The Future Poetry

The Movement of Modern Literature – 2 123

of poetic thought and creation which have added some novel
and powerful strains to poetry. With the return to subjective
intuition and a fresh adventuring of knowledge and imagination
into the beyond modern poetry, freed from the sceptical attitude,
is beginning in this field too to turn the balance in its favour as
against the old classical and mediaeval literature. The vision
of the worlds beyond which it is gaining is nearer, less grossly
human, more supernatural to physical Nature; the symbols it is
beginning to create and its reinterpretation of the old symbols
are more adequate and more revealing; rid of the old insuffi-
cient forms and limiting creeds, it is admitting a near, direct and
fearless seeing and experience of God in Nature, God in man,
God in the universal and the eternal. From faith it has advanced
through the valley of doubt to the heights of a more luminous
knowledge. These are the main movements of the modern mind
constituting the turns of a psychological evolution of the most
rapid and remarkable kind which have dominated the literature
of Europe, now more than ever before growing into a single
though varied whole. We have to see how they have worked
themselves out in English poetry during this period. We shall
then be able to form a clearer idea of the dominant possibilities
of the future: for though it has been a side stream and not the
central current, yet in the end the highest and most significant,
though not yet the strongest forces of the future poetry have
converged here and given their first clearest and most distinct
sounds. The continent is still overshadowed by the crepuscule
of the intellectual age sick unto death but unable to die. Here
there are some clear morning voices, English precursors, the
revived light of Celtic spirituality, not least significant the one or
two accents of a more self-assured message which have broken
across the mental barrier between East and West from resurgent
India.