272 The Future Poetry
passion of life and avid of its joy and pleasure and beauty, but
afflicted also by its unrest, grief, tragedy, discord, insufficiency,
incertitude, capable only of its lesser harmonies, not of any great
release and satisfaction. The art and poetry of the East have been
the creation of a larger and quieter spirit, intensely responsive as
in the far East to deeper psychic significances and finding there
fine and subtle harmonies of the soul’s experience or, as in India,
expressing in spite of the ascetic creed of vanity and illusion
much rather the greatness and power and satisfied activity of
human thought and life and action and behind it the communion
of the soul with the Eternal. The poetry of the future reconciling
all these strains, taking the highest as its keynote and interpreting
the rest in its intensity and its largeness, will offer to the human
mind a more complex aesthetic and spiritual satisfaction, express
a more richly filled content of self-experience raised to a more
persistent sight of things absolute and infinite and a more potent
and all-comprehending release into the calm and delight of the
spirit.
And this poetry must bring with it too a new depth of the
intimacies of the soul with Nature. The early poetry of Nature
gave us merely the delight of the forms of objects and the beauty
of the setting of the natural world around man’s life, but not
any inner communion between him and the universal Mother.
A later tone brought in more of the subtleties of the vital soul
of the natural world and a response of the moved sensation and
emotion of the life-spirit in us and out of this arose an intellec-
tual and aesthetic sense of hidden finer and subtler things and,
more profound, in the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron and Keats
and Shelley an attempt at communion with a universal presence
in Nature and a living principle of peace or light and love or
universal power or conscious delight and beauty. A more deeply
seeing and intimate poetry will take up these things into a yet
greater Nature sense and vision and make us aware of the very
self and soul and conscious being of Nature, her profoundest
psychic suggestion and significance, the spirit in her and the
intuition of all that she keeps hidden in her forms and veils
and reveals more and more to the soul that has entered into