PARTISAN REVIEW
it was my own fault
if
I did not appreciate quite
all
the poems
in
that collection. Often my excitement about the idea of poetry created
as it were a poetry beyond the lines themselves, so that words which
conveyed little to me in themselves were surrounded by the aura of
the idea that others had found them beautiful. For example,
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn,
conveyed no clear picture to me. But the idea that they were often
quoted as pure poetry illuminated them, and just as, getting out of
a boat and seeing a quayside and some houses one can cover over a
disappointment by filling one's mind with the thought, "This is
France," so when I read these lines, I said to myself: "This is pure
poetry."
Some poetry, such as Keats'
Endymion
filled me with awe. I
felt that I was in the presence of pure gold which I could not appre–
ciate, except for certain lines, and yet I could see it was gold. Other
poetry became, as soon as I had read it, identified with an experience
already existing within myself, which, nonetheless I had not known
until I read the poetry. In this, poetic language was different from
certain religious language, such as The Sermon on the Mount. When
I read the Sermon on the Mount, I knew it to be true as though it
had been made to fit some truth I knew already in my heart. But
this truth existed outside the words of the Sermon, beautiful as they
are: it was a truth of e-xperience. With poetry there was the same
experience of a poem corresponding to an experience-and yet the
experience did not exist outside the words of the poem. When I read
certain sonnets of Wordsworth, or Keats, or Shakespeare, I knew
them at once as though I had known them before: and yet I had not
known them before, as I knew the Christian truth. The inevitability
of the words in the poetry had such force that
it
somehow created
in my mind an illusion of its own past history there, as though it had
existed long before I experienced it. Probably what one means by
"inevitability" in words is a time illusion which a certain order of
words produces: that although they strike one as fresh and new they
also
strike one as though they had been said for as long as one can
remember.
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