Page:Spring and all - William Carlos Williams.djvu/42

 Invention of new forms to embody this reality of art, the one thing which art is, must occupy all serious minds concerned.

From the time of Poe in the U. S. — the first American poet had to be a man of great separation — with close identity with life. Poe could not have written a word without the violence of expulsive emotion combined with the in-driving force of a crudely repressive environment. Between the two his imagination was forced into being to keep him to that reality, completeness, sense of escape which is felt in his work — his topics. Typically American — accurately, even inevitably set in his time.

So, after this tedious diversion — whatever of dull you find among my work, put it down to criti- cism, not to poetry. You will not be mistaken — Who am I but my own critic ? Surely in isolation one becomes a god — At least one becomes something of everything, which is not wholly godlike, yet a little so — in many things.

It is not necessary to count every flake of the truth that falls ; it is necessary to dwell in the imagination if the truth is to be numbered. It is necessary to speak from the imagination —

The great furor about perspective in Holbein's