ABSTRACT
The development of experience is largely unconscious, subterranean, so that we cannot gauge its progress except once in every fIve or ten years; but in the meantime the poet must be working; he must be experimenting and trying his technique so that it will be ready, like a well-oiled fIre-engine, when the moment comes to strain it to its utmost. The poet who wishes to continue to write poetry must keep in training; and must do this, not by forcing his inspiration, but by good workmanship on a level possible for some hours' work every week of his life.
Today a poet faces a practical problem in trying to defIne a common cultural tradition available to both him and his readers. The diffIculty originates in contemporary society, where the continuous proliferation ofinformation has increasingly fragmented audiences into specialized subcultures that share no common frame of reference.
