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PARTISAN REVIEW
every time we experience something which recalls it, the clear and
lucid original experience imposes its formal beauty on the new expe–
riences. It is thus no longer a memory but an experience lived through
again and again.
Turning over these old note books, my eye catches some lines, in
a projected long poem, which immediately re-shape themselves into the
following short portrait of a woman's face:-
He'T eyes are gleaming fish
Caught in her nervous face, as if in a net.
Her hair is wild and fair, haloing her cheeks
Like a fantastic flare of Southern sun.
There is madness in her cherishing her children.
Sometimes, perhaps a single time in years,
Her wandering fingers stoop to arrange some flowers–
Then in her hands her whole life stops and weeps.
It is perhaps true to say that memory is the faculty of poetry, because
the imagination itself is an exercise of memory. There is nothing we
imagine which we do not already know. And our ability to imagine
is our ability to remember what we have already once experienced
and to apply it to some different situation. Thus the greatest poets
are those with memories so great that they extend beyond their
strongest experiences to their minutest observations of people and
things far outside their own self-centredness (the weakness of mem–
ory is its self-centredness: hence the narcissistic nature of most poetry).
Here I can detect my own greatest weakness. My memory
is
defective and self-centred. I lack the confidence in using it to create
situations outside myself, although I believe that, in theory, there are
very few situations
in
life which a poet should not be able to imagine,
because it is a fact that most poets have experienced almost every
situation in life. I do not mean by this that a poh who writes about
a Polar Expedition has actually been to the North Pole. I mean,
though, that he has been cold, hungry, etc., so that it is possible for
him by remembering imaginatively his own felt experiences to know
what it i'3 like to explore the North Pole. That is where I fail. I can–
not write about going to the North Pole.
Faith.
It is evident that a faith in their vocation, mystical in intensity,
sustains poets. There are many illustrations from the lives of poets to
