The poet who has not learned how to be rude has not learned his first duty to himself.  By “poet” I mean, of course, any imaginative creator—­novelist, mathematician, editor, or a man like Herbert Hoover.  And by “rude” I mean the strict and definite limitation which, sooner or later, he must impose upon his sociable instincts.  He must refuse to fritter away priceless time and energy in the random genialities of the world.  Friendly, well-meaning, and fumbling hands will stretch out to bind the poet’s heart in the maddening pack-thread of Lilliput.  It will always be so.  Life, for most, is so empty of consecrated purpose, so full of palaver, that they cannot understand the trouble of one who carries a flame in his heart, and whose salvation depends on his strength to nourish that flame unsuffocated by crowding and scrutiny.

The poet lives in an alien world.  That is not his pride; it is his humility.  It is often his joy, but often also his misery:  he must dree his weird.  His necessary solitude of spirit is not luxury, nor the gesture of a churl:  it is his sacrifice, it is the condition on which he lives.  He must be content to seem boorish to the general in order to be tender to his duty.  He has invisible guests at the table of his heart:  those places are reserved against all comers.  He must be their host first of all, or he is damned.  He serves the world by cutting it when they meet inopportunely.  There are times (as Keats said and Christ implied) when the wind and the stars are his wife and children.

There will be a thousand pressures to bare his bosom to the lunacy of public dinners, lecture platforms, and what not pleasant folderol.  He must be privileged apparent ruffian discourtesy.  He has his own heart-burn to consider.  One thinks of Rudyard Kipling in this connection.  Mr. Kipling stands above all other men of letters to-day in the brave clearness with which he has made it plain that he consorts first of all with his own imagination.

As the poet sees the world, and studies, the more he realizes that men are sharply cut in two classes:  those who understand, those who do not.  With the latter he speaks a foreign language and with effort, trying shamefacedly to conceal his strangeness.  With these, perhaps, every moment spent is for ever lost.  With the others he can never commune enough, seeking clumsily to share and impart those moments of rare intuition when truth came near.  There is rarely any doubt as to this human division:  the heart knows its kin.

The world, as he sees it around him, is almost unconscious of its unspeakable loveliness and mystery; and it is largely regimented and organized for absurdity.  The greater part of the movement he sees is (by his standard) not merely stupid (which is pardonable and appealing), but meaningless altogether.  He views it between anger and tenderness.  Where there might have been the exquisite and delicious simplicity of a Japanese print, he sees the flicker and cruel garishness of a speeding film.  And so, for refreshment, he crosses through the invisible doorway into his own dear land of lucidity.  He cons over that passport of his unsociability, words of J.B.  Yeats which should be unforgotten in every poet’s mind: