THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL (1) There are two ways of approaching the periods of change and new birth in literature.

The commonest and, for all the study which it entails, the easiest, is that summed up in the phrase, literature begets literature.
Following it, you discover and weigh literary influences, the influence of poet on poet, and book on book.

You find one man harking back to earlier models in his own tongue, which an intervening age misunderstood or despised; another, turning to the contemporary literatures of neighbouring countries; another, perhaps, to the splendour and exoticism of the east.

In the matter of form and style, such a study carries you far.

You can trace types of poetry and metres back to curious and unsuspected originals, find the well-known verse of Burns' epistles turning up in Provencal; Tennyson's _In Memoriam_ stanza in use by Ben Jonson; the metre of _Christabel_ in minor Elizabethan poetry; the peculiar form of Fitzgerald's translation of _Omar Khayyam_ followed by so many imitators since, itself to be the actual reflection of the rough metrical scheme of his Persian original.