XXIV.—Poetry, Philosophy, and Religion

Extract

Some thirty years ago, Matthew Arnold, in one of those magnificently cumulative passages with which he so loved to dazzle his readers, said of the future of poetry: “The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, when it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact, and now the fact is failing it. Poetry, on the other hand, attaches its emotion to the idea, the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry.”