ABSTRACT
In Rossetti's case and in Swinburne's, partial explanations, to the mind of little value, can be found in physical causes and in circumstances, and there are those who may be content to say chloral or Putney. But perhaps this new poetry had on it some doom, was not related quite closely enough to what in life is inexhaustible material for the artist, was the poetry of men who could not profit as artists by the whole of their experience. In one way or another, these poets seem destined to a less satisfying or less enduring relationship between their poetry and normal human experience than people find in most of the very greatest. Perhaps it is the destiny of Romanticism, the price it must pay for its peculiar successes, more valuable to the modern spirit, certainly, than classic successes, and that it should be in some such precarious relationship.
