is."

In fact, beauty as a separate and distinct thing does not exist. Neither
can it be reached by any sorting or sifting or clarifying process. It is
an experience of the mind, and must be preceded by certain conditions,
just as light is an experience of the eye, and sound of the ear.

To attempt to manufacture beauty is as vain as to attempt to manufacture
truth; and to give it to us in poems or any form of art, without a lion
of some sort, a lion of truth or fitness or power, is to emasculate it
and destroy its volition.

But current poetry is, for the most part, an attempt to do this very
thing, to give us beauty without beauty's antecedents and foil. The
poets want to spare us the annoyance of the beast. Since beauty is
the chief attraction, why not have this part alone, pure and
unadulterated,--why not pluck the plumage from the bird, the flower
from its stalk, the moss from the rock, the shell from the shore, the
honey-bag from the bee, and thus have in brief what pleases us? Hence,
with rare exceptions, one feels, on opening the latest book of poems,
like exclaiming, Well, here is the beautiful at last divested of
everything else,--of truth, of power, of utility,--and one may add of
beauty, too. It charms as color, or flowers, or jewels, or perfume
charms--and that is the end of it.

It is ever present to the true artist, in his attempt to report nature,
that every object as it stands in the circuit of cause and effect has
a history which involves its surroundings, and that the depth of the
interest which it awakens in us is in proportion as its integrity in
this respect is preserved. In nature we are prepared for any opulence
of color or of vegetation, or freak of form, or display of any kind,
because of the preponderance of the common, ever-present feature of the
earth. The foil is always at hand. In like manner in the master poems we
are never surfeited with mere beauty.

Woe to any artist who disengages Beauty from the wide background of
rudeness, darkness, and strength,--and disengages her from absolute
nature! The mild and beneficent aspects of nature,--what gulfs and
abysses of power underlie them! The great shaggy, barbaric earth,--yet
the summing-up, the plenum, of all we know or can know of beauty! So the
orbic poems of the world have a foundation as of the earth itself, and
are beautiful because they are something else first. Homer chose for his
groundwork War, clinching, tearing, tugging war; i