For the Modernists the worst thing was sentimentality
Which Yeats defined as The will doing the work of the imagination
But as his championing of imagination shows
Yeats was a transitional figure
Who had modernized himself Pound said
And yet who retained apparently a high regard
For spontaneous overflow from the anima mundi
And yet they were virtuosic technicians
Those Romantics the early and the late
Whose visions from the depths were ne’er so well expressed

So somebody tell me not what poetry is
Much less what might make it excellent
And dear critic feel free to say that this isn’t it
But tell me how poetry happens
And to be candid for a change
How one might make it happen
With hubris aforethought
For Yeats speaks of the frustration
Attendant upon having for a long time sought a theme
Thereby implying an application of will
And not simply the capture of the vast capricious image

And I keep trying to reach the fundamental claim
And I read once that the Augustans produced
A poetry of statement just as inimical to Modernist taste
As was the gushing of the world-organic fountain
And I feel the age-old dread arise in me again
Its youthful formulation I will fail to achieve
And in old age I have failed
And again the lapse into the confessional
And the fundamental claim that I have erred

And I am paralyzingly aware that I lack the gift for image
And the Modernists commanded
Skip the Romantics skip the Neo-classicals
Go back the the Metaphysicals with their antic conceits
Their compass legs altar stones and pregnant fleas
But if it’s images you seek go to the Inferno
You might as well abandon hope
And luxuriate in the appalling spectacle
The gnawing on a bloody skull
And punishment for the sin of being born too soon
Never enough that the good should prosper
But the wicked must be made to suffer
And those without hope live on in desire

And I confess that for me
It was always a matter of verbal formulations
And never the glory of the image
The golden hand the solemn monument
But DK nobody cares about you and your guilty defects
Nevertheless From silver spouts the grateful liquors glide
And yes there’s an image a trivial one
A stream of coffee
But what of grateful
Surely a misprint for graceful
Unless the feeling of the coffee-drinkers’ expectant gratitude
Has been transferred to the trivial stream
That descends into the cup as upon a continent
In a gush of verbal magic

And so too the unravished bride of quietness
And spots of time with their distinct preeminence
And even instruct me for Thou knowest
And I am not what I am
And I confess that naming a feeling does not express it
As images can sometimes do
Not only Dante’s vengeance nor Eliot’s self-importance
But also the fair love’s ripening breast
A tactile image of exquisite precision
And in elegiac splendor
The white and bristly beard of the harvested sheaf

And why is feeling so important
No doubt just because it is
A world without grief or love
A world without certainty or commitment
And what we feel we want to be made known
That I love my beloved
I grieve for my late father
And already for my mother who sustains
The grievous onslaughts of age

And with the feeling the expression comes again
That I an antlered layabout
Have merited suffering
The more so for having exaggerated the distress
When so many others have suffered far greater pain
And that I a spindle-legged preacher
Make an exception for myself when the truth is nobody
Absolutely nobody deserves to suffer
And that I a hornèd viper
Have given pain to others and to myself
Is this the thought that gives rise to the anxiety
Have I struck a devil’s bargain
Expression in return for dread