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PARTISAN REVIEW
It would be well to consider "pure" poetry for a moment,
before going on to painting. The theory of poetry as incantation,
hypnosis or drug-as psychological agent then-goes back to Poe,
and eventually to Coleridge and Edmund Burke with their efforts
to locate the enjoyment of poetry in the "Fancy" or "Imagination."
Mallarme, however, was the first to base a consistent practice of
poetry upon it. Sound, he decided, is only an auxiliary of poetry,
not the medium itself; and besides, most poetry is now read, not
recited: the sound of words is a part of their meaning, not the
vessel of it. To deliver poetry from the subject and to give full play
to its true affective power it is necessary to free words from logic.
The medium of poetry is isolated in the power of the word to evoke
associations and to connote. Poetry subsists no longer in the rela·
tions between words as meanings, but in the relations between
words as personalities composed of sound, history and possibilities
of meaning. Grammatical logic is retained only in so far as it is
necessary to set these personalities in motion, for unrelated words
are static when read and not recited aloud. Tentative efforts are
made to discard metric form and rhyme, because they are regarded
as too local and determinate, too much attached to specific times
and places and social conventions to pertain to the essence of
poetry. There are experiments in poetic prose. But as in the case
of music, it was found that formal structure was indispensable,
that some such structure was integral to the medium of poetry as
an aspect of its resistance.... The poem still offers possibilities of
meaning-but only possibilities. Should any of them be too pre·
cisely realized, the poem would lose the greatest part of its efficacy,
which is to agitate the consciousness with infinite possibilities by
approaching the brink of meaning and yet never falling over it.
The poet writes, not so much to
express,
as to create a thing which
will operate upon the reader's consciousness to produce the emo·
tion of poetry. The content of the poem. is what it does to the
reader, not what it communicates. The emotion of the reader
derives from the poem as a unique object-pretendedly-and not
from referents outside the poem. This is pure poetry as ambitious
contemporary poets try to define it by the example of their work.
Obviously, it is an impossible ideal, yet one which most of the
best poetry of the last fifty years has tried to reach, whether it is
