-4-

counting. But the greatest genius of our day is a Jew. He has invented a different counting. It would be a stupid insult to Einstein to write him a sonnet. Or, if he couldn't see that, then he isn't as enlightened as I believe. We do not live in a sonnet world; we do not live even in an iambic world; certainly we do not live in a world of iambic pentameters. Don't try to tell me what I mean. I mean that such things are out of place for us to-day, and, if we haven't the wit to see it quite apart from discovering the inventiveness we should possess to go beyond that, then let us be the shallow artists our work for the most part shows us to be.

But again an objection: everything of past artistic forms shows such forms to have been related to an anthropomorphic myth in which we gravely believed. Today we have little more of that. Perhaps poetry is dead for us forever. I object.

Today a far more comprehensive myth has absorbed our beliefs — Science.
But when I say science is a myth I disturb the good man and the scientist
equally. But we have moved from the position of having our gods on the
mountain in our back yards to the acceptance of the probability of the very
non-existence of matter as such . . . shall our poetic forms not show it?

Science is the same myth in which we believed in the past — but transformed — as in the past the manipulators of the Catholic world, astute as always, those who were able to take from the Moslem his beads and make them into a Christian symbol, have switched from opposition to science to an espousal of it. They have made a virtue of their necessity. Seeing the old superseded, or likely to be superceded, unless buttressed — as the walls of their cathedrals were buttressed lest they collapsed from lack of the necessary support from outside — so science with all its laboratories has

-5-

been taken over -- an interesting detail.

From this myth of science we look for all good; at least we do not look for such good without it. It is our Sacred Cow, and we dread it like the devil for what it may do. Were there any doubt as to its divinity for us all, what we should have to do would be, to appraise all that the scientific attitude implies. Who today can read Darwin's defense at the hands of Huxley before the clerics without incredulity; even without tears approaching laughter? It is science whose devotees profess absolute honesty; devotees who give their minds to unwavering sacredness of rule; devotees who have respect for the materials to the point of complete devotion. Anthropomorphic Myth? How do we not know that when we weigh and measure and divide, when we search among the materials and follow the lines and manners of force; how do we not know that when, through our senses (which is all we have to know from) in dealing with our materials, we are not laying our hands upon the very body of God. Why not?

If we wish to find again the seriousness of the Delphic Oracle and sense again the awe it inspired, if the devotion of the Crusaders, and the valor of Richard Cœur de Lion is to be known; if the Spanish mystics are to become again credible, and the very sainthood of the early martyrs to be realized, the magic of Papal Infallibility believed, where shall we look in our day?

We shall find it in all its pristine innocence, in all the glory of its devotional appeal, but especially in the seriousness and vigor of its original character, in only one place in our modern world, the dais where science sits enthroned. This is no figure.

-6-

Could science be questioned our world would end. It is the inviolable.
It is the great unquestioned myth. It is all that remains unquestioned for us.

If you wish to resense Greek pageantry, read of the transit of the
great 200 inch telescopic mirror from the laboratory at Berkeley to Mt. Pal-
omar:

"The mirrow spent the night in the little town of Escondito.
At first the roadsides were empty, but as the news traveled,
crowds began to gather. At Irvine near Santa Ana a starminded
school principal lined up his pupils to watch the parade pass."

And then look at a press picture of a huge truck carrying the case containing
the mirror to its shrine at the summit of the mountain.

This is not ersatz. This is the culmination of years of sacred polishing
and measurement. This is the great ikon of our era (to be destroyed in
some later era), the worshipped image of the great and true god of our day.
Before all this shall we count 14 and say, oom pah! thinking it a grave
matter?

To this myth, this simulacrum we bow: we accede to its demands and serve
it faithfully. The ritual of the laboratory as of the dissecting room is
sacred, and if its practical facet is the chief appeal to many, we find it
something too serious to question. The same for the ritual of asepsis in the
operating room, everything depends on it.

To return to the form of the poem: Look for a moment at the poems of
Rainer Maria Rilke for instance. Is not their outstanding character that they
were written in German (you can see the whole 3rd Reich delimited there)?
While the difficulty in bringing them over into English (when often they
sound so flat) arises in that too often they turn out for us to be nothing
more than sonnets — a crippling defect.

-8-

eliminate the idea of formality from verse (or from any of the arts)? If formality is to be banned, how will verse, painting, sculpture, music, etc. differ from raw, psychoanalytic emesis of experience.

If you mean that we must invent new forms congruous with our times, we think the reader would like to hear of this a little more specifically: i.e., something of the nature of these forms, exactly how they would harmonize with our age, and, perhaps a cursory examination of some of the poets already inventing such forms.

Wha'd a yuh know!

But to reply, briefly, though I feel no obligation to explain anything to the uninitiated — a few additional words might not be time lost. In the first place for the writer (the artist) "poetry" has no meaning. For the poet nothing exists but poems — I don't intend to go further into that. Or let me add, since it is both timely and important, none of the arts is a province of philosophy.

Secondly, of what else are we speaking here but form (that is to say, forms, specific forms, poems, things, works made by someone — something you can sense not generalize about. Or if you do begin to generalize about them you have jumped outside the context into any adjacent and irrelevant field). Of course, the specific form of the poem is important. Who said or implied anything about eliminating the idea of formality from verse? It is precisely to get rid of empty formality (or ritual) and to get to a formality that is comprehensive enough to embody the comparative complexity with reference to the past, of which I am speaking. This is nothing to talk about, it is a practical exercise to be mastered by the man who wants to make a work of art and has his colander of words before him.