270 The Future Poetry
or instead a collapse and decadence intervene and a recommenc-
ing of the circle. The hope of the race in this crisis lies in the
fidelity of its intellect to the larger perceptions it now has of the
greater self of humanity, the turning of its will to the inception
of delivering forms of thought, art and social endeavour which
arise from those perceptions and the raising of the intellectual
mind to the intuitive supra-intellectual spiritual consciousness
which can alone give the basis for a spiritualised life of the race
and the realisation of its diviner potentialities. The meaning of
spirituality is a new and greater inner life of man founded in the
consciousness of his true, his inmost, highest and largest self and
spirit by which he receives the whole of existence as a progressive
manifestation of the self in the universe and his own life as a
field of a possible transformation in which its divine sense will
be found, its potentialities highly evolved, the now imperfect
forms changed into an image of the divine perfection, and an
effort not only to see but to live out these greater possibilities of
his being. And this consciousness of his true self and spirit must
bring with it a consciousness too of the oneness of the individual
and the race and a harmonious unity of the life of man with the
spirit in Nature and the spirit of the universe.
The voice of a new deeper intuitive poetry can be a powerful
aid to this necessary change of seeing and aspiration, because
what the thought comprehends with a certain abstraction, it can
make living to the imagination by the word and a thing of beauty
and delight and inspiration for the soul’s acceptance. This poetry
will speak of new things and of old things in a new way and with
a new voice, not by any exclusion or diminution of its province,
but by a great heightening above, a great intimacy within, a great
enlargement and wideness around, a vision of inmost things
and therefore a changed vision of the world and life and the
untold potentialities of the soul’s experience. It will restore to
us the sense of the Eternal, the presence of the Divine which has
been taken from us for a time by an intellect too narrowly and
curiously fixed on the external and physical world, but it will
not speak of these things in the feeble and conventional tones
of traditional religion, but as a voice of intuitive experience and