306 The Future Poetry
has an unsurpassed power of imaginative and intuitive language
and has shown it to a very high degree in the intuitive expression
of the life soul and to some degree in that of the inspired intel-
ligence. It seems therefore a predestined instrument for the new
poetic language of the intuitive spirit. The chief danger of failure
arises from the external direction of the Anglo-Saxon mind. That
has been a source of strength in combination with the finer Celtic
imagination and has given English poetry a strong hold on life,
but the hold has been also something of a chain continually
drawing it back from the height and fullness of some great spiri-
tual attempt to inferior levels. Today however the language is no
longer the tongue only of the English people: the Irish mind with
its Celtic originality and psychic delicacy of vision and purpose
has entered into this poetic field. It is receiving too for a time
an element or at least an embassy and message from the higher
spiritual mind and imagination of India. The countries beyond
the seas, still absorbed in their material making, have yet to
achieve spiritual independence, but once that comes, the poetry
of Whitman shows what large and new elements they can bring
to the increase of the spiritual potentialities of the now wide-
spreading language. On the whole therefore it is here among
European tongues that there is the largest present chance of
the revolution of the human spirit finding most easily its poetic
utterance. It is also here by the union of a great vital energy and
a considerable possibility of the spiritual vision that there may
be most naturally a strong utterance of that which most has to
be expressed, the seen and realised unity of life and the spirit.
The pouring of a new and greater self-vision of man and
Nature and existence into the idea and the life is the condition
of the completeness of the coming poetry. It is a large setting and
movement of life opening a considerable expansion to the human
soul and mind that has been in the great ages of literature the
supreme creative stimulus. The discovery of a fresh intellectual
or aesthetic motive of the kind that was common in the last
century initiates only an ephemeral ripple on the surface and
seldom creates work of the very first order. The real inspiration
enters with a more complete movement, an enlarged horizon of