14 The Future Poetry
This power makes the rhythmic word of the poet the highest
form of speech available to man for the expression whether of
his self-vision or of his world-vision. It is noticeable that even the
deepest experience, the pure spiritual which enters into things
that can never be wholly expressed, still, when it does try to
express them and not merely to explain them intellectually, tends
instinctively to use, often the rhythmic forms, almost always the
manner of speech characteristic of poetry. But poetry attempts
to extend this manner of vision and utterance to all experience,
even the most objective, and therefore it has a natural urge
towards the expression of something in the object beyond its
mere appearances, even when these seem outwardly to be all
that it is enjoying.
We may usefully cast a glance, not at the last inexpressible
secret, but at the first elements of this heightening and inten-
sity peculiar to poetic utterance. Ordinary speech uses language
mostly for a limited practical utility of communication; it uses
it for life and for the expression of ideas and feelings necessary
or useful to life. In doing so, we treat words as conventional
signs for ideas with nothing but a perfunctory attention to their
natural force, much as we use any kind of common machine or
simple implement; we treat them as if, though useful for life, they
were themselves without life. When we wish to put a more vital
power into them, we have to lend it to them out of ourselves, by
marked intonations of the voice, by the emotional force or vital
energy we throw into the sound so as to infuse into the conven-
tional word-sign something which is not inherent in itself. But if
we go back earlier in the history of language and still more if we
look into its origins, we shall, I think, find that it was not always
so with human speech. Words had not only a real and vivid life
of their own, but the speaker was more conscious of it than we
can possibly be with our mechanised and sophisticated intel-
lects. This arose from the primitive nature of language which,
probably, in its first movement was not intended, — or shall we
say, did not intend, — so much to stand for distinct ideas of the
intelligence as for feelings, sensations, broad indefinite mental
impressions with minute shades of quality in them which we do