after all! For what I should like to do in this
book is to set forth in decent prose some of the
strange potencies of verse: its power, for in-
stance, to seize upon a physical image like
that of a woman planting bulbs, and trans-
mute it into a symbol of the resurrection of
the dead; its capacity for turning fact into
truth and brown earth into beauty; for re-
moulding the broken syllables of human
speech into sheer music; for lifting the mind,
bowed down by wearying thought and haunt-
ing fear, into a brooding ecstasy wherein
weeping is changed into laughter and au-
tumnal premonitions of death into assurance
of life, and the narrow paths of individual
experience are widened into those illimitable
spaces where the imagination rules. Poetry
does all this, assuredly. But how? And why?
That is our problem.

"The future of poetry is immense," de-
clared Matthew Arnold, and there are few
lovers of literature who doubt his triumphant
assertion. But the past of poetry is immense
also: impressive in its sheer bulk and in its
immemorial duration. At a period earlier
than any recorded history, poetry seems to
have occupied the attention of men, and some

-5-