Now, of all the poets of our day Verhaeren is the one who has felt this feeling of responsibility most strongly. To write poetry is for him to express not himself only, but the striving and straining of the whole period as well, the fearful torment and the happiness that are in the birth of the new things. Just because his work comprises all the present and aims at expressing it in its entity, he feels himself responsible to the future. For him a true poet must visualise the whole psychic care of his time. For when later generations--in the same manner as they will question monuments concerning our art, pictures concerning our painters, social forms concerning our philosophers--ask of the verses and the works of our contemporaries the question, What was your hope, your feeling, the sum of your interpretation? how did you feel cities and men, things and gods?--shall we be able to answer them? This is the inner question of Verhaeren's artistic responsibility. _And this feeling of responsibility has made his work great_. Most of the poets of our day have been unconcerned with reality. Some of them strike up a dancing measure, rouse and amuse people lounging in theatres; others again tell of their own sorrow, ask for pity and compassion, they who have never felt for others. Verhaeren, however, heedless of the approval or disapproval of our time, turns his face towards the generations to be: Celui qui me lira dans les siècles, un soir, Troublant mes vers, sous leur sommeil ou sous leur cendre, Et ranimant leur sens lointain pour mieux comprendre Comment ceux d'aujourd'hui s'étaient armés d'espoir, Qu'il sache, avec quel violent élan, ma joie S'est, à travers les cris, les révoltes, les pleurs, Ruée au combat fier et mâle des douleurs, Pour en tirer l'amour, comme on conquiert sa proie.[1] It was, in the last instance, this magnificent feeling of responsibility which did not permit him to pass by any manifestation of our present time without observing and appreciating it, for he knows that later generations will ask the question how we sensed the new thing, which to them is a possession and a matter of course, when it was still strange and almost hostile. His work is the answer. The true poet of to-day, in Verhaeren's eyes, must show forth the torment and the trouble of the whole psychic transition, the painful discovery of the new beauty in the new things, the revolt, the crisis, the struggles it costs to understand all this, to adapt ourselves to it, and in the end to love it. Verhaeren has attempted to express our whole time in its earthly, its material, its psychic form. His verses lyrically represent Europe at the turning of the century, us and our time; they consciously contemplate the whole circuit of the things of life: _they write a lyric encyclopædia of our time, the intellectual atmosphere of Europe at the turning of the twentieth century._