It seems then that the reason I could not feel the Imagist verse was because I was trying it by a law or principle which told me that poetry makes itself felt through the senses, not through the intellect. Furthermore, it makes itself felt not only by passionately initiating us into some mystery or other of reality, but by making us an active part of that mystery. The poet is a signature of poetic reality. I do not say this is the ultimate test of poetry. It may be that poetry is so indefinable as to elude all tests. Again it may be that this very indefinableness is the test of poetry. The secret in its motion cannot be analyzed. One cannot explain it any more than one can explain the odor of a flower. One is aware of it—that is all. Yet, I may ask, how does the Imagist poetry stand my test? The first thing one notices in the poetry is its air of cerebrality verging on cerebralitis. Accordingly one discovers an inordinate love of the intellectual qualities of style, and consequently, a feverish quest for figures. So there are figures of every kind. Condensing and visualizing figures, figures of similarity, contiguity and contrast, figures describing and analyzing perishable things. There is in fact a profusion of figures having one characteristic in common, namely, a straining after novelty, originality and freshness. If for the sake of argument one admits that poetry can be expressed in words, of course one admits that poetry can be expressed in images or figures of speech. But this is not to say that figures of speech are consequently poetry. Otherwise every bit of foolish verse that has ever been written could lay claim to the imperishable Garland. Every tup’ny box would be entitled to arrest each passer-by with a cry of “Behold the poetry in me.” Turn where we may in the wide-flung Garden of Verse and fruitful figures face us. Here are some gathered at random: “He came like night.” (Homer describes Apollo’s descent from Olympus.) “Soft as the fleeces of descending snows.” (Ulysses’ eloquence.) “With lockes crull, as they were laid in press.” (So Chaucer pictures his Squire.) “Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain-top with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green.” (Shakespeare.) “Her voice is but the shadow of a sound.” (Young.) “The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.” (Pope.) “Some true, some light, but every one of them Stamped with the image of the king.” (Tennyson compares Arthur’s Knights with coins.) “Hair in heaps lay heavily Over a pale brow spirit-pure— Carved like the heart of the coal-black tree, Crisped like a war-steed’s enclosure.” (Browning describes a lady’s hair.)