^"THOSE books," I say to myself, looking on the four volumes of my own poems, "I dare claim to be real poetry because they were in truth born out of my hatred, that is when my love of poetry at once grew intense and turned to the hatred of poetry."  Oh, that moment, indeed, of the true love and hatred, that very moment, there was my own poetry for once and forever; how I feared to look back and read again the poems when they were once done, or to be looked back upon by those poems, as if they were the sins I had committed from fascination, of which I was frightened and repented.  That is my confession; and you might call the poems of mine the real self-revelation of my own soul full of love and poetry, that is to say, full of hatred of poetry, provided that [word] "self-revelation" means more than the common use.  I should say that the man who is able to hate poetry is far better qualified even as a mere reader to become the true lover of poetry; how tired I am to hear one say that he loves poetry with all his heart and soul. [149]  That only sounds to me as a jest at the best.  I think there is a deeper truth in one's saying how he hates poetry; and since I know that the true love comes forth from the true hatred, and the love and hatred are twin brothers or sisters, I regard the hater of poetry as my real friend.  Therefore I say loudly: "Come to me those who hate poetry, I will tell them how I as a poet, hate the poetry; and let us, why through the virtue of that hatred, make the poetry reveal its real worth."
    When Rossetti found the interpretation of love in Beauty, he failed to explain, from his vagueness of mind or baffling cleverness, what was that Beauty; and he, like John Keats before him of course, misled the small poets, indeed thousands of them, making them believe in Beauty (whatever it was) as their guiding star.  I think that Ruskin was more sane in using it as the revealer of the defects of our commonplace life; what defects, I should like to know, we have in our life!  What I am going to say is that it is that Beauty or, let me say, Poetry, to reveal the beauty or perfection of our material life and order; when I write [150] my own poem, it is when I long for and adore my commonplace life whereto I hasten back.  I am the lover of material order; that love grows enriched from the fact of my having the most poetical moment which, as I said before, is so dear that I hate it.  Oh, let me hate and hate Poetry, because to hate it is to love it again.  Oh, let me make my commonplace life important; it is, is it not, that to make it important is to make my own life important? [151]