After reading this explanation of poetry, I felt I ought to credit the writer with a desire to exalt poetry to the Infinite. First, however, it was necessary to determine what he meant by the process of “transmutation.” If he meant the activity of the “thing” which I call poetry, and not the “thing” itself; if he was thinking of the change effected in the poet’s soul after it has received the rhythmic element which effects the change; then poetry to him was clearly the operation and not the operating agent. Further, there was the individualizing meaning to be considered. Let us assume that the poet’s soul receives rhythms or vibrations from the Infinite, which it instantly converts into its own. Just as a magnetic needle receives its own currents and points aright. Where is one to look for poetry? Is it the vibrations themselves, or is it the act of conversion? I sought the answer in the writer’s own words that “poetry resides first of all in the rhythms or motion,” and I concluded that he was not making a precise use of the word “transmutation.” So I was able to relate his explanation of poetry to one I had published somewhere in _The New Freewoman_. This was my explanation. There is a creative force underlying all phenomena. At an early period of the world’s history when self-ownership was real—not a dream—man was provoked by this force into poetic action. The force operated by dissolving man into its own and thereby exalting him mystically. But as man became more and more intellectual, so gradually he lost the power of being dissolved, and provoked into mystical action. With the result that he invented words to take the place of action. And as this process of degeneration continued, so he evolved substitutes—paid actors, poets, painters—to do for him what he had lost the power to do for himself. Thus the verbal poet is simply a projection of man’s lost capacity to poetize himself and for himself. That is, the power to obliterate himself physically. I need not go into this point further. If necessary, I could show that many human activities and most human institutions are symptomatic of the long drawn-out diseases of self-suppression and self-annihilation. Mind, I speak of the spiritual self and not that usually confused with a corporeal nature.