ABSTRACT
Beauty's difficult nature is explored in four post-Romantic poets, two of them English, one Irish and one American: principally Gerard Manley Hopkins and W. B. Yeats, and, also though more briefly, Hart Crane and Stephen Spender. Hopkins's notes about 'recitation-stress' relate to the poem's demeanour: by linking 'what' and 'serves' in the first line, he frustrates the ethical dice-loading that might attach to the privileging of one word over another. Yeats can seem to play the part of one who follows beauty alone, but the hidden strength of his work has much to do with its final suspicion of the beauty of which he can appear such a votary. Crane proposes poetry of difficult quest for what, in 'General Aims and Theories'; he calls 'absolute beauty'. Stephen Spender wrote during the 1930s when the pressures on a poet to engage with historical crisis were immense, and his poetry often reads as a search for authentic speech.
