Among the most usual heresies held about poetry is the idea that the first importance of the poet is his “message”; this idea probably originated with the decline of polite sermon-writing, when the poet was expected to take on the double duty; but it is quite untenable. The poet is only concerned with reconciling certain impressions of life as they occur to him, and presenting them in the most effective way possible, without reference to their educational value. The cumulative effect of his work is to suggest a great number of personal obsessions the sum of which compose if you like his “message,” but the more definitely propagandist the poet, the less of a poet is the propagandist. With this is bound up a heresy of about the same standing that poetry should only be concerned with presenting what is beautiful, beautiful in the limited sense of the picture-postcard. This romantic obsession (using the word “romantic” in the sense of optimistic loose thinking) is as absurd as that of the blood-and-guts realists. Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bitter-sweet mixture for all possible household emergencies, and its action varies according as it is taken in a wineglass or tablespoon, inhaled, gargled, or rubbed on the chest (like the literary Epic) by hard fingers covered with rings. LV THE ART OF EXPRESSION It is as foolish to sneer at the Very Wild Men as it is to assume that the Very Tame Men are all right because they are “in the tradition.” The Very Wild Men are at any rate likely to have done work which has explored the desert boundaries of the art they profess, and the Very Tame Men have never done anything worth doing at all. The only excusable quarrel is with the pretended Wild Men who persist in identically repeating the experiments in which their masters have already failed, and with those whose Very Wilderness is traceable to this--that they are satisfied with the original spontaneity of their work and do not trouble to test it in the light of what it will convey to others, whom they then blame for want of appreciation. What seems to be the matter with Blake’s Prophetic Books is just this, he connected his images by a system of free association the clue to which was lost by his death: for instance his enemy, Schofield, a soldier who informed against him, suddenly enters “Jerusalem” and its strange company of abstractions, in the guise of a universal devil “Skofeld.” Suppose that one Hodge, a labourer, attempted in a fit of homicidal mania to split my skull with a spade, but that my faithful bloodhound sprang to the rescue and Hodge barely escaped with his life. In my imagination, Hodge’s spade might well come to symbolize murder and madness, while the bloodhound became an emblem of loyal assistance in the hour of discomfiture. With this experience in my mind I might be inclined to eulogize a national hero as “Bloodhound leaping at the throat of Hodge Who stands with lifted spade,”