Actually the professor of the poetic temperament may never write a line of poetry. He may only live it. He may turn his creative imagination, which is the atomic energy of poetry, to spanning a continent with a mighty railroad, to harnessing an electric current that will transfigure the shadowed cities with the surge of radiant power, to tracking the foxes of disease and pestilence to their final lairs, to leading embattled peoples against their oppressors, to dying on crosses for the freedom of the soul, to lifting the broken sword that the warrior has let fall and wresting victory from defeat … these are the poets and this is the artistic temperament.

  They are not earthbound for they are warriors of eternity, citizens of the galaxies by virtue of their fourth-dimensional vision that can see beyond time to eternity, beyond death to resurrection, beyond life to its meaning. Yes, all these are poets, while many who claim the poet’s license because of some meager facility to box their prim souls within some metered cubicle or to parade their pale psychoses under the tattered banner of the “avant-garde” (actually as dated as Sodom and Gomorrah), these are not poets at all.

  With these definitions in mind, which guided this editor in founding Different as an organ not completely devoted to poets in the narrow sense but more broadly to poetry in its universal sense, and to the encouragement of the poetic temperament wherever it might be found, striving to direct it into the most appropriate channels for its highest expression—we can go on with our story.

  When the original Avalon Poetry Shrine, as the Avalon World Arts Academy was then known, was founded by this editor in 1940, to be followed a couple of years later by the publication of the Raven to provide a voice for its members, we did not realize the acuteness of the cultural starvation of the American people. To your editor, who, for several years after retirement from active business life, had been surrounded by a small but highly intellectual group of friends and co-workers who lived graciously, thought profoundly, and modeled their lives in accordance with the precepts of liberal educations received largely apart from the public school system—the knowledge came as a distinct shock.

  We had failed to realize how quickly and thoroughly in these few years the Great Books and with them the heritage of the Great Minds who had inspired them, endowing their readers with the intellectual tools by which one may reason logically, calmly, and impersonally toward the solution of human problems, had been amputated from the body of modern education.

  In the last days of our school teaching we had indeed heard the first faint rumblings of the program designed to reduce our people to the inglorious status which they have now attained, in which the comic strip is the only reading material in one home out of every five. In those days the spokesmen for powerful industrial concerns frequently invaded the schools as self-invited guests (flanked by substantial endowments) and orated at length on the necessity for “utilitarian education,” or “training for one’s job,” so that the student leaving school might immediately become an “efficient cog in the industrial machine.” Well, that wasn’t so bad, or at least it didn’t sound that way to the naïve educators. Why shouldn’t the child learn a useful trade along with his general education?

  What never entered our un-Machiavellian brains was that the end product of all this was designed to be not the addition of an adequate quota of training for an industrial age, but the substitution of specialized training for everything that had previously constituted the elements of a liberal education, which alone could have equipped these future citizens to meet the challenge of the democratic way of life.

  Little by little, we the teachers, you the parents, and all of us, the voters, allowed this to be done to our country. Today, all save a few of our higher institutions of learning and most of our high schools, paying only the most supercilious lip service to the only kind of education that prepares for life as it should be lived, are turning out functionalized robots, unfit even for their specialized trades. For no man can be at his best in any trade or profession who lacks the broad general knowledge that would equip him to think and reason in an emergency, to exercise initiative in a crisis, to better his position, or to carry on harmonious human relations. No man can fulfill his family or civic responsibilities who lacks the ability to analyze and the courage to repudiate the propaganda devices that keep him chained to the machine, glued to the comic strip, wed to the soap opera, and eventually committed to the foxholes in wars declared by vicious old men of all nations and fought by idealistic young men believing in manufactured causes.

  Not only do the schools turn out these zombies on their assembly lines, but the latest models are becoming unfit even for the purpose for which they were manufactured. The utter inefficiency that now runs rampant is so universal and we have grown so accustomed to shoddy products, broken contracts, sub-moronic service, plane crashes, and irresponsible management that our children will never believe that there was ever an age of smooth-running economy, ethical observances, guaranteed liberties, and water running from faucets in New York City.

  For it has come about, slowly, subtly, and imperceptibly at first, but culminating finally in the open covenants of the “bread and butter” system of education, that the schools have finally donned the dunce cap of regimentation that has been designed for them. Teachers not in accord with this ideology are not encouraged in the profession, and salaries are at such a level that only those unfit for the keener competition of more remunerative jobs will accept them. Restrictions on freedom of thought and action have finally reached the point where save for a few candidates for martyrdom and helpless older teachers waiting for a pension, few others will sacrifice their human dignity for the dubious privilege of twisting the American mind into something foreign to the instincts of a free people.

  This is all worked out according to plan and today our schools have reached a new low in that glorification of muscles over brains which has preceded the fall of every decadent civilization, and the mass production of conditioned reflexes now makes the mass mind ripe for whatever military, fascistic, or communistic regime succeeds in winning the battle of ideologies upon the grave of ideas.

  The purpose back of all this should be plain to every citizen. Yet on the other hand, how can it be? For when the reasoning processes of a people must be carried on with a twelve-year-old vocabulary, how, since words are the tools of thought, can such a people match wits with the cunning men with the large vocabularies who possess exact knowledge of the meager equipment of the robot brains which they themselves have molded and conditioned?

  How glibly have our people been lured down the poppied path of least resistance. How cleverly has the element of human laziness been glorified by the five-syllabled apostles of one-syllable English. How complacent are the self-confessed sweet, simple people whose masters have taught them the little serpent-slogans on which their lives are patterned. How often do we as editors have to listen to long lectures by these apostles of sweetness and simplicity and how deeply do we pity them. But we pity more ourselves and our kind, the reasoning minority, guarding the last books and probably thinking the last thoughts. For no one knows more surely than the thinkers what a howling mob sweet, simple people can become when the slogans change.

  Among the student-poets the most asinine argument is that they “have been told” that to read the great poets or the great writers will make them imitative and destroy their originality. Meanwhile the poor unfortunates, whose originality is questionable in the first place, are imitating the jingler, the soap opera, and the gagman, while crude slang is so much a part of their vocabulary that they confuse it with correct English.

  Vain it is to point out to them the fallacy of what they “have been told.” Vain to remind them that if there is any logic in this idea they had better stop reading the Bible lest they be guilty of imitating Christ and thus lose their tendency to original sin. Vain to repeat that the imitation of greatness, granted one is not innately endowed with sufficient originality to maintain his individuality when it comes into contact with other ideas, is infinitely to be preferred to the imitation of gutterdom. Vain indeed for … they “have been told.”

  Despite the apparent hopelessness of the task, however, Different was founded as a sincere attempt to use whatever influence we might attain to salvage some last remnants of American culture and to restore within the limits of that influence some of the lost glory of the poetry of Earth. For poetry, as we have said before, is the atomic energy of the soul, which, exploded against the battlements of hate and terror, will level them in the dust of oblivion and leave the liberated soul free in an expanding universe.

  For five exciting years your editor and publisher has given her time, her energy, her heart, and soul, with no material remuneration and considerable material sacrifice toward this end: the discovery, inspiration, promotion, and training of the poetic temperament as it manifests in the various fields of creative art. In that brief time Different and Avalon have invaded all the states and several foreign lands. They have secured the recognition and wide publication of hundreds of new authors and have encouraged many formerly timid but exceptionally competent members to fit themselves for places of leadership in their communities. We have deliberately moved our headquarters to various widely scattered locations that we might come to know personally the characteristics of the people of many regions and find the most effective method of training those who are to be the voices of these people.

  And … we say it not to boast, but only to suggest that it can be done, that Different has never missed a deadline, never changed its subscription price, and never lowered the quality of its format. We have never failed to accept or reject a single manuscript, giving reasons in case of rejection, on the day it was received. We have never failed to fill an order, to answer a letter requiring an answer, or to return a corrected versification lesson on the day received. Sometimes while we were on a lecture trip, when mail could not be forwarded, we have had to wait until our return home before we answered correspondence, because save for a few months when Different first started, several months when we were assisted by Edsel Ford, and now when we have the deeply appreciated assistance of Evelyn Thorne, this has been a one-woman job. But we have always managed to travel by plane so as not to be more than four days away from the office, and though on returning we often found mail piled partway to the ceiling, we rarely rested until it had all been answered. Some of our esteemed fellow editors have even chided us for “spoiling the poets,” but that’s the way our parents taught us that human relations should be carried on, regardless of how the other fellow acted, and that’s the way we do it.

  We have trained about 400 poets each year in our elementary versification course, in which we gave the instruction at no cost for the instruction itself to those of our member-subscribers who desire this training and who avail themselves of the texts containing their assignments. This has been the heaviest task that we have imposed upon ourselves and the one that consumes the most of our time, but on the whole, it has been most rewarding. Naturally we have had a few students who do not realize the injustice they are doing other students entitled to an equal share of the instructor’s time by repeatedly attempting to slip in poems not included in the assignments, but most of them scrupulously adhere to the requirements of the course.

  During the eight years that we have rendered this service, we have received hundreds of letters revealing to us that almost 100% of those who actually completed the course have achieved publication in first-class magazines. But valued even more than this knowledge of our students’ success is that, as they invariably word it, “a new world” has been opened to them. This is because they have been imbued with the spirit and mission of poetry in its highest sense, because beyond and apart from the teaching of the dry techniques and the more glamorous symbolic devices of their art, we have either returned them again, or turned them for the first time, to the study of great literature, to communion with great minds, and to the living of meaningful lives of civic service, as the only true sources of poetry which transcend the reportorial literalism of verse, the Undine soullessness of poesy, and the psychopathic existentialism of the pre-stone-age “moderns.”

  Naturally we work with dozens each year who fall by the wayside. Either through some fault of our own we are unable to make our full vision clear to them or they grasp the vision only too well, realize it means hard work and entirely too much self-revelation for comfort, and decline to meet the challenge. To all these we can utter only a friendly hail and farewell, for we are on our way. Nevertheless it is well that we met them, even though we may have passed like ships in the night, for there is an immutable law that nothing is ever lost, not even one iota of the energy expended in sincere service to one’s fellow men. Those who cannot ascend to the mountaintops or who prefer to linger in the pleasant valleys rarely return to sea level once they have glimpsed the heights. For the ineffable vision is like a fever in the blood, a burning in the brain, an undying fire, and he who lights it, no matter how feeble the spark, can always rest assured that no power on Earth can quench it. Many of those who fall by the wayside belong to the types of mind who “have been told” that all this “crusading” is just silly because some bright morning, without any effort on the part of humanity, God is going to perform a miracle and “everything will be all right.” So they are going to have a good time and “just not worry about it.”

  Of course, when the storm breaks it is they who will wail the loudest and wonder why it had to happen to them. Mournfully they will hang their little gold stars in the windows never realizing how much blood is on their own hands, never realizing that had they had the courage to “watch with Him for an hour” in the world’s Gethsemane, to share the burden of the world’s Thinkers, their only stars might be those that shine above us, over a world whose freedom that has been purchased with the coins of peace.

  We have never considered ourselves a crusader, for actually those fellows never had much fun and we have plenty of it. Somehow we can’t seem to shake off the illusion that all this milling around of the human species in a planetary crisis is an old play that we have seen a hundred times before, performed by new actors with new stage properties but always with the same words and music. But somehow we’re never quite sure how the last act turns out, and somehow it seems like it might be partly up to us and partly up to the players to do a little ad-libbing and perhaps change the whole situation. And we get a tremendous thrill out of it, and we’re awfully glad that we have forgotten how the play ended, because we might enjoy it so much. So we, too, just go on having our sort of good time, with this exception, that we have it with a clear conscience. For no matter what happens, we’ve never kept silent when there was the slightest chance to keep the hero from falling into the bear-trap. Of course, the darn thing might only be a movie, and then we couldn’t help much, but in that case no one really gets hurt anyway. But we’ll leave the philosophy to Dr. Grandbery.

  Although we have traveled a path that, on the whole, has been star-strewn and rewarding, it has at times led through the slime of petty malice and the slough of vicious ignorance. Perhaps the most obnoxious types of mind we have encountered are those who are constantly concerned with the “enormity” of our profits. The fetish of competition (so ably treated by Bill Tullos in this same issue), and the belief that monetary gain is the only, or at least the primary, motive back of all human endeavors, has given rise to this. Vain to explain that practically every advertiser-free magazine and most certainly almost every poetry magazine is published either at a loss, through patronage, or at little or no profit. This happens because their editors are glorious lunatics (whose insanity is the sanity of God) who have at heart the love of poetry and the desire to give more of it to a dream-starved people as a patriotic service.

  It is only necessary for such mice-souled individuals to secure these facts from any business consultant. In our case we started Different with fifty dollars and about 300 subscribers transferred from our Raven and from Now, our then coeditor’s smaller publication. A printer who had dreams of millions in his grasp told me that for a mere investment of $20,000 he could guarantee to me overnight what it has actually taken me five years to achieve. But I told him I wasn’t in any big hurry, and that besides I wasn’t going to invest a penny of my personal capital, other than to make up any deficits that might occur by priming the pump with profits from sales of my own books. He asked me how much I intended to start on, and I told him fifty dollars, and he recommended a nice warm straightjacket. I never saw the man again. Men just can’t seem to comprehend the capitalistic machinations of the American female, which might be why she possesses 80% of the national wealth.

  At any rate, Different was launched with fifty dollars and a few ready-made subscribers on the perilous seas of the most fantastic era of all history. By the grace of God, substantially reinforced by my ancestral chromosomes, namely the good humor of the Irish, the diplomacy of the French (used only when needed), the stoicism of the Indian, and the muddle-through-somehow of the British, adding up to a chemical paradox known as an American, we have survived to this day.

  Indispensable factors in that survival have been the wholehearted cooperation of about 90% of the nation’s poetry editors, the goodwill of a large number of newspapers and many well-known columnists who have said nice things about us and reprinted from our poems and editorials, the inspiration received from many of the nation’s finest poets and literary critics in sympathy with our aims and motives, the generosity of widely published and well-paid poets and authors who have contributed their work free, thus enhancing the prestige of our publication and setting a standard for our rising poets, the hard work, the many favors, and the understanding of our printers, the unprecedented cooperation of more than 100 radio stations, program directors, and broadcasters who have proven that they would use good poetry if they could get it by broadcasting widely and continuously from Different, the inspiring letters and the essential information on public affairs received by our many friends in the national Congress, the efficient service of our local postmistress and her staff in the mailing and distribution of our magazine, the dues of Avalon members, used to supplement deficits in our publication costs, the extra subscriptions secured by them in addition to their own, the cooperation of a number of progressive poetry organizations that have introduced both Different and its publisher to their members, and last, but most strangely stimulating, the weird and sometimes vicious epistolary attacks (frequently anonymous) to which we have on rare occasions been subjected. For he who never knows the kind of foe he faces is never utterly sure that he is on the right side, but if his foes expose themselves as small souled, evil, vicious, and ignorant, then he “marvels not that such despise him.”