The Course of English Poetry – 5 101English poetry from the hard, glittering, well-turned and well-
rhymed intellectual superficialities of a thin pseudo-classicism
to its second luminous outbreak of sight and beauty and an
inspired creative impulse.
Intellect, reason, a firm clarity of the understanding and
arranging intelligence are not the highest powers of our nature.
If this were our summit, many things which have now a great or
a supreme importance for human culture, religion, art, poetry,
would either be no more than a lure or a graceful play of the
imagination and emotions, or, though admissible and useful for
certain human ends, would still be deprived of the truth of their
own highest indications. Poetry, even when it is dominated by
intellectual tendency and motive, cannot really live and work by
intellect alone. Its impetus is not created and its functioning and
results are not shaped either wholly or predominantly by reason
and judgment; an intuitive seeing and an inspired hearing are its
natural means or its native sources. But intuition and inspiration
are not only spiritual in their essence, they are the characteristic
means of all spiritual vision and utterance; they are rays from
a greater and intenser Light than the tempered clarity of our
intellectual understanding. Ordinarily these powers are turned
in human action and creation to a use which is not spiritual and
not perhaps their last or most intrinsic purpose. Their common
use in poetry is to give a deeper and more luminous force and
a heightened beauty to the perceptions of outward life or to
sublimate the more inward but still untransformed and com-
paratively surface movements of human emotion and passion
or to empower thought to perceive and utter certain individual
and universal truths which enlighten or which raise to a greater
meaning the sensible appearances of the inner and outer life
of Nature and man. But every power in the end finds itself
drawn towards its own proper home and own highest capacity
and field of expression and one day or another the spiritual
faculties of intuitive hearing and seeing must climb at last to
the expression of things spiritual and eternal and their power
and working in temporal things. Poetry will yet find in that
supreme interpretation its own richest account, its largest and