Is this enough to say about Poetry? The danger is that it is too much to say of Poetry as a whole, and that not all of it will apply to all the different kinds of Poetry; but I have set it down as it is, because I believe that most of it does apply. However, it is not possible to speak much more definitely of Poetry unless one has in view some definite variety. All the chief sayings about Poetry have been couched in very general terms. There is, for example, Bacon's profound saying: Poetry 'was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shews of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things.'1 This is perhaps made a little clearer in Hazlitt's para

1 'The use of this Feigned History hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it; the world being in proportion inferior to the soul; by reason whereof there is agreeable to the spirit of man a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of things. Therefore, because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical; because true history propoundeth the successes and issues of actions not so agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, therefore poesy feigns them more just in retribution, and more according to revealed providence; because true history representeth actions and events more ordinary and less interchanged, therefore poesy endueth them with more rareness, and more unexpected and alternative variations. So as it appeareth that poesy serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation. And therefore it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shews of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things.'-Bacon, 'Advancement of Learning, the Second Book.' Works of Francis Bacon, Spedding, vol. iii. p. 343.

phrase: Poetry, according to Lord Bacon, has Poetry, something divine in it, because it raises the mind and hurries it into sublimity, by conforming the shows of things to the desires of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things, as reason and history do.' And Emerson with his usual succinctness puts it shortly: 'The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts'; or, to use the language employed in this essay, Poetry subjects external things to the soul, instead of subjecting the soul, as Prose does, to external things. An a word, the use of the poetical imagination communicates an ideal pleasure, a pleasure derived ultimately from the realisation by the soul of its own freedom in regard to the world,

This, if the greatest, is also a general doctrine of Poetry-the doctrine, if we may call it so, of the transcendence of the infinite. Equally general is Whitman's doctrine of a pervading infinity. The land and sea, the animals, fishes, and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the forests, mountains, and rivers, are not small themes; but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects,—they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls. Men and women perceive the beauty well enough-probably as well as he. . . . Outdoor people can never be assisted by poets to perceive: some may, but they never can. The poetic quality is not marshalled in rhyme or uniformity, or abstract addresses to things, nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but is the life of these and much else, and is in the soul.' What Whitman says here is not that the soul, by virtue of

its own infinity, transcends experience, but that in all experience it recognises an infinity akin to its own; and this too is one of the most profound things that has been said about poetry.

Yet all these definitions are general definitions, and it will be seen that, like all general definitions of poetry, they concern the essence, as also that, like all general definitions, they go some way to justify Poe's famous generalisation about long poems: a long poem, to express his theory in sensible terms, not being a long poem at all, but merely a collection of short poems with something intervening, something that is generally not poetry, but also generally not pure prose; something of a middle nature which at once preserves and modulates the effect of the more intense passages.1

Yet restricting ourselves to poetry that is essentially and obviously poetry, poetry that could be recognised as such immediately by every one-restricting ourselves, that is, to poetical passages, it is obvious that these may differ very widely in their nature, and that there are in fact several kinds of poetry. There is, in the

1 On this head Mr. Bradley says: 'Naturally, in any poem not quite short, there must be many variations and grades of poetic intensity; but to represent the differences of these numerous grades as a simple antithesis between pure poetry and mere prose is like saying that, because the eyes are the most expressive part of the face, the rest of the face expresses nothing. To hold, again, that this variation of intensity is a defect is like holding that a face would be more beautiful if it were all eyes, a picture better if the illumination were equally intense all over it, a symphony better if it consisted of one movement, and if that were all crisis. And to speak as if a small poem could do all that a long one does, and do it much more completely, is to speak as though a humming-bird could have the same kind of beauty as an eagle, the rainbow in a fountain produce the same effect as the rainbow in the sky, or a moorland stream thunder like Niagara. A long poem, as we have

first place, the poetry of maturity, and opposed to it, or at least alien from it, there is young man's poetry.

Of the poetry of maturity most of what has been said above will be found to be true; and by the poetry of maturity I mean quintessential poetry, such poetry as is to be found especially in the greatest of Wordsworth's short poems, and constantly in Shakespeare's later work.

To distinguish such poetry from prose would be easy. One might say that while prose explains things from the outside, this poetry of maturity is concerned immediately with the feeling itself and is occupied solely in expressing the feeling as felt. There is a directness, an immediacy of connection between the felt emotion and the expression of that emotion—a connection as close as that between a blow inflicted on the chest and the answering sound of the blow. Some experience comes to the poet and he reverberates with a sympathetic cry. He brings you near to life, not by criticising life but by replying to life. Without explanation or apology, allowing no time for reflection, such poetry places the quivering heart of man on the

seen, requires imaginative powers superfluous in a short one; and it would be easy to show that it admits of strictly poetic effects of the highest value which the mere brevity of a short one excludes.' This is to say, that of a long poem such as Wordsworth's Prelude, for example, Bacon's remark quoted above would be true in a wider sense than it could be true of a short poem. Nevertheless there are hosts of passages in the Prelude to which Bacon's remark could not be applied. It is better, therefore, for the purposes of clarity not to include long poems in our survey; not to include them, and yet not altogether to exclude them; this note serving sufficiently, for the present, to connect them with the discussion.

table. So that in those sudden bursts of volcanic speech you really get behind language altogether. You have expressed what has never been expressed, what could never have been expressed except by poetry. You seem to see the pulse of the machine.

The most concrete instance of the method of this kind of poetry is the short poem Wordsworth wrote on the death of Lucy. These Lucy poems, it is thought, are the record of a real experience, and it is supposed that Wordsworth in youth entertained the idea of ultimately marrying a cottage girl who had been brought up among the influences of Nature, and whose simplicity and gaiety of life had charmed his fancy. In good time she was to be educated so as to fit her for a place in the poet's social world, and in good time she was to be old enough to be his wife. But while the poet was dreaming of the future, the present slipped into the past, and the bright child was no more. The news dumfounded him. He had not connected with this young girl, the type of unfolding life, breathing gently and as by natural law, the sombre idea of death. He should have done so, since death comes to all and often unexpectedly, but he had not done so. She seemed as all young girls seem, and even especially for a young girl, the antithesis of death. But now she is dead, and Wordsworth, in his first realisation of the fact, can realise nothing more. He does not ask, as Shelley asks, of the nature of death. The sole thing he realises, as it is the sole thing we all realise when we first hear of the death of a beloved, is that she is no longer alive. Even of her life past he ceases to think in that stunned moment; her activity has become inactivity, and in the stupid brain of the