The New Adam

. Sentimental love, ideal love, platonic love, lyric and libidinous love, love elegant and de luxe?the variety seems all-encompassing at first glance. And then, beneath the apparent diversity of design, one is disturbed by a singular monotony; one quality stands out which gives this imposing structure a look of shoddy and crumbling artificiality. Its mass merely emphasizes its plastered columns and chipped cornices. The disillusion is bewildering. What has disintegrated? Why is it that what, in our youth, appeared to be a marble temple now seems to be little more than a suburban stucco-house? The answer is, I believe, fairly simple. These " enamored architects of airy rhyme " were, in xiv A Note on the Poetry of Love spite of their graceful decorations, clumsy in the use of their material; ignorant, at least as artists, of the possibilities of their most common property. They wrote endlessly of women. But, for one reason or other, women had ceased to be human to them and had become somehow both subnormal and super-terrestrial. These poets gave their mistresses strange attributes; they equipped them with inexplicable fancies and extraordinary habits of mind. Unable or unwilling to probe their differences, they accounted for them all by surrounding the opposite sex with a specious and convenient " mystery "; they made the objects of their affection less and less like ordinary human beings until their heroines seemed creatures of another and incredible world. This...