light, the one light that contains all the others, for though music is called the purist art – its relation to the spoken word being ignored – poetry is the thickest art, and thus the representation of artifice alltogether: it is musical, it paints a picture in the imagination, it sculpts an image through line breaks, and unlike music, it is logical, metaphorical, and a form of philosophy. As philosophy is the prototype of all the sciences of learning, poetry is the prototype not only of all the arts, but as well the prototype of philosophy itself, in its most sublime form, the sensual – indeed, all form is at last sensual.
Truth is not beauty, but truth does well to become beauty or it will hardly be received. Like a great “A,” the two start from different places, but meet for marriage in the heavens.
The artist does not create the work of art, he creates through the work of art, he makes heroes of men, and feeds the minds of philosophers and saints. Who would even know to be a Saint if some poet did not invent a scripture? What hero would know the honorable if some poet did not amber the honor in a noble verse? Therefore, the poet of all men stands for high culture, and the greatest creations a culture are its arts, and of arts, its books, and of books, its poems. All the rest resolves from this glorious tension.
Nature is mirror to the self. But the common man does not see this, and therefore, the poet must create the mirror obvious through the lens of the art work. Men contemplate art works in a museum only in order to contemplate the rest of the world through that lens ever after. Just as a worker does his vacation right when he learns by it how to make his life a permanent vacation, even when