THE ELUSIVE PURITY

The souls that form the great rose of Paradise are seated in banks and tiers of ascending blessedness...they are all perfectly happy; they are all pure...purged of moral taint...Poetry wants to be pure, but poems do not...The poems want to give us poetry which is pure, and the elements of a poem...will work together toward that end, but many of the elements, taken in themselves, may actually seem to contradict that end, or be neutral...They mar themselves with cacophonies, jagged rhythms, ugly words...all things which call us back to the world of prose and imperfection. -Robert Penn Warren in A Robert Penn Warren Reader, Random House, NY, 1987,p.174.

...poetry has for its object an indefinite sense of a definite pleasure...poetry is not supposed to undergo close inspection, only a cursory glance...poetry is a beautiful painting whose tints, to minute inspection, are confusion worse confounded, but start out boldly to the cursory glance of the connoisseur...aspires to music...indefinite sensations...melancholy is the most poetical effect...pure poetry is the pure effort to heighten consciousness. -Robert Penn Warren, ibid., p.185.

Where is no special wisdom here:

perhaps some irony, some dramatic

structure while the saint steps into

the fire, the philosopher writes some

enormous tome, the poet makes

simple affirmations and diversions,

philosophical titbits enter unobtrusively

into the poetry as it enters into the reader

with a net of connections, an echo

of crude experience, an attenuation,

a rehandling of theory and practice.

Perhaps there is knowledge here

and love, like some footless dance,

like some fluent crystal that flies

and glitters, like criers in a multitude

of tongues, often like music. I try to

put them where they are, here, where

you see them, in our imagination.

I give them many names, clear on

the attendance roll, but they seem elusive.

Ron Price

5 October 1995