88 The Future Poetry
In Elizabethan poetry the physical and external tendency
still persists, but it is no longer sufficient to satisfy either the
perceiving spirit or its creative force. Where it is most preserved,
it still demands a more vehement response, strong colours, vio-
lent passions, exaggerated figures, out-of-the-way or crowding
events. Life is still the Muse of this poetry, but it is a Life which
demands to feel itself more and is already knocking or trying to
knock at the gates of the deeper subjective being. And in all the
best work of the time it has already got there, not very deep,
but still enough to be initially subjective. Whatever Shakespeare
may suggest, — a poet’s critical theories are not always a just
clue to his inspiration, — there is not here any true or exact
holding up of a mirror to life and Nature, but instead a moved
and excited reception and evocation. Life throws its impressions,
but what seizes upon them is a greater and deeper life-power in
the poet which is not satisfied with mirroring or just beautifully
responding to what is cast upon it, but begins to throw up at once
around them its own rich matter of receptive being and shaping
force and so creates something new, something more personal,
intimate, fuller of a first inner vision, emotion, passion of self-
expression. This is the source of the new intensity; it is this
impulse towards an utterance of the creative life-power within
which drives towards the dramatic form and acts with such
unexampled power in Shakespeare. At another extremity of the
Elizabethan mind, in Spenser, it gets much farther away from
the actuality of life; it takes the impressions of the surrounding
physical world as hints only for a purely imaginative creation
which seems to be truly drawn not from the life of earth, but
from a more beautiful and harmonious life-scene that exists
either within our own unplumbed depths or on other subtler
vital or physical planes. This creation has an aim in it at things
symbolic, otherwise revelatory, deeper down in the soul itself,
and it tries to shadow them out through the magic of romance,
since it cannot yet intimately seize and express them. Still even
there the method of the utterance, if not altogether its aim, is the
voice of Life lifting itself out into waves of word and colour and
image and sheer beauty of sound. Imagination, thought, vision