266 The Future Poetry
within in a more universal power of the spirit and its vision and
delight of existence will supply the missing element and make
poetry once again young and mighty and creative and its word
deeply effective on life by the power of a greater Ananda.
The mind of man, a little weary now of the superficial plea-
sure of the life and intellect, demands, obscurely still, not yet
perceiving what will satisfy it, a poetry of the joy of self, of the
deeper beauty and delight of existence. A merely cultured poetry
fair in form and word and playing on the surface strings of mind
and emotion will not serve its purpose. The human mind is
opening to an unprecedented largeness of vision of the greatness
of the worlds, the wonder of life, the self of man, the mystery of
the spirit in him and the universe. The future poetry must seek in
that vision its inspiration, and the greater its universality of joy in
existence, the more it seeks through intuitive sight and aesthesis
the deepest fountains of poetic delight and beauty, the more it
will become powerfully creative of a greater life for the race.
The modern poet is perfectly right in a way in breaking down
in whatever direction the bounds erected by the singers of the
past around their magic palace and its grounds; he must claim
all things in heaven or earth or beyond for his portion: but that
care for a fine poetic beauty and delight which they safeguarded
by excluding all or most that did not readily obey its law or turn
to fair material of poetic shaping, he must preserve as jealously
and satisfy by steeping all that he finds in his wider field in that
profoundest vision which delivers out of each thing its spiritual
Ananda, the secret of truth and beauty in it for which it was
created; it is in the sense of that spiritual joy of vision, and not
in any lower sensuous, intellectual or imaginative seeing, that
Keats’ phrase becomes true for the poet, beauty that is truth,
truth that is beauty, and this all that we need to know as the law
of our aesthetic knowledge. He is right too in wishing to make
poetry more intimately one with life, but again in this sense
only, in going back to those creative fountains of the spirit’s
Ananda from which life is seen and reshaped by the vision that
springs from a moved identity, — the inmost source of the au-
thentic poet vision. The beauty and delight of all physical things