consider
that it is interesting to note that the lay monks of Creteil were in a
sense correct when they announced that they were performing "a heroic
act," an act symbolical of the way in which poetry would in the future
disdainfully protect itself against the invasion of common sense, the
dreadful impact of the sensual world. I think you will do well, if you
wish to pursue the subject of our conjectural discourse, to keep your
eye on this tendency to a poetical collectivism. We have not noticed
much evidence of it yet in England, but it is beginning to stir a good
deal in France and Italy. After all, the highest poetry is a mysterious
thing, like the practices of the Society of Rosicrucians, of whom it was
said, "Our House of the Holy Ghost, though a hundred thousand men should
have looked upon it, is yet doomed to remain untouched, imperturbable,
out of sight, and unrevealed to the whole godless world for ever." If I
am sure of anything, it is that the Poets of the Future will look upon
massive schemes of universal technical education, and such democratic
reforms as those which are now occupying the enthusiasm and energy of
Lord Haldane, as peculiarly hateful expositions of the godlessness of a
godless world.

To turn to another branch of our subject, it appears to me possible that
sexual love may cease to be the predominant theme in the lyrical poetry
of the future. Erotic sentiment has perhaps unduly occupied the
imaginative art of the past. In particular, the poets of the late
nineteenth century were interested to excess in love. There was a sort
of obsession of sex among them, as though life presented no other
phenomenon worthy of the attention of the artist. All over Europe, with
the various tincture of differing national habit and custom, this was
the mark of the sophistication of the poets, sometimes delicately and
craftily exhibited, but often, as in foreign examples which will easily
occur to your memory, rankly, as with the tiresome persistence of a
slightly stale perfume, an irritating odour of last night's opopanax or
vervain. And this is the one point, almost I think the only point, in
which the rather absurd and certainly very noisy and hoydenish
manifestoes of the so-called Futurists, led by M. Marinetti and his crew
of iconoclasts, are worthy of our serious attention. It is a plank in
their platform to banish eroticism, of the good kind and of the bad,
from the poetic practice of the future. I do not,