rse, based upon a convention, an
agreement between the speaker and the listener that certain objections
shall not be raised. The most realistic art in the world is open to
realistic objection. Against the most exact and everyday drama that
ever came out of Norway it is still possible for the realist to raise
the objection that the hero who starts a subject and drops it, who
runs out of a room and runs back again for his hat, is all the time
behaving in a most eccentric manner, considering that he is doing
these things in a room in which one of the four walls has been taken
clean away and been replaced by a line of footlights and a mob of
strangers. Against the most accurate black-and-white artist that human
imagination can conceive it is still to be admitted that he draws a
black line round a man's nose, and that that line is a lie. And in
precisely the same fashion a poet must, by the nature of things, be
conventional. Unless he is describing an emotion which others share
with him, his labours will be utterly in vain. If a poet really had an
original emotion; if, for example, a poet suddenly fell in love with
the buffers of a railway train, it would take him considerably more
time than his allotted three-score years and ten to communicate his
feelings.

Poetry deals with primal and conventional things--the hunger for
bread, the love of woman, the love of children, the desire for
immortal life. If men really had new sentiments, poetry could not deal
with them. If, let us say, a man did not feel a bitter craving to eat
bread; but did, by way of substitute, feel a fresh, original craving
to eat brass fenders or mahogany tables, poetry could not express him.
If a man, instead of falling in love with a woman, fell in love with a
fossil or a sea anemone, poetry could not express him. Poetry can only
express what is original in one sense--the sense in which we speak of
original sin. It is original, not in the paltry sense of being new,
but in the deeper sense of being old; it is original in the sense that
it deals with origins.

All artists, who have any experience of the arts, will agree so far,
that a poet is bound to be conventional with regard to matters of art.
Unfortunately, however, they are the very people who cannot, as a
general rule, see that a poet is also bound to be conventional in
matters of conduct. It is only the smaller poet who sees the poetry of
revolt, of isolation, of disagreement; the larger poet sees