The truth is that there is no fundamental difference between these two systems. The same principle that 1 = 1 = 1 prevails (_i.e._ that prose ideas have their exact equivalents in poetry, and many of them to one idea); though in a different order, we find the same categories representing the stages of the poem from creation to criticism. And the fact that the reader finds it necessary to make a poetical rather than a more strictly prose summary in (II.) would really make no appreciable difference in his enjoyment of the poem if it were really written as set forth in (II.). For the element of strangeness and excitement would perhaps be added to his enjoyment if the ordinary system were reversed: the novelty would at least last for a few poems of this sort, as it lasted for the first year or two of the recent _Vers Libre_ movement, a dead movement which tried to coué poetry back into health by depriving it of its crutches. But if the lines in question were not the prose idea as poem--B of (II.)--that is, the prose idea in a slightly poetical form which the reader had to amplify along suggested poetical lines, a discrepancy would appear between the poem as it stands and the reader’s poetical summary of it, should he find it possible to make one: we should have not two equivalent meanings but one meaning and another gratuitous meaning derived from it. B1 would not equal C1, but C1 would merely be X1, one of the many possible derived meanings of B1, but not the real meaning. B and C of (II.) would therefore read: B C 1. | X 1 2. | X 2 3. | X 3 4. | X 4 X 1-2-3-4 being but a digression from B, B then would not be the prose idea as poem, but the poem itself. If, as such, without the addition of any associations not provided in the poem, or of collateral interpretations, it could reveal an internal consistency strengthened at every point in its development and free of the necessity of external application, that is, complete without criticism--if it could do this, it would have established an insurmountable difference between prose ideas and poetic ideas, prose facts and poetic facts. This difference would mean the independence of poetic facts, as real facts, from any prose or poetical explanation in the terms of practical workaday reality which would make them seem unreal, or poetical facts.