494 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
There is something we want said and the poet has said it for us. 
The question as to why we want it said has as much profundity about 
it as the question why the world. I leave it utterly alone. As I take 
it for granted that we live and love life, I take it also for granted that 
we yearn to express that life, to put it into what we call words, to tell 
it to ourselves and to one another. The poet helps us to attain to 
this end. He extricates our aspirations. He displays our moods. 
He makes our indignations, our hates, our sympathies, our loves, our 
desires, our ambitions, our despairs articulate. We try, we desire; 
he achieves. And he does this because expression is an end. Our 
spirits achieve a tranquility when we have put into our own terms 
some wonder, when we have possessed in the net of our words that 
wonder. And each time that we attain to this tranquility by the 
aid of the writer of poems we attain to a new refinement of sensibility; 
there is a further widening of our spiritual horizons. 
I have tried now to show that this age of ours is awake and 
imaginative and creative if we will but see the fact. I have suggested 
the function of the poet and his poetry in assisting us in that work 
of seeing. I have called him our emancipator and the one who 
extricates meanings for us from the more or less chaotic pile of life. 
Now I wish to indicate that the age is about to become or is becoming 
more brightly awakened, that we are readier than for many generations 
to have the poets speak to us. 
To some minds all this talk may seem, when we are living under 
the strain of great and demanding times, unfeeling, even like callous 
indifference to the needs of the hour. But not so. Any words that 
in any degree can re-create the sense of spiritual values in life and that 
can serve to introduce us to poetry are salutary and wholesome. 
Because a love of poetry means a cleansing of the mind, a clarifying 
process in which aspirations are pointed and ideals are burnished. 
We need this cleansing of the mind to-day. We need it that we may 
maintain our sanity and be steady and strongly capable for the need 
of our next hour. We need to-day spiritual experience. We need a 
new birth into life. The poet will make life for us, and he will lead 
us into it. The enemy of life is the obsession with facts and with 
what pays and is practical. The poet will deliver us out of the hand 
of that enemy. 
We are indeed ready for deliverance. It is coming. Not by a 
way which we would have chosen, but it is near at hand and the poet 
is the supreme deliverer. The price of victory and the penalty of 
defeat in this war alike will shatter the smug affluence of our prosperity. 
A shifting of values is about to take place, is now taking place to the 
thunder of guns. A new aristocracy is rapidly arising. It is the 
