The disruptive forces let loose in this age (and they do not date from yesterday) are responsible amongst other things for rending poetry and life apart. This is a tragic situation which may end by brutalising humanity irretrievably, and has already seriously inhibited the civilising function of poetry. It is true that great artists and writers (at the height of this as of every other situation) continue to master life and to interpret its mystery. But the widening gulf between the war-haunted, machine-driven multitude and the heart-stricken modern poets is such that words cannot carry over it. Mankind as a whole is unaware of the visions life is engendering; whilst creative poets and artists, cut off from the common roots of humanity, are becoming markedly eccentric, disdainful, ambiguous and remote. Yet they are conditioned by the times they live in like everyone else. Vitally affected by the march of science, they have for many generations now been striving for new forms and a different language in order to express the altered aspect presented by life owing to such revolutionary thinkers as Darwin, Einstein and Freud.

For the spirit of life, rushing through and overflowing the deep but eroded channel of Christianity, seems to be on its way to rejoin some unknown sea as yet uncharted by humanity. Many individual poets have had strange visions of life throughout the ages, and isolated modem writers are prophetically inclined; but the earlier poets are forgotten, and the present divorce between popular and poetical modes of thought deprives the latter of universality, so that the fear expressed by Santayana in 1916 is still not dissipated:

The greatest calamity, however, would be that which seems, alas! not unlikely to befall our immediate posterity, namely, that while Christianity should be discredited no other religion, more disillusioned and not less inspired, should come to take its place. The new religion which seems to be gathering impetus is certainly one of disillusion, but it is nebulous and does not come from the mythological subsoil which nourishes great religions. Schopenhauer's ruthless and tragic Will, Nietzsche's merciless Superman, Proust's hoary enemy Time have certainly moulded and modified the thoughts of men; but they are intellectual conceptions rather than spiritual revelations.