Recent English Poetry – 4 199in some degree an indication of that which the twentieth century
is slowly turning to lay hold of, to develop and to make its own
in a closer actuality of insight and experience.
The idea in these and cognate passages anticipates the new
age, but the language and method are still that of the poetic
intellect straining to some fullest power of its intelligence and
speech-force, and the thought and writing of those who follow
Whitman, like the French “unanimist” poets, bear the same
character. At the centre of English poetry, in England itself, we
have found another turn of intuitive speech which is more native
to that closer actuality of experience for which we seek, a turn
and power brought about perhaps by the greater fire of poetic
genius and imagination, the special gift of the Anglo-Celtic mind,
which leaps at once to the forceful, native, instinctive energy of
poetic expression of the thing it has to say. The full idea of that
thing, the large and clearly conceived substance of thought and
vision which should fill this mould of intuitive utterance, we do
not get in any considerable degree or range, — again perhaps
because of the inferior turn for large and straight thinking on
the great scale, a full-orbed thinking with a sustained and total
conception, which is the defect of the English mind, — but we
have constant partial intuitions in detail and a treatment of life
and thought and nature which presses towards the greater com-
ing significance. That is as yet only one strain of recent poetry,
but it is the most powerful and original and turns sometimes
almost with a full face towards the future. These are strong
touches only, but they give already some impression and mould
of the thing that has to be, the ultimate creation. A new intuitive
interpretation of the soul and mind of man, of the soul and mind
in Nature, a thought which casts its fathom beyond the passion
of life and the clarity of the intelligence and starts sounding a
suggestion of the hidden and the infinite in all it touches is the
shaping power and the mode of this utterance.
The citations I have already given to illustrate the new
rhythm and language indicate also this power and thought-turn
in the substance. A few more citations from the same poets may
help to bring it out with more precision. The early and greater