And in fact such ulterior aims as the above can be carried out far more appropriately by quite other means. (_ββ_) The art of poetry, however, from the converse point of view, should strive to assert no absolute and isolated position; it ought, as a part of life itself, to enter freely into life. Already in the first part of this inquiry we found how many points of contact there were between art and ordinary existence, whose content and phenomenal appearance are repeated in its content and form. In poetry this vital relation to actual existence and its specific circumstances, private or public events, appears with most obvious variety in the so-called _poems d'occasion._ With a broader interpretation of the expression we may define as such most poetic compositions; in the more narrow and correct meaning of the term, however, we should restrict it to those productions whose origin is traceable to a single event of present time, which it is the express aim of the poet to emphasize, adorn, and celebrate. In this weaving together of the actual threads of life, however, poetry tends once more to decline to a position of dependence; it is therefore by no means unusual for writers on aesthetic to attach a purely subordinate value to poetry of this class in general, although as to a part of it, notably in the case of the lyric, we find here the most famous compositions. (_γγ_) The question consequently arises by virtue of what poetry may be enabled to still maintain its independence even in the conflict above described. The answer is simple. It must regard and assert the occasional facts it borrows from life not as its essential aim, while it is itself merely accepted as a means. Rather the reverse process is the right one, which absorbs the material of such reality within its own substance, and informs and elaborates the same conformably to the claims of an unfettered imagination. In other words poetry has nothing to do with the accidental or incidental fact as such. This material supplies the external opportunity, that is the stimulus which prompts the poet to draw upon his own profounder penetration and more transparent mode of presentment: by this means he creates from his own resources, as something newborn, that which, without such mediation, would have, in the plain and blunt particular case, wholly failed to impress us with the free spirit he communicates.