That and the great discovery of
India--an India misunderstood for his own purposes no doubt, but still
the first presentiment of an essential fact in our modern history as a
people--give him the hold that he has, and rightly, over the minds of
his readers.
It is in a territory poles apart from Mr. Kipling's that the main stream
of romantic poetry flows. Apart from the gravely delicate and scholarly
work of Mr. Bridges, and the poetry of some others who work separately
away from their fellows, English romantic poetry has concentrated itself
into one chief school--the school of the "Celtic Revival" of which the
leader is Mr. W.B. Yeats. Two sources went to its making. In its
inception, it arose out of a group of young poets who worked in a
conscious imitation of the methods of the French decadents; chiefly of
Baudelaire and Verlaine. As a whole their work was merely imitative and
not very profound, but each of them--Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson,
who are both now dead, and others who are still living--produced enough
to show that they had at their command a vein of poetry that might have
deepened and proved more rich had they gone on working it. One of them,
Mr. W.B. Yeats, by his birth and his reading in Irish legend and
folklore, became possessed of a subject-matter denied to his fellows,
and it is from the combination of the mood of the decadents with the
dreaminess and mystery of Celtic tradition and romance--a combination
which came to pass in his poetry--that the Celtic school has sprung.
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