AMONG the most usual heresies held about poetry is the idea that the first importance of the poet is his “message”; this idea probably originated with the decline of polite sermon-writing, when the poet was expected to take on the double duty; but it is quite untenable. The poet is only concerned with reconciling certain impressions of life as they occur to him, and presenting them in the most effective way possible, without reference to their educational value. The cumulative effect of his work is to suggest a great number of personal obsessions the sum of which compose if you like his “message,” but the more definitely propagandist the poet, the less of a poet is the propagandist.

With this is bound up a heresy of about the same standing that poetry should only be concerned with presenting what is beautiful, beautiful in the limited sense of the picture-postcard. This romantic obsession (using the word “romantic” in the sense of optimistic loose thinking) is as absurd as that of the blood-and-guts realists. Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bitter-sweet mixture for all possible household emergencies, and its action varies according as it is taken in a wineglass or tablespoon, inhaled, gargled, or rubbed on the chest (like the literary Epic) by hard fingers covered with rings.