Page:Spring and all - William Carlos Williams.djvu/48

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— 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 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.