Les Mouches Fantastiques (amateur journal)/May 1918/Poetry

​Poetry -- if I have any feeling for it -- is good verse, fixed or free, and something more. It is this "something more" that really matters, even while it baffles all attempts to isolate or define it. Critics have called it many conflicting things, since in two genuine poets it is never the same. I myself suspect it is always the man reaching through to us; that a great poem is simply a great soul revealed through song. The often implied doctrine that one can be important as an artist while unimportant as a person, strikes me as nonsense, as the impotent protest of limited souls against their cold limitations. At any rate, whatever this "something more" may be, it is always individual, highly concentrated, intense; like a single indestructible bead of perfume distilled, as it were, from all the roses of all the gardens of all the world. And there is one test for the true attar -- for there are many cleverly compounded imitations -- its undying seduction; a test which cannot be applied to contemporary verse, inasmuch as the seduction of today may well prove the weariness of tomorrow. But final tests apart, for anyone of us, I suppose, poetry is verse that inevitably casts a spell, verse to which we perforce return. The danger comes when we are moved to assert that lines which have enthralled us must necessarily enthrall others, for such and such laborious reasons. Ah, those reasons. A man who tries to in love who tries to explain why!