It is hard to make a certain type of mind understand that all which is seen with the physical eye, and touched with the fleshly hand, is illusion. That kind of a mind does not understand symbols. It belongs to the so-called practical people of the world, who obey, but do not comprehend, laws; whose laws, indeed, are the conventions of minds similar to their own. They organize, but do not construct; they interpret, but do not create. They are the wheels, and not the motor-power, of the engine of civilization and humanity. These are the people who make up nine-tenths of the world’s population; without the other tenth, they would perish. Their reality in life is mathematical immediacy, the cloak of visibility in which they are wrapped to go about their daily tasks in the world. Now poetry sees in these people and their affairs only the symbols of what is real, looks upon their whole fantastic display of living as the illusion beneath which their real living is concealed; the crises of their joys and sorrows, their aspirations and passions, hidden in the reality of their consciousness where exists an infinite universe of being, and where every event of their lives is enacted before their shadow is thrown upon the stage of the world. The fact of life is there, hidden away in the solitary soul, determining the illusions of conductual existence. It is crowded with moods, emotions and feelings, experienced with such intensity that what breaks forth in actual deed and event is but a faint reflection of the real experience the soul has gone through. The ideal is the real, because it is what one has lived but cannot express in the related experience of human intercourse. Poetry comes nearer finality in embodying the exact meaning and intensity of human feeling than any other art. Human feeling, being the root of all individual intelligence, is the most inexplicable quantity in life. Intuition is the primary significance of our existence. And it is the quality which gives to poetry its visionary and spiritual substance. In a nation it is the register of a people’s culture. * * * * *