300 The Future Poetry
the greatening, deepening and making normal of this kind that
is likely to bring the perfect voice of the poetry of the future.
The character of this change is a raising of what I have
called the adequate and the dynamic degrees of poetic speech
to the third intuitive and illuminative power or a touching and
penetrating of them with its peculiar lustre. The more potent
inspired or revelatory inevitable word occasionally intervenes
as in the older poets, but it is the greater generalising of the
intermediate, the first more purely intuitive degree that is the
common feature, the level of the endeavour, the distinctive stamp
where it succeeds of this new utterance. It takes the clear and
strong or the lucid and delicate poetical adequacy of speech
from which the older poets started and takes too the dynamic
poetical eloquence or the richer suggestive and imaginatively
effective power of language and tries to effect commonly what
they were content to do only in moments of greater elevation,
— to put into its mould or even surcharge it with a stronger
or subtler content of illumination and this also to discharge of
the intellectual tone and colour which so usually holds or else
makes its way into all but their rarest utterances and to arrive at
a pure intuitive expression of sensation and feeling and thought
or of an inwardly intuitive vital vision or of a strong or a subtle
psychic or spiritualised intelligence. This is a language which
aims at bare or strange or subtle or pregnant identities between
the mind’s intuitive thought and perception and emotion and
a rarer than the surface truth and meaning of the object or
experience. And very often the work is done not so much by the
language as the subtle sense suggestion of the rhythm and word
music, the sound doing the alchemic labour of transfiguration
which the expression is not yet strong and adult enough to lead
and compass.
These are beginnings and beyond lies much that has to be
done to effectuate the complete change; an uncertain transition
has yet to pass into a great transformation. The moulds or at
least the spirit and manner of poetic expression have to be recast,
very much as Shakespeare and his contemporaries recast the po-
etic speech of the English tongue so as to give shape and room to