All that our wonder can hope for is at best a very speculative answer. If parallels were not so dangerous, we might look with encouragement at that spangled rhetorical torrent which we call Elizabethan literature. Ben Jonson did not consider Shakespeare much of an artist, nor did Milton, and classicists ever since have followed them in that opinion. If one can be the greatest of poets and yet not much of an artist, we may here keep clear of the quarrel: what we get at is the fact that Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans participated in a literary movement which, like ours, began in energy, violence, and extravagance, was at its best excessively rhetorical and given to unpruned copiousness, and perished as it refined. Will a future generation see us in a somewhat similar light--will it like us for our vitality, for the reckless adventurousness of our literature, our extravagances, and forgive us, if it does not precisely enjoy as something with a foreign flavour, our artistic innocence? That is conceivable, certainly. Yet the view _is_ speculative and we dare not take it too seriously. For if we have kept hopefully and intelligently abreast of the contemporary we have kept, none the less, our own very sufficient aloofness, our own tactilism and awareness, in the light of which we are bound to have our own scepticisms and self-distrust. I do not mean that we would perhaps prefer something more classical or severe than “Spoon River Anthology” or “The Congo” or the colour symphonies of Mr. Fletcher, merely on the ground that it is the intrinsically classical and severe which we most desire. What we seem to see in contemporary American poetry is a transition from the more to the less exuberant, from the less to the more severe; and what we most _desire_ to see is the attainment of _that point_, in this transition, which will give us our parallel to the Shakespearean, if we may hope for anything even approximately so high; a point of equipoise.