can be regarded historically as a reaction against what pre-
ceded it. Such a reaction is inevitable and requires little
comment. As soon as an art reaches the limits of its idiom,
it is doomed to become moribund and to hamper creative
work. What happened to the grand manner of the eighteenth
century happened again at the end of the nineteenth, when
the Romantic movement, after yielding its final flowers in the
special art of the Symbolists, showed that nothing more could
be done with it and that any attempt to continue with it would
mean lifeless imitation. Yeats saw the issue when he turned
from the dream-laden style of The Shadowy Waters to the
concentrated, unadorned style of his later books. He realised
that his earlier manner was inadequate to what he now had
to say, for the reason that it had been invented by men whose
creative experiences and ambitions were quite different from
his own. The difficulty was in the first place a matter of
vocabulary. The words which the poets of the nineteenth
century had brought into circulation lost with use their mint
quality and became duller and duller until at last they seemed
to belong to a vanished world. Even if these words had not
been spoiled by use, they would still be incapable of express-
ing states of mind unknown to the great Romantics and
Symbolists. The first change that poetry demanded was in
language. Old words and phrases must be discarded, new
words introduced, and the whole art of words subjected to
a keen, selective criticism. In most European countries
something of this kind happened. It is almost impossible
now for a man to write with the vocabulary of the early
Yeats or of Darío or of Mallarmé. If he does so, he is
suspected either of distorting his experience through an
inapposite idiom or of being a mere imitator of the great
masters.

The change in vocabulary rises from the need to create
something new, but is not in itself enough to meet this end.
Poets must also reconsider the kind of effect which they pro-
duce, the spheres of experience which they think suitable for
poetry, and the degree of liberty to be allowed to the creative
spirit. Of course the nineteenth century with its tremendous
range of creative achievement produced many kinds of poetry.

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