large area of the consciousness he inherits: he lacks the gift of seeing any large area which is new. The material with which he most passionately desires to deal has been, alas, beautifully dealt with a thousand times before. If he is to avoid being a mere traditionalist (and by assuming that he is a genuine poet we assume that he will) how will the slight but clear "newness" of his sensibility manifest itself? The answer is obvious: it will manifest itself precisely as a refinement of an aspect or aspects of the inherited poetic consciousness; and whether this refining is aesthetic or kinesthetic or ethical or philosophic, if he carries it far and sharply enough it will leave him for us as one of the long line of idiosyncratic poets, the poets of unique temperament, brilliant, but lacking final power on a broad basis, the poets whose function it is, iota upon iota, to widen our stream of consciousness. These are the poets who illustrate for us most clearly the slow process by which poetry is extended to embrace all that man is capable of feeling or perceiving. It is no ignoble fate. For in this class belong all poets, with the exception of the dozen or so who are transcendent.