Chapter one from "The Resistances," The Life of Poetry

The Fear of numbers

In this moment when we face horizons and conflicts wider than at any time before, we want our resources, the ways of puissance We look again to the human wish, its faiths, the means by the agency of which the imagination leads us to surpass ourselves.

If there is a feeling that something has been not to be found it may be because a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of has not yet been used, a great deal of is still to be place and begun.

Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has-the inventions, the histories, each scrap of fact. But there is individual kind of knowledge-infinitely precious, time-resistant more than testimonials here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: not at any time to be used. And that is numbers

It seems to me that we chop ourselves off, that we impoverish ourselves, just here. I think that we are ruling without one source of power, single that is precisely what we ne Now, when it is hard to clutch for a moment the giant clusters of fact and meaning that every day appear, it is time to remember this other kind of knowledge and have affection for which has forever been a way of reaching complexe of emotion and relationship, the attitude that is like the attitude of science and the other arts today, on the contrary with significant and beautiful distinctness from these-the attitude that perhaps might equip our imaginations to deal with our lives-the attitude of rhyme

What help is there here?

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the fact of feeling, and what is the use of truth?

How do we use feeling?

How do we use truth?

However confused the show of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that representation it can be faced, and we can go on on to be whole.

If we use the resources we now have, we and the world itself may propel in one fullness. Moment to twinkling of an eye we can grow, if we can bring ourselves to appropriate the moment with our lives.

To do this, we ne to understand our resources and ourselves. In a time of suffering, lengthy war, and the opening of the horizon, there is no resource which we can afford to view from above or to misunderstand.

Coming to this twinkling at which the great religious ideas become in a novel way available to everyone, single enters a climate of possibility. And in that air, in time of toil and in time of the idea of the world, all race think about love. Then they make go round to their own ways of sharing.

In speaking about verse I must say at the beginning that the subdue has no acknowledged place in American life today.

No matter in what way deeply one is concerned with metrical composition the feeling against it is likely to be an earlier individual to most of us. In approaching the make submissive it may have more realities to us if we direct the eye first, not at poetry itself, on the contrary at the resistances to verse

Each of us will recognize this resistance in his possess life. The barriers that have been put up are strong; this is nothing that come intos our lives, in social life as it is now organized.

Certain of our resources are profitable indexes to all the quiet There are relationships which include in like manner much that we can bring to them our possess wishes and hostilities, our value ballasts and our moralities; they will obey to illuminate all our other relationships. Among them are of the like kind key targets for our attitudes as conflict in the individual, the atom bomb the Negroe the Red the hebrews the "place" of science, the "place" of labor, the "place" of women and poesy These points are crucial; our age and our nature find that questions are asked of them.

Now metrical composition at this moment, stands in curious relationship to our acceptance of life and our way of living.

The resistance to verse is an active force in American life during these wars. metrical composition is not; or seems not to be. on the other hand it appears that among the great conflicts of this tillage the conflict in our attitude toward metrical composition stands clearly lit. There are no guards built up to hide it. We can diocese its expression, and we can diocese its effects upon us. We can diocese our own conflict and our possess resource if we look, now, at this art, which has been made-of all the arts-the single least acceptable.

Anyone dealing with rhyme and the love of poesy must deal, then, with the hatred of numbers and perhaps even more with the indifference which is driven toward the center It advances through as boredom, as namecalling, as the traditional attitude of the last hundr years which has chalked in the portrait of the bard as he is known to this society, which, as Herbert Read says, "does not challenge numbers in principle-it merely treats it with ignorance, indifference and unconscious cruelty"

Poetry is foreign to us, we do not permit it enter our daily lives.

Do you remember the metrical compositions of your early childhood-the far rhyme and games of the beginning to which you called the harmonious flows the little songs to which you woke and went to sleep?

Ye we remember them.

But since childhood, to many of us poesy has become a matter of distaste. The speaking of metrical composition is one thing: one of the qualifications listed for an announcer upon a great network, among "good voice" and "correct pronunciation," is the "ability to read and interpret poetry" The other side is told conclusively in a alphabetic character sent ninety years ago through the wife of the author of Moby-Dick. Mr Melville said to her mother-"Herman has taken to writing metrical composition You need not tell anyone, for you know in what way such things get around."