In a great deal of traditional poetry the problem of externalizing his work is an easy one for the poet because there is a whole apparatus of conventions at his service ready to give it a formal literary independence of him. But as such conventions (stanza, rhyme, poetical punctuation, etc.) are really the conventions of the printing, not of the making, of poetry, this independence is only an artificial one. Of course there undoubtedly are really independent poems written in traditional forms, for which such conventions have only meant an additional guarantee of their individuality. But as these conventions give an artificial appearance of independence to poems, they are a constant temptation to people who are not poets to write things that look like poems and to poets themselves to be lazy, because the finality of traditional verse-forms can make an incomplete poem seem complete (‘incomplete’ meaning, of course, “not thoroughly separated from the poet”). Poetry like this, then, principally composed of literary conventions, is bound sooner or later to show its shabbiness; and attempts to smarten it up again only change the old conventions for new ones instead of striking at the underlying fallacy, that it is completeness of method that turns out good poems, or technical indefatigability, rather than an indefatigable obsession for making until the poem is made. For if the poet has poems in him they will get themselves made regardless of the poet’s method of setting them down. No technical method, whatever its merits, can extract poems where there are no poems: a method can _seem_ to make, it cannot _make_. The Imagists, for example, did not make new poems, only a new kind of stanza which seemed to them more real than traditional stanza-forms because it was new. When Mr. Cummings says that his ‘poems are competing with locomotives and roses’ he means that they were made as real entities, whether mechanical or natural. He does not claim to have a sure method to be used over and over again in making more and more poems, but to be irresistibly besieged by poems of even contradictory natures and of contradictory principles of growth, each with its own separate method of being made. All that the methodist poet boasts, however, is a trick for producing things that resemble locomotives or roses. In constantly repeating his method in poems he is only saying over and over again that two times two is four. The making poet, on the other hand, has no method, but a faculty for allowing things to invent themselves. As he cannot then write a poem unless there is one to write and is consequently incapable of repeating himself, he is declaring, with each new poem, a new truth, a complete truth, even a contradictory truth. He is allowing two times two (or truth) to become all it is possible for it to be, since truth cannot be reduced to a fixed mathematical law any more than poetry to a fixed literary method: