For poets, clean is the most mundane idea there is. Not so, for engineers. Here, then, is the essence of that great rift between poetry and science. Science loves a clean formula, a clean laboratory. We don’t mean organized, or clear, necessarily; we mean, with all its mundane moral import, clean. “Clean that up. Please, make sure it’s clean.” Religion, we would think, would favor the clean, and they do. If there is a speck of dust found in the austere interior of a new world, protestant church, it is not there intentionally; and for all the drapery and smoke of the Catholic religion, we don’t expect to find dirt or stains among the folds of the drapery; we want everything holy to be clean.
Are the poets alone, then, separated from the holy priest, as well as the scrutinizing scientist, in hating the clean? Novelists are exempt, for they write about everything—and can’t be accused of being for, or against something; a character in a novel may love cleanliness, or not; this has nothing to do with the theme of the novel, or the temperament of the novelist—prose fiction escapes categorization, just as the essay does; as I write this essay, I too, escape the dye I work in—myself, and what I write, cannot be accused of favoring, or not favoring, the clean: this is completely beside the point.
The poet, however, is different. I was just thinking of the difference between poetry and prose yesterday on my daily walk to the end of the wharf near my house, and I hit upon this formula. As a prose writer, when we think of something interesting pertaining to the theme of our essay or novel, we always wish to add it, and will find, quite easily, a way to add it. In composing a poem, however, we need to exclude interesting things which enter our thoughts on the subject; the poem, just by being what it is, forbids certain things, no matter how interesting, from being added. A poem is ruined when it tells too earnestly what it, the poem, is up to. A poem will always lose its shape, its identity, in the interest of mere interest. Prose is communication. Poetry is tact. Communication has nothing to do with clean, one way, or the other. One would think tact would have everything to do with clean, and it does, since poetry has a visceral dislike of it.
But if poetry equals tact, shouldn’t poetry embrace, rather than reject, cleanliness? No, because tact implies reticence, and the reticent is not clean. A dirty mouth is a silent mouth. A suffering mouth is a silent mouth. The eating mouth is not a lecturing mouth. A stained person is a shy person. A clear-running stream is voluble, and that which speaks too much is never tactful. Mozart’s music gushes, but it has no words, so the genius of Mozart is always tactful. One cannot speak a lot of excited words, however, while being tactful. It’s impossible. Mud which impedes the spring symbolizes the language of poetry. Poems never have anything to do with clean. The sacrifice of Christ is not clean—dirt and blood stains the Savior. Religion, as mentioned before, is clean as a general matter, in terms of presentation and keeping. The scientist may cross out many an idea before arriving at the right one; but the prophet does not cross out a line. The truth comes to the prophet cleanly, and with sacred precision. The disorder of the Sacrifice, however is different. The poets, who belong to the spirit of the Sacrifice, are the exemplars of tact—in terms of what is not clean. The paradox bursts forth in the brief example just cited; the passionate ending of Christ on earth is where poetry breaks from religion—poetry is the crying at the end of all that before was patient and holy. Poetry is more religious than religion—which in fact, belongs to reason. And science, too, becomes dirty at the end—after the theorizing, after the experiment is carefully and methodically conducted, the laboratory might indeed be a mess. In the disorder of the actual experiment is where poetry is found. Most great scientific discoveries are accidents, found inside experimental disarray. When the scientist is messing about, they approach the divine madness of poetry. When the Saviour is most denigrated in the flesh, the passion of poetry, briefly, without wisdom, without order, makes itself known.
Lastly, let us point out: those who fear germs are the most unpoetic individuals of all. Think of persons who never get themselves dirty. They are not poets. They may be engineers, or priests. But they are not poets. The nightingale does not sing in sterility. Stars in religion burn with purity, but stars in poems are filthy balls of gas. The oil-stained painters, who are poets in the pictorial realm, also do not like the clean. What oil painting depicts the clean? No oil painting does. One needs photography to show the clean. The poet hates the clinical. The poet loves the painters and their shadows. The poet hates nothing more than modern pornography. Many a novelist embraces erotic elements, for no other reason than to prove to their audience that they are Modern, rather than Victorian, but as we already said, prose dabbles in everything, and everything is finally its subject, since the essence of prose is communication; poetry, however, belongs to tact, a completely different impulse. And when it comes to clean, who fails to notice that in pornography, the interiors are clean—clean in pornography is so necessary, one may almost ask: is pornography for cleanliness, or is cleanliness for pornography? The clean, and the people who obsess over it, are often at the center of not only dullness, shallowness, and stupidity, but evil itself—since evil tends to spring from the shallow and the bored, more than anything else. The “evil genius” is an oxymoron. Evil is a gang of nitwits, avoiding at all costs the filth they have fallen into—annoyed by the filth all the more, because, in their souls, they are not poetic; they are stringently clean.