1. Read the prefaces to _Irradiations_ and _Goblins and Pagodas_ for Mr.
Fletcher's theory of poetry before you read the poems themselves. Has he
succeeded in making the arts of painting and music do service to poetry?
2. After reading the poems, consider the justice or injustice of Mr.
Aiken's criticism: "It is a sort of absolute poetry, a poetry of detached
waver and brilliance, a beautiful flowering of language alone--a
parthenogenesis, as if language were fertilized by itself rather than by
thought or feeling. Remove the magic of phrase and sound and there is
nothing left: no thread of continuity, no thought, no story, no emotion.
But the magic of phrase and sound is powerful, and it takes one into a
fantastic world."
3. Do you find any poems to which the quotation given above does not
apply? Are these of more or of less value than the others?