Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things - pg. 151

Those eight brilliant poems I spoke of: I went back a few days ago to the magazine they appeared in and reread them. They are indeed brilliant. The last he composed. They were composed for a woman, but are for himself. The particular configuration made by his life and by hers prevented his possession of her and these poems so eased his anguish. This woman has never seen them, yet they had the ability to act as a charm, a talisman, whereby his desire for her was stilled. Yet, in a way that artists understand, the lineaments of these poems, the fibers out of which the words came to be arranged, were taken from his love and need for Ellen. Only in his composition will his lust assert itself. His love for Ellen is so strong that it leaves him quiescent in the face of his desires. He wants to have them - both of them. So he expires in his imagination, and is reborn in his poems. They glitter: for one, so he thinks, and from the other: the fact. So is he momentarily saved from destruction. It is sometimes at this sort of crisis in the artist's career that his art is freshened. It may, however, on the other hand grow stale and stink.