“If you are going to appeal to the poets,” returns B, “you can’t disregard the position of the vine in decorative art. It has been conventionalized into the most static design you can find, after the lotus. When I say _Vine_, that’s quite enough for me, just V for vegetable.” They are interrupted by A the master spirit who says with authority:-- “Silence, the two of you! I rule a compromise. Call it a “gadding vine” and have done with it.” * * * * * The converse of the proposition stated at the beginning of this section, namely that every one who has the sort of family history mentioned above and is not the prey of inhibitions, will become a poet, is certainly not intended. Poetry is only one outlet for peculiar individual expression; there are also the other arts, with politics, generalship, philosophy, and imaginative business; or merely rhetoric, fantastic jokes and original swearing-- X THE DEAD END AND THE MAN OF ONE POEM The question of why Poets suddenly seem to come to a dead end and stop writing true Poetry, is one that has always perplexed literary critics, and the poets themselves still more. The explanation will probably be found in two causes. In the first case the poet’s preoccupation with the clash of his emotions has been transmuted into a calmer state of meditation on philosophic paradox: but poetry being, by accepted definition, sensuous and passionate is no vehicle of expression for this state. Impersonal concepts can perhaps be expressed in intellectual music, but in poetry the musical rhythm and word-texture are linked with a sensuous imagery too gross for the plane of philosophic thought. Thus dithyramb, by which I mean the essentially musical treatment of poetry in defiance of the sense of the words used, is hardly a more satisfactory medium than metaphysical verse: in which even a lyrical sugar-coating to the pill cannot induce the childish mood of poetry to accept philosophic statements removed beyond the plane of pictorial allegory. In the second case the conflict of the poet’s subpersonalities has been finally settled, by some satisfaction of desire or removal of a cause of fear, in the complete rout of the opposing parties, and the victors dictate their own laws, uncontradicted, in legal prose or (from habit) in verse.