The history of the word ‘poetry’ seems to me most instructive. Only quite recently has it begun to mean poetry, in our sense; formerly it meant art, the activity of the productive reason, and in this sense it was discussed by Aristotle and Antiquity and by our own classical period. One might say that the word had gradually threaded its way through the body, so to say, of poetry and reached at last into its soul, to the point where it touches the spirit; so that from the metaphysician’s point of view the perspectives have altered with time. This is the natural outcome of the fact that poetry has only recently, in the poets at least, begun to reflect on itself explicitly and deliberately. The reflection, once begun, is endless.

An increasing consciousness of the self is one of the main laws governing human history, and it arises directly from the nature of spiritual activity. According to traditional philosophy the mind is characterised by its ability to make a complete return to itself; the essential thing being not the return, but the grasp or penetration of self by self which accompanies it. Reflexion is of the essence of the spirit; it grasps itself by itself and passes right through itself. Hence, in culture, the general importance of the phenomenon of becoming conscious.