IT is as foolish to sneer at the Very Wild Men as it is to assume that the Very Tame Men are all right because they are “in the tradition.” The Very Wild Men are at any rate likely to have done work which has explored the desert boundaries of the art they profess, and the Very Tame Men have never done anything worth doing at all. The only excusable quarrel is with the pretended Wild Men who persist in identically repeating the experiments in which their masters have already failed, and with those whose Very Wilderness is traceable to this—that they are satisfied with the original spontaneity of their work and do not trouble to test it in the light of what it will convey to others, whom they then blame for want of appreciation. What seems to be the matter with Blake’s Prophetic Books is just this, he connected his images by a system of free association the clue to which was lost by his death: for instance his enemy, Schofield, a soldier who informed against him, suddenly enters “Jerusalem” and its strange company of abstractions, in the guise of a universal devil “Skofeld.”

Suppose that one Hodge, a labourer, attempted in a fit of homicidal mania to split my skull with a spade, but that my faithful bloodhound sprang to the rescue and Hodge barely escaped with his life. In my imagination, Hodge’s spade might well come to symbolize murder and madness, while the bloodhound became an emblem of loyal assistance in the hour of discomfiture. With this experience in my mind I might be inclined to eulogize a national hero as

and convey a meaning directly contrary to the one intended and having an apparent reference to agrarian unrest. But conscious reflection would put my image into line with a more widely favoured conception of Man the Attacker, and Dog the Rescuer; I would rewrite the eulogy as

One of the chief problems of the art of poetry is to decide what are the essentials of the image that has formed in your mind; the accidental has to be eliminated and replaced by the essential. There is the double danger of mistaking a significant feature of the image for an accident and of giving an accident more prominence than it deserves.

Too much modern country-side poetry is mere verbal photography, admirably accurate and full of observation but not excited by memories of human relationships, the emotional bias which could make Bunyan see the bee as an emblem of sin, and Blake the lion’s loving-kindness.

Now, if Wordsworth had followed the poetical fashion of the day and told the world that when wandering lonely as a cloud he had seen a number of vernal flowers, the poem would have fallen pretty flat—if however, anticipating the present century he had quoted the order, the species and the subspecies and remarked on having found among the rest no fewer than five double blooms, we would almost have wished the vernal flowers back again.

Mr. Edmund Blunden lately called my attention to a message from Keats to John Clare sent through their common publisher, Taylor. Keats thought that Clare’s “Images from Nature” were “too much introduced without being called for by a particular sentiment.” Clare, in reply, is troubled that Keats shows the usual inaccuracies of the townsman when treating of nature, and that when in doubt he borrows from the Classics and is too inclined to see “behind every bush a thrumming Apollo.”