To the consciousness of intellectual defeat and spiritual dismay, evidenced so widely in contemporary literature, it is not to be expected that poetry will for the present make any very direct or explicit answer. For we do not look to poetry for polemics, for the formulation of ethical or metaphysical ideas; and when poetry tries to assume a burden that belongs rather to criticism and philosophy, the result may have literary interest and excellence, as does Pope’s _Essay on Man_, but is more likely to be merely dull and forced, like the later work of Wordsworth or Browning. In either case some fulness of life belonging to poetry when confident in its own right is missing. No, what we look for in the poet is some more pervasive or implicit evidence of his scale of values, some intuitive, and for that reason more certain, indication of the quality of his response to life, felt as unmistakably in his imagery, his diction, and his rhythms as in those more ponderable elements of style which the eighteenth century called “fable” and “sentiments.” Thus, in two stanzas[60] of A. E. Housman-- The year might age, and cloudy The lessening day might close, But air of other summers Breathed from beyond the snows, And I had hope of those. They came and were and are not And come no more anew; And all the years and seasons That ever can ensue Must now be worse and few. --something that belongs to his deepest intuition (his acceptance, without evasion and without reconciliation, of life’s transitoriness) is caught in the very movement of the lines and the simplicity of the words: They came and were and are not. This pervasive sense of things chiefly valued and most deeply felt, which every great poet’s work gives us, is surely not determined altogether by forces external to him. The poet is something more than a highly sensitised receiving-set for remote, scattered goings-on in the world at large. What we prize in every poet we come to know intimately is some irreducible, _given_ quality of the personality. We shall not easily accept, therefore, the current argument that, in an age like ours of dissolving faiths, the only genuine kind of poetry must be one which has cut itself off from belief of any kind.[61] The history of English literature is not lacking in instances of poets who have withstood the pressure of their age: to recall only the greatest, the poems of Milton, from _Lycidas_ to _Samson Agonistes_, are triumphant testimonies against the idea that poetry need be so utterly subject to contemporaneous disintegrating influences. But if we claim for poetry a certain power of immunity from such forces, neither, by the same course of reasoning, should we expect too much from the _direct_ effect upon it of those forces which we think salutary, such as humanism.