Spirit of the Storm

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Excerpt from Spirit of the Storm: And Other Poems Poets are traditionally supposed (by red-blooded people) to be continually bemoaning their unhappy fate. The truth is that red-blooded people indulge in their feverish and largely meaningless activities, in order not to have any time to contemplate their own unhappy fate - the realization of which would be unendurable. The poet is braver, he can face the truth about his fate. And he has that courage precisely because he can see himself, from high above and from far off, as one of many. So that when he speaks for himself he is - in the degree of his perception - speaking for others. It is for this reason that when we can not write poetry we read it. We find ourselves, in our most secret moods, mirrored in another '8 poems. The poet reveals our hiddenmost hopes and fears to us. And conversely, those who read poetry are those who are debarred only by some technical limitation from Writing it. They are potential poets. Hence the poet has always in a sense, fellow-poets for an audience. And he pleases them to the degree in which he utters for them their unwritten poems. The Here and Now in which mankind is imprisoned has never, it would seem, been more irksome to the im patient soul than since the introduction Oi machinery. It seems that we can bear almost anything better than our nineteenth and twentieth century servitude to the machine. Poets, no matter how' gloomy a view of human fate they took, used to find many things to be incidentally enthusiastic about - such as ¿owers, and stars, and beauti ful women. But the ¿owers are being pushed further and further out of sight by the huge extensions of city brick and mortar, the stars are more and more hidden from our gaze by factory smoke, and beautiful women no longer seen as the consolations of a dreary life, but rather as fellow-victims, are quite as likely to evoke pity as admiration. Thus poetry becomes less and less calcu lated to give immediate cheer, even in its more ostensibly gay moods, it has an undertone of mocking irony. But it has a deeper comfort, which all those who have suffered, and are not afraid to remember it, must ever be grate ful for. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.