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POETRY: A Magazine of Verse
widen and enrich it, and his craftsmanship narrow it to the bare structure of the essential words.

For each poem is an experience for the poet and in proportion to the experience it gives us it is successful as a poem. Words in a poem are set into a pattern of beat and color to make us feel. A poem does not tell us somethings or explain or elucidate, not at least in the way that other groups of words do. A poem presents experience in the ordered sequence of art. From it we may learn and understand. But our learning and understanding is small business of the poet's

Yet to say that our learning and understanding is none of his business does not relegate poetry to the place of a revealed religion or set it apart into that intellectual borderland of the surrealist arts. Neither does it group poetry with the sensuous arts of painting or music. There is something slightly unhealthy in the art which steps over into the province of another. A poem is never "pure music," a landscape is not "a poem." Poetry is a communication in words. It remains what Emily Dickinson called her "letter to the world," no less a true communication because it is almost always to a part of the world "that never wrote to me."

Since his poem is a communication, what the poet has to convey is important. More important is what he is. For he communicates, not his ideas on this and that, but himself. And though he be a writer of many brief lyrics the poet is busy all his life writing this one poem. Therefore his social conceptions, his learning and sensitivity are important. He lives more, not less than the next man, and as Rilke says, "Each poem is made up background by the whole sum of his life, no less."

The wider his range of experience, his knowledge of external

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