The name is absent

Poetry and Democracy         49

on foot: the new world was taking substance, and lay ready
for the transforming touch of the poets. The American
Revolution had created the Republic. The French Revolu-
tion had shattered the old regime and its tradition in Europe.
The Industrial Revolution was transforming the whole
mechanism and texture of civilised life. In both continents
a new world had begun. It was the world of the Rights of
Man, of the carrière ouverte, of the sovereignty of the
People; and into this world poetry let itself loose, to create,
to interpret, to vivify. The idea of democracy had arisen
among the thinkers and been translated into action by the
statesmen; the patterns of a democratic world began to be
wrought out by the poets.

Among the great English poets of that age, the greatest,
in the combined mass and excellence of his work, is gen-
erally accounted to be Wordsworth. He divined the new
age, but did not enter into it. His early democratic enthu-
siasm, chilled by the terrors of the French Revolution, be-
came converted first into despair, and then into a search, in
the recesses of his own mind, for ideals of life independent
of external things. Yet he was the first, after Burns,—and
Burns was then still only the poet of a small nation, not of
the English-speaking race,—to link poetry with the require-
ments of nascent democracy. In his ‘Lyrical Ballads,’ as in
the poems which succeeded them during his greatest period,
he set himself expressly and deliberately to write poetry in
the language of the people, and to seek the material out of
which poetry was to be shaped in the common thoughts and
passions and experiences of mankind.

Hardly less was the share borne in the démocratisation of
poetry by other great poets of that great period. Byron,
himself an aristocrat by birth, believed in democracy; by his
appeal to the elemental human passions he brought the im-

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