Unpoeticality

He hits himself plump on the nose in every suggestion of his imaginary critic, down even to the assertion of the unpoeticality of his lyrics.

This verse does not lead us anywhere or develop the thought of No. 8. It turns the apparent unpoeticality of the previous verse into vagueness and abstraction, the arch-enemies of poetry.

By ‘I am the door’ he meant to say, in the poetical form peculiar to the Arab (Semitic) mind, that the new way of life and being which he was teaching is ‘the way, the truth and the life’. To understand this, as Barth and Western Christianity with their peculiarly un-Arab (un-Semitic) mind do understand, as meaning that Jesus was there advocating (or to use the American slang, ‘selling’) his own person, rather than ‘the will of my Father’ is crude, to say the least, and points to the ‘unpoeticality’ of the mould into which Western Christian consciousness had been moulded through the ages.