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beauty." It is a work of the imagination. It gives the feeling of completion by revealing the oneness of experience; it rouses rather than stupefies the intelligence by demonstrating the importance of personality, by showing the individual, depressed before it, that his life is valuable — when completed by the imagination. And then only. Such work elucidates —
    Such a realization shows us the falseness of attempting to “copy” nature. The thing is equally silly when we try to “make” pictures —
    But such a picture as that of Juan Gris, though I have not seen it in color, is important as marking more clearly than any I have seen what the modern trend is: the attempt is being made to separate things of the imagination from life, and obviously, by using the forms common to experience so as not to frighten the onlooker away but to invite him,
    The rose is obsolete
    but each petal ends in
    an edge, the double facet
    cementing the grooved
    columns of air — The edge
    cuts without cutting
    meets — nothing — renews
    itself in metal or porcelain —
    whither? It ends —
    But if it ends
    the start is begun
    so that to engage roses
    becomes a geometry —

    Sharper, neater, more cutting
    figured in majolica —
    the broken plate
    glazed with a rose
    Somewhere the sense
    makes copper roses
    steel roses —
    The rose carried weight of love
    but love is at an end — of roses
    If is at the edge of the
    petal that love waits
    Crisp, worked to defeat
    laboredness — fragile
    plucked, moist, half-raised
    cold, precise, touching
    What
    The place between the petal’s
    edge and the
    From the petal’s edge a line starts
    that being of steel
    infinitely fine, infinitely
    rigid penetrates
    the Milky Way
    without contact — lifting
    from it — neither hanging
    nor pushing —
    The fragility of the flower
    unbruised
    penetrates spaces
    VIII
    The sunlight in a
    yellow plaque upon the
    varnished floor
    is full of a song
    inflated to
    fifty pounds pressure
    at the faucet, of
    June that rings
    the triangle of the air
    pulling at the
    anemonies in
    Persephone’s cow pasture —
    When from among
    the steel rocks leaps
    J. P. M.
    who enjoyed
    extraordinary privileges
    among virginity
    to solve the core
    of whirling flywheels
    by cutting
    the Gordian knot
    with a Veronese or
    perhaps a Rubens —
    whose ears are about
    the finest on
    the market today —
    And so it comes
    to motor ears —
    which is the son
    leaving off the g
    of sunlight and grass —
    Impossible
    to say, impossible
    to underestimate —
    wind, earthquakes in

    Manehuria, a
    partridge
    from dry leaves
    things with which he is familiar, simple things — at the same time to detach them from ordinary experience to the imagination. Thus they are still “real” they are the same things they would be it photographed or painted by Monet, they are recognizable as the things touched by the hands during the day, but in this painting they are seen to be in some peculiar way — detached
    Here is a shutter, a bunch of grapes, a sheet of music, a picture of sea and mountains (particularly fine) which the onlooker is not for a moment permitted to witness as an “illusion." One thing laps over on the other, the cloud laps over on the shutter,the bunch of grapes is part of the handle of the guitar, the mountain and sea are obviously not “the mountain and sea”, but a picture of the mountain and the sea. All drawn with admirable simplicity and excellent design — all a unity —
    This was not necessary where the subject of art was not “reality” but related to the “gods” — by force or otherwise. There was no need of the “illusion” in such a case since there was none possible where a picture or a work represented simply the imaginative reality which existed in the mind of the onlooker. No special effort was necessary to cleave where the cleavage already existed.
    I don’t know what the Spanish see in their Velasquez and Goya but
    Today where everything is being