36 The Future Poetry
be no more perilous definition than Arnold’s poetic “criticism
of life”, in spite of the saving epithet, — to clothe, merely, in
the forms of poetry a critical or philosophic idea of life to the
detriment of our vision. Allegory with its intellectual ingenuities,
its facile wedding of the abstract idea and the concrete image,
shows a tendency to invade again the domain of poetry. And
there are other signs of the intellectual malady of which we are
almost all of us the victims. Therefore it is well to insist that
the native power of poetry is in its sight, not in its intellec-
tual thought-matter, and its safety is in adhering to this native
principle of vision; its conception, its thought, its emotion, its
presentation, its structure must rise out of that or else rise into
it before it takes its finished form. The poetic vision of things is
not a criticism of life, not an intellectual or philosophic view of
it, but a soul-view, a seizing by the inner sense. The Mantra
too is not in its substance or its form a poetic enunciation
of philosophic verities, but a rhythmic revelation or intuition
arising out of the soul’s sight of God and Nature and itself
and of the world and of the inner truth — occult to the out-
ward eye — of all that peoples it, the secrets of their life and
being.
In the attempt to fix the view of life which Art must take,
distinctions are constantly laid down, such as the necessity of a
subjective or an objective treatment or of a realistic or an idealis-
tic view, which mislead more than they enlighten. Certainly, one
poet may seem to excel in the concrete presentation of things and
falter or be less sure in his grasp of the purely subjective, while
another may move freely in the more subjective worlds and be
less at home in the concrete; and both may be poets of a high
order. But when we look closer, we see that just as a certain ob-
jectivity is necessary to make poetry live and the thing seen stand
out before our eyes, so on the other hand even the most objective
presentation starts from an inner view and subjective process of
creation or at least a personal interpretation and transmutation
of the thing seen. The poet really creates out of himself and not
out of what he sees outwardly: that outward seeing only serves
to excite the inner vision to its work. Otherwise his work would