I trust you will not hate me for wanting to delete from your
poem all the flippancies. The reason I want to do this is that
the beautiful lines are so very beautiful—so in the tone and
spirit of your _Postlude_—(which to me stands, a Nike, supreme
among your poems). I think there is _real_ beauty—and real
beauty is a rare and sacred thing in this generation—in all the
pyramid, Ashur-ban-i-pal bits and in the Fiesole and in the
wind at the very last.
I don’t know what you think but I consider this business of
writing a very sacred thing!—I think you have the “spark”—am
sure of it, and when you speak _direct_ are a poet. I feel in
the hey-ding-ding touch running through your poem a derivitive
tendency which, to me, is not _you_—-not your very self. It
is as if you were _ashamed_ of your Spirit, ashamed of your
inspiration!—as if you mocked at your own song. It’s very well
to _mock_ at yourself—it is a spiritual sin to mock at your
inspiration—
_Hilda._
Oh well, all this might be very disquieting were it not that “sacred”
has lately been discovered to apply to a point of arrest where
stabilization has gone on past the time. There is nothing sacred about
literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in
literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn
please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if
the authentic spirit of change is on it.
But in any case H. D. misses the entire intent of what I am doing no
matter how just her remarks concerning that particular poem happen to
have been. The hey-ding-ding touch _was_ derivitive but it filled a gap
that I did not know how better to fill at the time. It might be said that
that touch is the prototype of the improvisations.
It is to the inventive imagination we look for deliverance from every
other misfortune as from the desolation of a flat Hellenic perfection of
style. What good then to turn to art from the atavistic religionists,
from a science doing slavey service upon gas engines, from a philosophy
tangled in a miserable sort of dialect that means nothing if the full
power of initiative be denied at the beginning by a lot of baying and
snapping scholiasts? If the inventive imagination must look, as I think,
to the field of art for its richest discoveries today it will best make
its way by compass and follow no path.
But before any material progress can be accomplished there must be
someone to draw a discriminating line between true and false values.
The true value is that peculiarity which gives an object a character
by itself. The associational or sentimental value is the false. Its
imposition is due to lack of imagination, to an easy lateral sliding. The
attention has been held too rigid on the one plane instead of following a
more flexible, jagged resort. It is to loosen the attention, my attention
since I occupy part of the field, that I write these improvisations. Here
I clash with Wallace Stevens.
The imagination goes from one thing to another. Given many things of
nearly totally divergent natures but possessing one-thousandth part of
a quality in common, provided that be new, distinguished, these things
belong in an imaginative category and not in a gross natural array. To me
this is the gist of the whole matter. It is easy to fall under the spell
of a certain mode, especially if it be remote of origin, leaving thus
certain of its members essential to a reconstruction of its significance
permanently lost in an impenetrable mist of time. But the thing that
stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the
virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which
lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is
this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them
a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in
detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which
way to turn. Thus the so-called natural or scientific array becomes
fixed, the walking devil of modern life. He who even nicks the solidity
of this apparition does a piece of work superior to that of Hercules when
he cleaned the Augean stables.
Stevens’ letter applies really to my book of poems, “Al Que Quiere”
(which means, by the way, To Him Who Wants It) but the criticism he makes
of that holds good for each of the improvisations if not for the _oevre_
as a whole.
It begins with a postscript in the upper left hand corner: “I think,
after all, I should rather send this than not, although it is
quarrelsomely full of my own ideas of discipline.
_April 9_
My dear Williams:
…
What strikes me most about the poems themselves is their casual
character.… Personally I have a distaste for miscellany. It is
one of the reasons I do not bother about a book myself.
(Wallace Stevens is a fine gentleman whom Cannell likened
to a Pennsylvania Dutchman who has suddenly become aware of
his habits and taken to “society” in self defence. He is
always immaculately dressed. I don’t know why I should always
associate him in my mind with an imaginary image I have of Ford
Madox Hueffer.)
…My idea is that in order to carry a thing to the extreme
necessity to convey it one has to stick to it;… Given a
fixed point of view, realistic, imagistic or what you will,
everything adjusts itself to that point of view; and the
process of adjustment is a world in flux, as it should be for
a poet. But to fidget with points of view leads always to new
beginnings and incessant new beginnings lead to sterility.
(This sounds like Sir Roger de Coverly)
A single manner or mood thoroughly matured and exploited is
that fresh thing … etc.
One has to keep looking for poetry as Renoir looked for colors
in old walls, wood-work and so on.