are poetically valuable only in the measure of their power to procreate or
re-create experience."
[Footnote: O. W. Firkins, "The New Movement in Poetry," _Nation_, October
14, 1915.]

One may give the fullest recognition to the delicacy and sincerity of
imagist verse, to its magical skill in seeming to open new doors of sense
experience by merely shutting the old doors of memory, to its naive
courage in rediscovering the formula of "Back to Nature."
[Footnote: See the discussion of imagist verse in chap. III.]
Like "free verse," it has widened the field of expression, although its
advocates have sometimes forgotten that thousands of "imagist" poems lie
embedded in the verse of Browning and even in the prose of George
Meredith.
[Footnote: J. L. Lowes, "An Unacknowledged Imagist," _Nation_, February
24, 1916.]
We shall discuss some of its tenets later, but it should be noted at this
point that the radical deficiency of imagist verse, as such, is in its
lack of general ideas. Much of it might have been written by an infinitely
sensitive decapitated frog. It is "hemisphereless" poetry.


_4. The Poet and Other Men_

The mere physical vision of the poet may or may not be any keener than the
vision of other men. There is an infinite variety in the bodily endowments
of habitual verse-makers: there have been near-sighted poets like
Tennyson, far-sighted poets like Wordsworth, and, in the well-known
case of Robert Browning, a poet conveniently far-sighted in one eye and
near-sighted in the other! No doubt the life-long practice of observing