Recent English Poetry – 4 193interests, patient, accurate and analytic in its method of scrutiny,
occupied by a stress of many problems, moved by strong human
and democratic sympathies, attracted by intellectual ideals, but
mechanical and outward in stress and rather curious and inven-
tive than deep or fine in its aesthetic feeling. It has looked much
at the body and life and active idea, but little at the deeper soul
and spirit of things. Poetry has been affected by the turn of the
human mind in this age; it has been brilliant, curious, careful,
inventive, interested and interesting, moving over a great range
of subjects, closely observative and even sometimes analytical, or
elaborately aesthetic, or expressive of some intellectual idealism,
but without much height of wing or force from the depths or
strong or fine spiritual suggestion. Or there has been only some
occasional suggestion or isolated foretaste of these things. There
has been much stress of thought, but not much deeply moved or
spontaneous greatness of creation.
The mind and soul of the race is now moving forward on
the basis of what it has gained by a century of intellectual stir
and activity, towards a profounder mood and a more internal
force of thought and life. The intellectual way of looking at
things is being gradually transcended or is raising itself to a
power beyond itself; it is moving through the observing mind
and reflective reason towards an intimate self-experience, from
thought to vision, from intellectual experiment to intuitive ex-
perience, from life and Nature as observed by the eye of the
intellect in their appearance to life and Nature as seen and felt
by the soul in their spirit and reality. Mankind is still engaged in
thinking and searching with an immense stress of mental power,
but it is now once more in search of its soul and of the spirit
and deeper truth of things, although in a way very different
from that of its past cultural ages and on the whole with a
greater power and subtlety of the mind, though not as yet, but
that too seems predestined to come, with a greater power of
the spirit. It is, to return to a phrase already used, in search of
our inmost and attempting already to find, though it has not
yet altogether found, our inmost way of its sense, vision, idea,
expression. This change, reflected in the poetry of the time is