60 The Future Poetry
through some kind of intimately subjective vision that life is
turned into poetry. If this subjective medium is the inspired rea-
son or the intuitive mind, the external presentation of life gives
place inevitably to an interpretation, a presentation in which its
actual lines are either neglected or subordinated in order that
some inner truth of it may emerge. But in English poetry the
attempt is to be or at least to appear true to the actual lines
of life, to hold up a mirror to Nature. It is the mirror then
which has to do the poetising of life; the vital, the imaginative,
the emotional temperament of the poet is the reflecting medium
and it has to supply unaided the creative and poetical element.
We have then a faithfully unfaithful reflection which always
amounts to a transformation, because the temperament of the
poet lends to life and Nature its own hues, its own lines, its own
magnitudes. But the illusion of external reality, of an “imitation”
of Nature is created, — the illusion which has been for so long
a first canon of Western artistic conceptions, — and the English
mind which carries this tendency to an extreme, feels then that it
is building upon the safe foundation of the external and the real;
it is satisfied of the earth even when it is singing in the heavens.
But this sole reliance on the temperament of the poet has
certain strong results. It gives an immense importance to indi-
viduality, much greater than that which it must always have in
poetical creation: the transformation of life and Nature in the
individuality becomes almost the whole secret of this poetry.
Therefore English poetry is much more powerfully and con-
sciously personal and individual than that of any other language;
it aims much less directly at the impersonal and universal. This
individual subjective element creates enormous differences be-
tween the work of poets of the same age; they cannot escape from
the common tendencies, but give to them a quite independent
turn and expression and subordinate them to the assertion of
the individuality; in other literatures, until recently, the reverse
has oftener happened. Besides, the higher value given to the
intensity of the imaginative, vital or emotional response favours
and is perhaps a first cause of that greater intensity of speech
and immediate vision which is the strength of English poetry.