With regard to English letters, we tell the story a certain way: There was a period when the lingering forces of a spent Romanticism were gradually overwhelmed by the rising tide of High Modernism, and when all the roseate aestheticism of the belle époque became intolerable to a generation of artists living in the aftermath of the Great War and entre deux guerres. It happened within a relatively brief space of time, driven on by historical catastrophe, but the change did not come all at once. Certain rhetorical devices, a certain grandiose tone of voice, a certain ornamental melancholy, certain themes continued to enjoy a formal persistence long after the original inspiration from which they had been born had dissolved into a mere collection of mannerisms, or into wickedly ironic inversions of the innocent passions that had animated the Romantic movement in its dawn. The transition began earlier than we sometimes remember—at least as early as Browning—but it also continued long past the point that we tend now to recall as its conclusion. It is curiously jarring to realize that the Testament of Beauty appeared seven years after The Waste Land and was praised far more lavishly by a great many highly regarded literary critics (though, given that Bridges would have been almost wholly unreadable in any era, it is hard to make much sense of their enthusiasm). Those were uncertain decades, and some poets failed to negotiate the change from the epoch that was passing away to that of the rough beast that was slouching towards London and New York to be born, and as a result their work has now been consigned to the abyss of the quaint and marginal. It took rare genius for Yeats—unique genius, really—to be able so perfectly to bring all forces into harmony, and to make the Romantic so bracingly modern, and the Modern so enthrallingly romantic. Again, though, this long, difficult episode belongs to our literary history; in France, the story was somewhat different.
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