Page:Spring and all - William Carlos Williams.djvu/91

 clips her work into certain shapes—her pieces are without meter most often—but I believe she is most constantly a poet in her work because the purpose of her work is invariably from the source from which poetry starts—that it is constantly from the purpose of poetry. And that it actually possesses this characteristic, as of that origin, to a more distinguishable degree when it eschews verse rhythms than when it does not. It has the purpose of poetry written into and therefore it is poetry.

I believe it possible, even essential, that when poetry fails it does not become prose but bad poetry. The test of Mariane Moore would be that she writes sometimes good and sometimes bad poetry but always—with a single purpose out of a single fountain which is of the sort—

The practical point would be to discover—

I can go no further than to say that poetry feeds the imagination and prose the emotions, poetry liberates the words from their emotional implications, prose confirms them in it. Both move centrifugally or centripetally toward the intelligence.

Of course it must be understood that writing deals with words and words only and that all discus-