242 The Future Poetry
often to lash himself into a strained violence of passion in order
to make a way through the clogging thickness for its rush of
sound; Meredith’s strains, hymning life in a word burdened and
packed with thought, are strong and intimate, but difficult and
few. And therefore in this epoch of a bursting into new fields
and seeking for new finer and bolder impulses of creation, one
of the most insistent demands and needs of the human mind,
not only in poetry, but in thought itself and in spirit, has been
to lessen the tyranny of the reasoning and critical intellect, to
return to the power and sincerity of life and come by a greater
deepness of the intuition of its soul of meaning. That is the most
striking turn of all recent writing of any importance.
This turn is in itself perfectly sound and its direction is to a
certain extent on the right line, even if it does not yet altogether
see its own end. But the firm grasp on a greater life has not quite
come and there are many mistaken directions of this urge. The
enlightening power of the poet’s creation is vision of truth, its
moving power is a passion of beauty and delight, but its sustain-
ing power and that which makes it great and vital is the breath of
life. A poetry which is all thought and no life or a thought which
does not constantly keep in touch with and refresh itself from
the fountains of life, even if it is something more than a strong,
elegant or cultured philosophising or moralising in skilled verse,
even if it has vision and intellectual beauty, suffers always by
lack of fire and body, wants perfection of grasp and does not
take full hold on the inner being to seize and uplift as well as
sweeten and illumine, as poetry should do and all great poetic
writing does. The function of the poet even when he is most
absorbed in thinking, is still to bring out not merely the truth
and interest, but the beauty and power of the thought, its life
and emotion, and not only to do that, not only to make the
thought a beautiful and living thing, but to make it one thing
with life. But words are ambiguous things and we must see what
is the full extent of our meaning when we say, as we may say,
that the poet’s first concern and his concern always is with living
beauty and reality, with life.
As we can say that the truth with which poetry is touched,