But whatever may be the cause of the reader’s embarrassment with the poem, the important fact is, from the point of view of the poem and the poet, that the ‘making’ poet does not write because of the demand of the reader to be fed with poetry but because certain poems demand to be written and the poet is ‘somebody who is obsessed by Making’. Once the poems are ‘made’, his personal activity ceases in them. They begin a life of their own toward which he has no responsibility of advertising or selling: that they reach the reader at all is an accident, an affair entirely between them and the reader. This, by the way, is not what used to be meant by ‘art for art’s sake’. ‘Art for art’s sake’ was as if a cook should say, “I am employed as a cook, I know, but I am such a superior cook that what I cook is not to be eaten, it is a purely esoteric culinary mystery.” The modernist poet will not adopt this attitude at all, because he will not start with the sense of being an artist in an official, public-service sense. The purpose of printing in book-form poetry construed in this private sense is not to convert it into a selling product but merely to give it an identity separate from the author’s; and the disinterested anxiety of poets to get their work printed must be attributed partly to this desire to see it as a separate life. It is practically impossible for a poet to read his own poetry intelligently unless separated from him in some way. The easiest and most obvious way is to have it set down in print, since his own handwriting is like a physical part of himself: the printed page acts as a mirror. This explains the mystery of Shakespeare’s failure to have his plays uniformly printed in his lifetime: they had become sufficiently externalized by being presented on the stage. But the process of externalization must be seen to have two aspects: externalization for the sake of a legitimate vanity in the poet, a curiosity in him about his own poems; and externalization as a poet’s duty toward his poem. When both of these aspects are balanced, the poem has an outward and an inward sincerity. When externalization, or formalizing, has only what we may call the _printing_ aspect, which has only to do with the poem as something made by the poet and read by the reader--a theatrical ‘showing off’ on the part of the poet; when it means only this and has no _creative_ aspect, then the more facile the poem is as a printed piece the more insincere it is as a private, independent poem-person.