Because space is so small, Because space is so small, an inversion which the poet would surely mind less than the use of a prose summary, such as a philosophical reading: “Because so small is Space or the Universe or the Human Mind, not allowing Ideas to reach their full development but crowding them into cramped quarters so that they have a hard time keeping their independence and are often even completely extinguished.” The important thing that would be revealed by a wide application of this method to the reading of poems that really mean what they say (for obviously it could not be applied to poems that do not) would be that much of the so-called obscurity of poems was created by the laziness of the plain reader, who wishes to hurry through poetry as quickly as he does through prose, not realizing that he is dealing with a kind of thought which, though it may have the speed of prose to the poet, he must follow with a slowness proportionate to how much he is not a poet. Indeed, with a just realization of this proportion it should be possible for the plain reader to read a very difficult poem without even adding any repetitional lines. Increasing the time-length of reading is one way of getting out of the prose and into the poetic state of mind, of developing a capacity for minuteness, for seeing all there is to see at a given point and for taking it all with one as one goes along. We have forgotten, however, that the plain reader, while he does not object to the poetic state of mind in the poet, has a fear of cultivating it in himself. This is why he prefers the prose summary to the poem and to see the poem, as it began in the poet’s mind, as a genial prose idea free of those terrors which the poet is supposed to keep to himself or carefully disguise. Part of the reader’s reaction to what he calls the obscurity of certain poems is really his nervous embarrassment at feeling himself left alone with the meaning of the poem itself.