The Word and the Spirit 299of its direct power and vision, the more intuitive and illumined
becomes the word of our utterance. And the more we can light
up the veil and have the direct transmission, the greater the
force of inspiration and revelation and the nearer we shall get to
an absolute and inevitable word straight from the supramental
sight and language.
The most characteristic trend of recent poetry has been an
attempt, sometimes lucid, sometimes half understanding or ob-
scure, to break open the doors of the luminous cavern and to
get the seeing and phrase which would be that of this intuitive
self of our intelligence and imagination and sensation and life
and feeling. In a certain kind of continental poetry it is a search
for the sheer intuitivities of sensation and of the more vital
emotions and states and experiences and relations with objects
and persons, the spirit’s sense of itself, as it were, externalised
and made vital and physical and some illumination of the inner
meaning of this externality, that motives a new kind of utterance.
Much of present-day English poetry drives in the same direction
but with less subtlety and a more forceful outwardness of sight
and tone. The Irish poets and in a different way the few Indians,
Tagore and Chattopadhyay and Mrs. Naidu, who have written
in English or transferred their poetical thought into that medium,
aim at pure intuitivities of a more psychic feeling, sensation and
life-vision or a subtle and psychic or spiritualised imagination
and intelligence. All however are secretly moved to their very
different and often contradictory tendencies by the same funda-
mental endeavour of the Time-spirit. The difficulty has been to
find the intuitive language which will be the true medium and the
condition of perfect success of this endeavour. The old habits of
poetic speech still cling around and encrust or dilute the subtler
subtlety, the more luminous light, the intenser intensities, the
deeper depths sought for by the intuitive utterance. These things
however are already there and are shaping a new manner of
speech, a basis for the more inner and illumined poetic language
of the future. At its best, and oftenest in the greater poets, it
emerges from the admixture of older methods and manifests the
whole and pure characteristic note of the intuitive manner. It is