onsider. One thinks of Rudyard Kipling in
this connection. Mr. Kipling stands above all other men of letters
to-day in the brave clearness with which he has made it plain that
he consorts first of all with his own imagination.

As the poet sees the world, and studies, the more he realizes that
men are sharply cut in two classes: those who understand, those who
do not. With the latter he speaks a foreign language and with
effort, trying shamefacedly to conceal his strangeness. With these,
perhaps, every moment spent is for ever lost. With the others he can
never commune enough, seeking clumsily to share and impart those
moments of rare intuition when truth came near. There is rarely any
doubt as to this human division: the heart knows its kin.

The world, as he sees it around him, is almost unconscious of its
unspeakable loveliness and mystery; and it is largely regimented and
organized for absurdity. The greater part of the movement he sees is
(by his standard) not merely stupid (which is pardonable and
appealing), but meaningless altogether. He views it between anger
and tenderness. Where there might have been the exquisite and
delicious simplicity of a Japanese print, he sees the flicker and
cruel garishness of a speeding film. And so, for refreshment, he
crosses through the invisible doorway into his own dear land of
lucidity. He cons over that passport of his unsociability, words of
J.B. Yeats which should be unforgotten in every poet's mind:

Poetry is the voice of the solitary man. The poet is always a
solitary; and yet he speaks to others--he would win their
attention. Thus it follows that every poem is a social act done
by a solitary man. And being an alien from the strange land of
the solitary, he cannot be expected to admonish or to
sermonize, or uplift, as it is called; and so take part in the
cabals and intrigues in other lands of which he knows nothing,
being himself a stranger from a strange land, the land of the
solitary. People listen to him as they would to any other
traveller come from distant countries, and all he asks for is
courtesy even as he himself is courteous.

Inferior poets are those who forget their dignity--and, indeed,
their only chance of being permitted to live--and to make
friends try to enter into the lives of the people whom they
would propitiate, and so become teachers and moralists and
preachers. An