APPENDIX A LXIII 



be made more than it ever was, a thing of the spirit? Did Browning 

 separate himself from his audience when he cast his poem "Home 

 Thoughts from Abroad" into its irregular form? Can one create a 

 poem of greater spirituality than Vaughan's "I Saw Eternity the 

 Other Night"? To exorcise this senseless irritation against rhyme 

 and form, those possessed should intone the phrases of that great 

 iconoclast, Walt Whitman, written in the noble preface to the 1855 

 edition of "Leaves of Grass". "The profit of rhyme is that it drops 

 seeds of a sweeter and more luxuriant rhyme, and of uniformity that 

 it conveys itself into its own roots in the ground out of sight. The 

 rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of 

 metrical laws, and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs 

 and roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of 

 chestnuts and oranges, and melons and pears, and shed the perfume 

 impalpable to form". 



All that I intend to inveigh against in these sentences is the cult 

 that seeks to establish itself upon a false freedom in the realm of art. 

 Sincerity, or, if you will, freedom, is the touchstone of poetry — of any 

 and all art work in fact. Originality is the proof of genius, but all 

 geniuses have imitated. Poetry is an endless chain of imitation, 

 but genius comes dropping in, adding its own peculiar flavour in 

 degree. Sainte Beuve has written it down,— "The end and object of 

 every original writer is to express what nobody has yet expressed, to 

 render what nobody else is able to render. . . .". This may be 

 accepted as axiomatic, it governs production here and elsewhere, 

 present and future, and any literary movement is doomed to failure 

 if it attempts to pre-empt the conception that poetry should be 

 original, should be freshened constantly by the inventions of new and 

 audacious spirits. 



The desire of creative minds everywhere is to express the age in 

 terms of the age, and by intuition to flash light into the future. 

 Revolt is essential to progress, not necessarily the revolt of violence, 

 but always the revolt that questions the established past and puts 

 it to the proof, that finds the old forms outworn and invents new forms 

 for new matters. 



It is the mission of new theories in the arts, and particularly of 

 new theories that come to us illustrated by practice, to force us to 

 re-examine the grounds of our perferences, and to retest our accepted 

 dogmas. Sometimes the preferences are found to be prejudices and 

 the dogmas hollow formulae. There is even a negative use in ugliness 

 that throws into relief upon a dark and inchoate background the 

 shining lines and melting curves of true beauty. The latest mission 



