Poetry in Europe 1900–1950

Extract

Now that the twentieth century has celebrated its fiftieth birthday, it can no longer plead youth and inexperience as excuses to avoid judgments on its achievements, least of all in its poetry, of which one chapter is practically closed and another has at least made its main point. Of course any survey of European poetry in the last fifty years is bound to be very general and superficial, but is perhaps worth attempting not merely as a matter of historical inquiry but because it may throw some light on the immediate present and the prospects for the near future. We may be still too close to recent developments to see them in their right perspective or to gauge them at their final worth, but much that has happened since 1900 already belongs to a past sufficiently remote for an independent judgment to be passed on it, while much else has revealed its main lines of development, with the result that we may perhaps form a clearer and juster estimate of what the poets have done than was possible when their works were too new to be rightly assessed and suffered alike from the ardent hopes of their protagonists and the shocked disapproval of their opponents.