Chapter VIII

Conclusion

T

HE POETRY of the future has to solve, if the suggestions
I have made are sound, a problem new to the art of
poetic speech, an utterance of the deepest soul of man
and of the universal spirit in things, not only with another and
a more complete vision, but in the very inmost language of the
self-experience of the soul and the sight of the spiritual mind.
The attempt to speak in poetry the inmost things of the spirit
or to use a psychical and spiritual seeing other than that of
the more outward imagination and intelligence has indeed been
made before, but for the most part and except in rare moments
of an unusually inspired speech it has used some kind of figure
or symbol more than a direct language of inmost experience;
or else, where it has used such a language, it has been within
the limited province of a purely inward experience as in the
lofty philosophic and spiritual poetry of the Upanishads, the
expression of a peculiar psychic feeling of Nature common in
far eastern poets or the poetic setting of mystic states or of an
especial religious emotion and experience of which we have a
few examples in Europe and many in the literature of western
Asia and India. It is a different and much larger creative and
interpretative movement that we now see in its first stages, an
expansion of the inner way of vision to outer no less than to inner
things, to all that is subjective to us and all that is objective, a
seeing by a closer identity in the self of man with the self of
things and life and Nature and of all that meets him in the
universe. The poet has to find the language of these identities,
and even symbol and figure, when brought in to assist the more
direct utterance, must be used in a different fashion, less as a
veil, more as a real correspondence.
The first condition of the complete emergence of this new
poetic inspiration and this vaster and deeper significance of