The Future Poetry

The Word and the Spirit 291

The first is in the manner of terse prose statement, but made
just poetical by a certain life and vividness and a rhythmic sug-
gestion touching though not deeply some emotional centre of
response just sufficient to make it a thought felt and not merely
presented to the conception: the other though not going beyond
a luminously clear and strong poetical adequacy in its manner
of speech is far away from this doubtful borderland and from
the beginning a thing seen and lived within us and awakening a
satisfied soul response. It has the native action of the seeing word
and bears the stamp of a spiritual sincerity greater, profounder,
more beautiful than that of the intelligence.
The second power tries to go beyond this fine and perfect
adequacy in its intensities, attempts a more rich or a more power-
ful expression, not merely sound and adequate to poetic vision,
but dynamic and strongly effective. In prose also there is this
difference and on its lower levels its attempt at effect takes the
shape of rhetoric and appeals to a kind of nervous energy of the
intelligence but, when its mood is more intellectually deep and
sincere, it prefers to arrive rather by subtler means, suggestive
turn, aptness and vividness and richness and beauty of phrase.
Poetic speech follows the same methods but in another and
higher manner and with a different atmosphere. There is indeed
a poetic rhetoric which differs from prose rhetoric only in the
same way as the lower kind of poetic adequacy differs from
prose adequacy by just managing to bring in some element of
rhythmic emotion and vision, and of this kind we may take an
effective example from Pope, —

Atoms and systems into ruins hurled

And now a bubble burst and now a world.

A greater spirit and a less intellectual and more imaginative
sincerity and elevation of thought, feeling and vision will give us
a sublimer poetic rhetoric, as in certain lines of Milton belonging
to his more external manner, —

Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky

With hideous ruin and combustion down