isolated. But these are things in your analytic head, not in the poem, which is _poetic_ experience. And if you want to have the poem again, you cannot find it by adding together these two products of decomposition; you can only find it by passing back into poetic experience. And then what you have again is no aggregate of factors, it is a unity in which you can no more separate a substance and a form than you can separate living blood and the life in the blood. This unity has, if you like, various 'aspects' or 'sides,' but they are not factors or parts; if you try to examine one, you find it is also the other. Call them substance and form if you please, but these are not the reciprocally exclusive substance and form to which the two contentions _must_ refer. They do not 'agree,' for they are not apart: they are one thing from different points of view, and in that sense identical. And this identity of content and form, you will say, is no accident; it is of the essence of poetry in so far as it is poetry, and of all art in so far as it is art. Just as there is in music not sound on one side and a meaning on the other, but expressive sound, and if you ask what is the meaning you can only answer by pointing to the sounds; just as in painting there is not a meaning _plus_ paint, but a meaning _in_ paint, or significant paint, and no man can really express the meaning in any other way than in paint and in _this_ paint; so in a poem the true content and the true form neither exist nor can be imagined apart. When then you are asked whether the value of a poem lies in a substance got by decomposing the poem and present, as such, only in reflective analysis, or in a form arrived at and existing in the same way, you will answer, 'It lies neither in one, nor in the other, nor in any addition of them, but in the poem, where they are not.' And when you are told that you are talking _a priori_ metaphysics, you will not mind. 'Metaphysics' does not mean anything. It is only a term of abuse applied to the effort to look at facts instead of repeating _a priori_ fictions.We have then, first, an antithesis of subject and poem. This is clear and valid; and the question in which of them does the value lie is intelligible; and its answer is, In the poem. 

We have next a distinction of substance and form. If the substance means ideas, images, and the like taken alone, and the form means the measured language taken by it itself, this is a possible distinction, but it is a distinction of things not in the poem, and the value lies in neither of them. If substance and form mean anything _in_ the poem, then each is involved in the other, and the question in which of them the value lies has no sense. 

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