construed and normalized than the ordinarylanguage of every day. The discourses of modernism in Western poet-ics make steeper descents into sub-intelligibility; and in my own caseI am rather frequently accused of having more or less altogether takenleave of discernible sense. In fact I believe this accusation to be moreor less true, and not to me alarmingly so, because what for so long hasseemed the arduous royal road into the domain of poetry ("what doesit mean?") seems less and less an unavoidably necessary preconditionfor successful reading. The task, however, is not to subside into dis-tracted ingenious playfulness with the lexicon and cross-inflectionalidiomatics, but to write and read with maximum focused intelligenceand passion, each of these two aspects bearing so strongly into theother as to fuse them into the enhanced state once in an old-fashionedway termed the province of the imagination.'