228 The Future Poetry
And next, there is the quite opposite idea, which one finds
sometimes rampant and self-confident in an age of realism and
the cult of vital power, that the truth which is the material of
poetry and has to be set out and rhythmed in her process, is
the reality of life in its most strenuous vital sense, the reality of
what we see and hear and touch and vitally feel and energeti-
cally think with the most positive impact of the mind, the raw
rough concrete and dynamic fact of experience to be transferred
without any real change into rhythmic form, relieved with image
and dressed in its just idea and word. And we are even told that
poetry to be faithful to life must manage not only her seeing and
expression, but her rhythmic movement so as to create some
subjective correspondence with life, creep and trip and walk and
run and bound along with it, reproduce every bang and stumble
and shuffle and thump of the vital steps, and then we shall get a
quite new large and vigorous music and in comparison with its
sincere and direct power the old melodies will fade into false and
flimsy sweetnesses of insipid artifice. Here what is demanded is
not beauty but power or rather force. If beauty can get in, if
she can dress herself in these new and strong colours, we shall
gratefully accept her, provided she is not too beautiful to be true
and does not bring in again with her the unreal, the romantic
or remotely ideal or some novel kind of perverse^1 imagination.
But if ugly, brutal and sordid things are shown powerfully in
their full ugliness, brutality and sordidness without any work of
transmutation, so much the better since truth of life, force of vital
reality of whatever kind set and made vivid in a strong outlining
illumination is what we shall henceforth demand of the artist in
verse. And it cannot be denied that the crudity of actual life so
treated and heightened in art — for art cannot merely reproduce,
it cannot help heightening — gives us a new sensation, becomes
a crude and heady wine setting up an agreeable disturbance in
the midriff and bowels and a violent satisfaction in the brain
(^1) In the sense in which a critic of some note, I am told, applies the epithet to Yeats’
poetry. I have not read the criticism, but the expression itself is a sufficient condemnation
not of the poet, but of the mind — and of its poetic theory — which can use such a word
in such a connection.