The Future of English Poetry — Themes and Context

The Abbaye de Créteil as a Model

Gosse devotes considerable attention to the Abbaye de Créteil, a short-lived collectivist experiment in France (1906–1908). He describes its five founders, who aimed to create a 'prosodical chapel or school of poetry' independent of the public and established literary opinion. The group maintained a printing-press in a great park, cultivated a garden, and sold produce to sustain themselves. Their activities included recitations, discussions, and exhibitions of sketches, mingling with Cubists and Post-impressionists.

Gosse is candid about the experiment's failure: it lasted only fifteen months, and he judges that none of the founders had 'any measure of talent in proportion to his daring.' Yet he finds the effort instructive. The lay monks of Créteil, he notes, considered their act 'heroic'—a symbol of how poetry might 'disdainfully protect itself against the invasion of common sense.' He urges his audience to watch for similar tendencies toward 'poetical collectivism' in England, France, and Italy.

The Obsession with Eroticism

Gosse turns to what he sees as an excessive focus on sexual love in late-nineteenth-century poetry. He describes this as 'a sort of obsession of sex,' as though life presented no other phenomenon worthy of artistic attention. Across Europe, he claims, poets exhibited this mark of sophistication 'sometimes delicately and craftily exhibited, but often, as in foreign examples which will easily occur to your memory, rankly.' He likens the effect to 'the tiresome persistence of a slightly stale perfume, an irritating odour of last night's opopanax or vervain.'

He finds one point of agreement with the Futurists, led by Marinetti: their platform to banish eroticism. Gosse suggests that the poetry of the future may well move away from this dominant theme, though he does not specify what might replace it. His critique is sharp but measured, grounded in a sense that the art form has become overly narrow in its preoccupations.

Historical Cycles and the Survival of Poetry

Throughout the lecture, Gosse emphasizes that poetry has faced existential threats before. He cites the near-extinction of English verse in the mid-fifteenth century and a similar decline in Norway from about 1873 to 1885. These examples serve to contextualize his own era's anxieties about poetry's future. He does not predict doom, but rather a pattern of fluctuation: poetry 'will continue, with whatever fluctuations, to be a living and abiding thing.'

Gosse also references the Rosicrucians, quoting their motto about the 'House of the Holy Ghost' remaining unseen to the godless. He uses this to suggest that the highest poetry is inherently mysterious and resistant to democratic or educational reforms. He explicitly states that poets of the future will view 'massive schemes of universal technical education' and democratic reforms as 'peculiarly hateful expositions of the godlessness of a godless world.' This is one of his most pointed political statements.

Gosse's Rhetorical Strategy

Gosse's lecture is notable for its careful rhetorical framing. He begins by acknowledging the audacity of his project, then immediately undercuts it with humor: if right, he hopes the youngest present will remember him as a prophet; if wrong, no one will recall anything. This self-deprecation allows him to advance speculative claims without appearing dogmatic.

He also uses the first-person plural ('we,' 'our') to create a sense of shared inquiry, as when he says 'I invite you to join with me in some reflections.' His tone is conversational yet learned, peppered with references to French poetry (Henri de Régnier's epigraph), Scandinavian literary history, and contemporary artistic movements. The lecture is as much a performance of Edwardian intellectual authority as it is a genuine attempt to forecast poetry's trajectory.

Gosse's lecture is best approached as a period piece that reveals the anxieties and aspirations of its moment. Readers should attend to his use of historical precedent, his ambivalent engagement with avant-garde experiments, and his pointed critique of eroticism. The text rewards attention to its rhetorical structure: Gosse builds his case through analogy, anecdote, and a carefully calibrated tone of modesty. While his predictions may not have been borne out, the lecture offers a vivid snapshot of how one Edwardian critic imagined poetry's future.

Gosse’s austere prediction—that poetry might shed its private fervors for a shared, almost communal pulse—always reminds me of a particular ragged volume on my shelf, where someone long ago penciled similar longings beside Poe’s bells. That hand and this lecture, quiet kinship across years. The old longing survives, intact, in The Bells, and Other Poems — Reading Notes.