Spring and all

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u> Article Author: Williams, William Carlos, 1883-

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■<* Article Title: Spring and all,

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Spring and All

William Carlos Williams

I
I

V

Spring and All

by

William Carlos Williams

Copyrighted by the author

Published by
Contact Publishing Co.

To

Charles Demulh

Spring and All

f anything of moment results — so much the

JL better. And so much the more likely will it be
lhat 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

1

away but rylhm ! 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 you 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 twentv 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

— 3 —

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 imagina-
tion.

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 dis-
tracts 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.

— 5 —

Never mind ; the great event may not exist, so
there is no need to speak further of it. Kill I kill I
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 ortho-
doxy of its stupidity. Kill 1 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 annihi-
lation of every human creature on the face of the
earth. This is something never before attempted.
None to remain ; nothing but the lower vertebrates,

_ 6 —

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, agglutinat-
ed 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 accomplish-
ed 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 ivorywhile flowers.

_ / —

IIIX HaXdVHD

Thus, weary of life, in view of the great consum-
mation 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 week 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

— 8 —

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 se-
quences of unmentionable time EVOLUTION HAS
REPEATED ITSELF FROM THE BEGINNING.

Good God !

— 9 —

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 preceeded 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 disco-
vered. 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 microsco-
pic circles with his hoofs on the solid turf, running
without a stop for the millionth part of a second

— 11 —

until lie 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 even,- 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 lime at
that exact moment when in the ages past the des-
truction of the species Homo sapiens occured.

Now at last that process of miraculous verisimi-
litude, 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

— 12 —

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

— 13 —

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.

— 14 —

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 ? Mow ? What ? Why ?

At any rate, now at last spring is here i

The rock has split, the egg has hatched, the pris-
matically 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 !

— 15 —

The imagination, freed from the handcuffs 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 TRADI-
TIONALISTS OF PLAGIARISM try to get hold
of the mob. They seize those nearest them and shout
into their ears : Tradition ! The solidarity of life 1

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 eves 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 substan-
tiality of which is known. Denmth and a few others
do their best to point out the error, telling us that
design is a function of the IMAGINATION, describ-
ing its movements, its colors — but it is a hard battle.
I myself seek to enter the lists with these few notes
jotted down in the midst of the action, under distract-
ing circumstances — to remind mvsclf (see p. 2,
paragraph 1) of the truth.

Ill

The farmer in deep thought
is pacing through the rain
among his blank fields, with
hands in pockets,

— 17 —

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

— 18 —

break through to the fifty words
necessary —

a crown for her head with
caslles 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 asso-
ciation

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 vital-
ity which begot them is laid waste — this cannot
be so, a young man feels, since he feels it in himself

— 20 —

— but because meanings have been lost through
laziness or changes in the form of existance which
have let words empty.

Hare handed the man contends with the sky,
without experience of existence seeking to invent
and design.

Crude symbolism 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
even- 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 qua-
lity 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

y

— 21 —

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 tiling which is annonymously about us.

Composition is in no essential an escape from life.
In fact if it is so it is negligeable to the point of insig-
nificance. Whatever « life » the artist may be forced
to lead has no relation to the vitality of his compo-
sitions. Such names as Homer, the blind ; Schehe-
razade, 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 loo 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 verv 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.

— 23 —

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 —

— 24 —

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 difficulty from

the dead — the winter casing of grief

How easy to slip

into the old mode, how hard to

cling firmly to the advance —

— 25

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

— 26 —

is capable
of an
infinity of
combinations

involving the
moral
physical
and religious

codes

for everything
and nothing
are synonymous
wrhen

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 meas-
uring itself by the world it inhabits can only result

— 27 —

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 agency 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

— 28 —

be said to begin since only then can 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 under-
standing.

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 regur-
gitation 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 case 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

— 29 —

acknowledging a new situation. 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 pro-
portions without stimulating the sense.

In works of the imagination I hat 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 enlarge-
ment 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

— 30 —

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
attempting 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

— 31 —

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 defeat
laboredness — fragile
plucked, moist, half-raised
cold, precise, touching

What

— 32 —

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

imbruised

penetrates spaces

VIII

The sunlight in a
yellow plaque upon the
varnished floor

is full of a song

inflated to

fifty pounds pressure

— 33 —

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

— 34 —

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,

— 35 —

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 Velas-
quez 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

— 36 —

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 criti-
cism, 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

— 37 —

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 Bauer-
meister Kummel was letting a gold coin slip from
his fingers to the counting table.

The representation was perfect, it " said some-
thing 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

— 38 —

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
modem trend toward imaginative understanding of
life. The largeness which he interprets as his identity
with the least and the greatest about him, his " demo-
cracy " represents the • vigor of his imaginative
life."

IX

What about all this writing ?
O Kiki "

0 Miss Margaret Jarvis
The backhandspring

1 : clean

clean

clean : yes.. New- York

— 39 —

Wrigley's, appendecitis, John Marin :
skyscraper soup —

Either that or a bullet 1
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 cats 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 ?

— 10 —

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 —
while ,blue, orange

— hot with our passion

wild tears, desperate rejoinders
my legs, turning slowly
end over end in the air I

But what would you have ?

AH I said was :

there, you see, it is broken

stockings, shoes, hairpins

your bed, I wrapped myself round you

_ 41 —

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 I

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

— 42 —

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 tilings 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 expe-
rience 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.

— 43 —

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 under-
standing 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

— 44 —

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 an} - 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 expression-
its as to the impressionists group — points forward
to what will prove the greatest painting yet produced.

— the illusion once dispensed with, painting has

Ihis 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 relying on composition to give likeness lo
« 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 tilings
draws me toward the candy
with melon flowers that open

about the edge of refuse
proclaiming without accent
the quality of the farmer's

— 46 —

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 —

— 47

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 —

— 48 —

The supreme importance
of this nameless spectacle

sped me by them
Avithout 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 sympa-
thies 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 —

— 49 —

It is the presence of a

This is not " fit " but a unification of experience

That is, the imagination is an actual force compar-
able 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 — fn fact it is this which has
kept back the knowledge I seek —

The value of the imagination Lo 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

4

— 50 —

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

— 51 —

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 cafe life which gave him with the
freshness of discovery, the information upon which
his imagination fed. London was full of the concen-
trates of science and adventure. He saw at " The

— 52 —

Mermaid " everything he knew. He was not con-
spicuous 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 any-
thing 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 imagina-
tion. Not permitted to speak as W.S., in fact pecu-
liarly 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

— 53 —

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. parti-
cularly 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 —

— 54 —

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 same —

— ao —

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

Crustaccous
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 .

— 57 —

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

culling 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

— 59 —

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 —

— 60 —

But seism 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 selfspitlle

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

. — Gl —

It is rarely understood how such plays as Shakes-
peare'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
^xcrementa is books. The cage —

The most of all writing has not even begun in the
province from whicli alone it can draw sustenance.

There is not life in the stuff because it tries to l:e
" 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)

— 62 —

XVI

O tongue
licking
the sore on
her netherlip

O toppled belly

0 passionate cotton
stuck with
matted hair

elysian slobber
from her mouth
upon

the folded handkerchief

1 can't die

— moaned the old
jaundiced woman
rolling her
saffron eyeballs

I can't die
I can't die

— 63 —

XVII

Our orchestra

is the cat's nuts —

Banjo jazz

with a nickelplated

amplifier to
soothe

the savage beast —
Get the rythm

That sheet stufT
's a lot a cheese.

Man

gimme the key

and lemme loose —
I make 'em crazy

with my harmonies —
Shoot it Jimmy

— 61 —

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

— 65 —

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

5

— 66 —

sent out nt 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

— 67 —

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 expo-
sitions, 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

— G8 —

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 exper-
ience. It is the jump from prose to the process of
imagination that is the next great leap of the intelli-
gence — 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 expe-
rience and the imagination is rare. It is new, imme-
diate — It is so because it is actual, always real. It
is experience dynamized into reality.

— 69 —

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 Baroja 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 imagina-
tion, changes his milieu so that his food may be
richer — The social class, without the power of expres-
sion, 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 —

— 70 —

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

— 71 —

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 —

— 72 —

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

— 73 —

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 —

— 74 —

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

— 75 —

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
bim 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.

— 76 —

nothing could be more ridiculous. To data then?
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 end-
lessness of knowledge —

It is the imagination on which reality rides — It is
the imagination — It is a cleavage through every-
thing by a force that does not exist in the mass and

therefore can never be discovered by its analomiti-
zation.

It is for this reason that I have always placed art
first and esteemed it over science — in spite of every-
thing.

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 civiliza-
tion but stupidity — Before entering knowledge the
integrity of the imagination —

The effect will be to give importance to the sub-
divisions 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

— 78 —

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, unre-
lated 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 facts
it does not exist — Its form is that alone. To pene-
trate 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
sentence — Or if a new phase enters at that point it
is only stupidity to go on.

There is no confusion — only difficulties.

— 79 —

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

— 80 —

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

— 81 —

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 —

rie who has kissed
a leaf

— 82 —

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 car
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 juxta-
position. It is ridiculous to say that verse grades off
into prose as the rythm becomes less and less pro-
nounced, 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
always 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 pro-
posal 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 eye and ear then
what about it anyway ? Or it may be argued, that
since there is according to my proposal no discover-
able difference between prose and verse that in all .
probability none exists and that both are phases of
the same thing.

— 84 —

Yet, quite plainly, there is a very marked differ-
once 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
always.

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 invar-
iably full of imagery they are not, they are often
diagramatically informative, and not because she

— 85 —

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 con-
stantly 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 foun-
tain 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 discus-

— 86 —

sions 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 conveyed 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 amus-
ing — character of Miss Moore's work.

Her work puzzles me. It is not easy to quote
convincingly.

— 87 —

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

— 88 —
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 —

— 89 —

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
Bevolution

— 90 —

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.

— 91 —

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 understand-
ing, 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 notto avoid reality, nor is it descrip-
tion 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.

— 92 —

Painting too. Writing, as with certain of the modern-
Russians whose work I have seen, would use uno-
riented 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 eyed 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

PRINTED AT DIJON
BY

MAURICE DARANTIERE
M.CM. XXIII