SPRING AND ALL by William Garlos Williams Copyrighted by the author Published by Contact Publishing Co. To Charles Demuth Spring and All ============================================== IF anything of moment resulls —— so much the better. And so much the more likely will it be that no one will want to see it. There is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world. If there is an ocean it is here. Or rather, the whole world is between : Yesterday, tomorrow, Europe, Asia, Africa, —— all things removed and impossible, the tower of the church at Seville, the Parthenon. What do they mean when they say: „ I do not like your poems ; you have no faith whatever. You seem neither to have suffered nor, in fact, to have felt anything very deeply. There is nothing appealing in what you say but on the contrary the poems are positively repellant. They are heartless, cruel, they make fun of humanity. What in God's name do you mean? Are you a pagan ? Have you no tolerance for human frailty ? Rhyme you may perhaps take away but rythm ! why there is none in your work whatever. Is this what you call poetry ? It is the very antithesis of poetry. It is antipoetry. It is the annihilation of life upon which you are bent. Poetry that used to go hand in hand with life, poetry that interpreted our deepest promptings, poetry that inspired, that led us forward to new discoveries, new depths of tolerance, new heights of exaltation. You moderns ! it is the death of poetry that you are accomplishing. No. I cannot understand this work. You have not yet suffered a cruel blow from life. When vou have suffered you will write differently ? » Perhaps this noble apostrophy means something terrible for me, I am not certain, but for the moment I interpret it to say : « You have robbed me. God, I am naked. What shall I do ? » —— By it they mean that when I have suffered (provided I have not done so as yet) I too shall run for cover ; that I too shall seek refuge in fantasy. And mind you, I do not say that I will not. To decorate my age. But today it is different. The reader knows himself as he was twenty years ago and he has also in mind a vision of what he would be, some day. Oh, some day! But the thing he never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he is. And this moment is the only thing in which I am at all interested. Ergo, who cares for anything I do? And what do I care ? I love my fellow creature. Jesus, how I love him : endways, sideways, frontways and all the other ways —— but he doesn't exist ! Neither does she. I do, in a bastardly sort of way. To whom then am I addressed ? To the imagination. In fact to return upon my theme for the time nearly all writing, up to the present, if not all art, has been especially designed to keep up the barrier between sense and the vaporous fringe which distracts the attention from its agonized approaches to the moment. It has been always a search for „ the beautiful illusion ". Very well. I am not in search of „ the beautiful illusion ". And if when I pompously announce that I am addressed —— To the imagination —— you believe that I thus divorce myself from life and so defeat my own end, I reply : To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force —— the imagination. This is its book. I myself invite you to read and to see. In the imagination, we are from henceforth (so long as you read) locked in a fraternal embrace, the classic caress of author and reader. We are one. Whenever I say „ I " I mean also „ you ". And so, together, as one, we shall begin. CHAPTER 19 o meager times, so fat in everything imaginable! imagine the New World that rises to our windows from the sea on Mondays and on Saturdays —— and on every other day of the week also. Imagine it in all its prismatic colorings, its counterpart in our souls —— our souls that are great pianos whose strings, of honey and of steel, the divisions of the rainbow set twanging, loosing on the air great novels of adventure ! Imagine the monster project of the moment : Tomorrow we the people of the United States are going to Europe armed to kill every man, woman and child in the area west of the Carpathian Mountains (also east) sparing none. Imagine the sensation it will cause. First we shall kill them and then they, us. But we are careful to spare the Spanish bulls, the birds, rabbits, small deer and of course —— the Russians. For the Russians we shall build a bridge from edge to edge of the Atlantic —— having first been at pains to slaughter all Canadians and Mexicans on this side. Then, oh then, the great feature will take place. Never mind ; the great event may not exist, so there is no need to speak further of it. Kill ! kill ! the English, the Irish, the French, the Germans, the Italians and the rest : friends or enemies, it makes no difference, kill them all. The bridge is to be blown up when all Russia is upon it. And why ? Because we love them —— all. That is the secret : a new sort of murder. We make leberwurst of them. Bratwurst. But why, since we are ourselves doomed to suffer the same annihilation ? If I could say what is in my mind in Sanscrit or even Latin I would do so. But I cannot. I speak for the integrity of the soul and the greatness of life's inanity ; the formality of its boredom ; the orthodoxy of its stupidity. Kill ! kill ! let there be fresh meat... The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it kill. The imagination is supreme. To it all our works forever, from the remotest past to the farthest future, have been, are and will be dedicated. To it alone we show our wit by having raised in its honor as monument not the least pebble. To it now we come to dedicate our secret project: the annihilation of every human creature on the face of the earth. This is something never before attempted. None to remain ; nothing but the lower vertebrates, the mollusks, insects and plants. Then at last will the world be made anew. Houses crumble to ruin, cities disappear giving place to mounds of soil blown thither by the winds, small bushes and grass give way to trees which grow old and are succeeded by other trees for countless generations. A marvellous serenity broken only by bird and wild beast calls reigns over the entire sphere. Order and peace abound. This final and self inflicted holocaust has been all for love, for sweetest love, that together the human race, yellow, black, brown, red and white, agglutinated into one enormous soul may be gratified with the sight and retire to the heaven of heavens content to rest on its laurels. There, soul of souls, watching its own horrid unity, it boils and digests itself within the tissues of the great Being of Eternity that we shall then have become. With what magnificent explosions and odors will not the day be accomplished as we, the Great One among all creatures, shall go about contemplating our self-prohibited desires as we promenade them before the inward review of our own bowels —— et cetera, et cetera, et cetera... and it is spring —— both in Latin and Turkish, in English and Dutch, in Japanese and Italian ; it is spring by Stinking River where a magnolia tree, without leaves, before what was once a farmhouse, now a ramshackle home for millworkers, raises its straggling branches of ivorywhite flowers. CHAPTER XIII Thus, weary of life, in view of the great consummation which awaits us —— tomorrow, we rush among our friends congratulating ourselves upon the joy soon to be. Thoughtless of evil we crush out the marrow of those about us with our heavy cars as we go happily from place to place. It seems that there is not time enough in which to speak the full of our exaltation. Only a day is left, one miserable day, before the world comes into its own. Let us hurry ! Why bother for this man or that ? In the offices of the great newspapers a mad joy reigns as they prepare the final extras. Rushing about, men bump each other into the whirring presses. How funny it seems. All thought of misery has left us. Why should we care? Children laughingly fling themselves under the wheels of the street cars, airplanes crash gaily to the earth. Someone has written a poem. Oh life, bizarre fowl, what color are your wings? Green, blue, red, yellow, purple, white, brown, orange, black, grey? In the imagination, flying above the wreck of ten thousand million souls, I see you departing sadly for the land of plants and insects, already far out to sea. (Thank you, I know well what I am plagiarising) Your great wings flap as you disappear in the distance over the pre-Columbian acres of floating weed. The new cathedral overlooking the park, looked down from its towers today, with great eyes, and saw by the decorative lake a group of people staring curiously at the corpse of a suicide : Peaceful, dead young man, the money they have put into the stones has been spent to teach men of life's austerity. You died and teach us the same lesson. You seem a cathedral, celebrant of the spring which shivers for me among the long black trees. CHAPTER VI Now, in the imagination, all flesh, all human flesh has been dead upon the earth for ten million, billion years. The bird has turned into a stone within whose heart an egg, unlayed, remained hidden. It is spring ! but miracle of miracles a miraculous miracle has gradually taken place during these seemingly wasted eons. Through the orderly sequences of unmentionable time EVOLUTION HAS REPEATED ITSELF FROM THE BEGINNING. Good God! Every step once taken in the first advance of the human race, from the amoeba to the highest type of intelligence, has been duplicated, every step exactly paralleling the one that preceded in the dead ages gone by. A perfect plagiarism results. Everything is and is new. Only the imagination is undeceived. At this point the entire complicated and laborious process begins to near a new day. (More of this in Chapter XIX) But for the moment everything is fresh, perfect, recreated. In fact now, for the first time, everything IS new. Now at last the perfect effect is being witlessly discovered. The terms „ veracity " „ actuality " „ real " „ natural " „ sincere " are being discussed at length, every word in the discussion being evolved from an identical discussion which took place the day before yesterday. Yes, the imagination, drunk with prohibitions, has destroyed and recreated everything afresh in the likeness of that which it was. Now indeed men look about in amazement at each other with a full realization of the meaning of „ art ". CHAPTER 2 It is spring: life again begins to assume its normal appearence as of „ today ". Only the imagination is undeceived. The volcanos are extinct. Coal is beginning to be dug again where the fern forests stood last night. (If an error is noted here, pay no attention to it). CHAPTER XIX I realize that the chapters are rather quick in their sequence and that nothing much is contained in any one of them but no one should be surprised at this today. THE TRADITIONALISTS OF PLAGIARISM It is spring. That is to say, it is approaching THE BEGINNING. In that huge and microscopic career of time, as it were a wild horse racing in an illimitable pampa under the stars, describing immense and microscopic circles with his hoofs on the solid turf, running without a stop for the millionth part of a second until he is aged and worn to a heap of skin, bones and ragged hoofs —— In that majestic progress of life, that gives the exact impression of Phidias' frizze, the men and beasts of which, though they seem of the rigidity of marble are not so but move, with blinding rapidity, though we do not have the time to notice it, their legs advancing a millionth part of an inch every fifty thousand years —— In that progress of life which seems stillness itself in the mass of its movements —— at last SPRING is approaching. In that colossal surge toward the finite and the capable life has now arrived for the second time at that exact moment when in the ages past the destruction of the species Homo sapiens occured. Now at last that process of miraculous verisimilitude, that grate copying which evolution has followed, repeating move for move every move that it made in the past —— is approaching the end. Suddenly it is at an end. THE WORLD IS NEW. I By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast —— a cold wind. Beyond, the waste of broad, muddy fields brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen patches of standing water the scattering of tall trees All along the road the reddish purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy stuff of bushes and small trees with dead, brown leaves under them leafless vines —— Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches —— They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter. All about them the cold, familiar wind —— Now the grass, tomorrow the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf One by one objects are defined —  It quickens : clarity, outline of leaf But now the stark dignity of entrance —— Still, the profound change has come upon then : rooted they grip down and begin to awaken II Pink confused with white flowers and flowers reversed take and spill the shaded flame darting it back into the lamp's horn petals aslant darkened with mauve red where in whorls petal lays its glow upon petal round flamegreen throats petals radiant with transpiercing light contending above the leaves reaching up their modest green from the pot's rim and there, wholly dark, the pot gay with rough moss. A terrific confusion has taken place. No man knows whither to turn. There is nothing ! Emptiness stares us once more in the face. Whither ? To what end ? Each asks the other. Has life its tail in its mouth or its mouth in its tail ? Why are we here ? Dora Marsden's philosophic algebra. Everywhere men look into each other's faces and ask the old unanswerable question : Whither ? How ? What ? Why ? At any rate, now at last spring is here ! The rock has split, the egg has hatched, the prismatically plumed bird of life has escaped from its cage. It spreads its wings and is perched now on the peak of the huge African mountain Kilimanjaro. Strange recompense, in the depths of our despair at the unfathomable mist into which all mankind is plunging, a curious force awakens. It is HOPE long asleep, aroused once more. Wilson has taken an army of advisers and sailed for England. The ship has sunk. But the men are all good swimmers. They take the women on their shoulders and buoyed on by the inspiration of the moment they churn the free seas with their sinewey arms, like Ulysses, landing all along the European seaboard. Yes, hope has awakened once more in men's hearts. It is the NEW ! Let us go forward ! The imagination, freed from the handeuffs of „ art ", takes the lead ! Her feet are bare and not too delicate. In fact those who come behind her have much to think of. Hm. Let it pass. CHAPTER I SAMUEL BUTLER The great English divine, Sam Butler, is shouting from a platform, warning us as we pass: There are two who can invent some extraordinary thing to one who can properly employ that which has been made use of before. Enheartened by this thought THE TRADITIONALISTS OF PLAGIARISM try to get hold of the mob. They seize those nearest them and shout into their ears : Tradition ! The solidarity of life! The fight is on : These men who have had the governing of the mob through all the repetitious years resent the new order. Who can answer them ? One perhaps here and there but it is an impossible situation. If life were anything but a bird, if it were a man, a Greek or an Egyptian, but it is only a bird that has eyes and wings, a beak, talons and a cry that reaches to every rock's center, but without intelligence ? —— The voice of the Delphic Oracle itself, what was it ? A poisonous gas from a rock's cleft. Those who led yesterday wish to hold their sway a while longer. It is not difficult to understand their mood. They have their great weapons to hand : „ science ", „ philosophy " and most dangerous of all „ art". Meanwhile, SPRING, which has been approaching for several pages, is at last here. —— they ask us to return to the proven truths of tradition, even to the twice proven, the substantiality of which is known. Demuth and a few others do their best to point out the error, telling us that design is a function of the IMAGINATION, describing its movements, its colors —— but it is a hard battle. I myself seek to enter the lists with these few notes jolted down in the midst of the action, under distracting circumstances —— to remind myself (see p. 2, paragraph 4) of the truth III The farmer in deep thought is pacing through the rain among his blank fields, with hands in pockets, in his head the harvest already planted. A cold wind ruffles the water among the browned weeds. On all sides the world rolls coldly away : black orchards darkened by the March clouds —— leaving room for thought. Down past the brushwood bristling by the rainsluiced wagonroad looms the artist figure of the farmer —— composing —— antagonist IV The Easter stars are shining above lights that are flashing —— coronal of the black —— Nobody to say it —— Nobody to say : pinholes Thither I would carry her among the lights —— Burst it asunder break through to the fifty words necessary —— a crown for her head with castles upon it, skyscrapers filled with nut-chocolates —— dovetame winds —— stars of tinsel from the great end of a cornucopia of glass SO long as the sky is recognised as an assoiciation is recognised in its function of accessory to vague words whose meaning it is impossible to rediscover its value can be nothing but mathematical certain limits of gravity and density of air The farmer and the fisherman who read their own lives there have a practical corrective for —— they rediscover or replace demoded meanings to the religious terms Among them, without expansion of imagination, there is the residual contact between life and the imagination which is essential to freedom The man of imagination who turns to art for release and fulfilment of his baby promises contends with the sky through layers of demoded words and shapes. Demoded, not because the essential vitality which begot them is laid waste —— this cannot be so, a young man feels, since he feels it in himself —— but because meanings have been lost through laziness or changes in the form of existance which have let words empty. Bare handed the man contends with the sky, without experience of existence seeking to invent and design Crude svmbolism is to associate emotions with natural phenomena such as anger with lightning, flowers with love it goes further and associates certain textures with Such work is empty. It is very typical of almost all that is done by the writers who fill the pages every month of such a paper as. Everything that I have done in the past —— except those parts which may be called excellent —— by chance, have that quality about them. It is typified by use of the word « like » or that « evocation » of the « image » which served us for a time. Its abuse is apparent. The insignificant « image » may be « evoked » never so ably and still mean nothing. With all his faults Alfred Kreymborg never did this. That is why his work —— escaping a common fault —— still has value and will tomorrow have more. Sandburg, when uninspired by intimacies of the eye and ear, runs into this empty symbolism. Such poets of promise as ruin themselves with it, though many have major sentimental faults besides. Marianne Moore escapes. The incomprehensibility of her poems is witness to at what cost (she cleaves herself away) as it is also to the distance which the most are from a comprehension of the purpose of composition. The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost. It is no different from the aristocratic compositions of the earlier times, The Homeric inventions but these occured in different times, to this extent, that life had not yed sieved through its own multiformity. That aside, the work the two-thousand-year-old poet did and that we do are one piece. That is the vitality of the classics. So then —— Nothing is put down in the present book —except through weakness of the imagination —— which is not intended as of a piece with the « nature » which Shakespeare mentions and which Hartley speaks of so completely in his « Adventures » : it is the common thing which is anonymously about us. Composition is in no essential an escape from life. In fact if it is so it is negligeable to the point of insignificance. Whatever « life » the artist may be forced to lead has no relation to the vitality of his compositions. Such names as Homer, the blind ; Scheherazade, who lived under threat —— Their compositions have as their excellence an identity with life since they are as actual, as sappy as the leaf of the tree which never moves from one spot. What I put down of value will have this value : an escape from crude symbolism, the annihilation of strained associations, complicated ritualistic forms designed to separate the work from « reality » —— such as rhyme, meter as meter and not as the essential of the work, one of its words. But this smacks too much of the nature of —— This is all negative and appears to be boastful. It is not intended to be so. Rather the opposite The work will be in the realm of the imagination as plain as the sky is to a fisherman —— A very clouded sentence. The word must be put down for itself, not as a symbol of nature but a part, cognisant of the whole —— aware —— civilized. V Blacks wind from the north enter black hearts. Barred from seclusion in lilys they strike to destroy —— Beastly humanity where the wind breaks it —— strident voices, heat quickened, built of waves Drunk with goats or pavements Hate his of the night and the day of flowers and rocks. Nothing is gained by saying the night breeds murder —— It is the classical mistake The day All that enters in another person all grass, all blackbirds flying all azalia trees in flower salt winds —— Sold to them men knock blindly together splitting their heads open That is why boxing matches and Chinese poems are the same —— That is why Hartley praises Miss Wirt There is nothing in the twist of the wind but —— dashes of cold rain It is one with submarine vistas purple and black fish turning among undulant seaweed —— Black wind, I have poured my heart out to you until I am sick of it —— Now I run my hand over you feeling the play of your body —— the quiver of its strength —— The grief of the bowmen of Shu moves nearer —— There is an approach with difliculty from the dead —— the winter casing of grief How easy to slip into the old mode, how hard to cling firmly to the advance —— VI No that is not it nothing that I have done nothing I have done is made up of nothing and the dipthong ae together with the first person singular indicative of the auxilliary verb to have everything I have done is the same if to do is capable of an infinity of combinations involving the moral physical and religious codes for everything and nothing are synonymous when energy in vacuuo has the power of confusion which only to have done nothing can make perfect The inevitable flux of the seeing eye toward measuring itself by the world it inhabits can only result in himself crushing humiliation unless the individual raise to some approximate co-extension with the universe. This is possible by aid of the imagination. Only through the ageney of this force can a man feel himself moved largely with sympathetic pulses at work —— A work of the imagination which fails to release the senses in accordance with this major requisite —— the sympathies, the intelligence in its selective world, fails at the elucidation, the alleviation which is —— In the composition, the artist does exactly what every eye must do with life, fix the particular with the universality of his own personality —— Taught by the largeness of his imagination to feel every form which he sees moving within himself, he must prove the truth of this by expression. The contraction which is felt. All this being anterior to technique, that can have only a sequent value ; but since all that appears to the senses on a work of art does so through fixation by the imagination of the external as well internal means of expression the essential nature of technique or transcription. Only when this position is reached can life proper be said to begin since only then ean a value be affixed to the forms and activities of which it consists. Only then can the sense of frustration which ends. All composition defeated. Only through the imagination is the advance of intelligence possible, to keep beside growing understanding. Complete lack of imagination would be the same at the cost of intelligence, complete. Even the most robust constitution has its limits, though the Roman feast with its reliance upon regurgitation to prolong it shows an active ingenuity, yet the powers of a man are so pitifully small, with the ocean to swallow —— that at the end of the feast nothing would be left but suicide. That or the imagination which in this ease takes the form of humor, is known in that form —— the release from physical necessity. Having eaten to the full we must acknowledge our insufficiency since we have not annihilated all food nor even the quantity of a good sized steer. However we have annihilated all eating : quite plainly we have no more appetite. This is to say that the imagination has removed us from the banal necessity of bursting ourselves —— by acknowledging a new siluation. We must acknowledge that the ocean we would drink is too vast —— but at the same time we realize that extension in our case is not confined to the intestine only. The stomach is full, the ocean no fuller, both have the same qua= lity of fullness. In that, then, one is equal to the other. Having eaten, the man has released his mind. THIS catalogue might be increased to larger proportions without stimulating the sense. In works of the imagination that which is taken for great good sense, so that it seems as if an accurate precept were discovered, is in reality not so, but vigor and accuracy of the imagination alone. In work such as Shakespeares —— This leads to the discovery that has been made today —— old catalogues aside —— full of meat —— " the divine illusion has about it that inaccuracy which reveals that which I mean ". There is only „ illusion " in art where ignorance of the bystander confuses imagination and its works with cruder processes. Truly men feel an enlargement before great or good work, an expansion but this is not, as so many believe today a „ lie ", a stupefaction, a kind of mesmerism, a thing to block out " life ", bitter to the individual, by a " vision of beauty ". It is a work of the imagination. It gives the feeling of completion by revealing the oneness of experience ; it rouses rather than stupefies the intelligence by demonstrating the importance of personality, by showing the individual, depressed before it, that his life is valuable —— when completed by the imagination. And then only. Such work elucidates —— Such a realization shows us the falseness of allempling to " copy " nature. The thing is equally silly when we try to " make " pictures —— But such a picture as that of Juan Gris, though I have not seen it in color, is important as marking more clearly than any I have seen what the modern trend is : the attempt is being made to separate things of the imagination from life, and obviously, by using the forms common to experience so as not to frighten the onlooker away but to invite him, The rose is obsolete but each petal ends in an edge, the double facet cementing the grooved columns of air —— The edge cuts without cutting meets —— nothing —— renews itself in metal or porcelain —— whither ? It ends —— But if it ends the start is begun so that to engage roses becomes a geometry —— Sharper, neater, more cutting figured in majolica —— the broken plate glazed with a rose Somewhere the sense makes copper roses steel roses —  The rose carried weight of love but love is at an end —— of roses If is at the edge of the petal that love waits Crisp, worked to defeal laboredness —— fragile plucked, moist, half-raised cold, precise, touching What The place between the petal's edge and the From the petal's edge a line starts that being of steel infinitely fine, infinitely rigid penetrates the Milky Way without contact —— lifting from it —— neither hanging nor pushing —— The fragility of the flower unbruised penetrates spaces VIII The sunlight in a yellow plaque upon the varnished floor is full of a song inflated to fifty pounds pressure at the faucet of June that rings the triangle of the air pulling at the anemonies in Persephone's cow pasture —— When from among the steel rocks leaps J. P. M. who enjoyed extraordinary privileges among virginity to solve the core of whirling flywheels by cutting the Gordian knot with a Veronese or perhaps a Rubens whose cars are about the finest on the market today —— And so it comes to motor cars —— which is the son leaving off the g of sunlight and grass —— Impossible to say, impossible to underestimate —— wind, earthquakes in Manchuria, a partridge from dry leaves things with which he is familiar, simple things —— at the same time to detach them from ordinary experience to the imagination. Thus they are still " real " they are the same things they would be it photographed or painted by Monet, they are recognizable as the things touched by the hands during the day, but in this painting they are seen to be in some peculiar way —— detached Here is a shutter, a bunch of grapes, a sheet of music, a picture of sea and mountains (particularly fine) which the onlooker is not for a moment permitted to witness as an " illusion ". One thing laps over on the other, the cloud laps over on the shutter, the bunch of grapes is part of the handle of the guitar, the mountain and sea are obviously not " the mountain and sea ", but a picture of the mountain and the sea. All drawn with admirable simplicity and excellent design —— all a unity —— This was not necessary where the subject of art was not " reality " but related to the " gods " —— by force or otherwise. There was no need of the " illusion " in such a case since there was none possible where a picture or a work represented simply the imaginative reality which existed in the mind of the onlooker. No special effort was necessary to cleave where the cleavage already existed. I don't know what the Spanish see in their Velasquez and Goya but Today where everything is being brought into sight the realism of art has bewildered us, confused us and forced us to re-invent in order to retain that which the older generations had without that effort. Cezanne —— The only realism in art is of the imagination. It is only thus that the work escapes plagiarism after nature and becomes a creation Invention of new forms to embody this reality of art, the one thing which art is, must occupy all serious minds concerned. From the time of Poe in the U. S. —— the first American poet had to be a man of great separation —— with close identity with life. Poe could not have written a word without the violence of expulsive emotion combined with the in-driving force of a crudely repressive environment. Between the two his imagination was forced into being to keep him to that reality, completeness, sense of escape which is felt in his work —— his topics. Typically American —— accurately, even inevitably set in his time. So, after this tedious diversion —— whatever of dull you find among my work, put it down to criticism, not to poetry. You will not be mistaken —— Who am I but my own critic? Surely in isolation one becomes a god —— At least one becomes something of everything, which is not wholly godlike, yet a little so —— in many things. It is not necessary to count every flake of the truth that falls ; it is necessary to dwell in the imagination if the truth is to be numbered. It is necessary to speak from the imagination —— The great furor about perspective in Holbein's day had as a consequence much fine drawing, it made coins defy gravity, standing on the table as if in the act of falling. To say this was lifelike must have been satisfying to the master, it gave depth, pungency. But all the while the picture escaped notice —— partly because of the perspective. Or if noticed it was for the most part because one could see " the birds pecking at the grapes " in it. Meanwhile the birds were pecking at the grapes outside the window and in the next street Bauermeister Kummel was letting a gold coin slip from his fingers to the counting table. The representation was perfect, it " said something one was used to hearing " but with verve, cleverly. Thus perspective and clever drawing kept the picture continually under cover of the " beautiful illusion " until today, when even Anatole France trips, saying: " Art —— all lies! " —— today when we are beginning to discover the truth that in great works of the imagination A CREATIVE FORCE IS SHOWN AT WORK MAKING OBJECTS WHICH ALONE COMPLETE SCIENCE AND ALLOW INTELLIGENCE TO SURVIVE —— his picture lives anew. It lives as pictures only can : by their power TO ESCAPE ILLUSION and stand between man and nature as saints once stood between man and the sky —— their reality in such work, say, as that of Juan Gris No man could suffer the fragmentary nature of his understanding of his own life —— Whitman's proposals are of the same piece with the modern trend toward imaginative understanding of l ife. The largeness which he interprets as his identity with the least and the greatest about him, his " democracy " represents the vigor of his imaginative life. IX What about all this writing? O " Kiki" O Miss Margaret Jarvis The backhandspring I : clean clean clean : yes.. New-York Wrigley's, appendecitis, John Marin : skyscraper soup —— Either that or a bullet ! Once anything might have happened You lay relaxed on my knees —— the starry night spread out warm and blind above the hospital —— Pah ! It is unclean which is not straight to the mark —— In my life the furniture eats me the chairs, the floor the walls which heard your sobs drank up my emotion —— they which alone know everything and snitched on us in the morning —— What to want ? Drunk we go forward surely Not I beds, beds, beds elevators, fruit, night-tables breasts to see, white and blue —— to hold in the hand, to nozzle It is not onion soup Your sobs soaked through the walls breaking the hospital to pieces Everything —— windows, chairs obscenely drunk, spinning —— white blue, orange —— hot with our passion wild tears, desperate rejoinders my legs, turning slowly end over end in the air ! But what would you have? All I said was : there, you see, it is broken stockings, shoes, hairpins your bed, I wrapped myself round you —— I watched. You sobbed, you beat your pillow you tore your hair you dug your nails into your sides I was your nightgown I watched ! Clean is he alone after whom stream the broken pieces of the city —— flying apart at his approaches but I merely caress you curiously fifteen years ago and you still go about the city, they say patching up sick school children Understood in a practical way, without calling upon mystic agencies, of this or that order, it is that life becomes actual only when it is identified with ourselves. When we name it, life exists. To repeat physical experiences has no —— The only means he has to give value to life is to recognise it with the imagination and name it ; this is so. To repeat and repeat the thing without naming it is only to dull the sense and results in frustration. this make the artist the prey of life. He is easy of attack. I think often of my earlier work and what it has cost me not to have been clear. I acknowledge I have moved chaotically about refusing or rejecting most things, seldom accepting values or acknowledging anything. because I early recognised the futility of acquisitive understanding and at the same time rejected religious dogmatism. My whole life has been spent (so far) in seeking to place a value upon experience and the objects of experience that would satisfy my sense of inclusiveness without redundancy —— completeness, lack of frustration with the liberty of choice; the things which the pursuit of « art » offers —— But though I have felt « free » only in the presence of works of the imagination, knowing the quickening of the sense which came of it, and though this experience has held me firm at such times, yet being of a slow but accurate understanding, I have not always been able to complete the intellectual steps which would make me firm in the position. So most of my life has been lived in hell —— a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration, when a poem such as this or that would appear What would have happened in a world similarly lit by the imagination Oh yes, you are a writter ! a phrase that has often damned me, to myself. I rejected it with heat but the stigma remained. Not a man, not an understanding but a WRITER. I was unable to recognize. I do not forget with what heat too I condemned some poems of some contemporary praised because of their loveliness —— I find that I was somewhat mistaken —— ungenerous Life's processes are very simple. One or two moves are made and that is the end. The rest is repetitious. The Improvisations —— coming at a time when I was trying to remain firm at great cost —— I had recourse to the expedient of letting life go completely in order to live in the world of my choice. I let the imagination have its own way to see if it could save itself. Something very definite came of it. I found myself alleviated but most important I began there and then to revalue experience, to understand what I was at —— The virtue of the improvisations is their placement in a world of new values —— their fault is their dislocation of sense, often complete. But it is the best I could do under the circumstances. It was the best I could do and retain any value to experience at all. Now I have come to a different condition. I find that the values there discovered can be extended. I find myself extending the understanding to the work of others and to other things —— I find that there is work to be done in the creation of new forms, new names for experience and that « beauty » is related not to « loveliness » but to a state in which reality playes a part Such painting as that of Juan Gris, coming after the impressionists, the expressionists, Cezanne —— and dealing severe strokes as well to the expressionits as to the impressionists group —— points forward to what will prove the greatest painting yet produced. —— the illusion once dispensed with, painting has this problem before it : to replace not the forms but the reality of experience with its own —— up to now shapes and meanings but always the illusion relving on composition to give likeness to « nature » now works of art cannot be left in this category of France's « lie », they must be real, not « realism » but reality itself —— they must give not the sense of frustration but a sense of completion, of actuality —— It is not a matter of « representation » —— much may be represented actually, but of separate existence. enlargement —— revivification of values, X The universality of things draws me toward the candy with melon flowers that open about the edge of refuse proclaiming without accent the quality of the farmer's shoulders and his daughter's accidental skin, so sweet with clover and the small yellow cinquefoil in the parched places. It is this that engages the favorable distortion of eyeglasses that see everything and remain related to mathematics —— in the most practical frame of brown celluloid made to represent tortoiseshell —— A letter from the man who wants to start a new magazine made of linen and he owns a typewriter —— July 1, 1922 All this is for eyeglasses to discover. But they lie there with the gold earpieces folded down tranquilly Titicaca —— XI In passing with my mind on nothing in the world but the right of way I enjoy on the road by virtue of the law —— I saw an elderly man who smiled and looked away to the north past a house —— a woman in blue who was laughing and leaning forward to look up into the man's half averted face and a boy of eight who was looking at the middle of the man's belly at a watchchain —— The supreme importance of this nameless spectacle sped me by them without a word —— Why bother where I went ? for I went spinning on the four wheels of my car along the wet road until I saw a girl with one leg over the rail of a balcony When in the condition of imaginative suspense only will the writting have reality, as explained partially in what preceeds —— Not to attempt, at that time, to set values on the word being used, according to presupposed measures, but to write down that which happens at that time —— To perfect the ability to record at the moment when the consciousness is enlarged by the sympathies and the unity of understanding which the imagination gives, to practice skill in recording the force moving, then to know it, in the largeness of its proportions —— It is the presence of a This is not " fit " but a unification of experience That is, the imagination is an actual force comparable to electricity or steam, it is not a plaything but a power that has been used from the first to raise the understanding of —— it is, not necessary to resort to mystecisism —— In fact it is this which has kept back the knowledge I seek —— The value of the imagination to the writer consists in its ability to make words. Its unique power is to give created forms reality, actual existence This separates Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similies and pretty thoughts and images. I have experienced that to my sorrow. It is not a conscious recording of the day's experiences " freshly and with the appearance of reality " —— This sort of thing is seriously to the development of any ability in a man, it fastens him down, makes him a —— It destroys, makes nature an accessory to the particular theory he is following, it blinds him to his world, —— The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he, A world detached from the necessity of recording it, sufficient to itself, removed from him (as it most certainly is) with which he has bitter and delicious relations and from which he is independant —— moving at will from one thing to another —— as he pleases, unbound —— complete and the unique proof of this is the work of the imagination not " like " anything but transfused with the same forces which transfuse the earth —— at least one small part of them. Nature is the hint to composition not because it is familiar to us and therefore the terms we apply to it have a least common denominator quality which gives them currency —— but because it possesses the quality of independant existance, of reality which we feel in ourselves. It is not opposed to art but apposed to it. I suppose Shakespeare's familiar aphorism about holding the mirror up to nature has done more harm in stabilizing the copyist tendency of the arts among us than —— the mistake in it (though we forget that it is not S. speaking but an imaginative character of his) is to have believed that the reflection of nature is nature. It is not. It is only a sham nature, a " lie ". Of course S. is the most conspicuous example desirable of the falseness of this very thing. He holds no mirror up to nature but with his imagination rivals nature's composition with his own. He himself become " nature " —— continuing " its " marvels —— if you will I am often diverted with a recital which I have made for myself concerning Shakespeare : he was a comparatively uninformed man, quite according to the orthodox tradition, who lived from first to last a life of amusing regularity and simplicity, a house and wife in the suburbs, delightful children, a girl at court (whom he really never confused with his writing) and a café life which gave him with the freshness of discovery, the information upon which his imagination fed. London was full of the concentrates of science and adventure. He saw at " The Mermaid " everything he knew. He was not conspicuous there except for his spirits. His form was presented to him by Marlow, his stories were the common talk of his associates or else some compiler set them before him. His types were particularly quickened with life about him. Feeling the force of life, in his peculiar intelligence, the great dome of his head, he had no need of anything but writing material to relieve himself of his thoughts. His very lack of scientific training loosened his power. He was unencumbered. For S. to pretend to knowledge would have been ridiculous —— no escape there —— but that he possessed knowledge, and extraordinary knowledge, of the affairs which concerned him, as they concerned the others about him, was self-apparent to him. It was not apparent to the others. His actual power was PURELY of the imagination. Not permitted to speak as W.S., in fact peculiarly barred from speaking so because of his lack of information, learning, not being able to rival his fellows in scientific training or adventure and at the " same time being keen enough, imaginative enough, to know that there is no escape except in perfection, in excellence, in technical excellence —— his buoyancy of imagination raised him NOT TO COPY them, not to holding the mirror up to them but to equal, to surpass them as a creator of knowledge, as a vigorous, living force above their heads. His escape was not simulated but real. Hamlet no doubt was written about at the middle of his life. He speaks authoritatively through invention, through characters, through design. The objects of his world were real to him because he could use them and use them with understanding to make his inventions —— The imagination is a —— The vermiculations of modern criticism of S. particularly amuse when the attempt is made to force the role of a Solon upon the creator of Richard 3d. So I come again to my present day gyrations. So it is with the other classics : their meaning and worth can only be studied and understood in the imagination —— that which begot them only can give them life again, re-enkindle their perfection —— useless to study by rote or scientific research —— Useful for certain understanding to corroborate the imagination —— Yes, Anatole was a fool when he said: It is a lie. —— That is it. If the actor simulates life it is a lie. But —— but why continue without an audience ? The reason people marvel at works of art and say : How in Christ's name did he do it ? —— is that they know nothing of the physiology of the nervous system and have never in their experience witnessed the larger processes of the imagination. It is a step over from the profitless engagements of the arithmetical. XII The red paper box hinged with cloth is lined inside and out with imitation leather It is the sun the table with dinner on it for these are the —— Its twoinch trays have engineers that convey glue to airplanes or for old ladies that darn socks paper clips and red elastics —— What is the end to insects that suck gummed labels ? for this is eternity through its dial we discover transparent tissue on a spool But the stars are round cardboard with a tin edge and a ring to fasten them to a trunk for the vacation —— XIII Crustaceous wedge of sweaty kitchens on rock overtopping thrusts of the sea Waves of steel from swarming backstreets shell of coral inventing electricity —— Lights speckle El Greco lakes in renaissance twilight with triphammers which pulverize nitrogen of old pastures to dodge motorcars with arms and legs —— The agregate is untamed encapsulating irritants but of agonized spires knits peace where bridge stanchions rest certainly piercing left ventricles with long sunburnt fingers XIV Of death the barber the barber talked to me cutting my life with sleep to trim my hair —— It's just a moment he said, we die every night —— And of the newest ways to grow hair on bald death —— I told him of the quartz lamp and of old men with third sets of teeth to the cue of an old man who said at the door —— Sunshine today ! for which death shaves him twice a week XV The decay of cathedrals is efflorescent through the phenomenal growth of movie houses whose catholicity is progress since destruction and creation are simultaneous without sacrifice of even the smallest detail even to the volcanic organ whose woe is translatable to joy if light becomes darkness and darkness light, as it will —— But scism which seems adamant is diverted from the perpendicular by simply rotating the object cleaving away the root of disaster which it seemed to foster. Thus the movies are a moral force Nightly the crowds with the closeness and universality of sand witness the selfspittle which used to be drowned in incense and intoned over by the supple jointed imagination of inoffensiveness backed by biblical rigidity made into passion plays upon the altar to attract the dynamic mob whose female relative sweeping grass Tolstoi saw injected into the Russian nobility It is rarely understood how such plays as Shakespeare's were written —— or in fact how any work of value has been written, the practical bearing of which is that only as the work was produced, in that way alone can it be understood Fruitless for the academic tapeworm to hoard its excrementa is books. The cage —— The most of all writing has not even begun in the province from which alone it can draw sustenance. There is not life in the stuff because it tries to be " like " life. First must come the transposition of the faculties to the only world of reality that men know : the world of the imagination, wholly our own. From this world alone does the work gain power, its soil the only one whose chemistry is perfect to the purpose. The exaltation men feel before a work of art is the feeling of reality they draw from it. It sets them up, places a value upon experience —— (said that half a dozen times already) XVI O tongue licking the sore on her netherlip O toppled belly O passionate cotton stuck with matted hair elysian slobber from her mouth upon the folded handkerchief I can't die —— moaned the old jaundiced woman rolling her saffron eyeballs I can't die I can't die XVII Our orchestra is the cat's nuts —— Banjo jazz with a nickelplated amplifier to soothe the savage beast —— Get the rythm That sheet stuff 's a lot a cheese. Man gimme the key and lemme loose —— I make 'em crazy with my harmonies —— Shoot it Jimmy Nobody Nobody else but me —— They can't copy it XVIII The pure products of America go crazy —— mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves old names and promiscuity between devil-may-care men who have taken to railroading out of sheer lust of adventure —— and young slatterns, bathed in filth from Monday to Saturday to be tricked out that night with gauds from imaginations which have no peasant traditions to give them character but flutter and flaunt sheer rags —— succumbing without emotion save numbed terror under some hedge of choke-cherry or viburnum —— which they cannot express —— Unless it be that marriage perhaps with a dash of Indian blood will throw up a girl so desolate so hemmed round with disease or murder that she'll be rescued by an agent —— reared by the state and sent out at fifteen to work in some hard pressed house in the suburbs —— some doctor's family, some Elsie —— voluptuous water expressing with broken brain the truth about us —— her great ungainly hips and flopping breasts addressed to cheap jewelry and rich young men with fine eyes as if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky and we degraded prisoners destined to hunger until we eat filth while the imagination strains after deer going by fields of goldenrod in the stifling heat of September Somehow it seems to destroy us It is only in isolate flecks that something is given off No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car or better : prose has to do with the fact of an emotion ; poetry has to do with the dynamisation of emotion into a separate form. This is the force of imagination. prose : statement of facts concerning emotions, intellectua states, data of all sorts —— technical expositions, jargon, of all sorts —— fictional and other —— poetry : new form dealt with as a reality in itself. The form of prose is the accuracy of its subject matter-how best to expose the multiform phases of its material the form of poetry is related to the movements of the imagination revealed in words —— or whatever it may be —— the cleavage is complete Why should I go further than I am able ? Is it not enough for you that I am perfect ? The cleavage goes through all the phases of experience. It is the jump from prose to the process of imagination that is the next great leap of the intelligence —— from the simulations of present experience to the facts of the imagination —— the greatest characteristic of the present age is that it is stale —— stale as literature —— To enter a new world, and have there freedom of movement and newness. I mean that there will always be prose painting, representative work, clever as may be in revealing new phases of emotional research presented on the surface. But the jump from that to Cezanne or back to certain of the primitives is the impossible. The primitives are not back in some remote age —— they are not BEHIND experience. Work which bridges the gap between the rigidities of vulgar experience and the imagination is rare. It is new, immediate —— It is so because it is actual, always real. It is experience dynamized into reality. Time does not move. Only ignorance and stupidity move. Intelligence (force, power) stands still with time and forces change about itself —— sifting the world for permanence, in the drift of nonentity. Pio Baroia interested me once —— Baroja leaving the medical profession, some not important inspectors work in the north of Spain, opened a bakery in Madrid. The isolation he speaks of, as a member of the so called intellectual class, influenced him to abandon his position and engage himself, as far as possible, in the intricacies of the design patterned by the social class —— He sees no interest in isolation —— These gestures are the effort for self preservation or the preservation of some quality held in high esteem —— Here it seems to be that a man, starved in imagination, changes his milieu so that his food may be richer —— The social class, without the power of expression, lives upon imaginative values. I mean only to emphasize the split that goes down through the abstractions of art to the everyday exercises of the most primitive types —— there is a sharp division —— the energizing force of imagination on one side —— and the acquisitive —— PROGRESSIVE force of the lump on the other The social class with its religion, its faith, sincerity and all the other imaginative values is positive (yes) the merchant, hibernating, unmagnatized —— tends to drop away into the isolate, inactive particles —— Religion is continued then as a form, art as a convention —— To the social, energized class —— ebullient now in Russia the particles adhere because of the force of the imagination energizing them —— Anyhow the change of Baroja interested me Among artists, or as they are sometimes called " men of imagination " " creators ", etc. this force is recognized in a pure state —— All this can be used to show the relationships between genius, hand labor, religion —— etc. and the lack of feeling between artists and the middle class type —— The jump between fact and the imaginative reality The study of all human activity is the deliniation of the cresence and ebb of this force, shifting from class to class and location to location —— rhythm : the wave rhythm of Shakespeare watching clowns and kings sliding into nothing XIX This is the time of year when boys fifteen and seventeen wear two horned lilac blossoms in their caps —— or over one ear What is it that does this ? It is a certain sort —— drivers for grocers or taxidrivers white and colored —— fellows that let their hair grow long in a curve over one eye —— Horned purple Dirty satyrs, it is vulgarity raised to the last power They have stolen them broken the bushes apart with a curse for the owner —— Lilacs —— They stand in the doorways on the business streets with a sneer on their faces adorned with blossoms Out of their sweet heads dark kisses —— rough faces XX The sea that encloses her young body ula lu la lu is the sea of many arms —— The blazing secrecy of noon is undone and and and the broken sand is the sound of love —— The flesh is firm that turns in the sea O la la the sea that is cold with dead mens' tears —— Deeply the wooing that penetrated to the edge of the sea returns in the plash of the waves —— a wink over the shoulder large as the ocean —— with wave following wave to the edge coom barrooom —— It is the cold of the sea broken upon the sand by the force of the moon —— In the sea the young flesh playing floats with the cries of far off men who rise in the sea with green arms to homage again the fields over there where the night is deep —— la lu la lu but lips too few assume the new —— marrruu Underneath the sea where it is dark there is no edge so two —— XXI one day in Paradise a Gipsy smiled to see the blandness of the leaves —— so many so lascivious and still XXII so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens The fixed categories into which life is divided must always hold. These things are normal —— essential to every activity. But they exist —— but not as dead dissections. The curriculum of knowledge cannot but be divided into the sciences, the thousand and one groups of data, scientific, philosophic or whatnot —— as many as there exist in Shakespeare —— things that make him appear the university of all ages. But this is not the thing. In the galvanic category of —— The same things exist, but in a different condition when energized by the imagination. The whole field of education is affected —— There is no end of detail that is without significance. Education would begin by placing in the mind of the student the nature of knowledge —— in the dead state and the nature of the force which may energize it. This would clarify his field at once —— He would then see the use of data But at present knowledge is placed before a man as if it were a stair at the top of which a DEGREE is obtained which is superlative. nothing could be more ridiculous. To data there is no end. There is proficiency in dissection and a knowledge of parts but in the use of knowledge —— It is the imagination that —— That is : life is absolutely simple. In any civilized society everyone should know EVERYTHING there is to know about life at once and always. There should never be permitted, confusion —— There are difficulties to life, under conditions there are impasses, life may prove impossible —— But it must never be lost —— as it is today —— I remember so distinctly the young Pole in Leipzig going with hushed breath to hear Wundt lecture —— In this mass of intricate philosophic data what one of the listeners was able to maintain himself for the winking of an eyelash. Not one. The inundation of the intelligence by masses of complicated fact is not knowledge. There is no end —— And what is the fourth dimension ? It is the endlessness of knowledge —— It is the imagination on which reality rides —— It is the imagination —— It is a cleavage through everything by a force that does not exist in the mass and therefore can never be discovered by its anatomitization. It is for this reason that I have always placed art first and esteemed it over science —— in spite of everything. Art is the pure effect of the force upon which science depends for its reality —— Poetry The effect of this realization upon life will be the emplacement of knowledge into a living current —— which it has always sought —— In other times —— men counted it a tragedy to be dislocated from sense —— Today boys are sent with dullest faith to technical schools of all sorts —— broken, bruised few escape whole —— slaughter. This is not civilization but stupidity —— Before entering knowledge the integrity of the imagination —— The effect will be to give importance to the subdivisions of experience —— which today are absolutely lost —— There exists simply nothing. Prose —— When values are important, such —— For example there is no use denying that prose and poetry are not by any means the same IN INTENTION. But then what is prose ? There is no need for it to approach poetry except to be weakened. With decent knowledge to hand we can tell what things are for I except to see values blossom. I expect to see prose be prose. Prose, relieved of extraneous, unrelated values must return to its only purpose : to clarity to enlighten the understanding. There is no form to prose but that which depends on clarity. If prose is not acurately adjusted to the exposition of fats it does not exist —— Its form is that alone. To penetrate everywhere with enlightenment —— Poetry is something quite different. Poetry has to do with the crystalization of the imagination —— the perfection of new forms as additions to nature —— Prose may follow to enlighten but poetry —— Is what I have written prose ? The only answer is that form in prose ends with the end of that which is being communicated —— If the power to go on falters in the middle of a sentence —— that is the end of the s entence —— Or if a new phase enters at that point it is only stupidity to go on. There is no confusion —— only difficulties. XXIII The veritable night of wires and stars the moon is in the oak tree's crotch and sleepers in the windows cough athwart the round and pointed leaves and insects sting while on the grass the whitish moonlight tearfully assumes the attitudes of afternoon —— But it is real where peaches hang recalling death's long promised symphony whose tuneful wood and stringish undergrowth are ghosts existing without being save to come with juice and pulp to assuage the hungers which the night reveals so that now at last the truth's aglow with devilish peace forestalling day which dawns tomorrow with dreadful reds the heart to predicate with mists that loved the ocean and the fields —— Thus moonlight is the perfect human touch XXIV The leaves embrace in the trees it is a wordless world without personality I do not seek a path I am still with Gipsie lips pressed to my own It is the kiss of leaves without being poison ivy or nettle, the kiss of oak leaves —— He who has kissed a leaf need look no further —— I ascend through a canopy of leaves and at the same time I descend for I do nothing unusual —— I ride in my ear I think about prehistoric caves in the Pyrenees —— the cave of Les Trois Freres The nature of the difference between what is termed prose on the one hand and verse on the other is not to be discovered by a study of the metrical characteristics of the words as they occur in juxtaposition. It is ridiculous to say that verse grades off into prose as the rythm becomes less and less pronounced, in fact, that verse differs from prose in that the meter is more pronounced, that the movement is more impassioned and that rhythmical prose, so called, occupies a middle place between prose and verse. It is true that verse is likely to be more strongly stressed than what is termed prose, but to say that this is in any way indicative of the difference in nature of the two is surely to make the mistake of arguing from the particular to the general, to the effect that since an object has a certain character that therefore the force which gave it form will alwavs reveal itself in that character. Of course there is nothing to do but to differentiate prose from verse by the only effective means at hand, the external, surface appearance. But a counter proposal may be made, to wit : that verse is of such a nature that it may appear without metrical stress of any sort and that prose may be strongly stressed —— in short that meter has nothing to do with the question whatever. Of course it may be said that if the difference is felt and is not discoverable to the eve and ear then what about it anyway ? Or it may be argued, that since there is according to my proposal no discoverable difference between prose and verse that in all probability none exists and that both are phases of the same thing. Yet, quite plainly, there is a very marked difference between the two which may arise in the fact of a separate origin for each, each using similar modes for dis-similar purposes ; verse falling most commonly into meter but not always, and prose going forward most often without meter but not alwavs. This at least serves to explain some of the best work I see today and explains some of the most noteworthy failures which I discover. I search for " something " in the writing which moves me in a certain way —— It offers a suggestion as to why some work of Whitman's is bad poetry and some, in the same meter is prose. The practical point would be to discover when a work is to be taken as coming from this source and when from that. When discovering a work it would be —— If it is poetry it means this and only this —— and if it is prose it means that and only that. Anything else is a confusion, silly and bad practice. I believe this is possible as I believe in the main that Marianne Moore is of all American writers most constantly a poet —— not because her lines are invarjably full of imagery they are not, they are often diagramatically informative, and not because she clips her work into certain shapes —— her pieces are without meter most often —— but I believe she is most constantly a poet in her work because the purpose of her work is invariably from the source from which poetry starts —— that it is constantly from the purpose of poetry. And that it actually possesses this characteristic, as of that origin, to a more distinguishable degree when it eschews verse rhythms than when it does not. It has the purpose of poetry written into and therefore it is poetry. I believe it possible, even essential, that when poetry fails it does not become prose but bad poetry. The test of Mariane Moore would be that she writes sometimes good and sometimes bad poetry but always —— with a single purpose out of a single fountain which is of the sort —— The practical point would be to discover —— I can go no further than to say that poetry feeds the imagination and prose the emotions, poetry liberates the words from their emotional implications, prose confirms them in it. Both move centrifugally or centripetally toward the intelligence. Of course it must be understood that writing deals with words and words only and that all discussions of it deal with single words and their association in groups. As far as I can discover there is no way but the one I have marked out which will satisfactorily deal with certain lines such as occur in some play of Shakespeare or in a poem of Marianne Moore's, let us say : Tomorrow will be the first of April —— Certainly there is an emotional content in this for anyone living in the northern temperate zone, but whether it is prose or poetry —— taken by itself —— who is going to say unless some mark is put on it by the intent conveved by the words which surround it —— Either to write or to comprehend poetry the words must be recognized to be moving in a direction separate from the jostling or lack of it which occurs within the piece. Marianne's words remain separate, each unwilling to group with the others except as they move in the one direction. This is even an important —— or amusing —— character of Miss Moore's work. Her work puzzles me. It is not easy to quote convincingly. XXV Somebody dies every four minutes in New York State —— To hell with you and your poetry —— You will rot and be blown through the next solar system with the rest of the gases —— What the hell do you know about it ? AXIOMS Do not get killed Careful Crossing Campaign Cross Crossings Cautiously THE HORSES black & PRANCED white What's the use of sweating over this sort of thing, Carl ; here it is all set up —— Outings in New York City Ho for the open country Dont't stay shut up in hot rooms Go to one of the Great Parks Pelham Bay for example It's on Long Island Sound with bathing, boating tennis, baseball, golf, etc. Acres and acres of green grass wonderful shade trees, rippling brooks Take the Pelham Bay Park Branch of the Lexington Ave. (East Side) Line and you are there in a few minutes Interborough Rapid Transit Co. XXVI The crowd at the ball game is moved uniformly by a spirit of uselessness which delights them —— all the exciting detail of the chase and the escape, the error the flash of genius —— all to no end save beauty the eternal —— So in detail they, the crowd, are beautiful for this to be warned against saluted and defied —— It is alive, venemous it smiles grimly its words cut —— The flashy female with her mother, gets it —— The Jew gets it straight —— it is deadly, terrifying —— It is the Inquisition, the Revolution It is beauty itself that lives day by day in them idly —— This is the power of their faces It is summer, it is the solstice the crowd is cheering, the crowd is laughing in detail permanently, seriously without thought The imagination uses the phraseology of science. It attacks, stirs, animates, is radio-active in all that can be touched by action. Words occur in liberation by virtue of its processes. In description words adhere to certain objects. and have the effect on the sense of oysters, or barnacles. But the imagination is wrongly understood when it is supposed to be a removal from reality in the sense of John of Gaunt's speech in Richard the Second : to imagine possession of that which is lost. It is rightly understood when John of Gaunt's words are related not to their sense as objects adherent to his son's welfare or otherwise but as a dance over the body of his condition accurately accompanying it. By this means of the understanding, the play written to be understood as a play, the author and reader are liberated to pirouette with the words which have sprung from the old facts of history, reunited in present passion. To understand the words as so liberated is to understand poetry. That they move independantly when set free is the mark of their value Imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it description nor an evocation of objects or situations, it is to say that poetry does not tamper with the world but moves it —— It affirms reality most powerfully and therefore, since reality needs no personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the indestructibility of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature but —— As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight Writing is likened to music. The object would be it seems to make poetry a pure art, like music. Painting too. Writing, as with certain of the modern Russians whose work I have seen, would use unoriented sounds in place of conventional words. The poem then would be completely liberated when there is identity of sound with something —— perhaps the emotion. I do not believe that writing is music. I do not believe writing would gain in quality or force by seeking to attain to the conditions of music. I think the conditions of music are objects for the action of the writer's imagination just as a table or —— According to my present theme the writer of imagination would attain closest to the conditions of music not when his words are disassociated from natural objects and specified meanings but when they are liberated from the usual quality of that meaning by transposition into another medium, the imagination. Sometimes I speak of imagination as a force, an electricity or a medium, a place. It is immaterial which : for whether it is the condition of a place or a dynamization its effect is the same : to free the world of fact from the impositions of " art " (see Hartley's last chapter) and to liberate the man to act in whatever direction his disposition leads. The word is not liberated, therefore able to communicate release from the fixities which destroy it until it is accurately tuned to the fact which giving it reality, by its own reality establishes its own freedom from the necessity of a word, thus freeing it and dynamizing it at the same time. XXVII Black eved susan rich orange round the purple core the white daisy is not enough Crowds are white as farmers who live poorly But you are rich in savagery —— Arab Indian dark woman