I do not mean to suggest here the notion of poetry’s having a life of its own in any transcendental sense, or to imply that poets possess mysterious astral powers. My thought is simply that the new humanism, before it is given any large imaginative expression in American poetry, must expect to prove its worth by responding to broadly human, and not alone specifically poetic needs. It will do this by its power of bringing harmony into lives which are ordered in accordance with its insight, of establishing in society “a current of fresh and true ideas,” and of creating thus “a quickening and sustaining atmosphere” which poetry can breathe. I feel no need of apologising for my use of these well-worn phrases of Matthew Arnold; not only was he the best representative of the spirit of humanism in nineteenth-century England or America, but also, in his realisation of the hopeless disparity between natural processes and human aims, he anticipated the very pattern of our own dilemma. The paralysis which came over Arnold’s poetic powers in later life is sometimes attributed to the steady growth of his humanistic interests, requiring the ampler medium of prose. However that may be, I believe it certain that his humanism--his sense, that is, of the worth and fruitfulness of human powers when wisely exercised and his acceptance of the limitations which such a view imposes--gave to his poetry nearly all that power of invigoration and refreshment for which we chiefly value it. A contemporary critic, R. H. Hutton, observed how frequently Arnold closes a poem on the burdensomeness of existence by some seemingly unconnected figure or story, such as the simile of the Tyrian trader in “The Scholar Gipsy,” instinct with the pride and buoyancy of old world enterprise. “‘The problem is insoluble,’ he seems to say, ‘but insoluble or not, let us recall the pristine strength of the human spirit, and not forget that we have access to great resources still.’”[62] In such ways to-day, indirectly and obliquely, humanism may make itself felt as one influence among many upon contemporary poetry: by rendering accessible and operative, for the poets as for the rest of us, some of these moral energies from times of more robust faith and higher intellectual vitality than our own. FOOTNOTES [45] Reprinted by permission of The Macmillan Company, Publishers.