The New Poetic

By the end of the nineteenth century the Romantic movement had split into two opposed impulses, producing on the one hand the popular discursive poet in the manner of Kipling and Newbolt and on the other the aesthete-poet in search of ‘Beauty’. In this highly original study Professor Stead re-examines the experiments of the Georgian school and those of their more radical successors, Ezra Pound and the Imagists, and contends that it has been the function of poetry since Yeats to restore a wholeness of sensibility and to readjust the relations between the poet, his audience, and his experience. In his survey of this ‘new poetic’ Professor Stead offers a radical re-appraisal of the poetry and criticism of T. S. Eliot, whom he places in a tradition running unbroken from the great Romantics. As a result he not only re-discovers the essential ‘newness’ of the major poetry of our age, but stimulates insight into the essential nature of all great poetry.