People have always known, before the age of machines and mechanis­tic science, that it is imagination—as poetry, faith, ethics—which gives order and beauty to life. Modern man, become a tool of industrial, commercial, and political machinery, believes that this work of the imagination is false, trivial, or irrelevant: a belief which makes him the petty monster that he is. The failure of imagination, bad poetry, makes him a Prufrock, a Babbitt, a Boob.

The way to freedom and order in the future will lie through art and poetry. Only imagination, discovering man’s self and his relation to the world and to other men, can save him from complete enslavement to the state, to machinery, the base dehumanized life which is already spreading around us.

Language is the great, saving first poem, always being written; all others are made of it. We must prize it, protect it against the destroyers and perverters of our time. Journalists and advertisers, all who use words to “sell,” whether goods or ideas, destroy the reverence and life‑giving power of good speech; they are enemies of mankind whom all must learn to fear and repel.

Cerberus

Anyone who understands this is capable of assuming a responsi­bility, of becoming a citizen of the world. Anyone who reads a good poem with understanding—a poem that bites into the evil, or that retrieves a truth—creates an order in himself. Every person who does this, who opposes the life‑destroying forces of modern life with the assertion of full humanity as one finds it in the best poetry of our time and of past times, is helping to make men free, true to their greatest capability of work and happiness.

We three in this book share the same affirmations and therefore the same negations in the face of the present. For all three of us the external horrors of the world today, as well as its scattered beauty, are much the same. If our affirmations are not filled with more hallelujahs, it is only because all affirmations are pushed aside by the threatening destructiveness that faces us all. Our theme is love. But who can sing of love at the walls of Hiroshima, Belsen, Korea?

Poetry cannot change the world in a day, the world of wars, oppressions and mob‑suicide which men have prepared for them­selves. But in the end, only poetry, imagination, can do so. Actuality itself is a metaphor made of iron, the diseased poem which man has erected out of mass frustration, out of centuries of evil. Poetry, therefore, opposed to this, has power, immense power for good, because it is the true poem, the epic all men would live if they were free. And that is, after all, what we want.