[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sm,—Thank you very much
for the lucid and generous expo- sition by Mrs. Williams-Ellis which you gave of my poem. The whole of the article interested me very much, particularly where it touched on the justifications of obscurity. The most important one occurred to me when I read :—" Words . . . . are a two-dimensional medium." If this is so, then what we name poetry, at its rarest, is something which gives to words a three-dimensional appearance ; the poetic form (which covers a heap of ignorance) gives reality to an idea, as per- spective gives the illusion of it to a drawing. Words used two- dimensionally, as I am using them now and as it is so hard to escape from using them, show the idea in plan ; the litera I poem, like the design of an architect, defines without making visible the actual structure. Actually, this fact is recognized by everybody, otherwise a howl of ridicule would greet mention of " The Phoenix and the Turtle "—the purest poem in the language, but completely meaningless in the flat. Yet, after all, I think obscurity is sometimes a self-indulgence.—
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