The fourth point is of more general importance perhaps than these three. It is in fact the real point of disagreement between the view we are upholding and the doctrine which Dr Bradley, together with the vast majority of modern critics, wishes to maintain. It is stated in the concluding sentence of the paragraph which I have quoted. He says of poetry that “its nature is to be, not a part nor yet a copy of the real world, as we commonly understand that phrase, but to be a world by itself, independent, complete, autonomous. To possess it fully, you must enter that world, conform to its laws, and ignore, for the time being, the beliefs, aims, and particular conditions which belong to you in the other world of reality.” This doctrine insists: upon a severance between poetry and what, in opposition, may be called life; a complete severance, allowing however, as Dr Bradley goes on to insist—an ‘underground’ connection. But this ‘underground’ connection is all-important. Whatever there is in the poetic experience has come through it. The world of poetry has in no sense any different reality from the rest of the world and it has no special laws and no other-worldly peculiarities. It is made up of experiences of exactly the same kinds as those that come to us in other ways. Every poem however is a strictly limited piece of experience, a piece which breaks up more or less easily if alien elements intrude. It is more highly and more delicately organised than ordinary experiences of the street or of the hillside; it is fragile. Further it is communicable. It may be experienced by many different minds with only slight variations. That this should be possible is one of the conditions of its organisation. It differs from many other experiences, whose value is very similar, in this very communicability. For these reasons when we experience it, or attempt to, we must preserve it from contamination, from the irruptions of personal particularities. We must keep the poem undisturbed by these or we fail to read it and have some other experience instead. For these reasons we establish a severance, we draw a boundary between the poem and what is not the poem in our experience. But this is no severance between unlike things but between different systems of the same activities. The gulf between them is no greater than that between the impulses which direct the pen and those which conduct the pipe of a man who is smoking and writing at once, and the ‘disassociation’ or severance of the poetic experience is merely a freeing of it from extraneous ingredients and influences. The myth of a ‘transmutation’ or ‘poetisation’ of experience and that other myth of the ‘contemplative’ or ‘æsthetic’ attitude, are in part due to talking about Poetry and the ‘poetic’ instead of thinking about the concrete experiences which are poems.