THE POET'S EXERCISE

John Williams, Augustus, introduction by Daniel Mendelsohn (New York: New York Review Books, 1971, 2015) ("Do they know that before us lies a road at the end of which is either death or greatness? The two words go around in my head, around and around, until it seems they are the same." Id. at 25. "And then Marcella said petulantly and somewhat sleepily, 'Oh, let's not talk of unpleasant things.' Jullus turned to her. 'We are not, my dear wife. We are talking of the world, and of things that have happened in it.'" Id. at at 250. "The poet contemplates the chaos of experience, the confusion of accident, and the incomprehensible realms of possibility--which is to say the world in which we all so intimately live few of us take the trouble to examine it. The fruits of that contemplation are the discovery, or invention , of some small principle of harmony and order that may be isolated from that disorder which obscures it, and the subjection of that discovery to those poetic laws which at last make it possible. No general ever more carefully exercises his troops in their intricate formations than does the poet dispose his words to the rigorous necessity of meter; not consul more shrewdly aligns this faction against that in order to achieve his end than the poet who balances one line with another in order to display his truth; and no Emperor ever so carefully organizes the disparate parts of the world that he rules so that they will constitute a whole than does the poet dispose the details of his poem so that another world, perhaps more real than the one that we so precariously inhabit, will spin in the universe of men's minds." Id. at 285.).