Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/303

Rh right down to hardpan in this matter, it was and it wasn't. The stuff made me feel just a little bit woozy when I took a whole sheaf of it and sat alone in my room reading it at night. It was all about walls and deep wells and great bowls with young trees standing erect in them and trying to find their way to the light and air over the rim of the bowl.

Queer crazy stuff, every line of it, but fascinating too in a way. One got into a new world with new values, which after all is I suppose what poetry is all about. There was the world of fact we all know or think we know, the world of flat buildings and Middle-Western farms with wire fences about the fields and Fordson tractors running up and down, and towns with high schools and advertising billboards and everything that makes up life, or that we think makes up life.

There was this world we all walk about in and then there was another world that I have come to think of as Wilson's world: a dim world, to me at least, of far-away near places—things taking new and strange shapes, the insides of people coming out, the eyes seeing new things, the fingers feeling new and strange things.

It was a world of walls mainly. I got hold of the whole lot of Wilson's verse by a piece of luck. It happened that I was the first newspaper man who got into the place on the night when the woman's body was found; and there was all the stuff, carefully written out in a sort of child's copy-book, and two or three stupid policemen standing about. I just shoved the book under my coat, when they weren't looking, and later, during Wilson's trial, we published some of the more intelligible ones in the paper. It made pretty good newspaper stuff—the poet who killed his mistress, and all that.

To get back to the poetry itself for a moment. I just wanted to explain that all through the book there ran this notion that men had erected walls about themselves and that all men were perhaps destined to stand for ever behind the walls, on which they constantly beat with their fists, or with whatever tools they could get hold of. One couldn't quite make out whether there was just one great wall or many little individual walls. Sometimes Wilson put it one way, sometimes another. Men had themselves built the walls and now stood behind them, knowing dimly that beyond the walls there was warmth, light, air, beauty, life in fact—while at