THE POET:

The poet needs the community, just as the community needs the poet. Neither can function properly without the other. The poet might write on a desert island, but he wouldn’t write fully nor as well as if he were a happy member of a happy community, and I am inclined to think that after a while on a desert island, the poet would either cease writing or go mad with his own isolation; for no art so demands that it be communicated for its completion. The poet who has to write without the final relief of an audience knows himself to be thwarted and denied his completion and nothing could give the poet a greater sense of insecurity and frustration than the knowledge that he is being denied completion; for completion is the goal of poetry, not only for itself but for its maker, in whom its effect is to stimulate a desire for wholeness of living and fullness of humanity. The poet might be defined as one who hungers after the realization of every possibility of good inherent in the human mind. Sometimes this hunger is not directed socially, as it should be, by its incorporation in the cultural framework of the community, and consequently becomes a hungering for the realization of every possibility of the human mind, evil as well as good, and this is not to the good of society. A community that is permitting its art to become dissipated in this fashion is not only wasting a power for good within itself, but is helping to create a destructive ferment within its own body.