CHAPTER VI The National Evolution of Poetry THE work of the poet depends not only on himself and his age, but on the mentality of the nation to which he belongs and the spiritual, intellectual, aesthetic tradition and environment which it creates for him. It is not to be understood by this that he is or need be entirely limited by this condition or that he is to consider himself as only a voice of the national mind or bound by the past national tradition and debarred from striking out a road of his own. In nations which are returning under difficulties to a strong self-consciousness, like the Irish or the Indians at the present moment, this nationalism m

CHAPTER XXXII Conclusion             THE 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 us

section four Translation of Poetry TWO WAYS OF TRANSLATING POETRY There is no question of defective poetry or lines. There are two ways of rendering a poem from one language into another — one is to keep strictly to the manner and turn of the original, the other to take its spirit, sense and imagery and reproduce them freely so as to suit the new language. (A’s poem is exceedingly succinct, simply-direct and compact in word, form, rhythm, yet full of suggestion — it would perhaps not be possible to do the same thing in Bengali; it is necessary to use an ampler form, and this is what you have done. Your translation is very beautiful; only, side by side with the

CHAPTER XXXI The Word and the Spirit             A DEVELOPMENT of the kind of which we are speaking must affect not only the frames of poetry, but initiate also a subtle change of its word and rhythmic movement. The poetic word is a vehicle of the spirit, the chosen medium of the soul’s self-expression, and any profound modification of the inner habit of the soul, its thought atmosphere, its way of seeming, its type of feeling, any change of the light in which it lives and the power of the breath which it breathes, heartening of its elevations or entry into deeper chambers of its self must reflect itself in a corresponding modification, changed intensity of ligh

chapter XXIV New Birth or Decadence? AT THIS point we stand in the evolution of English poetry. Its course, we can see, is only one line of a com­mon evolution, and I have singled it out to at follow because, for two reasons, it seems to me the most complete and suggestive. It follows most faithfully the natural ascending curve 'of/the human spirit in this kind of rhythmic imaginative self-expression and, again, because of all the modern European languages it has the largest freest poetic energy and natural power, it responds, on the whole, most directly of all of them — in spite of certain se­rious limitations of the English mind — to the fountain motives, the e

CHAPTER XIV The Movement of Modern Literature             POETRY as the fullness of imaginative self-expression of the entirely modernized mind begins with the writers of the later eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. They are the free impetuous but often narrow sources of these wider flowings. We se the initial tendencies which undergo a rapid growth of meaning and changes of form in the subsequent decades, until now all their sense and se3king have reached in the early twentieth a subtle intensity, refinement and variety of motives, a tense straining on many lines to find some last truth and utterance which must end either in a lingering dec

chapter XXV The Ideal Spirit of Poetry T0 ATTEMPT to presage the future turn or development of mind or life in any of its fields is always a hazardous occupation. Life and mind are not like physical Nature which runs in precise mechanical grooves; these are more mobile and freer powers. The gods of life and still more the gods of mind are so incalculably self-creative that even when we can distinguish the main lines on which the working runs or has so far run, we are still unable to foresee with any certainty what turn they will yet take or of what new thing they are in labour. It is therefore impossible to predict what the poetry of the future will actually

chapter XXVIII The Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty THE light of truth, the breath of life, great and potent things though they are, are insufficient to give poetry the touch of immortality and perfection, even a little of which is enough to carry it safe through the ages, unless the soul and form of delight and beauty take possession of the seeing of truth and give immortality to the breath and body of the life. Delight is the soul of existence, beauty the intense impression, the concentrated form of delight; and these two fundamental things tend to be one for the mind of the artist and the poet, though they are often enough separated in our cr

chapter XXIX The Power of the Spirit A POETRY born direct from and full of the power of the spirit and therefore a largest and a deepest self-expression of the soul and mind of the race is that for which we are seeking and of which the more profound tendencies of the creative mind seem to be in travail. This poetry will be a voice of eternal things raising to a new significance and to a great satisfied joy in experience the events and emotions and transiences of life which will then be seen and sung as the succession of signs, the changing of the steps of an eternal manifestation; it will be an expression of the very self of man and the self of things and the s

-10_The Course of English Poetry – 1.htm CHAPTER IX The Course of English Poetry – 1             THESE are the general characteristics of English Poetry, the powers which have been at work in it. For we have to see first what are the spirit and temper that have stood behind and come to the front in a literature in order to understand the course that it has taken and the forms that it has assumed. The field which poetry covers is common ground, but each nation has its own characteristic spirit and creative quality which determine the province in which it will best succeed, the turn or angle of its vision and the shape of its work. The English poetical genius was evidently predestined by the co