282 The Future Poetry
its sheer directness of touch and vision. And then we may find
that this Ananda, this spiritual delight, for it is something more
intimate and rapturous than emotion, has brought with it an
unprecedented freedom of manifold and many-suggestioned and
yet perfectly sufficient and definite formation and utterance. The
poetry born from the inmost spirit will not bind the poet in any
limiting circle or narrow theory of an intellectual art principle,
but create at will according to the truth of the spirit’s absolute
moments. According to the innate rightnesses of the motive and
its needed cadence the spirit will move him to discover infinite
possibilities of new spiritual measure and intonation in time-
old lyrical rhythms or to find a new principle of rhythm and
structure or to make visible developments which will keep past
treasures of sound and yet more magically innovate than can be
done by any breaking up of forms in order to build a new order
out of chaos. The intimate and intuitive poetry of the future will
have on the one side all the inexhaustible range and profound
complexities of the cosmic imagination of which it will be the
interpreter and to that it must suit a hundred single and separate
and combined and harmonic lyrical tones of poignantly or richly
moved utterance, and on the other it will reach those bare and
absolute simplicities of utter and essential sight in which thought
sublimates into a translucidity of light and vision, feeling passes
beyond itself into sheer spiritual ecstasy and the word rarefies
into a pure voice out of the silence. The sight will determine the
lyrical form and discover the identities of an inevitable rhythm
and no lesser standard prevail against the purity of this spiritual
principle.
A spiritual change must equally come over the intention
and form of the drama when once the age has determined
its tendencies, and this change is already foreshadowed in an
evolution which is still only at its commencement and first ten-
tatives. Hitherto there have been two forms consecrated by great
achievements, the drama of life, whether presenting only vivid
outsides and significant incidents and morals and manners or
expressive of the life-soul and its workings in event and char-
acter and passion, and the drama of the idea or, more vitally,