Newbolt finds that the reason so much religious poetry is futile is because it is remote from earth. But he finds in the _Psalms_ a fervor of patriotism and moral enthusiasm that he compares to the common liturgical poetry "as a great and sonorous bell to the vague whistle of the wind." They preach no dogma, they are remote from practical politics, they are rooted in human emotions, and are the product of no particular church. That is why they always move.
Incidentally one may add that is why the great medieval Hebrew poets like Solomon Ibn Gebirol, Jehudah Ha Levi and Moses Ibn Ezra, are great poets.[172:A]
Heine in his poem on _Jehuda Ben Halevi_ deplores the fact that these three poets are not well known to Aryan peoples. In fact the liturgical poetry of the medieval Hebrew poets is non-sectarian and can be appreciated by any lover of the literature of ecstasy. Any reader of poetry may be moved by Jehudah Ha Levi's _Ode to Zion_, or Bachya Ibn Pakuda's _My Soul_. There are able prose translations of these in B. Halper's _Post-Biblical Hebrew Literature. An Anthology_, Vol. II.
Any one who reads the history of the poetry of a country, that is, of the poetry in verse, will find much to amuse him in the alleged progress made in the conventions of poetry. One poet dethrones another and the reader gets the impression that the later poet is always superior to the earlier one because he has destroyed convention, and introduced what is often a minor change. The eighteenth century rated Chaucer and Spenser rather low, the nineteenth century killed off Dryden and Pope, Tennyson and Browning were assumed to have advanced upon Byron and Shelley, and the mid-Victorians in turn were deemed to have been supplanted by the poets of "the nineties." Though a later age may make some technical improvements in the art of writing poetry, it is genius that counts. Many problems about poetry have disturbed critics since Byron died, but none of the succeeding generations have been able to detract from the quality of poets like Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. For a poet is such by virtue of his ability to convey great emotion and thought, and he does not become obsolete solely by the technical innovations of a later age.