e blood. This unity has, if you like, various
'aspects' or 'sides,' but they are not factors or parts; if you try to
examine one, you find it is also the other. Call them substance and form
if you please, but these are not the reciprocally exclusive substance
and form to which the two contentions _must_ refer. They do not 'agree,'
for they are not apart: they are one thing from different points of
view, and in that sense identical. And this identity of content and
form, you will say, is no accident; it is of the essence of poetry in so
far as it is poetry, and of all art in so far as it is art. Just as
there is in music not sound on one side and a meaning on the other, but
expressive sound, and if you ask what is the meaning you can only
answer by pointing to the sounds; just as in painting there is not a
meaning _plus_ paint, but a meaning _in_ paint, or significant paint,
and no man can really express the meaning in any other way than in paint
and in _this_ paint; so in a poem the true content and the true form
neither exist nor can be imagined apart. When then you are asked whether
the value of a poem lies in a substance got by decomposing the poem and
present, as such, only in reflective analysis, or in a form arrived at
and existing in the same way, you will answer, 'It lies neither in one,
nor in the other, nor in any addition of them, but in the poem, where
they are not.' And when you are told that you are talking _a priori_
metaphysics, you will not mind. 'Metaphysics' does not mean anything. It
is only a term of abuse applied to the effort to look at facts instead
of repeating _a priori_ fictions.

We have then, first, an antithesis of subject and poem. This is clear
and valid; and the question in which of them does the value lie is
intelligible; and its answer is, In the poem. We have next a distinction
of substance and form. If the substance means ideas, images, and the
like taken alone, and the form means the measured language taken by
itself, this is a possible distinction, but it is a distinction of
things not in the poem, and the value lies in neither of them. If
substance and form mean anything _in_ the poem, then each is involved in
the other, and the question in which of them the value lies has no
sense. No doubt you may say, speaking loosely and perilously, that in
this poet or poem the aspect of substance is the more noticeable, and in
that the aspect of form, and you may pursue interesting discussion