Time and Space... It is not nature which imposes them upon us, it is we who impose them upon nature because we find them convenient.
Does the harmony the human intelligence thinks it discovers in nature exist outside of this intelligence? No, beyond doubt, a reality completely independent of the mind which conceives it, sees or feels it, is an impossibility.
It is because simplicity and vastness are both beautiful that we seek by preference simple facts and vast facts; that we take delight, now in following the giant courses of the stars, now in scrutinizing the microscope that prodigious smallness which is also a vastness, and now in seeking in geological ages the traces of a past that attracts us because of its remoteness.
So whose reality is it? In dream or an induced halucination, the figurative frame of experience is taken as if it were literal, like it was mana for sympathetic magic or how some petrol can relate reality to napalm, the lit fuse or imaginative figment is required to even notice another's torment. Unless it's pulled a trigger, the literary idea of it is absurd: words never do justice. At best they uncover a sewer-hole or open a window-shade like a dropped jaw just prior to a bout with nausea or the wink and a grin reeking from a ghastly intruder. It's only the uncensored eyes and the nose who are first to take notice and it's read from a face, not a page. No act is believable if the ego's still visible. Otherwise the play is deceptive, an illusion.
Only an artist could pull off the scam to not only survive but get paid selling their own internal organs on the open market or with them playing tunes within a church. Though the effect is the same, opposed to expressions of pretentious fakery, at least authentic unfleshly possession does not well succumb to practice. A synonym for magical powers or imagination, empathy can never be sold or bought, it can't even be rhymed with commodity exchange without a major metamorphosis like a bash on the head from a fallen flowerpot. Flights of fantasy are not an enigma. It's the fear of a landing which calls into question a developing sense of paranoia. Otherwise, whose business is it anyway, however well-reduced to a materialist economy? Dissemblance of mentality is only that which interferes with work – otherwise the label would be "criminal" so you'd have to pass inspection by the county clerk.
And in regard to Truth, if, to be sure, through the attainment of a truth we are led to perceive a harmony where none was apparent before, we experience at once the true poetical effect; but this effect is referable to the harmony alone, and not in the least degree to the truth which merely served to render the harmony manifest.
We shall reach, however, more immediately a distinct conception of what the true Poetry is, by mere reference to a few of the simple elements which induce in the Poet himself the true poetical effect.
He recognises the ambrosia which nourishes his soul in the bright orbs that shine in Heaven – in the volutes of the flower – in the clustering of low shrubberies – in the waving of the grain-fields – in the slanting of tall eastern trees – in the blue distance of mountains – in the grouping of clouds – in the twinkling of half-hidden brooks – in the gleaming of silver rivers – in the repose of sequestered lakes – in the star-mirroring depths of lonely wells. He perceives it in the songs of birds – in the harp of Aeolus – in the sighing of the night-wind – in the repining voice of the forest – in the surf that complains to the shore – in the fresh breath of the woods – in the scent of the violet – in the voluptuous perfume of the hyacinth – in the suggestive odour that comes to him at eventide from far-distant undiscovered islands, over dim oceans, illimitable and unexplored.
While the epic mania, while the idea that to merit in poetry prolixity is indispensable, has for some years past been gradually dying out of the public mind, by mere dint of its own absurdity, we find it succeeded by a heresy too palpably false to be long tolerated, but one which, in the brief period it has already endured, may be said to have accomplished more in the corruption of our Poetical Literature than all its other enemies combined. I allude to the heresies of The Didactic. It has been assumed, tacitly and avowedly, directly and indirectly, that the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth. Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral, and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We Americans especially have patronized this happy idea, and we Bostonians very especially have developed it in full. We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force: – but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem's sake.
With as deep a reverence for the True as ever inspired the bosom of man, I would nevertheless limit, in some measure, its modes of inculcation. I would limit to enforce them. I would not enfeeble them by dissipation. The demands of Truth are severe. She has no sympathy with the myrtles. All that which is so indispensable in Song is precisely all that with which she has nothing whatever to do. It is but making her a flaunting paradox to wreathe her in gems and flowers. In enforcing a truth we need severity rather than efflorescence of language. We must be simple, precise, terse. We must be cool, calm, unimpassioned. In a word, we must be in that mood which, as nearly as possible, is the exact converse of the poetical. He must be blind indeed who does not perceive the radical and chasmal difference between the truthful and the poetical modes of inculcation. He must be theory-mad beyond redemption who, in spite of these differences, shall still persist in attempting to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth.
"At bottom Kropotkin conceived nature as a kind of Providence, thanks to which there had to be harmony in all things, including human societies. And this has led many anarchists to repeat that “Anarchy is Natural Order”, a phrase with an exquisite kropotkinean flavour. If it is true that the law of Nature is Harmony, I suggest one would be entitled to ask why Nature has waited for anarchists to be born, and goes on waiting for them to triumph, in order to destroy the terrible and destructive conflicts from which mankind has already suffered. Would one not be closer to the truth in saying that anarchy is the struggle, in human society, against the disharmonies of Nature?"
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