288 The Future Poetry
to a more intimate and directly or fully intuitive speech and
rhythm. The thing is in itself so subtle that it can better be
indicated than analysed, adequately described or made precise to
the intelligence. And moreover all poetry except that of the most
outward kind, — a verse movement which is separable rather by
distinction of form than power of the soul from prose, — is in
its inmost inspiration and character intuitive, more a creation
of the vision and feeling than of the intelligence, and the change
made is one of the level or the depth of the self from which the
poetic intuition, usually modified in transmission, immediately
acts, and of its intervening psychological instrument rather than
its primary initiating movement. The initiating inspiration must
always be intuitive in a greater or lesser degree and it is the form
or expression that differs. The intellect in its use of speech is
apt to regard it as an intellectual device, a means for the precise
connotation of object and idea or at most an elegant and pleasing
or an effective and forceful presentation. The poetic view and
use of speech is of a very different kind and enters more into the
vital reality of the word and the more mystic connection between
the movement of the spirit and the significances of the mental
utterance. The poet has to do much more than to offer a precise,
a harmonious or a forcefully presented idea to the intelligence:
he has to give a breath of life to the word and for that must find
out and make full use of its potential power of living suggestion;
he has to make it carry in it not only the intellectual notion but
the emotion and the psychical sensation of the thing he would
make present to us; he has to erect an image of its presence
and appeal with which we can inwardly live as we live with the
presence and appeal of the objects of the actual universe. As in
the Vedic theory the Spirit was supposed to create the worlds
by the Word, so the poet brings into being in himself and us by
his creative word fragmentarily or largely, in isolated pieces or
massed spaces an inner world of beings, objects and experiences.
But all creation is a mystery in its secret of inmost process and it
is only at best the most outward or mechanical part of it which
admits analysis; the creative faculty of the poetic mind is no
exception. The poet is a magician who hardly knows the secret