140 The Future Poetry
this other world, he hears around him the echoes of its sounds
and voices. He is not only a seer, but almost an inhabitant of
other planes, another domain of being; or at least this second
subtle sight is his normal sight. His power of expression is akin
in its strangeness to his eye of vision. His speech like his seeing
has a singular other-world clarity and sheerness of expression in
it, the light of supernature. When he prophetises as in some of
his more ambitious efforts, he mentalises too much the mystic
and misses the marvel and the magic. It is when he casts into
some echo of the language of the luminous children of those
shores the songs of their childhood and their innocence, that
he becomes limpid to us and sheds upon our earth some clear
charm, felicity, wonder of a half divine otherwhere. Here again
we have something unique, a voice of things which had not been
heard before nor has it been heard since; for the Celtic poets who
sometimes give us something that is in its source akin, bring a
ripe reflective knowledge and a colour of intellectuality into
their speech and vision, but Blake seeks to put away from him
as much as possible the intellectual mind, to see only and sing.
By this effort and his singularity and absorption he stands apart
solitary and remote, a unique voice among the poets of the time;
he occupies indeed a place unique in the poetry of the English
language, for there is no other singer of the beyond who is like
him or equal to him in the strangeness, supernatural lucidity,
power and directness of vision of the beyond and the rhythmic
clarity and beauty of his singing.
A greater poet by nature than almost any of these, Shelley
was alone of them all very nearly fitted to be a sovereign voice
of the new spiritual force that was at the moment attempting
to break into poetry and possess there its kingdom. He has on
the one hand, one feels, been a native of the heights to which he
aspires and the memory of them, not indeed quite distinct, but
still environing his imagination with its luminous ethereality, is
yet with him. If the idea of a being not of our soil fallen into the
material life and still remembering his skies can be admitted as
an actual fact of human birth, then Shelley was certainly a living
example of one of these luminous spirits half obscured by earth;