Page:Spring and all - William Carlos Williams.djvu/33

 in himself crushing humiliation unless the individual raise to some approximate co-extension with the universe. This is possible by aid of the imagination. Only through the agency of this force can a man feel himself moved largely with sympathetic pulses at work —

A work of the imagination which fails to release the senses in accordance with this major requisite — the sympathies, the intelligence in its selective world, fails at the elucidation, the alleviation which is —

In the composition, the artist does exactly what every eye must do with life, fix the particular with the universality of his own personality — Taught by the largeness of his imagination to feel every form -which he sees moving within himself, he must prove the truth of this by expression.

The contraction which is felt.

All this being anterior to technique, that can have only a sequent value; but since all that appears to the senses on a work of art does so through fixation by the imagination of the external as well internal means of expression the essential nature of technique or transcription.

Only when this position is reached can life proper