When we say, then, that the modernist poet has an experimental attitude toward the poem, we do not mean to imply that he is experimenting with the poem in order to prove some system he has developed. This is properly only the attitude of such a dead movement as Imagism, merely a sign that something is wrong with the education of the poem (literally, the ‘drawing out’ of it). The Montessori system of education, for example, corresponds in the history of pedagogical reform with Imagism and other such systems in the reformation of poetry. Both are schools with new systems of training or form to replace old systems: they do not imply the existence of a new kind of relationship between the parent and the child, the poet and the poem, a feeling of mutual respect favourable to the independent development of each and therefore to a maximum of benefit of one to the other. Of course, if the poem is left to shift entirely for itself and its independence is really only a sign of the irresponsibility of the poet, then its personality, by its wildness, is likely to be as indecisive as the personality of the formalized poem is by its reliance on discipline. The policy of leaving the poem to write itself makes it only a form of automatic writing which inevitably leads to the over-emphasis of the dream element in the writing of poetry. It is true that dreams seem to exercise the same kind of control over the mind as the poem does over the poet. But in dreams we have thought in an uncreative state running itself out to a solution out of sheer inertia, unrefreshed by any volitional criticism of it; a solution which is like a negative image of the solution which thought would arrive at in a creative, waking state, refreshed by volitional criticism. The dream solution is therefore as arbitrary a substitute for the solutions of waking thought as the dream-poem (or automatic poem) is for the poem that would naturally result from the deliberate adjustment of the creative will to the solution which seems to come nearer and nearer as the creative will grows more and more discreet. The problem of preventing poetry from sinking into rapid decline and disuse does not seem to point, then, to a sense of responsibility in the poet toward the reader as shown in the use of a carefully designed ‘style’. It points rather to the responsibility which the poet owes to the poem because of its dependence on him until it is complete, a dependence which shall not, however, be reflected as a weakness in the poem after it has been completed; as childhood should survive in a person as the element of continuous newness in him, not as the permanent bad effect of discipline that made him less, rather than more, independent as he grew. CHAPTER VI THE MAKING OF THE POEM