264 The Future Poetry
of which there is some promise in the highest strains that we
have now begun to hear. This change will mean that poetry may
resume on a larger scale, with a wider and more shining vision
the greater effect it once had on the life of the race in the noble
antique cultures. At one time poetry was a revelation to the race
of the life of the gods and man and the meaning of the world and
the beauty and power of existence and through its vision and
joy and the height and clarity of its purpose it became creative
of the life of the people. Ananda, the joy of the spirit in itself
carrying in it a revelation of the powers of its conscious being,
was to the ancient Indian idea the creative principle, and ancient
poetry did thus creatively reveal to the people its soul and its
possibilities by forms of beauty and suggestions of power in a
way we have to a great extent lost by our later pettier use of
this always great art and medium. One might almost say that
ancient India was created by the Veda and Upanishads and that
the visions of inspired seers made a people. That sublime poetry
with its revelation of godhead and the joy and power of life and
truth and immortality or its revelation of the secrets of the self
and the powers of its manifestation in man and the universe
and of man’s return to self-knowledge got into the very blood
and mind and life of the race and made itself the fountain-head
of all that incessant urge to spirituality which has been its dis-
tinguishing gift and cultural motive. The Mahabharata and the
Ramayana revealing to it in forms of noble beauty and grandiose
or beautiful or telling types of character the joy of its forms of
life, the significance of its spiritual, ethical and aesthetic ideals,
the powers and dangers of the human soul, its godheads and its
titanisms have played a great and well-recognised formative part
second only to religion and the stress of religio-social training in
the life of the Indian peoples. And even later the religious poetry
of the Vaishnavas, Shaivas, Shaktas has entered powerfully into
the life of the nation and helped to shape its temperament and
soul-type. The effect of the Homeric poems in Greece, the inti-
mate connection of poetry and art with the public life of Athens
sprang from a similar but less steep height of poetic and artistic
motive. The epic poems revealed the Hellenic people to itself