d which shows its true understanding of life and art without logical or philosophical discipline to control it" (13).
Yet such an idea possesses a critical power that accounts for the distance he tried to establish between "the extreme and creative self-abandon" which he cultivated for his art and the "linguistic self-consciousness" and extreme care that he lavished on his works" (Ward, "Persistence" 16). There could, of course, be something almost wild and quite immediate about the poems--such as the "feverish and discordant levity" found in the Ode to a Grecian Urn (Ward, "Persistence" 16). But he was emphatic about the difference between the utterly personal expression as subject and the use of feelings and imagination in the creation of a poem. He was not, in other words, a creator of solipsistic verse but a conveyor of an experience that could, if an individual desired, be part of anyone's life. It was an experience that began in the self--and his account involved the use of his own intellectual, sensational, and spiritual life--but the e
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