In which C.S. Lewis calls me a phony:

Once, if you wanted an ode to celebrate your victory at the games, you went to the poet (Pindar or another) and ordered it, just as you ordered your banquet from the cook; and you had the same chance of getting a good poem, if you chose a good poet, as of getting a good dinner, if you chose a good cook. … A poet who could not practise his art to order would then have been no less ridiculous than a surgeon who could not operate or a compositor who could not print except when ‘inspired’.

But in the last few centuries we have unquestionably lost the power of fitting art into the processes of life –of producing a great work to fill up a given space of wall in a room or a given space of time in an evening’s festivity. The decay of the hymn (for there was no difficulty about it in the Middle Ages) is only one instance of this general phenomenon. I do not doubt that this escape of poetry from the harness is a very great evil, and a very bad omen for the future of the culture in which it has occurred… (Image and Imagination, 159)

Though it’s certainly not what Lewis had in mind, that phrase “the power of fitting art into the processes of life” brought to my mind Alexey Kondakov’s work. Surely a poet with eyes could look at Kondakov’s creations and see a poem or two: