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the word « like » or that « evocation » of the « image » which served us for a time. Its abuse is apparent. The insignificant «image» may be « evoked » never so ably and still mean nothing.
    With all his faults Alfred Kreymborg never did this. That is why his work — escaping a commonfault — still has value and will tomorrow have more.
    Sandburg, when uninspired by intimacies of the eye and ear, runs into this empty symbolism. Such poets of promise as ruin themselves with it, though many have major sentimental faults besides.
    Marianne Moore escapes. The incomprehensibility of her poems is witness to at what cost (she cleaves herself away) as it is also to the distance which the most are from a comprehension of the purpose of composition.
    The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.
    It is no different from the aristocratic compositions of the earlier times, The Homeric inventions but these occured in different times, to this extent, that life had not yet sieved through its own multiformity. That aside, the work the two-thousand-year-old poet did and that we do are one piece. That is the vitality of the classics.
    So then — Nothing is put down in the present book
    — except through weakness of the imagination — which is not intended as of a piece with the « nature » which Shakespeare mentions and which Hartleyspeaks of so completely in his « Adventures »: it is the common thing which is annonymously about us.
    Composition is in no essential an escape from life. In fact if it is so it is negligeable to the point of insignificance. Whatever « life » the artist may be forced to lead has no relation to the vitality of his compositions. Such names as Homer, the blind; Scheherazade, who lived under threat — Their compositions have as their excellence an identity with life since they are as actual, as sappy as the leaf of the tree which never moves from one spot.
    What I put down of value will have this value: an escape from crude symbolism, the annihilation of strained associations, complicated ritualistic forms designed to separate the work from « reality » — such as rhyme, meter as meter and not as the essential of the work, one of its words.
    But this smacks too much of the nature of — This is all negative and appears to be boastful. It is not intended to be so. Rather the opposite
    The work will be in the realm of the imagination as plain as the sky is to a fisherman — A very clouded sentence. The word must be put down for itself, not as a symbol of nature but a part, cognisant of the whole — aware — civilized.
    V
    Blacks wind from the north
    enter black hearts. Barred from
    seclusion in lilys they strike
    to destroy —
    Beastly humanity
    where the wind breaks it —
    strident voices, heat
    quickened, built of waves
    Drunk with goats or pavements
    Hate his of the night and the day
    of flowers and rocks. Nothing
    is gained by saying the night breeds
    murder — It is the classical mistake
    The day
    All that enters in another person
    all grass, all blackbirds flying
    all azalia trees in flower
    salt winds —
    Sold to them men knock blindly together
    splitting their heads open
    That is why boxing matches and
    Chinese poems are the same — That is why
    Hartley praises Miss Wirt
    There is nothing in the twist
    of the wind but — dashes of cold rain

    It is one with submarine vistas
    purple and black fish turning
    among undulant seaweed —
    Black wind, I have poured my heart out
    to you until I am sick of it —
    Now I run my hand over you feeling
    the play of your body — the quiver
    of its strength —
    The grief of the bowmen of Shu
    moves nearer — There is
    an approach with difficulty from
    the dead — the winter easing of grief
    How easy to slip
    into the old mode, how hard to
    cling firmly to the advance —
    VI
    No that is not it
    nothing that I have done
    nothing
    I have done
    is made up of
    nothing
    and the dipthong
    ae
    together with
    the