The Eighteen Nineties by Holbrook Jackson — Read

The term "minor poet" is inexact at best, but during the Eighteen Nineties it was used very widely, and a little unnecessarily, to distinguish the younger generation of poets from the generation still represented by Tennyson, Swinburne, William Morris, George Meredith, and from among whom Robert Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were but lately removed. The distinction, like the term "decadent," began as a disparagement and, despite well-meaning protests, it lived on with a difference. Richard Le Gallienne lectured on "The Minor Poet," proving him of importance; and many critics were of the same mind, including William Archer. In the preface to _Poets of the Younger Generation_, a book written in 1899, but not published until 1902, owing to the outbreak of the Boer War, he said: "Criticism has made great play with the supercilious catchword ‘minor poet. ' No one denies, of course, that there are greater and lesser lights in the firmament of song; but I do most strenuously deny that the lesser lights, if they be stars at all and not mere factitious fireworks, deserve to be spoken of with contempt. Now a shade of contempt has certainly attached of late years to the term ‘minor poet,' which has given it a depressing and sterilising effect."

Zeal to stigmatise a calumny has here led to over-statement of its effect. The very book in which the above words appear, with its excellent review of the work of thirty-three poets, disproves at least any suggestion of sterilising results; and, though the survey is both comprehensive and catholic, one might add without much fear of cavil the names of another twelve poets or more to William Archer's hierarchy. The truth of the matter is that the poets so labelled were indifferent to the term; but less discerning members of the reading public may have suffered by allowing it to prejudice them against new poetry which was certainly in the tradition of the great British bards. Indeed, it is not easy to discover another decade in which English literature possessed so numerous and so meritorious a body of young poets. There were splendid outbursts of song in the Elizabethan and Caroline epochs, and another in the early years of the nineteenth century, when such poetic planets as Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley swam into human ken, but I know of no other decade with such a variety and ebullience of song as that under review. How much of it will survive the test of the passing years no critical judgment can say; nor is that our concern. The future will have its own tastes and its own criteria. It is our business to recognise that, according to existing standards and modern predilections, the Nineties were prodigal of poets and distinguished in poems.