The Twentieth Century Saw An Amazing Development

Poetry Is The Most Direct And Simple Means Of Expressing Oneself In Words: The Most Primitive Nations Have Poetry, But Only Quitewell Developed Civilizations Can Produce Good Prose. So Don't Think Of Poetry As A Perverse And Unnatural Way Of Distorting Ordinary Prose Statements: Prose Is A Much Less Natural Way Of Speaking Than Poetry Is. If You Listen To Small Children, And To The Amount Of Chanting And Singsong In Their Speech, You'll See What I Mean.

No Human Society Is Too Primitive To Have Some Kind Of Literature. The Only Thing Is That Primitive Literature Hasn't Yet Become Distinguished From Other Aspects Of Life: It's Still Embedded In Religion, Magic And Social Ceremonies.

Just As A New Scientific Discovery Manifests Something That Was Already Latent In The Order Of Nature, And At The Same Time Is Logically Related To The Total Structure Of The Existing Science, So The New Poem Manifests Something That Was Already Latent In The Order Of Words.

The Fact That Creative Powers Come From An Area Of The Mind That Seems To Be Independent Of The Conscious Will, And Often Emerge With A Good Deal Of Emotional Disturbance In Their Wake, Provides The Chief Analogy Between Prophecy And The Arts... Some People Pursue Wholeness And Integration, Others Get Smashed Up, And Fragments Are Rescued From The Smash Of An Intensity That The Wholeness And Integration People Do Not Reach.

Literature Begins With The Possible Model Of Experience, And What It Produces Is The Literary Model We Call The Classic.