REATION AND CRITICISM, in literature, are two complementary activities. Once I asked a poet what was the meaning of one of his poems, and his answer was this: “I don’t know. Such a task belongs to you, the critics, not to us, the poets.”

Modern aesthetics is dominated by the conception that art is nothing but a question of expression and does not have any reference to communication. This is a consequence of the sway that Hegel’s philosophy continues to exert over the modern world.