The Breath of Greater Life 243is an infinite truth, all the truth that lives in the eternal and
universal and fills, informs, vivifies, holds and shapes the spirit
and form of creation, so we may say too that the life, something
of which the poet has to reembody in the beauty of the word,
is all life, the infinite life of the spirit thrown out in its many
creations. The poet’s business most really, most intimately is not
with the outward physical life as it is or the life of the passions
and emotions only for its own sake or even with some ideal
life imaged by the mind or some combining and new shaping
of these things into a form of beauty, but with the life of the
soul and with these other things only as its expressive forms.
Poetry is the rhythmic voice of life, but it is one of the inner
and not one of the surface voices. And the more of this inner
truth of his function the poet brings out in his work, the greater
is his creation, while it does not seem to matter essentially or
not at the first whether his method is professedly subjective or
objective, his ostensible power that of a more outward or a more
inward spirit or whether it is the individual or the group soul
or the soul of Nature or mankind or the eternal and universal
spirit in them whose beauty and living reality find expression
in his word. This universal truth of poetry is apt to be a little
hidden from us by the form and stress of preoccupation with
this or that medium of outward soul-expression in the poet’s
work. Mankind in its development seems to begin with the most
outward things and go always more and more inward in order
that the race may mount to greater heights of the spirit’s life. An
early poetry therefore is much occupied with a simple, natural,
straightforward, external presentation of life. A primitive epic
bard like Homer thinks only by the way and seems to be carried
constantly forward in the stream of his strenuous action and
to cast out as he goes only so much of surface thought and
character and feeling as obviously emerges in a strong and single
and natural speech and action. And yet it is the adventures and
trials and strength and courage of the soul of man in Odysseus
which makes the greatness of the Odyssey and not merely the
vivid incident and picturesque surrounding circumstance, and
it is the clash of great and strong spirits with the gods leaning