For only that poet can be necessary to our time who himself feels that everything in this time is necessary, and therefore beautiful. He must be one whose whole endeavour as poet and man it is to make his own sensations vibrate in unison with contemporary sensations; who makes the rhythm of his poem nothing else than the echoed rhythm of living things; who adjusts the beat of his verse to the beat of our own days, and takes into his quivering veins the streaming blood of our time. He must not on this account, when seeking to create new ideals, be a stranger to the ideals of old; for all true progress is based on the deepest understanding of the past. Progress must be for him as Guyau interprets it: 'Le pouvoir, lorsqu'on est arrivé à un état supérieur, d'éprouver des émotions et des sensations nouvelles, sans cesser d'être encore accessible à ce que contenaient de grand ou de beau ses précédantes émotions.'[2] A poet of our time can only be great when he conceives this time as great. The preoccupations of his time must be his also; its social problem must be his personal concern. In such a poet succeeding generations would see how man has fought a way to them from the past, how in every moment as it passed he has wrestled to identify the feeling of his own mind with that of the cosmos. And even though the great works of such a poet should be soon disintegrated and his poems obsolete, though his images should have paled, there would yet remain imperishably vivid that which is of greater moment, the invisible motives of his inspiration, the melody, the breath, the rhythm of his time. Such poets, besides pointing the way to the coming generation, are in a deeper sense the incarnation of their own period. Hence the time has come to speak of Émile Verhaeren, the greatest of modern poets, and perhaps the only one who has been conscious of what is poetical in contemporary feeling, the only one who has shaped that feeling in verse, the first poet who, with skill incomparably inspired, has chiselled our epoch into a mighty monument of rhyme.