A few years ago I went to the Falkland Islands to sheep-farm for a bare subsistence, and while living on a lonely station twenty miles from everywhere, so to speak, tending my flock, what time the half-breeds came and helped themselves to my humble belongings, I experienced a new emotion. Perhaps it would be more correct to say I became aware of the nature of an old emotion. I felt the currents of transcendent energy which I felt in my childhood. But I now felt them more frequently, and I saw that I was elevated by them beyond the normal course of every-day life. At such moments I forgot the sheep, the pastures and the marauding half-breeds. I even forgot the strong colour and form of nature. I saw something ridding me of solid things and leaving nothing but a fluid universe. I saw distinct forms melting to formative motions. I had been caught in the midst of an intense current—a transforming current of livingness. Moreover, I was free to the current, with the result that I became a part of itself—fluid—unresistingly, and was actuated accordingly. For the time being, I moved as the fluid element most moved me. Later reflection showed me that I was moved by some ineffable thing which I believe to be poetry. It may be that the soul is made of poetry, and after the human soul has freed itself from the fetters of materialism it becomes re-converted to poetry; that is, a part of its own flow or motion. I do not think materialists will understand this. But it will be clear to the spiritual minded. I am sure that the hypothesis, that poetry is simply soul-stuff, is a verifiable one. I am convinced that in my Falkland Island days, whenever I was raised by intensity out of my material self at a higher level than actuality, whenever such intensity annihilated time and space, obliterated that personality which I call Huntly Carter, lifted me to the infinite and eternal and left me dumb, I was experiencing poetry. I know that the hypothesis involves two assumptions. First, that poetry cannot be written. It can only be expressed in motion or action. And it can only be expressed by the person who receives it direct from its source or fount. Hence a significant poet is not one who writes verse, but one who lives poetry, _is_ poetry. The second assumption is that every human being who possesses the smallest soul vibration possesses a poetry-sense, and is, in fact, a potential poet. Given absolute freedom, he, too, would become poetry, such is the power of conversion residing in the element waiting to operate upon him. Which is not absurd when we come to think of it.