PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

Let Us Order Our World:

The defenders of tradition among accepted establishments have long been barking up the wrong tree, the quarry generally lies elsewhere. That much is trite enough to the alert. But that tradition is indeed the quarry though of an exclusive nature and slippery disposition is not quite so evident. It is marvellous to see a formal array advancing full livery to the chase! What, in God's name does the chase seem to amount to before that splendor ? The academy, the established government, the church. The country folk gape along the roadsides bespeaking more often adenoids than brains. But the hard thing to grasp is that the kernel of the situation is still tradition even when stupidly indited. Order is still the necessity even though not to be attained by pontifically brutalizing the understanding. The quarry is the same even when it has transmuted itself not so much beyond the reach as beyond the recognition of the classical mind.

He who will write the first ranking verse of his day will be he who expands the tradition to a point sufficient to bear the heaviest strains put upon it by the demands of the day, without breaking down. That is, not only the style but the structural devices employed must be adequate to the strain they are expected to bear. New devices are necessary, you cannot fly through the clouds in a coach and four though the purpose remains the same, to arrive safely at the end of a journey; partly so, for there are today reaches of the understanding that# unattainable except to the imagination of former times.

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Thus the complexity of modern thought goes on increasing,
involving a complete change of base, often, when compared with
former concepts. And whereas all solutions are alike in beauty and
simplicity when attained, the means to attain them will today involve
enormous excursions of inventive skill before the answers can be
brought home whereas a formerly a turkey might be brought home from
almost any patch of woods. Sometimes a man is flying upside down
without knowing it and may still be advancing. Order is still there
but you'd hardly recognize it for what it was formerly. Enterprises
of the imagination must be made retroactive upon old rules which
unless they permit limitless expansion cannot but be adjudged trivial
or false. By release we confirm, by restraint we destroy.

So let it be restated that all efforts of the verse makers
shall be accepted only as they relate to the tradition: the expanded,
liberated, unrestrained tradition of verse. No matter wht the origin,
how found or by whom invented - it is the new resource, as it fits
into or upon the old making of verse, is that which will be prized.
Were it not so, criticism could not exist - which, after all, would
not be so important; more important, the keenness of our enjoyment
would be dulled by extraction of its richest pleasures, of memory.
The priests must be there but they must be beaten down when they are
dull. Tradition demands it.

It is the imagination which permits us to anticipate these
demands. If that is defeated, the whole man is defeated and the work
of art along with him.

The imagination is recognizable at the peak of all profess-

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ions but in the arts it exists at its purest and in poetry at its
most articulate and impassioned. A poetry of the first brilliance,
unless lost through the accidents of history, is the inevitable
mark of an age of first moment. Imagination being the prime instigator
and perhaps the prime reality of an age its very claim to greatness
seems to rest on that. The entire apparatus of an era is little more
than a sconce to its poetry, everything else of an age is secondary
to that in its imaginative flowering.

The responsibility that rests upon tradition, then, is to
find new for its verse the versatility and the scope necessary to
express the pith of the age in which it is existing. That is the
measure of that age itself, to find such a means. Without cramming
or deformity, without covert amputations or maiming restrictions,
that the new may fit upon the old staff.

I am often led to wonder at the persistence of interest
bred no doubt by fear that continues in poetry on the part of the
less drilled members of the community. This wonder they seem to feel,
has the validity, if I observe it correctly, of a universal recogni-
tion. It is a very wide-spread instinct that though it is somewhat
defensive, springs up astonishingly to affirmation, a valuable
indicator at times if correctly interpreted, of what is going on.
You have to know the meaning of the reactions. Why should they bother
with what a madman writes? Could anything be more immaterial than
so many words, arranged to avoid plain sense, dealing with nothing,
quite obviously, of immediate significance in a given age? Nothing
that could not be better said, they must think, in plain, declarative

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sentences? They have a feeling he is trying to touch their bare guts. You have to make it good when you do that. It is a fifth wheel, a pure superfluity. Yet, they are noticeably disturbed - to the point of merder, even, at times. This is merely to state a quality, a crude recognition. The thing is charged ( if it is charged!) with the imagination, a power comparable to card tricks and horoscopes. We are speaking of the mind, as a weathervane, bespeaking the at its full. That is why the wrestling of minds among writers takes on the dignity and violence we sometimes see. Who is to survive? What name? - as if that mattered. But that which wins survival matters. The disturbance it registers on its contemporaries is the blunt recording. That's the first sign of the imaginative edge. Most cannot read.

The disease of the imagination most flagrant is dry rot. It exists in established orders only, such as take upon themselves the perpetuation of tradition as their special obligation, taking upon themselves at the same time what honors may exist because of this. And the cash, if any, that may attach itself thereto - if they can get it away from their competitors. These are the graveyards of the imagination where it is too often buried. These are the ones that get the tipoff before the crash, if it can be arranged. But such establishments and the men they attract to themselves are the sinks of the tradition they pretend to celebrate, be their manners or their taste what it may.

Such establishments and such men want to write the history books in their own biased manner, today as always. They need watching

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or they may do so again as usual. They are laying pipe now. They must be prevented now where they are hidden under the bewildermments of war from getting too firm a hold on the academic means. They are up to old tricks and it isn't easy to dislodge them. To attack them effectively we have to keep rehearsing our counter-parts. To a man bent upon playing his imagination as a poet to the full today, the world is a world in flux touching the traditions of verse as of many other things. The war is everywhere, not only among the military and its participants are taking the same sides as the armies in the field, each in his relative sphere, to establish the character of an identity : the tradition.

Among the reaches of poetry, extraordinarily important, as in war, the same sort of enterprise is called for - when it is possible to write at all. The work runs parallel, there's no difference here. No man need be ashamed to write, on the contrary he should be ashamed if he do not write when there is dry rot to blast out, the oive imagination to put in its place wherever possible, reestablishing the tradition of his art. The Church of England is caught in the throes of such a struggle. War cannot replace poetry any more than piety can replace crude physical courage and skill of the imagination in whatever form. But these men, crushing to the mind and the heart as it will be, our friends, are literally no more than granules of the imagination to the leaders or reputed leaders who govern them. So among the movements of words the imagination is the master and terrible as it must be the words will prove more durable than the men.

We badly need generals ( and supplies! ) generals with

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imagination - trained, let me add, to take new liberties with the
traditions of arms. But primarily men of imagination. So, in arms,
it happens when the imagination is lacking that men of another
profession, perfect jackasses in the military skills but with the
imagination keenly alert, a newspaperman, will tell the military
plainly to their faces of their assinine lapses - leaving rows of
planes exposed to enemy fire in an open field. And the generals,
we know now, without that requisite quality of the mind to differen-
tiate between tradition, supine, and tradition, poised to leap,
remained perfect lumps. Other illustrations could be adduced, even
among the most expert. In the old days kings often kept hunchbacks
and seml-idiot about them, provided they had that requisite
quality of the imagination about them that means movement; giving
them the privilege to speak their minds - did I say minds? at all #
times; to interrupt, to deal insults, even, on occasion, touching
the royal person - provided only that they used their imaginations,
of advice, to save dry rot; to awaken, to cleanse, to set the mind
upright on its way.

The mind does not stay in academies except by accident.
Men in established ###### positions are constantly threatened
by a certain blindness because of the establishment. It's the
psychology of the basket that holds the eggs. A rigidity is required.
They seem to need reminders from without of their stasis. But it is
hard for them to acknowledge this and harder still for them to
accept it. But this influx of the imagination should be welcomed
and fostered as courts in other days fostered the fools. Poets,
fools. There is a clear justice in this association. We ### need
blunt commandments of

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blunt reminders of our lapses and a sharp breaking away at times,
such as only a fool can give, from the rigidities of precedent. A
poet might well ( if he is up to his times ) be made a part of any
board of strategy ( and this should bring up the correct definition
of a poet , a man of structural imagination ) The danger would be
that he might not be able to keep clear but would succumb to the
fixations of the group. But could he keep his imagination free his
seevices might be invaluable.

The perpetual error in all establishments is old age. Old
age as it ribs out the imagination. Only madness sometimes seems
able to restore it to plasticity. The thing is, and it is an
inescapable defect in all establishments, that it takes time to read
the five hundred books necessary to be thoroughly informed - in
anything. You can't read fifty important books a year and know what's
in them, taking books through the ages; you can't do it and eat,
to say nothing of sleeping - beginning at seventeen, to be reasonably
erudite by the time you're twenty seven. And what's five hundred
books as thw eorld goes? It can't be done. It can be done, to be
sure, but not without injury to the mind - if no other injury than
retardation of the initiative in a world outside of books.

The result is that men are too old before they are wise.
Or if born wise then too uninformed to make their words count. There
results too many who end up in an alove or stand in one to preach.
Are they afraid something might bite them in the ass? Reading has
its great uses, of course, and we do, at times, find a mind that
ripenes magnificently that way provided, first or last, that it has
related itself to the world outside. But such minds are of the

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rarest, seldom of primary importance and frequently of no more than
a value as stiffening, a certain staunchness at most, not suited
to a change of tastes, to go in among the trees and battle those
who live there on their own terms. The imagination, whose home is
youth, is seldom ground away; youth is suppressed and with youth the
attributes of youth. We live the lives of sluggards, more accurately,
scholars without the healing of humility, offensively absent in
nearly all. They get to resemble that Byzantine lion, his back
broken by the hunters, who drags his dead hindquarters after him as
his head and forequarter seek to advance. The effects of these
things keep us in a school whose chief business seems to be to beat
us back UNLESS we are willing to ape the leaders and conform. The
church is an unspeakable offender. But what? And the making of
verses gets into hands, to be mild, that have done nothing to soil
them, offensively courteous.

They can be made out already riding their fiery establish-
ments through the war haze, already manoeuvering for the peace and
how they will torture it if given the chance.

The imagination needs disciplining. Granted. It must above
all be trained to apply to the business in hand If it is the making
of verses then it must mould that - it cannot drag in military
strategy as such and not publish its ineptitude. It cannot itself #
think psychotherapy. It may take off from anything it pleases but
in the application it must stay on the making of verses in the terms
of the tradition. This cannot be too often stressed. But it does
not, the imagination does not have to stay within the confines
of the tradition as it has been formerly

of the tradition as it has been formerly. The terms, yes, but their
former alignment, no! Never! Expanded, reimagined - or we shall come
to the dessert.

That's where we stand today, a body of scholars or would-be scholars, who are seeking to keep the traditions of verse whole, with laudable intention - using what is known as culture as their chief weapon. Against that a world of the imagination, borrowing from a world in flux, not untrained writers, who have the tradition equally at heart as it rises inform in flux, as the world is, confident of it, rely on it to release them to fulfillment. I speak as one of these. Niggardly, complacent hands never gave great verses the largess upon which it has thriven in its best days. Are they afraid to will break? The great fear of establishments is that they will break, of the imagination that there will be no break. We rely upon it confidently, with ease of heart, a magnificent bounty that cannot be exhausted. You can walk freely through it, build in it and it will never be filled and lost.

I speak for the tradition, the tradition of the great innovators. The imagination is and has always been the life of the great saving movements of men. Today while the war is going on you can make out, well on its way, a covert digging among certain writers - as among other classes of men, those attached to establishments, trying to manoeuvre themselves into a position of advantage so that when the peace shall have been won they will be ready to keep their establishments unaltered by anything that has taken place, and their own places. It is a dangerous thing and I want now, before too late,

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to point it out and call upon the alert to combat it.

I shall not name names because to the thoughtful names
will suggest themselves. I leave it to the imagination. I want to
point out what is going on and to warn against the thing. As far as
th men are concerned, we are enemies. They know it and I know it.
What they are trying to do is to hang on to certain traditional points
of vantage and to establish themselves there to weather out the war
for futur advances. They want to save the the establishments of
literature. Nothice how blandly it sets itself forth. Why should
not all the institutions of learning accord them honors? But the
effects are , if they succeed, to be devastating.

Imagine! if this war is to be fought out and we are to
learn nothing from it but to return to the defects of those establish-
ments of yesterday, which forced it on by their failures, which the
war has shown to be #**# calamities - and yet we are to learn
nothing? Judt as there are those senators in all countries who are
more #**# interested in saving their positions and their tarts
in the world, their fortunes and their privileges than they are in
imaginatively conceiving the war as a great volcano of nascent and
unaligned values to be recombined in a better, more humane, more
politically satisfactory order than ever before in the history of the
world. If this **not** the good that may come out of the war, then what
of good can come out of anything? For good must be brought out of #
every convulsion of the world if we are men of imagination - by which
we live.

Just so the so called scholars, the careful fixers, are

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arranging for themselves a world of tomorrow after the peace in which
they shall rule by the same rigidities of tradition which they had
established in the past and where, mollusk-like, they clung to and
offended us to the denial of all that we perfected.

It is a variable crew. Some come from one place, some from
another but they all have one characteristic: they wish to use
America now for their purposes just as the church finds in America
its pabulum - regardless of the character of the mass itself, the
thing they encounter and upon which they work, whose new character,
whose back stroke upon them is denied and avoided. They do not want
to acknowledge the imaginative force which would modify them, in their
tradition, and give the field its new dignity. They do not want to
be modified by us - by the thing on which they would work. They want
to tell us what to do, they do not want to marry, they want to
eat. They want to suck it dry and themselves remain the same - like
white children sucked by Black Mammies.

It is the history of America. But the thing to notice is
that it is also the history of the imagination. We have those among
us who lend themselves to that attack, blindly, not intentionally
# slavish, but to a hazardous degree. There is a whole class
of them, mostly college men, if not all, and that is their offense
that they allow themselves to be taken without seeking to attack in
their turn, to plunge their imaginations into the body of old
establishments to break them into more effective, responsive agents,

And not to attack lightly! No piddling, "Yes, fathers" and
why don't you think of this and that? Our attack must be in force,

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with every new weapon and utmost violence. I am not speaking of
soldiery.

It is to cleanse the tradition that we attack or should
attack, to wipe out its anachronisms and to command respect and
attention. Not only for ourselves but for the tradition, for the re-
newing of the establishment. I am tired of the term "revolution". It
means merely to turn. Revolution means nothing. The tradition means
everything. But not to be a maimed practice. It gets to be no more
than taboo and mere size, mere stone, mere "order".

Order has meant to often no more than to maim. It means
just that today in most mouths. But America, the thing we feel and
live and eat by, the generous host, the welcoming continent is to
the establishments #{} and its prewns just so much
careass. They, the men who were mothered by it, run from it and spit
on it from some sort of masochistic lust for satisfaction which I
cannot understand. Without it we are expressionless, it is our
bodies, our language which we will give! About which we gather.

The imagination wherever it is flagrant must be our guide.
How many things could be said in particular! The fragrance of the
betrayal, their insolence and their success is the picture of # a
world which it should be the effort of every thinking man to sear
into his brain so he may never forget it - tomorrow. Make new. That
is why I praise the surrealists, I praise them because they are the
pillars of the establishment. In the major sense. Extraordinary as
it may seem I praise them because they are lovers of the imagination,
upon conservative grounds. And I praise them because they have some

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to America as to a new country and are willing to take us, ourselves
for what we may imitate. To discover in us. Not to make us something
even
they were yesterday or may be tomorrow - but to discover in us what
the imagination proposes.

I am disgusted with foreigners for the most part who come
here and ## keep their children from corruption by our dialect and
contact with our exhuberance and vulgarity - while selling us their
goods. They do belong with our scholars. They will not permit
themselves to be modified by us - we shall all be modified by our
victories or lack of them in the field. Not by them but because of
them - new combinations in that furnace : It goes all through the
categories of life so that chemistry and poetry are allied. The
electric furnace becomes ## ## ## the parallel for the fusing force
of the mind - more than all learning.

So, the surrealists mean to me release! release for the
forces that are truly in me. That are me. They recognize that I am
me, not they. They may not learn anything from me but they ##
courteously or practically or imaginatively realize that I am I and
that I am not they.

I salute the traditional Surrealistes, the only active arm
of the great European tradition, who carry on among us for a brief
moment the unpredictable fusions of the imagination to the hopeful
future of the world - that we do not expect to live forever will #
make us no less sanguine : eternity leaps into the minute and life
is by that the more quickened.