ABSTRACT
To read one great lyric with exact appreciation of its beauty is in a way to experience the highest delight that poetry can afford, just as a man who knew Macbeth and Twelfth Night thoroughly, but nothing else of Shakespeare, might nevertheless in essential respects be said to have the full measure of the dramatist's invention. Poetry can be considered in its chronological sequence, with a genealogy as significant as that of the race. The satisfaction derived from a lyric by Ralph Hodgson may be the same in spiritual essence as that derived from a lyric by Chaucer, but it is a matter of absorbing interest to follow the long road that poetry has travelled between the two. One of the oldest and most controversial problems of literary criticism is that of deciding how much or how little the artist should reflect or interpret his own age in his work.
