NATURALISM CHAPTER I DRYDEN AND POPE HE distance in time between the last poems of Pope THE time and the first of Wordsworth was nearly sixty years. During that time, and including the "Lyrical Ballads," the spirit, method, manner, metre, melody and the passion of poetry had suffered a complete and vital change. And the end the poets proposed to themselves in making poetry, and their conception of its origin and sources, were radically different from what they had been in the days of Dryden and Pope. Indeed, the change began before Pope's death, about the middle of his career. Even then, the reaction which brought us to Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge took its rise. It was a reaction which, caused by a weariness of artificial and conventional poetry, went back, in order to draw new life into poetry, to simple human nature, and to Nature herself as seen in her wild and uncultivated beauty. And this, briefly put (it will be sufficiently expanded hereafter), is what is meant by the rise of Naturalism. If we date it from the middle of Pope's career and not from his death, it took not sixty but fully eighty years to open out fully a new world of poetry-so |