CONTENTS
Reading edition
PAGE
I.The General Situation1
II.The Poetic Experience7
III.What is Valuable28
IV.The Command of Life38
V.The Neutralization of Nature43
VI.Poetry and Beliefs55
VII.Some Contemporary Poets68
[Footnotes]
[Transcriber’s Note]
The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything.
—Matthew Arnold.