Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/123

Rh opacity, warmth, motion, coolness, roughness, smoothness—all things unconnected with that unreality concocted by man to soothe his baffled life. When he uses fantasy he is not violating the reality around him; he is merely splitting this reality into probing variations. Once revealed to itself, the reality of objects finds new shapes within itself by playing with its outward forms.

This is the poetry that has been concentrated into one pointed trend during the last fifteen years. The old emotional eloquence, dramatic ecstasies of phraseology, and suave oratory with which most poets have always addressed birds, trees, flowers, and the lives of men, is disappearing, and in its place there has been born a struggle on the part of the poet to wrestle with the concrete forms about him, and in the heat of this fight suddenly awake to find that he has been gripping different parts of himself. This battle, in which wood becomes wood and stone becomes stone and the poet sees the wood and stone that lie within himself and breaks them into articulate variations—this battle is not a new one. It is a thread running through all Occidental literature; it has been achieved in parts of the Bible, in the sagas of the Norsemen, in the plays of Euripides, in Homer, in novels and plays by Russians and Frenchmen, but not until the last fifteen years has it ever been gathered into a poetic uprising. It is the actual poetry of life, separated from material statistics, honeyed emotional subterfuges, ingenious fiction in which the characters are strained marionettes, and ponderous philosophical dictates. It is the abstracted, impersonal glare of eyes that do not seek to judge, praise, or blame, but are immersed in patiently subtracting and multiplying the bare words, expressions, forms, and colors of life, in order to arrive at the nearest possible approach to the sum total of their essence. The poet must bring to this task the inevitable, sub-conscious prejudices of his individuality and the environments that have stained it, but through completely immersing his energies in an effort to catch the breath, concealed rhythms, and natural substances of men and inanimate life, he can reduce these sub-conscious prejudices to an ever-dwindling minimum or a friendly disputant.

And this attempt to unearth an inner reality which often conflicts with the surface plausibility and visual falseness which men have ever called "reality"—this attempt is the actual dividing line between poetry and prose: a division which contradicts the old one