12 The Future Poetry
are only first elements. For these must not only be refined in
order to meet the highest requirements of the intelligence, the
imagination and the ear; but afterwards they have to be still
farther heightened and in their nature raised beyond even their
own noblest levels, so that they may become the support for
something greater beyond them; otherwise they cannot lead to
the height on which lives the Mantra.
For neither the intelligence, the imagination nor the ear are
the true or at least the deepest or highest recipients of the poetic
delight, even as they are not its true or highest creators; they
are only its channels and instruments: the true creator, the true
hearer is the soul. The more rapidly and transparently the rest do
their work of transmission, the less they make of their separate
claim to satisfaction, the more directly the word reaches and
sinks deep into the soul, the greater the poetry. Therefore poetry
has not really done its work, at least its highest work, until it
has raised the pleasure of the instrument and transmuted it into
the deeper delight of the soul. A divine Ananda,^1 a delight in-
terpretative, creative, revealing, formative, — one might almost
say, an inverse reflection of the joy which the universal Soul felt
in its great release of energy when it rang out into the rhythmic
forms of the universe the spiritual truth, the large interpretative
idea, the life, the power, the emotion of things packed into an
original creative vision, — such spiritual joy is that which the
soul of the poet feels and which, when he can conquer the hu-
man difficulties of his task, he succeeds in pouring also into all
those who are prepared to receive it. This delight is not merely a
godlike pastime; it is a great formative and illuminative power.
The critic — of a certain type — or the intellectually consci-
entious artist will, on the other hand, often talk as if poetry were
mainly a matter of a faultlessly correct or at most an exquisite
technique. Certainly, in all art good technique is the first step
towards perfection; but there are so many other steps, there is
(^1) Ananda, in the language of Indian spiritual experience, is the essential delight which
the Infinite feels in itself and in its creation. By the infinite Self’s Ananda all exists, for
the Self’s Ananda all was made.