Book Description

Excerpt from Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1914, and Year Book of American Poetry Escaping the illusion, this modern world has become the prisoner of delusion. For, if poetry deals with anything, it deals with reality. No matter how remote the setting, how subtle the com munication, the one hard fact about true poetry, is its reality. The poet at the core and centre of life, surrounded with his dreams, his clairvoyant madness imbibed from the full draught of experi ence, his intensity of emotion, his childlike tender ness of sympathy, his quickening ecstasy of nu ashamed and unrestrained feeling, is consideredthe abnormal product of modern civilization; while in truth he is alone the one normal type of modern mankind, because he alone is in absolute harmony and understanding with the real and common impulse of human destiny. The great secret of life is to discover by a process of related effects, this common reality of experience. Most of mankind grope blindly in the dark, and miss it, and by a kind of frenzied and pitiable ignorance acquire the abnormal character of conduct. The poet discovers, or at least puts his being wholly at the disposal of, these secrets, wins a serene and contemplative relationship to these efl'ects, and lives a normal spiritual life. Harmony and rhythm are but two common terms that express and designate infinity. There was a man who was so absolutely sane that the scod'era of his day called him mad this man was Wil liam Blake. Christ was a madman to the com munity of his day, even his closest friends and dis ciples were not without doubt at times as to his sanity. But these two men were never a hair's breadth from the commonest reat of existence. They realized imaginative facts, and kept in abso lute tune with the harmony and rhythm of life, not merely with what they saw with the actual eye, but with that more penetrative, more limitless sense, the seeing soul. They were poets, and the one insistent quality of their message, was the reality of mortal and immortal life. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.