]02
PARTISAN REVIEW
child. Past generations have toiled so that any child born today in–
herits, with
his
generation, cities, streets, organization, the mdSt elab–
orate machinery for living. Everything has been provided for
him
by
people dead long before he was born. Then, naturally enough; sadder
thoughts colored this picture for me, and I reflected how he also
inherited vast maladjustments, vast human wrongs. Then I thought
of the child as like a pin-point of present existence, the moment
incarnate, in whom the whole of the past, and all possible futures
cross.
This word
cross
somehow suggested the whole situation to me
of a child born into the world and also of the form of a poem about
his situation. When the word
cross
appeared in the poem, the idea
of the past should give place to the idea of the future and it should
be apparent that the
cross
in which present and future meet
is
the
secret of an individual human existence. And here again, the unspoken
secret which lies beyond the poem, the moral significance of other
meanings of the word 'cross' begins to glow with its virtue that should
never be said and yet should shine through every image in the poem.
This account of inspiration is probably weak beside the ac–
counts that other poets might give. I am writing of my own experi–
ence, and my own inspiration seems to me like the faintest flash of
insight into the nature of reality beside that of other poets whom I can
think of. However, it is possible that I describe here a kind of expe–
rience which, however slight it may be, is far truer to the real poetic
experience than Aldous Huxley's account of how a young poet writes
poetry in his novel
Time Must Have a Stop.
It is hard to imagine
anything more self-conscious and unpoetic than Mr. Huxley's account.
Memory.
If
the art of concentrating in a particular way
is
the discipline
necessary for poetry to reveal itself, memory exercised in a particular
way is the natural gift of poetic genius. The poet, above all else, is a
person who never forgets certain sense-impressions which he has ex–
perienced and which he can re-live again and again as though with
all their original freshness.
All poets have this highly developed sensitive apparatus of mem–
ory, and they are usually aware of experiences which happened to
them at the earliest age and which retain their pristine significance
throughout life. The meeting of Dante and Beatrice when the poet
was only nine years of age is the experienc which became a symbol
in Dante's mind around which the
Divine Comedy
crystallized. The
