Poetry does not play its part.
Behold John Keats, skilful with the surgeon's knife; but when he writes
poetry his inspiration is not from the operating table. Here I am
reminded, though, of a modern instance to the contrary in prose. Mr. H.
G. Wells, who, as far as I know, has never written a line of verse, was
inspired a few years ago to write a short story, _Under the Knife_. Out
of a clock-dial, a brass rod, and a whiff of chloroform, he has conjured
for us a sensation of space and eternity, evoked the face of the
Unknowable, and an awesome, august voice, like the voice of the Judgment
Day; a great voice, perhaps the voice of science itself, uttering the
words: "There shall be no more pain!" I advise you to look up that
story, so human and so intimate, because Mr. Wells, the writer of prose
whose amazing inventiveness we all know, remains a poet even in his most
perverse moments of scorn for things as they are. His poetic imagination
is sometimes even greater than his inventiveness, I am not afraid to say.
But, indeed, imaginative faculty would make any man a poet--were he born
without tongue for speech and without hands to seize his fancy and fasten
her down to a wretched piece of paper.
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