Page:Spring and all - William Carlos Williams.djvu/36

 out " life ", bitter to the individual, by a " vision of 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The rose is obsolete but each petal ends in an edge, the double facet cementing the grooved columns of air — The edge cuts without cutting