We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
in its first meaning, this sentence is reduced to, "The film of imagination will not come until creative imagination is used in its making," which is very nearly a truism. If by "poet" he means the maker of verse, or even of literature generally, several other interesting points are raised.
There seems to be no particular reason why the sentence quoted above should not run, "The film of imagination will not come until the musician enters the studio"; or the painter; or the sculptor. Mr. Read says that literature is visual; but is not this at least equally the case with painting and sculpture?
But let us examine this contention a little more closely. Mr. Read says that the "single aim': of literature is "to convey images by means of words." In that case, other things being equal, the more clearly and accurately the visual image is expressed, the better is the description as literature. This is a rather remarkable conclusion. Thus, for example, when Milton wrote, "On his crest sat horror plumed, nor wanted in his grasp what seemed both spear and shield," he was writing very bad poetry, for he described things quite impossible to visualise. Thus, numerous sonnets of Shakespeare, large parts of Milton and Wordsworth, and many others, are not poetry at all, for they make no attempt at all to convey images, but are concerned with reflection or philosophy. Thus, Walter de la Mare, when he wrote, "Dusk on the windless casement weaves a labyrinth of flowers," would have been much better advised to express himself in some such manner as this: "C.U. of the casement from inside. Dusk is falling outside, and the evening is perfectly calm. In speeded-up motion, frost-patterns (back-lit by the remains of light outside) appear on the window-panes."
At this point Mr. Read will doubtless interpose that, although my scene from an imaginary film scenario is clear and accurate, it is not vivid; it does not immediately call up in the mind the image it describes, but the mind has, of its own volition and with some effort, to construct the image. To this I reply that vividness is not its business; and, therefore, that even according to Mr. Read's definition the scenario is not literature. But if the scenario is not literature, how can the film have any connection with literature? "To convey images," according to Mr. Read, is the object of literature; it is also, in a somewhat different sense, the object of the scenario; but it is certainly not the object of the film. The film is the images, and they stand in need of no conveyance except a purely physical one. If literature uses words to convey images, the film uses images to convey whatever lies behind them. But in that case the conveyance of images is not an end in itself, and therefore literature is merely the film at second-hand.
According to Mr. Read's definition, then, it seems that Homer
34