school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the autocrats among us can be “literalists of the imagination”—above insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand, in defiance of their opinion— the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is, on the other hand, genuine then you are interested in poetry.
IN THE DAYS OF PRISMATIC COLOR
not in the days of Adam and Eve but when Adam was alone; when there was no smoke and color was fine, not with the fineness of early civilization art but by virtue of its originality, with nothing to modify it but the
mist that went up, obliqueness was a varia- tion of the perpendicular, plain to see and to account for: it is no longer that; nor did the blue red yellow band of incandescence that was color, keep its stripe: it also is one of
those things into which much that is peculiar can be read; complexity is not a crime but carry it to the point of murki- ness and nothing is plain. A complexity moreover, that has been committed to darkness, instead of granting it-
self to be the pestilence that it is, moves all a- bout as if to bewilder with the dismal fallacy that insistence is the measure of achievement and that all truth must be dark. Principally throat, sophistication is as it al-
ways has been—at the antipodes from the init- ial great truths. “Part of it was crawling, part of it was about to crawl, the rest was torpid in its lair.” In the short legged, fit- ful advance, the gurgling and all the minutiæ—we have the classic