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He knew no more that he was poor,
Or that his frame was dust;

He danced along the dingy days,
And this bequest of wings

Was but a book! What liberty

A loosened spirit brings!

-Emily Dickinson

PETIT, THE POET

Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,

Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel—

Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens

But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof.
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,

Ballades by the score with the same old thought:

The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished;
And what is love but a rose that fades?
Life all around me here in the village:
Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth,
Courage, constancy, heroism, failure-
All in the loom, and oh, what patterns!
Woodlands, meadows, streams and rivers-
Blind to all of it all my life long.
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,
Tick tick tick, what little iambics,

While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines!

-Edgar Lee Masters

A CAUTION TO POETS

What poets feel not when they make,
A pleasure, in creating,

The world, in its turn, will not take
Pleasure in contemplating.

-Matthew Arnold

HOW POETS WORK

In the exquisitely written introduction to his "Colors of Life" Max Eastman gives a competent discussion of two methods of making poetry, the subjective method of Walt Whitman and the objective method of Edgar Allan Poe. He seems to prefer the method of Poe and quotes at length from the famous essay on the philosophy of composition in which we are told how the pertinaciously popular raven was made to croak his sardonic "Nevermore." But he also quotes some of Whitman's best lines, perhaps to show that the other method produces its own values.

Mr. Eastman could hardly have chosen more extremely divergent examples of the two ways of creating. Whitman, whose chief concern was to get himself said, typifies for our time the thought of poetry as a catharsis of the spirit. Poe, who was, by his own confession, an artist deliberate in every detail, considering always the impres sion to be made on a reader's mind, is a strong type of the craftsman at play with materials. Not many poets of rank are so confidently subjective as Whitman, so scrupulously objective as Poe.

Yet even Whitman was not merely subjective, even Poe was not entirely objective. Whitman must have rolled his resonant phrases through his mind and mouth for sheer joy in their amplitude. And Poe escapes the implications of the subjective only by dismissing them from consideration. He says:

Let us dismiss as irrelevant to the poem, per se, the circumstance or say the necessity—which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.

Truly a believer in the subjective method might argue cogently that by the peremptory dismissal of circumstance and necessity Poe sets aside the underlying cause of all his choices, preferring to rationalize his thoughts and feelings, wishing to hide their origins even from himself. Modern psychology might make interesting suggestions with regard to both methods.

For it seems fairly obvious that the subjective poet is merely one who allows the subconscious mind free range in composition. Out of the deep he calls to his unknown gods and the volume and significance of his calling are often a surprise even to himself. The value of his work depends largely on the kind of a subconscious mind he has and on what he has put into it. Are the hidden springs sweet and clean, for the most part? If so, the fountains will rise white and glorious even though they be more unruly than those at Ashokan Dam. Are the hidden springs foul? The rising stream of thought will be darkened like a gush of crude oil near a coal mine. Whether the uprush be lovely or unlovely the poet of subjective method is seldom able to decide. He is rarely a good critic of his own work, for the elemental pleasure which he derives from the release of his own complexes often blinds him to defects in his way of saying things. If he were capable of the detachment essential to sound self-criticism, he would be too self-conscious about his own naive effusions to offer them whole-heartedly to the world in lan

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