it—it gains life through fighting for life. There is always an inadequate market for poetry because it rebels against the sleek regularity of its times, against solemn church-going ways, against the high-sounding phrases that are forever seeking to hide the inner reality of things, against tenaciously domineering philosophies—in short, against the entire surface of the life surrounding it.
Poetry is simply the momentary struggle of those few, recurring people who cannot fit their imaginations into the accepted emotional, mental, and social patterns of their age. Poetry is a great cry out of the smooth darkness which isolates people from each other. The poet is not a being separated from his fellow-men in his fundamental substances. He is merely a being in whom the unbroken fundamentals of other men break into myriads of elastic, expanding branches. He exists, in a major sense, to show ether men what lies beneath their hard outer skin; to reveal to them the complexities and unfoldings which life has denied them. His is a brilliantly futile, daring attempt to show men the potentialities which forever slumber within them, sometimes breaking out in unconscious flashes; the exploring, resilient delicateness which their lives have almost entirely stifled.
He is the mad, insulted preacher among men—not a preacher in the ordinary sense of the word, not one shouting for some little philosophy, religion, or creed, but one who indirectly tells men what they could have been, by holding his heart and mind up to them like an unconcerned child. If men ever join hands with him, he will cease to exist in his ordinary, past function; he will joyously lead them into a greater restlessness in which their thoughts and emotions, moved by an overwhelming curiosity, will meet each other with the touch that children have when they pat a sand-hill—a simple, careless reaching out for variations in color and form; a restlessness too large and quickly moving to be confined within the narrow lines of any one gesticulating creed. Men are a million miles away from this state, and even the poet is only enclosed by its luring shadows. He spies in men and in himself flashes of a beginning childhood in which forms, colors, and substances take on their actual shapes and throw off the distortions, false grandeurs, and sleekly emotional lies which men have fastened upon them. And he strives, whether he sees the whip striking him or not, to make all things come forth nakedly as wood, stone, light, shadow, curves,
