The Future Poetry

Recent English Poetry – 4 203

And the fullness of that which it points to beyond itself, is a
movement to unite the life of the earth, not lessened, not denied,
not cast away, but accepted, with its own hidden spiritual reality,
the one crucial movement necessary for man before he can reach
that perfection which the race shall have on its heights, when

The vile plucked out of them, the unlovely slain,

Not forfeiting the beast with which they are crossed,

To stature of the Gods they shall attain.

They shall uplift their earth to meet her Lord,

Themselves the attuning chord.

This is in substance the same strain that arises finally from the
more puissant voice of Whitman, but it has if a less forceful,
a profounder touch, — a more delicate, intimate and spiritual
closeness of seeing, experience and utterance is its charm and
distinction.
The indications that we get in these and other English poets
open to a clearer totality in the two great Irish voices. They have,
helped by the strand of a spiritual lucidity of thought in the finer
Celtic mind, a sustained and conscious idea of the thing that is
most inwardly stirring them to utterance. That shapes into a sin-
gular light, delicacy and beauty the whole of Yeats’ poetry. Here
I must be content to note three of its more distinctive features,
the remarkable interweaving into one, whether against a back-
ground of Irish tradition and legend or by a directer thought, of
the earthly life of man with the unseen psychical life which, if we
could only see it, as we can when we go back from the frontage of
things into the inner soul-spaces, presses upon the earth-life and
supports it, so that at times our world seems only its detached
projection; the reading through the signs of life of the brighter
letters of an ideal and eternal Beauty; the insistence, even when
touching exclusively our external life, on the suggestion of finer
soul-values which exceed its material meanings. The poetry of
A. E. is still more remarkable. What the others suggest or give
us in more or less luminous glimpses, he casts into concentrated
expression from a nearer spiritual knowledge, — as when he