He
wrote lyrics of extraordinary freshness and delicacy and spontaneity; he
could speak in a child's voice of innocent joys and sorrows and the
simple elemental things. His odes to "Spring" and "Autumn" are the
harbingers of Keats. Not since Shakespeare and Campion died could
English show songs like his
"My silks and fine array."
and the others which carry the Elizabethan accent. He could write these
things as well as the Elizabethans. In others he was unique.
"Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry."
In all the English lyric there is no voice so clear, so separate or
distinctive as his.
CHAPTER VII
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL
(1)
There are two ways of approaching the periods of change and new birth in
literature. The commonest and, for all the study which it entails, the
easiest, is that summed up in the phrase, literature begets literature.
Following it, you discover and weigh literary influences, the influence
of poet on poet, and book on book. You find one man harking back to
earlier models in his own tongue, which an intervening age misunderstood
or despised; another, turning to the contemporary literatures of
neighbouring countries; another, perhaps, to the splendour and exoticism
of the east.
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