experiences. These have
been hard to explain, however, only because their cause has been
probed for too profoundly. _The chief cause of the decline of poetry
was not spiritual but physical._ Cities are not unpoetic in spirit. It
is only in the physical sense that Emerson's warning is true: "If
thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York ... thou shalt find no
radiance of meaning in the lonely wastes of the pine woods." The
trouble was this: that the modern type of city, when it started into
being, back in the seventies, began to take from men, and to use up,
that margin of nervous energy, that exuberant overplus of vitality of
which so much has already been said in this book, and which is always
needed for the true appreciation of poetry. Grant Allen has shown that
man, when he is conscious of a superfluity of sheer physical strength,
gives himself to play; and in like manner, when he is conscious of a
superfluity of receptive power, _which has a physical basis_, he gives
himself to art.

Now, though all of the arts demand of their appreciators this overplus
of nervous energy (and Heaven knows perfectly well how inadequate a
supply is offered up to music and the arts of design!), yet the
appreciation of poetry above that of the sister arts demands this
bloom on the cheek of existence. For poetry, with quite as much of
emotional demand as the others, combines a considerably greater and
more persistent intellectual demand, involving an unusual amount of
physical wear and tear. Hence, in an era of overstrain, poetry is the
first of the arts to suffer.

Most lovers of poetry must realize, when they come to consider it,
that their pleasure in verse rises and falls, like the column of
mercury in a barometer, with the varying levels of their physical
overplus. Physical overplus, however, is the thing which life in a
modern city is best calculated to keep down.

Surely it was no mere coincidence that, back there in the seventies,
just at the edge of the poetic decline, city life began to grow so
immoderately in volume and to be "speeded up" and "noised up" so
abruptly that it took our bodies by surprise. This process has kept on
so furiously that the bodies of most of us have never been able to
catch up. No large number have yet succeeded in readjusting
themselves completely to the new pace of the city. And this continues
to exact from most of us more nervous energy than any life may, which
would keep us at our best. Henc