Chapter V

The Power of the Spirit

A

POETRY born direct from and full of the power of the
spirit and therefore a largest and a deepest self-expression
of the soul and mind of the race is that for which we
are seeking and of which the more profound tendencies of the
creative mind seem to be in travail. This poetry will be a voice of
eternal things raising to a new significance and to a great satisfied
joy in experience the events and emotions and transiences of life
which will then be seen and sung as the succession of signs, the
changing of the steps of an eternal manifestation; it will be an
expression of the very self of man and the self of things and the
self of nature; it will be a creative and interpretative revelation
of the infinite truth of existence and of the universal delight and
beauty and of a greater spiritualised vision and power of life.
This can only come if the mind of the race takes actually the step
over which it is now hesitating and passes from the satisfaction
of the liberated intellect which has been its preoccupation for the
last two centuries to the pursuit of the realisation of the larger
self, from the scrutiny of the things that explain to the experience
of the things that reveal, the truths of the spirit. The progress
of the mind of humanity takes place by a constant enlarging
attended with a constant transmutation of its experience which
is reflected in its ways of self-expression, and the tendency of
this progression is always more and more inward, a movement
that cannot cease till we get to the inmost, and even then there
can be no real cessation because the inmost is the infinite. The
progress of poetry, as it has been viewed in these pages, has
been an index of an advance of the cultural mind of humanity
which has enlarged its scope by a constant raising of the scale
of the soul’s experience and has now risen to a great height and
breadth of intellectual vision and activity, and the question is at
present of the next step in the scale of ascension, and whether