The compilation and testing of this book brought out unforeseen difficulties. The fact soon became evident that few poems affect everybody in exactly the same way. Where half-a-dozen people react similarly to a dose of aconite, they may react in three or four different ways to Henley's "Invictus." What is salvation for the average Jones may be poison for the exceptional Smith. What would lift me out of the blues might conceivably plunge you deeper within them. (Only I should think you abnormal.) And a lyric which filled me with eager vitality might possibly lull you to sleep-if you were outside the common run of people.

But even in spite of such wide variations as these, poetry was found to be still more dependably uniform. in its healing effect than the dependable but vaguer art of music. Perhaps this is because the subject matter of a poem is much the same for everyone; while, within certain wide limits, a Chopin nocturne or a Beethoven minuet can mean all things to all men.

For a long period I studied, collected, and tried the effects of various sorts of verse on patients in my poetic clinic. Finally, a year ago, it grew evident that enough poems might be counted on to affect enough people with enough power and uniformity, to make possible a science of poetic therapeutics, and justify the present book.

Any poem that has genuine healing in its wings, usually commences its medical career the moment it

is conceived. It begins by promptly curing its creator. Charles Kingsley once went, on friendly invitation, to preach in a London church. After the sermon, his reverend host rushed to the pulpit, coarsely repudiated everything that Kingsley had said, and branded him with various impolite epithets ranging from Judas Iscariot downwards. A riot was narrowly averted.

Naturally the poet was furious. But, as he went home, a line of verse began to take form in his mind; then another and another. Before he knew it, his most famous poem, "The Three Fishers," was born. And Kingsley was surprised to find that his fury had vanished. The act of creation had absorbed the poisonous secretions of anger like so much blotting paper. It had richly compensated him for a bad quarter of an hour.

Such experiences are common among poets. Goethe once remarked: "I habitually convert whatever rejoices or worries or otherwise concerns me into a poem, and so get rid of it, and at once correct my conception of outward things and set my mind at rest." William Blake was in the secret too:

"I was angry with my friend:

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:

I told it not, my wrath did grow."

And William H. Davies, the tramp and beggar poet, confesses:

"My mind has thunderstorms,
That brood for heavy hours;

Until they rain me words."

But, once the relieving rain has begun to fall, the poet admits

"My thoughts are dancing flowers

And joyful singing birds."

. . an un

According to Ribot, the French psychologist, “all invention presupposes a want, a craving satisfied impulse. . . . The origin of all imaginative creation is a need, a desire." The poet can usually find quicker and easier relief from his troubles than other artists can, because the apparatus he requires for selfexpression is so simple and portable. He is not encumbered with the problem of how to get at a lump of clay or a yard of canvas or a grand piano. If anything mental or spiritual ails him he can alleviate it instantly by scribbling on his cuff just the poem for the complaint. As Shakespeare puts it, he can "turn diseases to commodity."

When the new psychology discovers the poet at work on his cuff, it will pull a long face and declare that he is starting up a thing called a psychic mechanism. There are three principal kinds: mechanisms of escape, of self-defence and of compensation.

A word about this trio. As I understand it, escape is simply taking refuge from the actual. Obeying a strong, primordial instinct of self-preservation, we flee

from a reality that is unpleasant or even dangerous, into a delightful region suffused with "the light that never was on sea or land." Philosophy, religion, music and poetry all conspire to lure us into this never-never world of topsy-turvy, where loss is gain, torture-bliss, failure-success, loneliness-fellowship, and deathlife. The escape mechanism shatters experience to bits, and then remoulds it "nearer to the heart's desire." It affords us a respite in which we may gather renewed strength for the old struggle to adapt ourselves to reality.

The defence mechanism consists in the sort of thinking through which the ego protects itself against harmful obsessions and actions, and preserves its self-respect. Purposeful forgetting, neurotic symptoms and religious or patriotic or ascetic fanaticism may all be defences which protect one from more destructive unconscious. impulses.

Lastly, compensation is a way of recovering one's psychic balance. It is closely akin to defence. A person whose unconscious mind is corroded by an inferiority complex, will often consciously, but without realizing why he does it, cultivate a feeling of competence and solid self-esteem. War heroism, like charity, may cover a multitude of sins. The loss of a limb may be compensated by a sense of gain in character. Grief may be offset by a heightened capacity for esthetic appreciation. In the words of A. E's "Hope in Failure," 1

1 see p. 13.

"The beauty that breathes in thy spirit shall shape of thy sorrow a flower."

Ugliness may be compensated by virtue; old age by knowing better than the young; a bad stutter by literary fluency; tuberculosis by optimism.

These three mechanisms, then, build up within us the spiritual factors which, in their turn, construct the ideal that makes our actual existence. Through escape, defence and compensation our unconsciousness legitimately preserves those vital and indispensable fictions about ourselves which are the most valuable things in life for us. They are so valuable because, as Everett Dean Martin explains,1 they help men to keep their "personality pictures" unbroken, "to save their self-valuations-their souls."

Now, when we find the poet at work on his cuff, curing himself by starting up some mechanism or other, let us not be disgusted or disconcerted by all this technical jargon. Let us simply realize that folks were unconsciously using poetry as a means of escape, defence and compensation some thousands of years before Freud, Adler and Jung discovered the polysyllable and popularized psycho-analysis.

Without the aid of these gentlemen, Homer, David, Sophocles and Dante made their own lives more bearable. In our century, William H. Davies defended himself against the agitations of his budding fame

1 In his brilliant book "The Mystery of Religion," Harper's, 1924.