A Harvest of Poems

About the Book

Poetry is always new and unexplained. We wonder at the delicacy of its touch and the eternity it inherits. Its emotional and intellectual delight for the reader is a primal and compulsive force for the writer. The maker of a poem, like the film-artist, builds a lighted road into infinite chaotic night and is followed by those who hear him with something of his own wild, creative Dionysian delight. Or did you think that poetry was simply the verbal materialization of a daydream? An attempt to satisfy a longing simply by stating that it is satisfied? Or imagination’s bold effort to escape from the cold and clammy facts of existence that hedge us in, soothing the wrinkled, fevered brow with beautiful balderdash? Whitman sets us straight: “Literature is big only in one way — when used as an aid in the growth of the humanities — a furthering of the cause of the masses — a means whereby men may be revealed to each other as brothers.” Following Whitman’s lead and example, I announce my implicit belief in the wisdom, health, mystery and beauty of every process, every object, every human or other existence. Each particle in the universe is equally necessary and perfect in its own stage of maturation, equally good on its own level of evolution. If science enjoins absolute acceptance of the universe, the message of the poet is to show how this might be done aesthetically.

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