T he idea has come to me

« The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don’t belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional. Why admit any thing to literature that is not poetry–by which I mean saturated? Is that not my grudge against novelists — that there select nothing? The poets succeeding by simplifying: pratically is left out. I want to put practically everything in; yet to saturate. »