Conclusion 307life, a widening of the fields of the idea, a heightening of the
flight of the spirit. The change that is at present coming over
the mind of the race began with a wider cosmic vision, a sense
of the greatness and destiny and possibilities of the individual
and the race, the idea of humanity and of the unity of man with
man and a closer relation too and unity of his mind with the
life of Nature. It is the endeavour to make the expression of
these things one with the expression of life that imparts to the
poetry of Whitman so much more large and vital an air than
the comparatively feeble refinement and careful art of most of
the contemporary poetry of Europe — not that the art has to
be omitted, but that it must be united with a more puissant
sincerity of spirit and greatness of impulse and a sense of new
birth and youth and the potencies of the future. The intellectual
idea was yet not enough, for it had to find its own greater
truth in the spiritual idea and its finer cultural field in a more
delicate and complex and subtle psychic sight and experience.
It is this that has been prepared by recent and contemporary
poets. The expression of this profounder idea and experience
is again not enough until the spiritual idea has passed into a
complete spiritual realisation and not only affected individual
intellect and psychic mind and imagination, but entered into the
general sense and feeling of the race and taken hold upon all
thought and life to reinterpret and remould them in their image.
It is this spiritual realisation that the future poetry has to help
forward by giving to it its eye of sight, its shape of aesthetic
beauty, its revealing tongue and it is this greatening of life that
it has to make its substance.
It is in effect a larger cosmic vision, a realising of the godhead
in the world and in man, of his divine possibilities as well as
of the greatness of the power that manifests in what he is, a
spiritualised uplifting of his thought and feeling and sense and
action, a more developed psychic mind and heart, a truer and
a deeper insight into his nature and the meaning of the world,
a calling of diviner potentialities and more spiritual values into
the intention and structure of his life that is the call upon hu-
manity, the prospect offered to it by the slowly unfolding and