28 The Future Poetry
mass of the Elizabethan drama; a strong emotional poetry which
stirs our feelings and gives us the sense and active image of the
passions; a strong intellectual poetry which satisfies our curiosity
about life and its mechanism, or deals with its psychological and
other “problems”, or shapes for us our thoughts in an effective,
striking and often quite resistlessly quotable fashion. All this
has its pleasures for the mind and the surface soul in us, and
it is certainly quite legitimate to enjoy them and to enjoy them
strongly and vividly on our way upward; but if we rest content
with these only, we shall never get very high up the hill of the
Muses.
The style of such poetry corresponds usually to its substance;
for between the word and the vision there tends to be, though
there is not by any means perfectly or invariably, a certain equa-
tion. There is a force of vital style, a force of emotional style,
a force of intellectual style which we meet constantly in poetry
and which it is essential to distinguish from the language of the
higher spiritual imagination. The forceful expression of thought
and sentiment is not enough for this higher language. To take
some examples, it is not enough for it to express its sense of
world-sorrow in a line of cheap sentimental force like Byron’s
There’s not a joy the world can give like that it takes away,or to voice an opposite truth in the sprightly-forcible manner of
Browning’s
God’s in his heaven,
All’s right with the world,or to strike the balance in a sense of equality with the pointed
and ever quotable intellectuality of Pope’s
God sees with equal eyes as lord of all
A hero perish or a sparrow fall.This may be the poetical or half-poetical language of
thought and sentiment; it is not the language of real poetic
vision. Note that all three brush the skirts of ideas whose deeper
expression from the vision of a great poet might touch the very