I Am Talking About Poetry. It's Like

Pound Described Poetry As Original Research In Language, And Just As Formal Experiment In Poetry Has To Try Things And Has To Go Too Far, So Does Experiment With Writing About Politics In Poetry And What The Politics Of Poetry Is.

Images Are Not Quite Ideas, They Are Stiller Than That, With Less Implication Outside Themselves. And They Are Not Myth, They Do Not Have The Explanatory Power; They Are Nearer To Pure Story. Nor Are They Always Metaphors; They Do Not Say This Is That, They Say This Is.

I Don't Know That I Had A Sense That There Was Such A Thing As "the Poetry World" In The 1960s And Early 70s. Maybe Poets Did, But For Me As An Onlooker And Reader Of Poetry, Poetry Felt Like It Was Part Of A Larger Literary World. I Mean, Even The Phrase "the Poetry World" Reflects A Sort Of Balkanization Of American Literary And Artistic Life That Has To Some Extent Happened Since Then.

After Pope, In The Beginning Of Romanticism, People Developed The Idea That Imagination Rather Than Reason Was A Special Form Of Knowledge And Its Best Expression Is Through Poetry. Therefore, Poetry Should Not Try To Do The Stuff That Mere Prose Does: Convey Information Or Make Arguments About Ideas.

If You Ask Me If I Have This Or That Principle, Tell Me What Its Consequences Are, And Then I'll Tell You Whether I Have That Principle Or Not.