se light, and, by analogy, the after-colors of
the poet's initial vision. In its third sense, Spectric connotes
the overtones, adumbrations, or spectres which for the poet haunt
all objects both of the seen and the unseen world,--those
shadowy projections, sometimes grotesque, which, hovering around the
real, give to the real its full ideal significance and its poetic
worth. These spectres are the manifold spell and true essence of
objects,--like the magic that would inevitably encircle a mirror from
the hand of Helen of Troy.

Just as the colors of the rainbow recombine into a white light,--just
as the reflex of the eye's picture vividly haunts sleep,--just as
the ghosts which surround reality are the vital part of that
existence,--so may the Spectric vision, if successful, synthesize,
prolong, and at the same time multiply the emotional images of
the reader. The rays which the poet has dissociated into colorful
beauty should recombine in the reader's brain into a new intensity
of unified brilliance. The reflex of the poet's sight should sustain
the original perception with a haunting keenness. The insubstantiality
of the poet's spectres should touch with a tremulous vibrancy of
ultimate fact the reader's sense of the immediate theme.

If the Spectrist wishes to describe a landscape, he will not
attempt a map, but will put down those winged emotions, those
fantastic analogies, which the real scene awakens in his own mind.
In practice this will be found to be the vividest of all modes of
communication, as the touch of hands quickens a mere exchange of names.

It may be noted that to Spectra, to these reflected experiences of
life, as we perceive them, adheres often a tinge of humor. Occidental
art, in contrast to art in the Orient, has until lately been afraid
of the flash of humor in its serious works. But a growing acquaintance
with Chinese painting is surely liberating in our poets and painters
a happy sense of the disproportion of man to his assumed place in
the universe, a sense of the tortuous grotesque vanity of the
individual. By this weapon, man helps defend his intuition of the
Absolute and of his own obscure but real relation to it.

The Spectric method is as yet in its infancy; and the poems that
follow are only experimental efforts toward the desired end. Among
them, the most obvious illustrations of the method are perhaps _Opus
41_ by Emanuel Morgan and _Opus 76_ by Anne Knish.

Emanuel Morgan, with