Cambridge Poets 1900–1913

xii INTRODUCTION . its eminence come from that force in a happy moment of application . So it happens even with a Shakespeare . I do not say that he can be explained : but will maintain that no explanation is possible which leaves out of account the moving mass out of which he was projected . Despite all its towering crests he who would understand Elizabethan literature must lay his account with an ocean of mighty flat and dull reading . In fine, we may reverence good poetry without wrapping a religious mystery about it. It is with poets as with bricklayers ,-- if you set a thousand to work you are likelier to discover genius than if you set a dozen ; and this in spite of all such sayings as poeta nascitur non fit and solus rex vel poeta non quotannis nascitur . For even as many youths have started with an impulse for poetry and failed to achieve it, so many others have dropped into it almost by hazard and discovered their genius by practice . Which is more likely — that Shake speare came to London on the impulse to write such a play as Hamlet ? or that he avoided Stratford in some disgrace , that he sought the capital to pick up a liveli hood , started by holding horses at the theatre door , became an actor , learned how plays should be written , and so steadily improved his genius upon successive chances ? A vast deal of nonsense moreover is talked by those who , making a mystery of poesy , treat it as something too holy to be practised except by stealth . I have never heard it advanced that because in religion omne exit in mysterium we should abstain from practising religion in our daily life . Formy part ,I doubt if some discipline in verse - making be not as necessary to complete intellectual grace in a man as fencing or