not largely in a sensing of the proximate age. Hence while Mr Housman seems to anticipate and now to join with us in our despair, he is serene and bitter where we are bitter and distraught. His cultural world was an accepted one, though he chose to deny its conscious values; our own perturbations, could they penetrate into the marrow of his bone, would not find him a sympathetic sufferer. In the larger perspective his best work is seen to be a highly personal culmination point in a poetic tradition that is thoroughly alien to us of to-day, and nothing demonstrates this more forcibly than the apparent backwash in some of the Last Poems. There is no backwash in spirit or in style, there is simply the lessened intensity that allows general, underlying cultural traits to emerge. His zero and our zero do not equate for the reason that his is personal where ours is cultural.
Finally, the vain question. Such work as Mr Housman's, admirably simple and clear, classical, as it is, once more raises the doubt as to whether we can truly be said to be expressing ourselves until our moods become less frenetic, our ideas less palpable and self-conscious, and, above all, our forms less hesitant. Our eccentricities have much interest and diagnostic value to ourselves, but should it not be possible to cabin their power in forms that are at once more gracious and less discussible? One wonders whether there is not in store for English poetry some tremendous simplification. One prays for a Heine who may give us all our mordancies, all our harmonies, and our stirrings of new life with simpler and subtler apparatus. There is room for a new Shropshire Lad.
