Poets, then, who need the support of a system (labourers pretending to be inventors, since in poetry, unlike science, there is no place for labourers) are obliged to adopt not only the workshop method of science, but the whole philosophical point of view of science, which is directly opposite to the point of view of poetry. For in science there is no personality granted to the things discovered, which are looked upon as soulless parts of a soulless aggregate, with no independent rights or life of their own. Such poets, therefore, produce poems that are only well-ordered statements about chosen subjects, not new, independent living organisms; facts, not truths; pieces of literature, not distinct poetic personalities. Poetry of this sort (and there has been little poetry of any other sort, as there have been few real poets) is thus the science of poem-training instead of the art of poem-appreciation. The real poet is a poet by reason of his creative vision of the poem, as the real parent is a parent by reason of his creative vision of the child: authorship is not a matter of the right use of the will but of an enlightened withdrawal of the will to make room for a new will. It is this delicate and watchful withdrawal of the author’s will at the right moments which gives the poem or the child an independent form. But as the creative will is of as rare appearance in poetry as in parenthood, there are, in its absence, very few real poems and very few real children. Or if a real poem or child occurs in spite of its absence, the poem or child will have to stand in the relation of a creator to itself, which means a dangerous enlargement of the creative will in either of them, an enlargement that we may call genius. But with genius there is as much chance of self-destruction as of fulfilment of the creative will. And therefore the poem which survives great odds, the poem of genius, is as rare as the child who survives to become the poet of genius. Most real poems and real poets have come to be in this way, it being as impossible to arrange that the poet with a capacity for writing real poems should have any to write as that two people with a capacity for being the right parents for a real child should have one who could benefit by this capacity. All that can be done is to encourage an attitude toward the poem and the child which shall provide for the independence of either in proportion to its power of independence. In poetry at least this would mean that people would not write poems unless they were complete ones, that is, they would not force a poem by violent training to behave independently when it had no independence. In general it would mean that people would not have to be ‘geniuses’ (_i.e._ turn sports in order to survive the odds against them) to use their creative will freely, to behave with genius.