248 The Future Poetry
poetic synthesis and fusion. Their work has been to create a new
and deeper manner of seeing life, to build bridges of visioned
light and rhythm between the infinite and eternal and the limited
mind and soul and embodied life of man. The future poetry has
not to stay in their achievement; it has yet to step from these first
fields into new and yet greater ranges, to fathom all the depths
yet unplumbed, to complete what has been left half done or not
yet done, to bring all it can of the power of man’s greater self and
the universal spirit into a broader and even the broadest possible
all of life. That cannot and will not be achieved in its fullness
at once, but to make a foundation of this new infinite range of
poetic vision and creation is work enough to give greatness to a
whole age.
The demand for activity and realism or for a direct, exact
and forceful presentation of life in poetry proceeds upon a false
sense of what poetry gives or can give us. All the highest activities
of the mind of man deal with things other than the crude actual-
ity or the direct appearance or the first rough appeal of existence.
A critical or a scientific thought may attempt to give an account
of the actuality as it really is, though even to do that they have
to go far behind its frontage and make a mental reconstruction
and surprising change in its appearance. But the creative powers
cannot stop there, but have to make new things for us as well
as to make existing things new to the mind and eye. It is no real
portion of the function of art to cut out palpitating pieces from
life and present them raw and smoking or well-cooked for the
aesthetic digestion. For in the first place all art has to give us
beauty and the crude actuality of life is not often beautiful, and
in the second place poetry has to give us a deeper reality of things
and the outsides and surface faces of life are only a part of its
reality and do not take us either very deep or very far. Moreover,
the poet’s greatest work is to open to us new realms of vision,
new realms of being, our own and the world’s, and he does this
even when he is dealing with actual things. Homer with all his
epic vigour of outward presentation does not show us the heroes
and deeds before Troy in their actuality as they really were to
the normal vision of men, but much rather as they were or might