Faith & Spirit Quote by Henry Reed

Intuition, for Henry Reed, isn’t a mystical shortcut so much as the soul doing its own fieldwork. The line turns what people casually call a “gut feeling” into an active verb: a force, an activity, a mode of moving through life. Reed’s phrasing refuses the popular fantasy that intuition drops in from some cleaner, higher realm. It is made, not found, and it is made out of the only material we actually possess: whatever the soul has already lived.

The sly power is in the loopiness of “experience through whatever has been the experience.” That near-tautology isn’t sloppy; it’s the point. Intuition feels immediate precisely because it’s recursive. It compresses memory, pattern-recognition, fear, desire, habit, and hard-won judgment into something that arrives without argument. Reed gives intuition dignity without romanticizing it: if it’s “the soul in its experience,” then it can be wise, but it can also be prejudiced, haunted, self-protective. The soul doesn’t just store experiences; it is shaped by them, and intuition is the shape showing itself.

Context matters. Reed, writing in the long wake of two world wars and modernism’s distrust of grand certainties, leans toward an inward authority that doesn’t require institutions or dogma. For a poet, this is also a quiet defense of the artistic hunch: the line suggests that what looks like inspiration is actually deep familiarity with one’s own lived archive. Intuition becomes less prophecy than autobiography at speed.