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Updated: June 27, 2025
But there crowded after him a whole horde of verse-writers, who seized the most obvious symbols he used and standardized them, and in their writings one wandered about, gasping for fresh air land sunlight, for the Celtic soul seemed bound for ever pale lights of fairyland on the north and by the by the darkness of forbidden passion on the south, and on the east by the shadowiness of all things human, and on the west by everything that was infinite, without form, and void.
The critic who condemns as wholly discordant the variant notes of our multitudinous verse-writers may point out that we should have had more right to expect concord if we had shown some discernment in sifting true poets from false. Those who have least claim to the title of poet have frequently been most garrulous in voicing their convictions.
Only remember this, that, if a bushel of potatoes is shaken in a market-cart without springs to it, the small potatoes always get to the bottom. Believe me, etc., etc. I always think of verse-writers, when I am in this vein; for these are by far the most exacting, eager, self-weighing, restless, querulous, unreasonable literary persons one is like to meet with.
I do not speak of petty verse-writers, I say a great Poet, by which term I imply a great creative genius who is honestly faithful to his high vocation.
So far in this chapter the story of poetry, from Tennyson downwards, has been conducted in regular fashion, and by citing the principal names which represent the chief schools or sub-schools. But we must now return to notice a very considerable company of other verse-writers, without mention of whom this history would be wofully incomplete.
The comedies of Goldsmith abound in humor and gayety, and those of Sheridan have an unintermitted fire of epigrams, a keen insight into the follies and weaknesses of society, and great ingenuity in inventing whimsical situations. Of the verse-writers in the time of Johnson's old age, Goldsmith has alone achieved immortality.
But there are two men upon that mountain, whom neither rock nor rain, storm nor thunder have conquered, because they are simply brave honest men; and who are, perhaps, far more "poetic" characters at this moment than Elsley Vavasour, or any dozen of mere verse-writers, because they are hazarding their lives, on an errand of mercy, and all the while have so little notion that they are hazarding their lives, or doing anything dangerous or heroic, that, instead of being touched for a moment by Nature's melodrama, they are jesting at each other's troubles, greeting each interval of darkness with mock shouts of misery and despair, likening the crags to various fogies of their acquaintance, male and female, and only pulling the cutty pipes out of their mouths to chant snatches of jovial songs.
But his influence on writers has not depended on his popularity with readers, and from Sir Aubrey de Vere, who was born more than a century ago, to verse-writers who have only just published, his unmistakable tone, the tone which, so far as we can see, would never have been if Wordsworth had never existed, shows itself.
But no living poet can move his readers to the fascinated horror once felt by the Puritans as they followed Wigglesworth's relentless gaze into the future of the soul's destiny. Historical curiosity may still linger, of course, over other verse-writers of the period.
And in the ranks of our multitudinous verse-writers, it is not the most prepossessing who are loudest in promising us a fair spectacle. How harsh-voiced and stammering are some of these obscure apostles who are offering to exhibit the entire mystery of their gift of tongues! We see more impressive figures, to be sure.
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