The Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty 259regards itself and its creations. This deeper spiritual feeling, this
Ananda is the fountain of poetic delight and beauty. It springs
from a supreme essence of experience, a supreme aesthesis which
is in its own nature spiritual, impersonal, independent of the
personal reactions and passions of the mind, and that is why the
poet is able to transmute pain and sorrow and the most tragic
and terrible and ugly things into forms of poetic beauty, because
of this impersonal joy of the spirit in all experience, whatever its
nature. And as, therefore, the subject of the poet is all that he can
feel of the infinite life of the spirit that creates in existence and
all that he can seize of the infinite truth of God and Nature and
our own and the world’s being, so too what he brings out from
his subject is all that he can pour into speech of his vision of
eternal and universal beauty, all that he can express of the soul’s
universal delight in existence. That is what he has to reveal, and
to make others share in, to render more expressive and firmly
present to them what experience they have of it and help the race
towards its greater fullness in the soul of man and embodiment
in our mind and life. This Ananda is not the pleasure of a mood
or a sentiment or the fine aesthetic indulgence of the sense in the
attraction of a form, superficial results and incidents which are
often mistaken for that much deeper and greater thing by the
minor poetic faculty, the lesser artistic mind, but the enduring
delight which, as the ancient idea justly perceived, is the essence
of spirit and being and the beauty which all things assume when
the spirit lives in the pure joy of creation and experience.
The universality of this delight and beauty does not mean
that we can take whatever we will straight from life and expe-
rience, just as it is, and by making it precise and vivid through
word and image or dressing it in imaginative colour achieve
poetic effect and beauty. That is the theory by which a great
deal of our modern endeavour at poetry seems to be guided, as
it is the ruling method of inferior poets and the mark too of the
lesser or unsuccessful or only partially successful work of greater
writers. The error made is to confuse the sources of poetic delight
and beauty with the more superficial interest, pain and pleasure
which the normal mind takes in the first untransmuted appeal