Many poets are praised for the "note of revolt" in their poetry, because they have brought about some changes in the technical art of writing poetry, or have written their poetry in a manner different from the ancients only in form. But let us never lose sight of the fact that these changes which are considered tokens of great courage on the part of the innovators, amount to very little when these so-called audacious poets remain on an intellectual and moral level with the masses and do not rise as high as the older poet whose vision soared ahead of his time.
A poet may be great even though he uses the old machinery of the supernatural, even though he indulges in artificial diction, clichés and stereotyped metres, for what counts in poetry is the greatness and power of a human soul and personality, the ecstatic presentation of an advanced point of view, his share as a battler for truth, freedom and justice, the intensity and importance of his emotion. People are under the impression that all the martyrs for human liberty perished in the medieval ages; that the world has been set free by those who gave up their lives to liberate humanity from kings and priests, and that there is no more work to be done by poets to-day in championing human liberty. Critics who admire Milton and Shelley as champions of liberty attack to-day's unpopular champions of it. It amuses one to read of the epithets, revolutionary and radical, applied to versifiers because they have arranged a system of vowel-sounds combination in their poems, or imported a metre, or broken with an old conventional metre, while the substance of their poetry remains far below the intellectual and aesthetic level of poets who lived many centuries ago.
But what greater poetry has been produced in the last two generations, than many of the novels and prose dramas written in Russia, Germany, France, Italy, England and Scandinavia? Why is there greatness in the poetry in these works? Is it not because of the character drawing, the delineation of great emotional conflicts, of the ecstasy bathing the ideas? Would these poets have been any the less great, had they continued to use the same ideas, emotions and situations, tricked out even in the old conventional forms of rhyme, metre, tropes, allegories, high personages, supernatural agencies? In fact plays like _Peer Gynt_ and _The Sunken Bell_ are rather technically conventional as verse plays, but could any one compare with them the vapid, senseless and trite lyrics created by some of our so-called modern "revolutionary" poets? The great poet who deals with the capabilities of man in experiencing emotion, and fears not to track the human soul, even into morbid feelings, who has the courage to challenge society with ideas, even though these arouse the most bitter antagonism of some of the leaders of society, is the man whom posterity will most enjoy, for he is most human and bold and he never loses sight of the fact that he deals with real ecstasy, and not with the cultivated nuances of some cliques of versifiers.