o launches a new locution, the poet who creates a symbol,
must do so without knowing what significance it may eventually acquire,
and conscious at best only of the emotional background from which it
emerged. Pure poetry is pure experiment; and it is not strange that
nine-tenths of it should be pure failure. For it matters little what
unutterable things may have originally gone together with a phrase in
the dreamer's mind; if they were not uttered and the phrase cannot call
them back, this verbal relic is none the richer for the high company it
may once have kept. Expressiveness is a most accidental matter. What a
line suggests at one reading, it may never suggest again even to the
same person. For this reason, among others, poets are partial to their
own compositions; they truly discover there depths of meaning which
exist for nobody else. Those readers who appropriate a poet and make him
their own fall into a similar illusion; they attribute to him what they
themselves supply, and whatever he reels out, lost in his own personal
revery, seems to them, like _sortes biblicoe,_ written to fit their own
case.

[Sidenote: Inspiration irresponsible.]

Justice has never been done to Plato's remarkable consistency and
boldness in declaring that poets are inspired by a divine madness and
yet, when they transgress rational bounds, are to be banished from an
ideal republic, though not without some marks of Platonic regard.
Instead of fillets, a modern age might assign them a coterie of
flattering dames, and instead of banishment, starvation; but the result
would be the same in the end. A poet is inspired because what occurs in
his brain is a true experiment in creation. His apprehension plays with
words and their meanings as nature, in any spontaneous variation, plays
with her own structure. A mechanical force shifts the kaleidoscope; a
new direction is given to growth or a new gist to signification. This
inspiration, moreover, is mad, being wholly ignorant of its own issue;
and though it has a confused fund of experience and verbal habit on
which to draw, it draws on this fund blindly and quite at random,
consciously possessed by nothing but a certain stress and pregnancy and
the pains, as it were, of parturition. Finally the new birth has to be
inspected critically by the public censor before it is allowed to live;
most probably it is too feeble and defective to prosper in the common
air, or is a monster that violates some prim