hen he tries to single out one element or the
other as his most distinctive quality of soul. Yet, were it not unsafe
to generalize when our data apply to only one country, we should venture
the assertion that the dualism of the poet's desires is not an insular
characteristic, but is typical of his race in every country.

Because the poet is drawn equally to this world and to the other world,
shall we characterize him as a hybrid creature, and assert that an
irreconcilable discord is in his soul? We shall prove ourselves
singularly deaf to concord if we do so. Poets have been telling us over
and over again that the distinctive element in the poetic nature is
harmony. What is harmony? It is the reconciliation of opposites, says
Eurymachus in the _Symposium_. It is union of the finite and the
infinite, says Socrates in the _Philebus_. Do the poet's desires
point in opposite directions? But so, it seems, do the poplars that
stand tiptoe, breathless, at the edge of the dreaming pool. The whole
secret of the aesthetic repose lies in the duality of the poet's desire.
His imagination enables him to see all life as two in one, or one in
two; he leaves us uncertain which. His imagination reflects the
spiritual in the sensual and the sensual in the spiritual till we cannot
tell which is the more tangible or the more meaningful. We sought unity
in the poetic character, but we can reduce a nature to complete and
barren unity only by draining it of imagination, and it is imagination
which enables the poet to find aesthetic unity in the two worlds of
sense and spirit, where the rest of us can see only conflict. There is a
little poem, by Walter Conrad Arensberg, which is to me a symbol of this
power of reflection which distinguishes the poetic imagination. It is
called _Voyage a L'Infine_:

The swan existing
Is like a song with an accompaniment
Imaginary.

Across the grassy lake,
Across the lake to the shadow of the willows
It is accompanied by an image,
--as by Debussy's
"Reflets dans l'eau."

The swan that is
Reflects
Upon the solitary water--breast to breast
With the duplicity:
"The other one!"

And breast to breast it is confused.
O visionary wedding! O stateliness of the procession!
It is accompanied by the image of itself
Alone.

At night
The lake is a wide silence,
Without imagination.

But why should poets assume, someone may object, that this mystic
answering of sense