Page:Spring and all - William Carlos Williams.djvu/67

. It is rarely understood how such plays as Shakespeare's were written — or in fact how any work of value has been written, the practical bearing of which is that only as the work was produced, in that way alone can it be understood

Fruitless for the academic tapeworm to hoard its excrementa is books. The cage —

The most of all writing has not even begun in the province from which alone it can draw sustenance.

There is not life in the stuff because it tries to l:e " like " life.

First must come the transposition of the faculties to the only world of reality that men know : the world of the imagination, wholly our own. From this world alone does the work gain power, its soil the only one whose chemistry is perfect to the purpose.

The exaltation men feel before a work of art is the feeling of reality they draw from it. It sets them up, places a value upon experience — (said that half a dozen times already)