Wilfred Scawen Blunt (1840-1922), English poet and political writer.
When your published you first work, it was at the very height of the Victorian period. The abstract poet was in a state of glory. One no longer wrote as a human being, with an address, living in a London street, having a definite income, and a definite tradition, but one wrote as an abstract personality. One was expected to be very much wiser than other people. . . The only objection to such a conception of the poet was that it was impossible to believe he existed. . . Now instead of abstract poetry, you wrote verses which were pretty good poetry because they were, first of all, fine things to have thought or to have said in some real situation in life. . . We are now at the end of Victorian romance, completely at an end. One may admire Tennyson, but one cannot read him. . . If I take up today some of the things that interested me in the past I can no longer use them. They bore me. Every year some part of my poetical machinery suddenly becomes of no use. . .
--from a speech made by W.B. Yeats, reported by EP in "Homage to Wilfrid Blunt", Poetry, Volume III, October-March 1913-4, ed. Harriet Monroe, pg. 223.