Now the elements of this experience--the jar, its shape, colour, and quality, the hill in Tennessee where it is placed, the behaviour or appearance of the wilderness, the bird, the bush--stand doubtless in some kind of relation with each other in the poet’s mind, have possibly certain symbolic values. Since we have no clues to these relationships and values, our mind is free to do anything it pleases with the bare grey jar, the hill, and the wilderness. This freedom, however, and any pleasure we may take in the separate images, in the rhythms, or the placing of the words, are not sufficient compensation for the state of uncertainty and slight irritation in which we are left. Very likely the little poem is meant to suggest nothing more than the superiority, to an intensely civilised person, of the simplest bit of handicraft over any extent of unregulated “nature,” but it has been seriously interpreted to me, by devotees of recent poetry, as, respectively, an _objet d’art_, a sex-symbol, and a burial-urn containing the remains of a valued friend. And so it must remain, for me, not only like nothing else in Tennessee but like nothing else in the universe. Considerable damage was done to this shallow affectation of knowingness of the last few years by Max Eastman’s witty article in the April (1929) _Harper’s_. A young intellectual from one of our well-known private schools told me that members of his group were observed to discontinue their perusal of _transition_[49] upon the appearance of Mr. Eastman’s “The Cult of Unintelligibility.” But contemporary poetry is still afflicted by an acute attack of that extreme of Puritanism--separatism: it asserts the right not only of private judgment, but of a private symbolism,--which is, æsthetically, of much graver consequences. My point here, of course, has nothing to do with the values or qualities of the experience which the writer is presumably seeking to share. I am simply saying that, in the reading of the slightest as of the most profound poem, a sense of singleness or wholeness is the most essential part of the experience, and that this totality of effect cannot be achieved if all clues to the way the poem is organised are withheld or too casually indicated. The enigmatic character of Dr. William Carlos Williams’s poems, we are told, is due in part to his habit of jotting down free-verse impressions in the intervals between his professional visits to patients. I can only hope that in writing out his prescriptions he makes a greater allowance for the mental capacity of the pharmacist than he seems to make for mine. To speak bluntly, the difficulty of reading much “modernist” verse is due less to the superior sophistication or cleverness of these writers than to their essential lack of art.