THE POET ON CAPITOL HILL
9
and not long ago he expressed unqualified contempt for all poetry
that passes as "pure."
The loudmouthed, disrespectful, horselaughing challenges to
those who tell us poetry is "pure." Those who tell us poetry is
"poetry." Those who tell us poetry is a parlor game and has no
truck with the living of live men or the misery of hungry men or
the politics of ambitious men or the indignation of believing men.
Those who tell us the eternal poetry
is
the poetry written about
the feeling of being dreadfully alone. Those with the High Stand·
ards. (The impotent have the High Standards: the begetters
beget.) ... Those who escape into mirrors-into the gentleman–
farms arid the upstairs rooms with the view of the river and the
seminars at five p.m. The loudmouthed disrespectful challenge to
all such ·to come out of their words and their paragraphs into
the open air of the art and say their say in the sun with the wind
blowing.
16
He says that the poet may "bring the mind of this nation one step
nearer to an understanding of its will, and one step nearer to an
imagination of the world in which it can believe and which, believ–
ing, it can bring about,m
7
and he surmises that "the luxury of the
complete confession, the uttermost despair, the farthest doubt
should be denied themselves by writers living in any but the most
orderly and settled times.ms He announces that "the writer's irre–
sponsibility is no less" that the scholar's when he so indulges
himself:
Where the modern scholar escapes from the adult judgments
of the mind by taking the disinterested man of science as his
model, the modern writer escapes by imitation of the artist. He
practises his writing as a painter does his painting. He thinks as
artist, which is to say he thinks without responsibility1:o anything
but truth of feeling. . . . His devotion, as with every honest
painter, is devotion to the thing observed, the actual thing, the
thing without its consequences or its antecedents, naked of judg–
ment, stripped of causes and effects. The invisible world, the
intellectual world, the world of the relation of ideas, the world of
judgments, of values, the world in which truth is good and lies
are evil-this world has no existence for the honest artist or for
the honest writer who takes the artist for his model. He sees the
world as a god sees it-without morality, without care, without
judgment.... His most searching purpose is to find, not the truth
of human action, but the low-down, the discreditable explanation
