How unkind of Poe
to say The Raven was a fact.
The Philosophy of Composition
finished Romanticism. T.S. Eliot began.
Taste was assumed to be Victorian.
Moderns rebelled against both.
But they are not the same.
Taste is ancient. And hasn’t any name.
Intentionality was aborted.
The poems of the Moderns
are the new gods, none of them made.
They are, they are. Poems are intricate,
no longer by their introductions betrayed.
Victorian poems were created, like chocolate.
But T.S. Eliot and the automobile—these things just are.
When I discovered ideals are facts, the facts of Realism too far,
I settled into a new life, a life glimpsed by an old star.
This had nothing to do with Sara Subtlety
and the tortures of the diarist, forced to read his worst poetry,
as the terrier, licking herself endlessly
on the other side of the bed, is the symbol
of Joseph and Sara’s aborted, illicit, love
and its endless will.