304 The Future Poetry
a supreme light of the spirit, a perfect joy and satisfaction of
the subtlety and complexity of a finer psychic experience and a
wide strength and amplitude of the life soul sure of the earth
and open to the heavens have met, found each other and fused
together in the sovereign unity of some great poetic discovery
and utterance.
It is possible that it may be rather in Eastern languages and
by the genius of Eastern poets that there will come the first
discovery of this perfection: the East has always had in its tem-
perament a greater constant nearness to the spiritual and psychic
sight and experience and it is only a more perfect turning of this
sight on the whole life of man to accept and illuminate that is
needed for the realisation of that for which we are still waiting.
On the other hand the West has this advantage that though it is
only now emerging not so much into the spiritual light as into
an outer half-lit circle and though it is hampered by an excessive
outward, intellectual and vital pressure, it has at present a more
widely ranging thought and a more questing and active eye,
and if these once take the right direction, the expression is not
so much encircled by past spiritual forms and traditions. It is in
any case the shock upon each other of the oriental and occidental
mentalities, on the one side the large spiritual mind and inward
eye turned upon self and eternal realities, on the other the free
inquiry of thought and the courage of the life energy assailing
the earth and its problems that is creating the future and must
be the parent of the poetry of the future. The whole of life and
of the world and Nature seen, fathomed, accepted, but seen in
the light of man’s deepest spirit, fathomed by the fathoming of
the self of man and the large self of the universe, accepted in
the sense of its inmost and not only its more outward truth, the
discovery of the divine reality within it and of man’s own divine
possibilities, — this is the delivering vision for which our minds
are seeking and it is this vision of which the future poetry must
find the inspiring aesthetic form and the revealing language.
The world is making itself anew under a great spiritual pres-
sure, the old things are passing away and the new things ready
to come into being, and it may be that some of the old nations