up again in his incomparable manner, many bruised, broken, and maybe a
few lost." This is certainly an interesting way of putting the
doctrine of analysis and synthesis as applied to art.

What has Mr. Masefield done then for the advance of poetry? One of his
notable services is to have made it so interesting that thousands look
forward to a new poem from him as readers look for a new story by a
great novelist. He has helped to take away poetry from its
conventional "elevation" and bring it everywhere poignantly in contact
with throbbing life. Thus he is emphatically apart from so-called
traditional poets who brilliantly follow the Tennysonian tradition,
and give us another kind of enjoyment. But although Mr. Masefield is a
twentieth century poet, it would be a mistake to suppose that he has
_originated_ the doctrine that the poet should speak in a natural
voice about natural things, and not cultivate a "diction." Browning
spent his whole life fighting for that doctrine, and went to his grave
covered with honourable scars. Wordsworth successfully rebelled
against the conventional garments of the Muse. Chaucer, Shakespeare,
and Browning are the poets who took human nature as they found it; who
thought life itself was more interesting than any theory about it; who
made language appropriate to the time, the place, and the man,
regardless of the opinion of those who thought the Muse ought to wear
a uniform. The aim of our best twentieth century poets is not really
to write something new and strange, it is to get back to those poets
who lived up to their conviction that the business of poetry is to
chronicle the stages of all life. This is not the only kind of poetry,
but it is the kind high in favour during these present years. The
fountain-head of poetry is human nature, and our poets are trying to
get back to it, just as many of the so-called advances in religious
thought are really attempts to get back to the Founder of