280 The Future Poetry
The turn to a more direct self-expression of the spirit must
find out its way first by the emergence of a new kind of lyrical sin-
cerity which is neither the directness of the surface life emotions
nor the moved truth of the thought mind seizing or observing the
emotion and bringing out its thought significances. There are in
fact only two pure and absolute sincerities here, the power of the
native intuition of itself by life which has for its result a direct
and obvious identity of the thing felt and its expression, and
the power of identity of the spirit when it takes up thought and
feeling and life and makes them one with some inmost absolute
truth of their and our existence. There is a power too of the
sincerities of thought, but that is an intermediary between life
and the spirit and only poetic when it fills itself with the sense
of one of the others or links them together or aids to bring
them to oneness. It is therefore a transition from the lyricism
of life weighted by the stresses of thought to the lyricism of the
inmost spirit which uses but is beyond thought that has to be
made. And here we notice a significant tendency, an endeavour
to present life in an utmost clarity of its intention and form
and outline stripped and discharged of the thought’s abundant
additions, made naked of the haze of the reflective intelligence,
the idea being that we shall thus get at its bare truth and feeling,
its pure vital intuition where that starts out of the subconscious
suggestion and meets the seeing mind and a conscious identity
can be created with its sense in our souls by the revealing fi-
delity of the expression. There is often added to this endeavour
the injunction that the rhythmic movement should follow the
fluctuations of life with a subtle adaptation of the verbal music,
and this notion is used to justify the now common free or else
irregular and often broken-backed verse which is supposed to
be the medium of a subtler correspondence than is at all possible
to the formal rigidity of fixed metres. But in actual fact this kind
of verse, whatever its power of lyric intention, sensibly fails to
give us the satisfaction of a true lyrical form, because it ignores
the truth that what sustains the lyrical spirit is the discovery and
consistent following of some central cadence revealing the very
spirit of the feeling and not at all the sole pursuit of its more