Page:Spring and all - William Carlos Williams.djvu/56

 released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he,

A world detached from the necessity of recording it, sufficient to itself, removed from him (as it most certainly is) with which he has bitter and delicious relations and from which he is independant — moving at will from one thing to another — as he pleases, unbound — complete

and the unique proof of this is the work of the imagination not " like " anything but transfused with the same forces which transfuse the earth — at least one small part of them.

Nature is the hint to composition not because it is familiar to us and therefore the terms we apply to it have a least common denominator quality which gives them currency — but because it possesses the quality of independant existance, of reality which we feel in ourselves. It is not opposed to art but apposed to it.

I suppose Shakespeare's familiar aphorism about holding the mirror up to nature has done more