The Future Poetry

The Character of English Poetry – 2 61

For since the heightening cannot come mainly from the power
and elevation of the medium through which life is seen, as in
Greek and ancient Indian poetry, it has to come almost entirely
from the individual response in the poet, his force of personal
utterance, his intensity of personal vision.
Three general characteristics emerge. The first is a constant
reference and return of the higher poetical motives to the forms
of external life, as if the enriching of that life were its principal
artistic aim. The second is a great force of subjective individ-
uality and personal temperament as a leading power of poetic
creation. The third is a great intensity of speech and ordinarily
of a certain kind of direct vision. But in the world’s literature
generally these are the tendencies that have been on the increase
and two of them at least are likely to be persistent. There is
everywhere a considerable stressing of the individual subjective
element, a drift towards making the most of the poet’s person-
ality, an aim at a more vivid response and the lending of new
powers of colour and line from within to the vision of life and
Nature, a search for new intensities of word and rhythm which
will translate into speech a deeper insight. In following out the
possible lines of the future the defect of the English mind is
its inability to follow the higher motives disinterestedly to their
deepest and largest creative results, but this is being remedied
by new influences. The entrance of the pure Celtic temperament
into English poetry through the Irish revival is likely to do much;
the contribution of the Indian mind in work like Tagore’s may
act in the same direction.
If this change is effected, the natural powers of the English
spirit will be of the highest value to the future poetry. For that
poetry is likely to move to the impersonal and universal, not
through the toning down of personality and individuality, but
by their heightening to a point where they are liberated into
the impersonal and universal expression. Subjectivity is likely to
be its greater power, the growth to the universal subjective en-
riched by all the forces of the personal soul-experience. The high
intensity of speech which English poetry has brought to bear
upon all its material, its power of giving the fullest and richest