Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/255

 VII.

IMAGINATION.

t is worth while to reflect for a moment upon the characteristics of recent poetry. Take, Qualities of modern verse. for example, the verse of our language produced during the laureateship of Tennyson, and since the rise, let us say, of Longfellow and his American compeers.

In much of this composition you detect an artistic convergence of form, sound, and color; a nice adjustment of parts, a sense of craftsmanship, Its conscious refinement and vocabulary. quite unusual in the impetuous Georgian revival,—certainly not displayed by any poets of that time except those among whom Keats was the paragon and Leigh Hunt the propagandist. You find a vocabulary far more elaborate than that from which Keats wrought his simple and perfected beauty. The conscious refinement of our minor lyrists is in strong contrast with the primitive method of their romantic predecessors. Some of our verse, from "Woodnotes" and "In Memoriam" and "Ferishtah's Fancies" down, is charged with wholesome and often subtile thought. There has been a marked idyllic picturesqueness, besides a variety of classical and Preraphaelite experiments,