The modern idea seems to be that poetry has no relation to life. Life in the modern sense is action, progress, success. Poetry has been conceded special themes: it can deal with passion,--the strange and unnatural and unreal physical attraction of the sexes--with nature, with the symbols of mythology, and with the characteristic sentimental heroism of history and events. With reality, it must have nothing to do. It is supposed, by the modern world of Anglo-Saxon literalness, to create an atmosphere of illusion, which one must avoid to keep one’s emotions from going astray in a civilization that needs the hardest kind of common sense. It is paradoxical that the English-speaking people who have given the world the greatest poets, should take this false attitude while in possession of the greatest spiritual and imaginative legacy of life and experience, bequeathed them from one generation to another during the last four hundred years. Escaping the illusion, this modern world has become the prisoner of delusion. For, if poetry deals with anything, it deals with reality. No matter how remote the setting, how subtle the communication, the one hard fact about true poetry, is its reality. The poet at the core and centre of life, surrounded with his dreams, his clairvoyant madness imbibed from the full draught of experience, his intensity of emotion, his childlike tenderness of sympathy, his quickening ecstasy of unashamed and unrestrained feeling, is considered the abnormal product of modern civilization; while in truth he is alone the one normal type of modern mankind, because he alone is in absolute harmony and understanding with the real and common impulse of human destiny. The great secret of life is to discover by a process of related effects, this common reality of experience. Most of mankind grope blindly in the dark, and miss it, and by a kind of frenzied and pitiable ignorance acquire the abnormal character of conduct. The poet discovers, or at least puts his being wholly at the disposal of, these secrets, wins a serene and contemplative relationship to these effects, and lives a normal spiritual life. Harmony and rhythm are but two common terms that express and designate infinity. There was a man who was so absolutely sane that the scoffers of his day called him mad--this man was William Blake. Christ was a madman to the community of his day, even his closest friends and disciples were not without doubt at times as to his sanity. But these two men were never a hair’s breadth from the commonest reality of existence. They realized imaginative facts, and kept in absolute tune with the harmony and rhythm of life, not merely with what they saw with the actual eye, but with that more penetrative, more limitless sense, the seeing soul. They were poets, and the one insistent quality of their message, was the reality of mortal and immortal life.