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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Lyric, by John Drinkwater
+#2 in our series by John Drinkwater
+
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+Title: The Lyric
+       An Essay
+
+Author: John Drinkwater
+
+Release Date: February, 2006 [EBook #9850]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on October 24, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LYRIC ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Thierry Alberto and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LYRIC
+
+AN ESSAY BY JOHN DRINKWATER
+
+
+1922
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+What is Poetry
+
+The Best Words in the Best Order
+
+The Degrees of Poetry
+
+Paradise Lost
+
+What is Lyric
+
+The Classification of Poetry
+
+Lyric Forms
+
+Song
+
+The Popularity of Lyric
+
+Conclusion
+
+
+
+
+WHAT IS POETRY?
+
+
+If you were to ask twenty intelligent people, "What is the Thames?" the
+answer due to you from each would be--"a river." And yet this would hardly
+be matter to satisfy your enquiring mind. You would more probably say,
+"What do you know of the Thames?" or, "Describe the Thames to me." This
+would bring you a great variety of opinions, many dissertations on
+geological and national history, many words in praise of beauty, many
+personal confessions. Here would be the revelation of many minds
+approaching a great subject in as many manners, confirming and
+contradicting each other, making on the whole some impression of cumulative
+judgment, giving you many clues to what might be called the truth, no one
+of them by itself coming near to anything like full knowledge, and the
+final word would inevitably be left unsaid.
+
+The question, "What is poetry?" has been answered innumerable times, often
+by the subtlest and clearest minds, and as many times has it been answered
+differently. The answer in itself now makes a large and distinguished
+literature to which, full as it is of keen intelligence and even of
+constructive vision, we can return with unstaling pleasure. The very poets
+themselves, it is true, lending their wits to the debate, have left the
+answer incomplete, as it must--not in the least unhappily--always remain.
+And yet, if we consider the matter for a moment, we find that all this
+wisdom, prospering from Sidney's _Apology_ until to-day, does not
+strictly attempt to answer the question that is put. It does not tell us
+singly what poetry is, but it speculates upon the cause and effect of
+poetry. It enquires into the impulse that moves the poet to creation and
+describes, as far as individual limitations will allow, the way in which
+the poet's work impresses the world. When Wordsworth says "poetry is the
+breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," he is, exactly, in one intuitive
+word, telling us how poetry comes into being, directing us with an inspired
+gesture to its source, and not strictly telling us what it is; and so
+Shelley tells us in his fiery eloquence of the divine functions of poetry.
+But poetry is, in its naked being and apart from its cause and effect, a
+certain use of words, and, remembering this simple fact, there has been
+one perfect and final answer to the question, "What is poetry?" It was
+Coleridge's: "Poetry--the best words in the best order."
+
+
+
+THE BEST WORDS IN THE BEST ORDER
+
+
+This is the fundamental thing to be remembered when considering the art of
+poetry as such. The whole question of what causes a poet to say this or
+that and of the impression that is thence made upon us can be definitely
+narrowed down to the question "How does he say it?" The manner of his
+utterance is, indeed, the sole evidence before us. To know anything of
+a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know
+something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly
+inessential. The written word is everything. If it is an imperfect word, no
+external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry. We may at times,
+knowing of honourable and inspiriting things in a poet's life, read into
+his imperfect word a value that it does not possess. When we do this our
+judgment of poetry is inert; we are not getting pleasure from his work
+because it is poetry, but for quite other reasons. It may be a quite
+wholesome pleasure, but it is not the high aesthetic pleasure which the
+people who experience it generally believe to be the richest and most vivid
+of all pleasures because it is experienced by a mental state that is more
+eager and masterful than any other. Nor is our judgment acute when we
+praise a poet's work because it chimes with unexpected precision to some
+particular belief or experience of our own or because it directs us by
+suggestion to something dear to our personal affections. Again the poet is
+giving us delight, but not the delight of poetry. We have to consider this
+alone--the poet has something to say: does he say it in the best words in
+the best order? By that, and by that alone, is he to be judged.
+
+For it is to be remembered that this achievement of the best words in the
+best order is, perhaps, the rarest to which man can reach, implying as it
+does a coincidence of unfettered imaginative ecstasy with superb mental
+poise. The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience;
+what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way,
+that is, completely. He has felt it with an imaginative urgency so great as
+to quicken his brain to this flawless ordering of the best words, and it
+is that ordering and that alone which communicates to us the ecstasy, and
+gives us the supreme delight of poetry. It should here be added that poetry
+habitually takes the form of verse. It is, perhaps, profitless to attempt
+any analysis of the emotional law that directs this choice, nor need it
+arbitrarily be said that poetry must of necessity be verse. But it is a
+fact, sufficiently founded on experience, that the intensity of vision that
+demands and achieves nothing less than the best words in the best order for
+its expression does instinctively select the definitely patterned rhythm
+of verse as being the most apt for its purpose. We find, then, that the
+condition of poetry as defined by Coleridge implies exactly what the
+trained judgment holds poetry to be. It implies the highest attainable
+intensity of vision, which, by the sanction of almost universal example,
+casts its best ordering of the best words into the form of verse. Ruskin
+wrote, with fine spiritual ardour--
+
+"... women of England! ...do not think your daughters can be trained to the
+truth of their own human beauty, while the pleasant places, which God
+made at once for their schoolroom and their playground, lie desolate and
+defiled. You cannot baptize them rightly in those inch-deep founts of
+yours, unless you baptize them also in the sweet waters which the great
+Lawgiver strikes forth for ever from the rocks of your native land--waters
+which a Pagan would have worshipped in their purity, and you worship only
+with pollution. You cannot lead your children faithfully to those narrow
+axe-hewn church altars of yours, while the dark azure altars in heaven--the
+mountains that sustain your island throne--mountains on which a Pagan would
+have seen the powers of heaven rest in every wreathed cloud--remain for you
+without inscription; altars built, not to, but by an unknown God."
+
+Here we have, we may say, words in their best order--Coleridge's equally
+admirable definition of prose. It is splendid prose, won only from great
+nobility of emotion. But it is not poetry, not the best words in the best
+order announcing that the feeling expressed has been experienced with the
+highest intensity possible to the mind of man. The tenderness for earth and
+its people and the heroic determination not to watch their defilement in
+silence, have been deeply significant things to Ruskin, moving him to
+excellent words. But could they be more strictly experienced, yet more
+deeply significant, shaping yet more excellent words? Blake gives us the
+answer:
+
+  And did those feet in ancient time
+    Walk upon England's mountains green?
+  And was the holy Lamb of God
+    On England's pleasant pastures seen?
+
+  And did the Countenance Divine
+    Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
+  And was Jerusalem builded here
+    Among these dark Satanic mills?
+
+  Bring me my bow of burning gold!
+    Bring me my arrows of desire!
+  Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
+    Bring me my chariot of fire!
+
+  I will not cease from mental fight,
+    Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
+  Till we have built Jerusalem
+    In England's green and pleasant land.
+
+It may be suggested that, for their purpose, Ruskin's words are perfectly
+chosen, that as a direct social charge they achieve their purpose better
+than any others that could have been shaped. Even if we allow this and
+do not press, as we very reasonably might, the reply that merely in this
+direction Blake's poem working, as is the manner of all great art, with
+tremendous but secret vigour upon the imagination of the people, has a
+deeper and more permanent effect than Ruskin's prose, we still remember
+that the sole purpose of poetry is to produce the virile spiritual
+activity that we call aesthetic delight and that to do this is the highest
+achievement to which the faculties of man can attain. If by "the best
+words" we mean anything, we must mean the best words for the highest
+possible purpose. To take an analogy: if we say that a democratic
+government is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completely
+fulfills the highest function of a government--the realisation of the will
+of the people. But it is also a function of government to organise the
+people and--although, just as we may think that Blake's poem finally
+beats Ruskin's prose on Ruskin's own ground, we may think, too, that the
+government that best represents the people will finally best organise
+the people--it may quite plausibly be said that in this business an
+aristocratic or militant government will, in an imperfectly conditioned
+civilisation (such as that of the world to-day), excel a democratic
+government. Nevertheless, we still say with an easy mind that a democratic
+government is the best government, without qualification, since it excels
+in the highest purpose of government. Clearly Coleridge implies, and
+reasonably enough, an elaboration such as this in his definition--the best
+words in the best order. To say that Blake and Ruskin, in those passages,
+were giving expression to dissimilar experiences is but to emphasise the
+distinction between prose and poetry. The closest analysis discovers no
+difference between the essential thought of the one and the other. But
+Blake projected the thought through a mood of higher intensity, and, where
+Ruskin perfectly ordered admirable words, he perfectly ordered the
+best words. It is the controlling mood that differs, not the material
+controlled. Hence it is that still another mind, starting from the same
+radical perception, might transfigure it through a mood as urgent as
+Blake's and produce yet another poem of which it could strictly be said
+that here again were the best words in the best order. We should then
+have three men moved by the same thought; in the one case the imaginative
+shaping of the thought would fail to reach the point at which the record
+and communication of ecstasy become the chief intention, and the expression
+would be prose; in each of the other cases the shaping would pass beyond
+that point, and there would be two separate moods expressed, each in the
+terms of poetry.
+
+One further qualification remains to be made. By words we must mean, as
+Coleridge must have meant, words used for a purpose which they alone can
+serve. Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences
+that can be communicated in no other way. If you ask me the time, and I
+say--it is six o'clock, it may be said that I am using the best words in
+the best order, and that, although the thought in my mind is incapable of
+being refined into the higher aesthetic experience of which we have spoken,
+my answer is, if Coleridge was right, poetry. But these are not, in our
+present sense, words at all. They have no power which is peculiar to
+themselves. If I show you my watch you are answered just as effectively.
+
+That there is no absolute standard for reference does not matter. All
+aesthetic appreciation and opinion can but depend upon our judgment,
+fortified by knowledge of what is, by cumulative consent, the best that has
+been done. There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best
+words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and
+judgment, that it is so. And the conviction is, exactly, the conviction
+that the mood to which the matter has been subjected has been of such a
+kind as to achieve an intensity beyond which we cannot conceive the mind as
+passing, and it follows that there may be--as indeed there are--many poems
+dealing with the same subject each of which fulfills the obligations of
+poetry as defined by Coleridge. For while the subjects of poetry are few
+and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is
+the same in all arts. If six masters paint the same landscape and under
+the same conditions, there will be one subject but six visions, and
+consequently six different interpretations, each one of which may, given
+the mastery, satisfy us as being perfect; perfect, that is, not as the
+expression of a subject which has no independent artistic existence, but as
+the expression of the mood in which the subject is realised. So it is in
+poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having
+been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do
+this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant
+verse.
+
+
+
+THE DEGREES OF POETRY
+
+
+The question that necessarily follows these reflections is--Are there
+degrees in poetry? Since a short lyric may completely satisfy the
+requirements of poetry as here set down, announcing itself to have been
+created in a poetic or supremely intensified mood, can poetry be said at
+any time to go beyond this? If we accept these conclusions, can a thing so
+slight, yet so exquisite, so obviously authentic in source as:
+
+    When I a verse shall make,
+      Know I have pray'd thee,
+    For old religion's sake,
+      Saint Ben, to aid me.
+
+    Make the way smooth for me,
+      When I, thy Herrick,
+    Honouring thee, on my knee
+      Offer my lyric.
+
+    Candles I'll give to thee,
+      And a new altar,
+    And thou, Saint Ben, shall be
+      Writ in my Psalter,
+
+be said to be less definitely poetry than _Paradise Lost_ or in any
+essentially poetic way below it? The logical answer is, no; and I think it
+is the right one. In considering it we should come to an understanding of
+the nature of lyric, the purpose of this essay. But first let us see how
+far it may be justifiable.
+
+
+
+PARADISE LOST
+
+
+It is commonly asserted and accepted that _Paradise Lost_ is among the
+two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of
+supreme poetic achievement in our literature. What are the qualities by
+virtue of which this claim is made, and allowed by every competent judge?
+Firstly there is the witness of that ecstasy of mood of which we have
+spoken.
+
+  His praise, ye Winds, that from four quarters blow,
+  Breathe soft or loud: and wave your tops, ye Pines,
+  With every plant, in sign of worship wave.
+  Fountains, and ye that warble, as ye flow,
+  Melodious murmurs, warbling tune his praise.
+  Join voices all ye living Souls. Ye Birds,
+  That, singing, up to Heaven-gate ascend,
+  Bear on your wings and in your notes his praise.
+  Ye that in waters glide, and ye that walk
+  The earth, and stately tread, or lowly creep,
+  Witness if I be silent, morn or even,
+  To hill or valley, fountain, or fresh shade,
+  Made vocal by my song, and taught his praise.
+
+This note of high imaginative tension is persistent throughout the poem,
+and that it should be so masterfully sustained is in itself cause for
+delighted admiration. But to be constant in a virtue is not to enhance
+its quality. Superbly furnished as _Paradise Lost_ is with this
+imaginative beauty, the beauty is as rich and unquestionable in the few
+pages of _Lycidas_; there is less of it, that is all. And who shall
+say that it is less ecstatic or less perfect in the little orison to Saint
+Ben? You may prefer Milton's manner, but then you may, with equal reason,
+prefer Herrick's, being grateful for what Keats announced to be truth, in
+whatever shape you may find it. In any case we cannot, on this ground,
+assign a lower place to the poet who could order those words "religion's,"
+"Saint Ben," "Psalter" and the rest of them, with such inspired good
+fortune. And yet we know that _Paradise Lost_ is a greater work than
+this little flight of certain song, greater, too, than the poet's own
+elegy. There is an explanation.
+
+Of all the energies of man, that which I will anticipate my argument by
+calling the poetic energy, the energy that created Herrick's song and the
+distinguishing qualities of that passage from Milton, is the rarest and the
+most highly, if not the most generally, honoured; we have only to think of
+the handful of men who at any time out of all the millions can bring this
+perfect expression to a mood of the highest imaginative intensity, to know
+that the honour is justly bestowed. So splendid a thing is success in
+this matter that failure, if it is matched with a will for sincerity and
+intelligence of purpose, will often bring a man some durable fame. But the
+energies of man are manifold, and while we rightly set the poetic energy
+above the rest, there are others which are only less rare, and in their
+most notable manifestations yielding to it alone in worthiness of homage
+which will, indeed, often be more generally paid. Such an energy is the
+profound intellectual control of material, as distinct from profound
+emotional sensitiveness to material; the capacity for ordering great masses
+of detail into a whole of finely balanced and duly related proportions.
+Caesar and Napoleon had it, marshalling great armies to perfectly conceived
+designs; Fielding had it, using it to draw a multitude of character and
+event into the superbly shaped lines of his story; the greatest political
+leaders have had it; Cromwell had it, organising an enthusiasm; Elizabeth,
+organising a national adventure.[1] Again, there is the energy
+of morality, ardently desiring justice and right fellowship, sublimely
+lived by men who have made goodness great, like Lincoln, sublimely spoken
+by men who made sermons passionate, like Ruskin and Carlyle. To take one
+other instance, there is the highly specialised energy that delights in the
+objective perception of differentiations of character, the chief energy of
+the deftest wits such as Samuel Johnson and the best comic dramatists.
+
+[1: It may be necessary to point out that while the poetic energy
+does not include this architectural power, the intellectual co-ordination
+of large masses of material, it does, of course, include the shapely
+control of the emotion which is its being. It is, indeed, difficult to see
+precisely what can be meant by the suggestion that is often made that the
+emotions can ever be translated into poetic form wholly without the play of
+intellect. If the emotion is intense enough for the creation of poetry at
+all, it will inevitably call up the intellectual power necessary to its
+shaping, otherwise it would be ineffectually diffused. Mr. John Bailey, in
+his masterly if sometimes provoking essay on Milton says, in the midst
+of some admirable remarks on this subject, "It has been said by a living
+writer that 'when reason is subsidiary to emotion verse is the right means
+of expression, and, when emotion to reason, prose.' This is roughly true,
+though the poetry of mere emotion is poor stuff." I would suggest that
+poetry of emotion, in this sense, does not and could not exist. Bad verse
+is merely the evidence of both emotion and intellect that are, so to
+speak, below poetic power, not of emotion divorced from intellect, which
+evaporates unrecorded.]
+
+Any one of these energies, greatly manifested, will compel a just
+admiration; not so great an admiration as the poetic energy, which is
+witness of the highest urgency of individual life, of all things the most
+admirable, but still great. If, further, we consider any one of these
+energies by itself, we shall see that if it were co-existent with the
+poetic energy, the result would be likely to be that, in contact with
+so masterful a force, it would become yet more emphatic, and so a thing
+arresting in itself would become yet more notable under its new dominion.
+And so it is. Fielding's architectural power is a yet more wonderful thing
+in Sophocles, where it is allied to poetic energy; Ruskin's moral fervour
+is, for all its nobility, less memorable than Wordsworth's and Ben Jonson
+defines character more pungently than Sheridan. These energies remain,
+nevertheless, distinct from the poetic energy. When, however, a poet is
+endowed not alone with his own particular gift of poetry, but also with
+some of these other energies--of which there are many--his work very
+rightly is allowed an added greatness. It is so with _Paradise Lost_.
+Of the three energies other than the poetic that I have mentioned, Milton
+had rich measure of two and something of the third. No man has ever
+excelled him either in power of intellectual control or in moral passion,
+and he was not without some sense of character. Consequently we get in
+his great poem, not only the dominating poetic quality which is the chief
+thing, enabling the poet to realise his vision (or mood) perfectly, but
+also the spectacle of a great number of perfectly realised visions being
+related to each other with excellent harmony; we get, further, a great
+moral exaltation--again perfectly realised by the poetic energy, and we
+get, finally, considerable subtlety--far more than is generally allowed--of
+psychological detail. From all these things, the architectonics, the zeal
+for justice and the revelation of character, we get an added and wholesome
+delight which gives Milton's work a place of definitely greater eminence
+than Herrick's song in the record of human activity. In effect, Milton
+besides being a poet, which is the greatest of all distinctions, becomes,
+by possession of those other qualities, a great man as well, and I think
+that this is really what we mean when we speak of a great poet. Without his
+poetic faculty, although he would fall in the scale of human distinction,
+which is not at all the same thing as renown, below, say, so humble a
+personality yet so true a poet as John Clare[2], Milton would still be a
+great man, while Herrick without his poetry would be indistinguishable from
+the crowd. And the great man is as clearly evident in Milton's poetry as he
+is clearly not evident in Herrick's.
+
+[2: It may be asked: "Do you really think that a poet who has left
+no other record of himself than a page or two of songs, even perfect songs,
+can claim a greater distinction than a great man who is not a poet?" Let me
+say, once for all, that I do think so. To have written one perfect song
+is to have given witness and the only kind of witness (in common with the
+media of other arts) that is finally authoritative, that at least one
+supremely exacting mood has been perfectly realised; that is to say, one
+moment of life has been perfectly experienced. And since, with our human
+conception, we can see no good or desirable end beyond the perfect
+experience of life, the man who proves to us that he has done this, no
+matter though it has been but for a moment, is more distinguished--that is,
+more definitely set apart in his own achievement--than the man who, with
+whatever earnestness and nobility, has but proved to us that he desired
+this perfection of experience, even though the desire is exalted by the
+most heroic altruism.]
+
+
+
+WHAT IS LYRIC?
+
+
+And so we have Milton and Herrick, both poets, the one a great man, the
+other not. It is a wide difference. Great men are rare, poets are rarer,
+but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest
+of all events. Milton is one of perhaps a dozen names in the history of the
+world's literature, Herrick--still with a fine enough distinction--one of
+something under two hundred in the history of our own. And yet they are
+left on equal terms in the possession of the purely poetic energy. Milton's
+achievement outweighs Herrick's, but for the reasons that I have mentioned,
+and not because poetry grows better by accumulation or because it is
+possible to prove, or even to satisfy any considerable majority of good
+judges, that--
+
+    Ye have been fresh and green,
+      Ye have been filled with flowers,
+    And ye the walks have been
+      Where maids have spent their hours.
+    You have beheld how they
+      With wicker arks did come
+    To kiss and bear away
+      The richer cowslips home.
+    You've heard them sweetly sing,
+      And seen them in a round:
+    Each virgin like a spring,
+      With honeysuckles crown'd.
+    But now we see none here
+      Whose silvery feet did tread,
+    And with dishevell'd hair
+      Adorn'd this smoother mead.
+    Like unthrifts, having spent
+      Your stock and needy grown,
+    You've left here to lament
+      Your poor estates, alone,
+
+is inferior, in specifically poetic quality, to
+
+  Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,
+  For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
+  Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor;
+  So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,
+  And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
+  And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
+  Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.
+
+We come, then, to the consideration of this specific quality that
+distinguishes what we recognise as poetry from all other verbal expression.
+Returning for a moment to _Paradise Lost_, we find that here is a work
+of art of which the visible and external sign is words. That it has three
+qualities--there may be more, but it is not to the point--architectural
+power, moral exaltation and a sense of character, each of which, although
+it may be more impressive when presented as it were under the auspices of
+the poetic quality, can exist independently of it, as in _Tom Jones_,
+_Unto This Last_, and _The School for Scandal_ respectively;
+that there remains a last and dominating quality, which is not related to
+intellectual fusion of much diverse material, as is the first of those
+other qualities, or to the kind of material, as are the other two, but to
+extreme activity of the perceptive mood upon whatever object it may be
+directed, remembering that this activity is highly exacting as to the
+worthiness of objects in which it can concern itself. We find, further,
+that this is a quality which it has in common not with _Tom Jones_
+or _Unto This Last_, but with a thing so inconsiderable in all other
+respects as those songs of Herrick's. And in each case we find that the
+token of this quality is a conviction that here are words that could not
+have been otherwise chosen or otherwise placed; that here is an expression
+to rearrange which would be to destroy it--a conviction that we by no means
+have about the prose of Fielding and Ruskin, admirable as it is. We find,
+in short, that this quality equals a maximum of imaginative pressure
+freeing itself in the best words in the best order. And this quality is the
+specific poetic quality; the presence or absence of which should decide for
+us, without any other consideration whatever, whether what is before us is
+or is not poetry. And it seems to me, further, that what we have in our
+minds when we speak of lyric is precisely this same quality; that lyric and
+the expression of pure poetic energy unrelated to other energies are the
+same thing.
+
+
+
+THE CLASSIFICATION OF POETRY
+
+
+It is not yet the place to discuss the question of lyric forms--to consider
+what kind of thing it is that people mean when they speak of "a lyric."
+First we must consider the commonly accepted opinion that a lyric is an
+expression of personal emotion, with its implication that there is an
+essential difference between a lyric and, say, dramatic or narrative
+poetry. A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but
+then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of
+poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly
+artificial divisions which have no real being. To talk of dramatic
+poetry, epic poetry and narrative poetry is to talk of three different
+things--epic, drama and narrative; but each is combined with a fourth thing
+in common, which is poetry, which, in turn, is in itself of precisely the
+same nature as the lyric of which we are told that it is yet a further
+kind of poetry. Let us here take a passage from a play and consider it in
+relation to this suggestion:
+
+
+CLOWN.      I wish you all joy of the worm.
+
+CLEOPATRA.  Farewell.
+
+CLOWN.      You must think this, look you, that the worm will do his kind.
+
+CLEOPATRA.  Ay, ay; farewell.
+
+CLOWN.      Look you, the worm is not to be trusted but in the keeping of
+              wise people; for indeed there is no goodness in the worm.
+
+CLEOPATRA.  Take thou no care; it shall be heeded.
+
+CLOWN.      Very good. Give it nothing, I pray you, for it is not worth
+              the feeding.
+
+CLEOPATRA.  Will it eat me?
+
+CLOWN.      You must not think I am so simple but I know the devil himself
+              will not eat a woman; I know that a woman is a dish for the
+              gods, if the devil dress her not. But, truly, these same
+              whoreson devils do the gods great harm in their women, for
+              in every ten that they make the devils mar five.
+
+CLEOPATRA.  Well, get thee gone; farewell.
+
+CLOWN.      Yes, forsooth; I wish you joy of the worm.
+
+             _Re-enter_ IRAS.
+
+CLEOPATRA.  Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have
+            Immortal longings in me; now no more
+            The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip.
+            Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear
+            Antony call; I see him rouse himself
+            To praise my noble act; I hear him mock
+            The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men
+            To excuse their after wrath; husband, I come:
+            Now to that name my courage prove my title!
+            I am fire and air; my other elements
+            I give to baser life. So; have you done?
+            Come then, and take the last warmth of my lips.
+            Farewell, kind Charmian; Iras, long farewell.
+
+I have chosen this passage not because of its singular beauty, but because
+it is peculiarly to our present purpose. In the first place, Shakespeare,
+by using both prose and verse--which he by no means always does under
+similar circumstances--makes a clear formal division between what is poetry
+and what is not. It is all magnificently contrived drama, but down to the
+Clown's exit it is not poetry. The significance of the Clown does not
+demand of Shakespeare's imaginative mood that highest activity that would
+force him to poetry. The short dialogue has great excellence, but not this
+kind of excellence. The fact that it occurs in what we call a poetic drama
+does not make it poetry; its fine dramatic significance does not give it
+poetic significance. We are living in a world of dramatic poetry, and
+yet we have here a perfectly clear distinction between the drama and the
+poetry, since we definitely have the one without the other. Then, when
+Cleopatra begins her farewell speech, we have the addition of poetry and
+a continuance of the drama. And this speech illustrates perfectly the
+suggestion that the quality which is commonly said to be exclusively lyric
+is the quality of all poetry. It illustrates it in a particularly
+emphatic way. For not only is it unquestionably poetry, but it is also
+unquestionably dramatic. Very clearly the poet is not here speaking out of
+his own actual experience; it is a woman speaking, one who is a queen: who
+is wrecked upon the love of kings: who knows that she is about to die a
+strange and sudden death. So that if the impulse of the poetry in poetic
+drama were essentially different from the impulse of lyric, if the personal
+experience which is said to be this latter were something differing in kind
+from the experience which is the source of what is called dramatic poetry,
+then here is a case where the essential difference could surely be
+perceived and defined. It cannot be defined, for it does not exist. It is a
+fallacy to suppose that experience is any the less personal because it is
+concerned with an event happening to someone else. If my friend falls to a
+mortal sickness my experience, if my imaginative faculty is acute, is as
+poignant as his; if he achieves some great good fortune, my delight is as
+vigorous as his. And if I am a poet, and choose to express the grief or
+pleasure as if it were his concern and not mine, the experience does not
+become one whit less personal to me. You may, if it is convenient, call the
+result lyric if I speak as though the experience is my own and dramatic
+poetry if I speak of it as being his, but what you are really saying is
+that in the one case I am producing pure poetry, and in the other I am
+producing poetry in conjunction with dramatic statement. The poetic quality
+is the same in either case. Cleopatra's speech is notable for two things:
+its dramatic significance, which is admittedly contrived by Shakespeare,
+and its poetry which springs from an intensity of experience which is
+clearly, unless we juggle with words, Shakespeare's and not Cleopatra's.
+The fact that the material upon which the poet's mood has worked has not
+been confined to some event that has happened to himself but has included
+the condition of an imagined being does not alter the radical significance
+of his experience or influence the essential nature of its product. The
+poetic energy may operate on many things through a million moods, but the
+character of the energy is immutable. And when we speak of lyric, thinking
+of the direct and simple activity of this energy unmodified by the process
+of any other energies, we shall, if we get our mind clear about it, see
+that we mean pure poetry, and we shall recognise this poetry as being
+constant in its essential properties in whatever association we may
+henceforth find it.
+
+If it is allowed, as, for the reasons I have attempted to set out, I think
+it rightly may be, that the purely poetic energy is not a variable quality,
+that of any given expression of a man's mental activity it can definitely
+be said that it is or is not poetry, there remains one question to be
+answered,--Can one poem be better than another, if both are truly poems?
+Or can one poet, by reason of his poetry, be better than another poet by
+reason of his? Is Keats, for example, a better poet than Suckling? Every
+good judge of poetry, if that question were put, would be likely to answer
+without hesitation--Yes, he is. And yet the answer, although the reason for
+it may be found and, in a sense, allowed, does not in any way discredit the
+principle that has been defined. With a passage from each of these poets at
+his best before us, let us see what we find. This from Keats:
+
+    Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
+      No hungry generations tread thee down;
+    The voice I hear this passing night was heard
+      In ancient days by emperor and clown:
+
+    Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
+      Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home
+        She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
+          The same that oft-times hath
+        Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
+        Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
+
+And this from Suckling:
+
+    Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
+      Prythee, why so pale?
+    Will, when looking well can't move her,
+      Looking ill prevail?
+      Prythee, why so pale?
+
+    Why so dull and mute, young sinner?
+      Prythee, why so mute?
+    Will, when speaking well can't win her,
+      Saying nothing do't?
+      Prythee, why so mute?
+
+    Quit, quit, for shame! This will not move;
+      This cannot take her.
+    If of herself she will not love,
+      Nothing can make her:
+      The Devil take her!
+
+The poetic energy in Keats is here entirely undisturbed. I do not mean that
+it is not united to any other energy--though here it happens not to be--as
+in poetic drama, where it is united to the dramatic energy and is still
+undisturbed in its full activity, but that it is here freely allowed to
+work itself out to its consummation without any concession, conscious or
+unconscious, to any mood that is not non-poetic but definitely anti-poetic,
+in which case, although unchanged in its nature, it would be constrained in
+a hostile atmosphere. Keats's words are struck out of a mood that tolerates
+nothing but its own full life and is concerned only to satisfy that life by
+uncompromising expression. The result is pure poetry, or lyric. But when
+we come to Suckling's lines we find that there is a difference. The poetic
+energy is still here. Suckling has quite clearly experienced something in
+a mood of more than common intensity. It does not matter that the material
+which has been subjected to the mood is not in itself very profound or
+passionate. Another poet, Wither, with material curiously like Suckling's
+to work upon, achieves poetry as unquestionable if not so luxuriant as
+Keats's.
+
+    Shall I, wasting in despair,
+    Die because a woman's fair?
+    Or make pale my cheeks with care
+    Because another's rosy are?
+    Be she fairer than the day,
+    Or the flowery mead in May--
+      If she think not well of me
+      What care I how fair she be?
+
+To object that there is an emotional gaiety in this which is foreign to
+Keats is but to state a personal preference. It is, indeed, a preference
+which is common and founded upon very general experience. Most of us have,
+from the tradition and circumstance of our own lives, a particular sympathy
+with the grave and faintly melancholy beauty which is the most recurrent
+note in fine poetry throughout the world, but this does not establish this
+particular strain of beauty as being in any way essential to poetry. It is
+related to an almost universal condition, but it is a fertile source of
+poetry, not one with the poetic energy itself. It would be absurd to impugn
+a man's taste because he preferred Chaucer's poetry, which has scarcely
+a touch of this melancholy, to Shelley's, which is drenched in it, as it
+would be absurd to quarrel with it because he obtained strictly imaginative
+pleasure more readily from
+
+    Shall I, wasting in despair
+
+than from
+
+    Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
+
+His preference merely shows him to belong to a minority: it does not show
+him to be insensible to poetry. For Wither's mood, by the evidence of its
+expression, although it may not be so universal in its appeal nor so
+adventurous in design, is here active to the degree of poetry no less
+surely than is Keats's. And yet, while it would be an error of judgment
+to rate Wither below Keats (by virtue of these illustrations) in pure
+poetic energy, it would, I think, be quite sound so to rate Suckling by
+the witness of his lyric. For while Wither's mood, in its chosen activity,
+is wholly surrendered to the poetic energy, Suckling's is not. It is
+contaminated by one of those external activities which I have spoken of as
+being hostile to poetry. Although he perceives his subject with the right
+urgency, he is unwilling to be quite loyal to his perception. He makes
+some concession to the witty insincerity of the society in which he lives,
+and his poetry is soiled by the contact. It is not destroyed, not even
+changed in its nature, but its gold is left for ever twisted in a baser
+metal with which it does not suit. What we get is not a new compound with
+the element that corresponds to poetic energy transmuted, but an
+ill-sorted mixture, while Keats gives us the unblemished gold. We are
+right in proclaiming his the finer achievement.
+
+Keats and Wither will serve as examples with which to finish our argument.
+In spite of all that has been said Keats takes higher rank as poet than
+Wither? Yes, certainly, but not because the poetic energy in him was a
+finer thing than the poetic energy that was in Wither. It was more
+constant, which is a fact of no little importance; its temper appealed to
+a much more general sympathy, a circumstance which cannot be left out of
+the reckoning; it touched a far wider range of significant material.
+These things give Keats his just superiority of rank, but they do not
+deprive Wither, at his best moments, of the essential quality which is
+with Keats, as with all poets, the one by which he makes his proudest
+claim good. Nor need it be feared that in allowing Wither, with his rare
+moments of withdrawn and rather pale perfection, this the highest of all
+distinctions, we are making accession to the title of poet too easy. It
+remains the most difficult of all human attainments. The difference between
+the essential quality in those eight fragile lines and that in such verse
+as, say:
+
+    Oft. In the stilly night,
+      Ere slumber's chain has bound me,
+    Fond memory brings the light
+      Of other days around me,
+
+may be so elusive as to deceive many people that it does not exist, but it
+is the difference between the rarest of all energies and a common enough
+sensibility.
+
+
+
+LYRIC FORMS
+
+
+While, therefore, the term "lyric poetry" would in itself seem to be
+tautological, and so to speak of lyric forms is, strictly, to speak of
+all poetic forms, there are nevertheless certain more or less defined
+characteristics of form that we usually connect in our mind with what we
+call "a lyric" (or, even less exactly, "lyric poetry") which may be said to
+be a poem where the pure poetic energy is not notably associated with other
+energies--with a partial exception to which reference will be made. In
+examining these characteristics nothing will be attempted in the way of a
+history or an inclusive consideration of particular forms which are known
+as lyric, but only, as far as may be, an analysis of their governing
+principles.
+
+To say that a lyric (using the word henceforward in its particular sense)
+is generally short is but to say that poetic tension can only be sustained
+for a short time. Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short
+ones is perfectly just. What happens, I think, is this. The poetic mood,
+selecting a subject, records its perception of that subject, the result is
+a lyric, and the mood passes. On its recurrence another subject is selected
+and the process repeated. But if another energy than the purely poetic, the
+energy of co-ordination of which I have spoken, comes into operation, there
+will be a desire in the poet to link the records of his recurrent poetic
+perceptions together, and so to construct many poems into a connected
+whole. Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or
+narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed
+into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them. The
+decision that the material used at one occurrence of the poetic mood shall
+be related to the material used at the next is not in itself an operation
+of the purely poetic energy, but of another.
+
+The present purpose is, however, to consider the general character of forms
+used by poets when they choose to leave each successive record of poetic
+experience in isolation. I have said that any translation of emotion into
+poetry--it might be said, into any intelligible expression--necessarily
+implies a certain co-operation of intellectual control. If we take even a
+detached phrase so directly and obviously emotional in source as:
+
+    I die, I faint, I fail!
+
+it is clear that the setting out those words is not merely an emotional
+act. But intellectual control of this kind is not identical with that
+intellectual relating of one part to another of which we have been
+speaking, which we may call co-ordination. Of all energies, however, the
+co-ordinating energy is the one with which the poetic energy is most
+instinctively in sympathy, and it is in this connection that I made a
+partial exception when I said that a lyric was a poem where the pure poetic
+energy was not notably associated with other energies. When a poet writes
+a poem of corresponding lines and stanzas or in a form of which the
+structural outline is decided by a definable law--as in the sonnet--he is
+in effect obeying the impulse of the co-ordinating energy, and the use of
+rhyme is another sign of obedience to the same impulse. It so happens
+that this energy, next to the poetic energy, is the most impressive
+and satisfying of all mental activities, and while poetry may exist
+independently of it, the fact remains that it very rarely does so. A very
+curious fallacy about this matter has sometimes obtained support. The
+adherents of what is called free verse, not content, as they should
+thankfully be, if they can achieve poetry in their chosen medium, are
+sometimes tempted to claim that it is the peculiar virtue of their
+manner--which, let me say it again, may be entirely admirable--that it
+enables the structure of verse to keep in constant correspondence with
+change of emotion. The notion is, of course, a very convenient one when you
+wish to escape the very exacting conditions of formal control, and have not
+the patience or capacity to understand their difficulties, and that it is
+professed by many who do so wish is doubtless. But there are other serious
+and gifted people, loyally trying to serve a great art, who hold this view,
+and on their account consideration is due to it. But it is none the less a
+fallacy, and doubly so. In the first place, the change of line-lengths and
+rhythms in a short poem written in "free verse" is nearly always arbitrary,
+and does not succeed in doing what is claimed for it in this direction,
+while it often does succeed in distressing the ear and so obscuring the
+sense, though that is by the way. It is not as though given rhythms and
+line-lengths had any peculiar emotional significance attached to them.
+A dirge may be in racing anapaests, laughter in the most sedate iambic
+measure; a solemn invocation may move in rapid three-foot lines, while
+grave heroic verse may contain the gayest of humours. In a long work,
+indeed, variety of structure may be used to give variety of sensation to
+the ear with delightful and sometimes even necessary effect, though--in
+English, and I am always speaking of English--it cannot even then be used
+with any certainty to express change of emotion. But in a lyric the ear
+does not demand this kind of relief. With many of us, at least, it accepts
+and even demands an unbroken external symmetry. The symmetry may be
+externally simple, as in, say, the stanzas of _Heraclitus_:
+
+    They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;
+    They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.
+    I wept as I remembered how often you and I
+    Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
+
+    And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
+    A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
+    Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales awake,
+    For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take,
+
+or intricate, as in:
+
+    Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy,
+    Sphere-born harmonious Sisters, Voice and Verse,
+    Wed your divine sounds, and mixt power employ
+    Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce;
+    And to our high-raised phantasy present
+    That undisturbed song of pure content,
+    Aye sung before the sapphire-colour'd throne
+        To Him that sits thereon
+    With saintly shout and solemn jubilee;
+    Where the bright Seraphim in burning row
+    Their loud-uplifted angel-trumpets blow;
+    And the Cherubic host in thousand quires
+    Touch their immortal harps of golden wires,
+    With those just Spirits that wear victorious palms,
+        Hymns devout and holy psalms
+        Singing everlastingly:
+
+in either case there is a formal and easily perceptible relation between
+one part of the structure and another, and this relation is a positive help
+to us in understanding the plain sense of the words, while its presence
+does not involve any loss of emotional significance which its absence would
+supply. The truth is--and here is the second and chief objection to the
+claim that we are discussing--that the poetic mood, which is what is
+expressed by the rhythm and form of verse and may very well be called the
+emotion of poetry, is not at all the same thing as what are commonly called
+the emotions--as happiness, despair, love, hate and the rest. Its colour
+will vary between one poet and another, but in one poet it will be
+relatively fixed in quality, while these other emotions are but material
+upon which, in common with many other things, it may work. And being a
+relatively fixed condition, it is, for its part, in no need of changing
+metrical devices for its expression, and to maintain that the "emotions,"
+subjects of its activity, should have in their alternation a corresponding
+alternation of metrical device is no more reasonable than to maintain that
+other subjects of its activity should be so treated; it is to forget, for
+example, that when Shakespeare wrote:
+
+    Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
+      Nor the furious winter's rages:
+    Thou thy worldly task hast done,
+      Home art gone and ta'en thy wages:
+    Golden lads and girls all must,
+      As chimney-sweepers, come to dust,
+
+it was his subject-matter that changed from line to line and not the poetic
+emotion governing it, and to say that he ought to have made the metrical
+and rhythmic form of the first line in itself suggest heat: of the second,
+rough weather: of the third, work: of the fourth, wages: and of the fifth
+and sixth the death of golden lads and girls and of chimney-sweepers
+respectively, all things manifestly very different from each other, and
+things which, if it were the function of verbal rhythms and metres to do
+this sort of thing at all, could not with any propriety have the closely
+related equivalents that they have here. No; to ask for this kind of effect
+is really to ask for nothing more valuable than the devotional crosses and
+altars into which a perverted wit led some of the seventeenth-century poets
+to contrive their verses in unhappy moments, or Southey's _Lodore_, in
+which there is a fond pretence that verbal rhythms are water.[3] It is just
+as difficult to explain why verbal rhythms will not perform this function
+as it is to explain why the moon is not a green cheese.
+
+[3: Most poets will occasionally use onomatopoeia with success,
+but this is a different matter, and even so it is quite an inessential
+poetic device. One might sometimes suppose from what we are told, that
+Virgil's chief claim to poetry was the fact that he once made a line of
+verse resemble the movement of a horse's hoofs.]
+
+But while it is true that the function of the rhythm of poetry is to
+express the governing poetic emotion, and that, since the emotion in
+itself is fixed rather than changing, it will best do this not by mere
+irregularity, but by flexible movement that is contained in an external
+symmetry, it does not follow at all that the subject-matter which the
+poetic emotion is controlling, be it the "emotions" or anything else,
+cannot hope for expression that catches its peculiar properties. To do this
+in poetry is the supreme distinction not of rhythms, but of words. The
+preponderance of the five-foot blank-verse line in the work of, say,
+Shakespeare and Milton, is so great that we can safely say that their rank
+as poets would not be lower than it is if they had written nothing else.
+Clearly their constancy to this metre was not the result of any technical
+deficiency. Even if Milton had not written the choruses of _Samson
+Agonistes_ and Shakespeare his songs, nobody would be so absurd as
+to suggest that they adopted this five-foot line and spent their mighty
+artistry in sending supple and flowing variety through its external
+uniformity, because they could not manage any other. They used it because
+they found that its rhythm perfectly expressed their poetic emotion, and
+because the formal relation of one line to another satisfied the instinct
+for co-ordination, and for the full expression of the significance of their
+subject-matter they relied not upon their rhythms, but upon their choice
+of words. The belief that when a poem is written there is one and only one
+metrical scheme that could possibly be used for that particular occasion is
+an amiable delusion that should be laid aside with such notions as that the
+poet makes his breakfast on dew and manna. Once the poem is written we
+may feel indeed, if it be a good one, that any change in the form is
+impossible, but when the poet was about to write it we may be sure that
+he quite deliberately weighed one form against another before making his
+choice. It may even be true that he will sometimes find the shape of his
+poem running to his tongue as it were unbidden, but this certainty of
+selection is really in itself the result of long and, perhaps, subconscious
+deliberation. The point is that the chosen form must in any case express
+the poetic emotion, but that its particular election is a personal whim,
+wholly satisfactory in its result, rather than a divine necessity. _The
+Ode to the West Wind_ and the _Stanzas written in Dejection_ are
+both superb poems, but who shall say that Shelley might not have written
+the former in the short-measured nine-line stanzas and the latter in his
+_terza-rima_, and yet have embodied his poetic emotion as completely
+as he has done? It need hardly be added that it does not follow that,
+because a simple metrical outline may easily and justly be chosen, it can
+easily be used. So plain a measure as the six-line octo-syllabic stanza may
+be the merest unintelligent jog-trot, or it may be:
+
+    I wander'd lonely as a cloud
+    That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
+    When all at once I saw a crowd,
+    A host, of golden daffodils;
+    Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
+    Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
+
+We may now consider this question of the subject-matter and its expression
+in words. When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is
+endowing the word with life. He has something in his mind, subjected to
+his poetic vision, and his problem is to find words that will compel us to
+realise the significance of that something. To solve this problem is his
+last and most exacting difficulty, demanding a continual wariness and the
+closest discipline. When Homer nodded, another man's word came to his lips,
+and when that happens the poet may as well be silent. No poet has been
+wholly blameless of this relaxation or escaped its penalties, but it is by
+his vigilance in this matter that we measure his virility.
+
+I suppose everyone knows the feeling that sometimes calls us to a life
+where we fend and cater for ourselves in the fields and rivers, such as
+William Morris knew when he shot fieldfares with his bow and arrow and
+cooked them for his supper. Shakespeare knew it too, in the mind of
+Caliban, and his business was to realise this subject-matter for us in such
+a way that it could not possibly escape us in vague generalisation. Its
+appeal to our perceptions must be irresistible. He can do it only by the
+perfect choice of words, thus:
+
+    I'll show thee the best springs; I'll pluck thee berries;
+    I'll fish for thee and get thee wood enough.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow;
+    And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts;
+    Show thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how
+    To snare the nimble marmoset; I'll bring thee
+    To clustering filberts and sometimes I'll get thee
+    Young scamels from the rock.
+
+Every word sings with life, and the whole passage shows perfectly the
+function of words in poetry. The peculiar delight which we get from such a
+passage as this comes, I think, apart from its fundamental poetic quality,
+from the fact that the subject-matter is of such general interest as
+constantly to tempt incomplete perception to inadequate expression.
+Consequently when we get an expression which is complete our pleasure has
+an added surprise. "Show thee a _jay's_ nest"; it is strangely simple,
+but it is revelation. Or let us take a case where the subject-matter is one
+of the emotions of which we have spoken; the emotion that marks the pity of
+parting at death:
+
+    I am dying, Egypt, dying:
+
+the use of that one word, Egypt, should answer for ever the people who
+think that the subject-matter of poetry is to be expressed by rhythm.
+
+Thus we have rhythm expressing the poetic emotion, or intensity of
+perception, and words expressing the thing that is intensely perceived; so,
+as the creed of the mystics shows us beauty born of the exact fusion of
+thought with feeling, of perfect correspondence of the strictly chosen
+words to the rhythmic movement is born the complete form of poetry.
+And when this perfect correspondence occurs unaccompanied by any other
+energy--save, perhaps, the co-ordinating energy of which I have spoken--we
+have pure poetry and what is commonly in our minds when we think of lyric.
+If it be objected that some of my illustrations, that speech of Caliban's
+for example, are taken from "dramatic poetry" and not from "lyric poetry,"
+my answer is that it is impossible to discover any essential difference
+between those lines and any authentic poem that is known as "a lyric." The
+kind of difference that there is can be found also between any two
+lyrics; it is accidental, resulting from difference of personality and
+subject-matter, and the essential poetic intensity, which is the thing that
+concerns us, is of the same nature in both cases. Any general term that can
+fitly be applied to, say, the _Ode to The West Wind_ can be applied
+with equal fitness to Caliban's island lore. Both are poetry, springing
+from the same imaginative activity, living through the same perfect
+selection and ordering of words, and, in our response, quickening the same
+ecstasy. Although we are accustomed to look rather for the rhymed and
+stanzaic movement of the former in a lyric than for the stricter economy
+and uniformity of Caliban's blank verse, yet both have the essential
+qualities of lyric--of pure poetry.
+
+
+
+SONG
+
+
+It may be protested that after all the peculiar property of lyric,
+differentiating it from other kinds of poetry, is that it is song. If we
+dismiss the association of the art of poetry with the art of music, as
+we may well do, I think the protest is left without any significance. In
+English, at any rate, there is hardly any verse--a few Elizabethan poems
+only--written expressly to be sung and not to be spoken, that has any
+importance as poetry, and even the exceptions have their poetic value quite
+independently of their musical setting. For the rest, whenever a true poem
+is given a musical setting, the strictly poetic quality is destroyed. The
+musician--if he be a good one--finds his own perception prompted by the
+poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from
+the terms of poetry into the terms of music. The result may be, and often
+is, of rare beauty and of an artistic significance as great, perhaps, as
+that of the poem itself, and the poet is mistaken in refusing, as he often
+does,[4] to be the cause of the liberation of this new and admirable
+activity in others. But, in the hands of the musician, once a poem has
+served this purpose, it has, as poetry, no further existence. It is
+well that the musician should use fine poetry and not bad verse as his
+inspiration, for obvious reasons, but when the poetry has so quickened him
+it is of no further importance in his art save as a means of exercising a
+beautiful instrument, the human voice. It is unnecessary to discuss the
+relative functions of two great arts, wholly different in their methods,
+different in their scope. But it is futile to attempt to blend the two.
+
+[4: His refusal is commonly due to lamentable experience. If a
+Shelley is willing to lend his suggestions to the musician, he has some
+right to demand that the musician shall be a Wolf. The condition of his
+allowing his poem to be used and destroyed in the process is, rightly, that
+something of equal nobility shall be wrought of its dust.]
+
+As far as my indifferent understanding of the musician's art will allow me
+I delight in and reverence it, and the singing human voice seems to me to
+be, perhaps, the most exquisite instrument that the musician can command.
+But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with
+the use of words in poetry. If the song be good, I do not care whether the
+words are German, which I cannot understand, or English, which I can. On
+the whole I think I prefer not to understand them, since I am then not
+distracted by thoughts of another art.
+
+If then from the argument about the lyric that it should "sing," we dismiss
+this particular meaning of its adaptability to music, what have we left? It
+cannot be that it peculiarly should be rhythmic, since we have seen that to
+be this is of the essential nature of all poetry--that rhythm is, indeed,
+necessary to the expression of the poetic emotion itself. It cannot be that
+it peculiarly should be of passionate intensity, since again, this we have
+seen to be the condition of all poetry. In short, it can mean nothing that
+cannot with equal justice be said of poetry wherever it may be found. To
+the ear that is worthy of poetry the majestic verse of the great passages
+in _Paradise Lost_, the fierce passion of Antony and Macbeth, the
+movement of the poetry in _Sigurd the Volsung_, "sing" as surely as
+the lyrics of the Elizabethans or of _Poems and Ballads_. Poetry must
+give of its essential qualities at all times, and we cannot justly demand
+that at any time it should give us more than these.
+
+
+
+THE POPULARITY OF LYRIC
+
+
+Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire
+be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the
+universality of its appeal is a matter of course. We often hear people say,
+sincerely enough, that they feel no response to poetry. This nearly always
+means that their natural feeling for poetry has been vitiated in some
+way, generally by contact, often forced upon them, with work that only
+masquerades as poetry, or by such misgovernment of their lives as dulls all
+their finer instincts. Unless it be wholly numbed in some such way, the
+delight of poetry is ready to quicken in almost every man; and with a
+little use it will quicken only to what is worthy. And lyric being pure
+poetry, and most commonly found in isolation in the short poems which are
+called lyrics, these will make the widest appeal of all the forms in which
+poetry is found. For while sympathy with the poetic energy is almost
+universal, sympathy with most other great energies is relatively rare.
+The reason, for example, why twenty people will enjoy Wordsworth's
+_Reaper_ for one who will enjoy _Paradise Lost_, is not because
+_Paradise Lost_ is longer, but because it demands for its full
+appreciation not only, in common with _The Reaper_, a sympathy with
+the poetic energy, which it would obtain readily enough, but also a
+sympathy with that other energy of intellectual control which has been
+discussed. This energy being, though profoundly significant, yet far less
+so than the poetic energy, the response to it is far less general, and many
+readers of _Paradise Lost_ will find in it not only poetry, which they
+desire but faintly, while in _The Reaper_ they will find poetry as
+nearly isolated from all other energies as it can be.
+
+
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+To summarise our argument, we find that poetry is the result of the
+intensest emotional activity attainable by man focusing itself upon some
+manifestation of life, and experiencing that manifestation completely; that
+the emotion of poetry expresses itself in rhythm and that the significance
+of the subject-matter is realised by the intellectual choice of the perfect
+word. We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these
+conditions, the best words in the best order--poetry; and to put this
+essential poetry into different classes is impossible. But since it is most
+commonly found by itself in short poems which we call lyric, we may say
+that the characteristic of the lyric is that it is the product of the pure
+poetic energy unassociated with other energies, and that lyric and poetry
+are synonymous terms.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Lyric, by John Drinkwater
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Lyric, by John Drinkwater
+#2 in our series by John Drinkwater
+
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+Title: The Lyric
+       An Essay
+
+Author: John Drinkwater
+
+Release Date: February, 2006 [EBook #9850]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on October 24, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LYRIC ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Thierry Alberto and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LYRIC
+
+AN ESSAY BY JOHN DRINKWATER
+
+
+1922
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+What is Poetry
+
+The Best Words in the Best Order
+
+The Degrees of Poetry
+
+Paradise Lost
+
+What is Lyric
+
+The Classification of Poetry
+
+Lyric Forms
+
+Song
+
+The Popularity of Lyric
+
+Conclusion
+
+
+
+
+WHAT IS POETRY?
+
+
+If you were to ask twenty intelligent people, "What is the Thames?" the
+answer due to you from each would be--"a river." And yet this would hardly
+be matter to satisfy your enquiring mind. You would more probably say,
+"What do you know of the Thames?" or, "Describe the Thames to me." This
+would bring you a great variety of opinions, many dissertations on
+geological and national history, many words in praise of beauty, many
+personal confessions. Here would be the revelation of many minds
+approaching a great subject in as many manners, confirming and
+contradicting each other, making on the whole some impression of cumulative
+judgment, giving you many clues to what might be called the truth, no one
+of them by itself coming near to anything like full knowledge, and the
+final word would inevitably be left unsaid.
+
+The question, "What is poetry?" has been answered innumerable times, often
+by the subtlest and clearest minds, and as many times has it been answered
+differently. The answer in itself now makes a large and distinguished
+literature to which, full as it is of keen intelligence and even of
+constructive vision, we can return with unstaling pleasure. The very poets
+themselves, it is true, lending their wits to the debate, have left the
+answer incomplete, as it must--not in the least unhappily--always remain.
+And yet, if we consider the matter for a moment, we find that all this
+wisdom, prospering from Sidney's _Apology_ until to-day, does not
+strictly attempt to answer the question that is put. It does not tell us
+singly what poetry is, but it speculates upon the cause and effect of
+poetry. It enquires into the impulse that moves the poet to creation and
+describes, as far as individual limitations will allow, the way in which
+the poet's work impresses the world. When Wordsworth says "poetry is the
+breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," he is, exactly, in one intuitive
+word, telling us how poetry comes into being, directing us with an inspired
+gesture to its source, and not strictly telling us what it is; and so
+Shelley tells us in his fiery eloquence of the divine functions of poetry.
+But poetry is, in its naked being and apart from its cause and effect, a
+certain use of words, and, remembering this simple fact, there has been
+one perfect and final answer to the question, "What is poetry?" It was
+Coleridge's: "Poetry--the best words in the best order."
+
+
+
+THE BEST WORDS IN THE BEST ORDER
+
+
+This is the fundamental thing to be remembered when considering the art of
+poetry as such. The whole question of what causes a poet to say this or
+that and of the impression that is thence made upon us can be definitely
+narrowed down to the question "How does he say it?" The manner of his
+utterance is, indeed, the sole evidence before us. To know anything of
+a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know
+something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly
+inessential. The written word is everything. If it is an imperfect word, no
+external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry. We may at times,
+knowing of honourable and inspiriting things in a poet's life, read into
+his imperfect word a value that it does not possess. When we do this our
+judgment of poetry is inert; we are not getting pleasure from his work
+because it is poetry, but for quite other reasons. It may be a quite
+wholesome pleasure, but it is not the high æsthetic pleasure which the
+people who experience it generally believe to be the richest and most vivid
+of all pleasures because it is experienced by a mental state that is more
+eager and masterful than any other. Nor is our judgment acute when we
+praise a poet's work because it chimes with unexpected precision to some
+particular belief or experience of our own or because it directs us by
+suggestion to something dear to our personal affections. Again the poet is
+giving us delight, but not the delight of poetry. We have to consider this
+alone--the poet has something to say: does he say it in the best words in
+the best order? By that, and by that alone, is he to be judged.
+
+For it is to be remembered that this achievement of the best words in the
+best order is, perhaps, the rarest to which man can reach, implying as it
+does a coincidence of unfettered imaginative ecstasy with superb mental
+poise. The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience;
+what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way,
+that is, completely. He has felt it with an imaginative urgency so great as
+to quicken his brain to this flawless ordering of the best words, and it
+is that ordering and that alone which communicates to us the ecstasy, and
+gives us the supreme delight of poetry. It should here be added that poetry
+habitually takes the form of verse. It is, perhaps, profitless to attempt
+any analysis of the emotional law that directs this choice, nor need it
+arbitrarily be said that poetry must of necessity be verse. But it is a
+fact, sufficiently founded on experience, that the intensity of vision that
+demands and achieves nothing less than the best words in the best order for
+its expression does instinctively select the definitely patterned rhythm
+of verse as being the most apt for its purpose. We find, then, that the
+condition of poetry as defined by Coleridge implies exactly what the
+trained judgment holds poetry to be. It implies the highest attainable
+intensity of vision, which, by the sanction of almost universal example,
+casts its best ordering of the best words into the form of verse. Ruskin
+wrote, with fine spiritual ardour--
+
+"... women of England! ...do not think your daughters can be trained to the
+truth of their own human beauty, while the pleasant places, which God
+made at once for their schoolroom and their playground, lie desolate and
+defiled. You cannot baptize them rightly in those inch-deep founts of
+yours, unless you baptize them also in the sweet waters which the great
+Lawgiver strikes forth for ever from the rocks of your native land--waters
+which a Pagan would have worshipped in their purity, and you worship only
+with pollution. You cannot lead your children faithfully to those narrow
+axe-hewn church altars of yours, while the dark azure altars in heaven--the
+mountains that sustain your island throne--mountains on which a Pagan would
+have seen the powers of heaven rest in every wreathed cloud--remain for you
+without inscription; altars built, not to, but by an unknown God."
+
+Here we have, we may say, words in their best order--Coleridge's equally
+admirable definition of prose. It is splendid prose, won only from great
+nobility of emotion. But it is not poetry, not the best words in the best
+order announcing that the feeling expressed has been experienced with the
+highest intensity possible to the mind of man. The tenderness for earth and
+its people and the heroic determination not to watch their defilement in
+silence, have been deeply significant things to Ruskin, moving him to
+excellent words. But could they be more strictly experienced, yet more
+deeply significant, shaping yet more excellent words? Blake gives us the
+answer:
+
+  And did those feet in ancient time
+    Walk upon England's mountains green?
+  And was the holy Lamb of God
+    On England's pleasant pastures seen?
+
+  And did the Countenance Divine
+    Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
+  And was Jerusalem builded here
+    Among these dark Satanic mills?
+
+  Bring me my bow of burning gold!
+    Bring me my arrows of desire!
+  Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
+    Bring me my chariot of fire!
+
+  I will not cease from mental fight,
+    Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
+  Till we have built Jerusalem
+    In England's green and pleasant land.
+
+It may be suggested that, for their purpose, Ruskin's words are perfectly
+chosen, that as a direct social charge they achieve their purpose better
+than any others that could have been shaped. Even if we allow this and
+do not press, as we very reasonably might, the reply that merely in this
+direction Blake's poem working, as is the manner of all great art, with
+tremendous but secret vigour upon the imagination of the people, has a
+deeper and more permanent effect than Ruskin's prose, we still remember
+that the sole purpose of poetry is to produce the virile spiritual
+activity that we call æsthetic delight and that to do this is the highest
+achievement to which the faculties of man can attain. If by "the best
+words" we mean anything, we must mean the best words for the highest
+possible purpose. To take an analogy: if we say that a democratic
+government is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completely
+fulfills the highest function of a government--the realisation of the will
+of the people. But it is also a function of government to organise the
+people and--although, just as we may think that Blake's poem finally
+beats Ruskin's prose on Ruskin's own ground, we may think, too, that the
+government that best represents the people will finally best organise
+the people--it may quite plausibly be said that in this business an
+aristocratic or militant government will, in an imperfectly conditioned
+civilisation (such as that of the world to-day), excel a democratic
+government. Nevertheless, we still say with an easy mind that a democratic
+government is the best government, without qualification, since it excels
+in the highest purpose of government. Clearly Coleridge implies, and
+reasonably enough, an elaboration such as this in his definition--the best
+words in the best order. To say that Blake and Ruskin, in those passages,
+were giving expression to dissimilar experiences is but to emphasise the
+distinction between prose and poetry. The closest analysis discovers no
+difference between the essential thought of the one and the other. But
+Blake projected the thought through a mood of higher intensity, and, where
+Ruskin perfectly ordered admirable words, he perfectly ordered the
+best words. It is the controlling mood that differs, not the material
+controlled. Hence it is that still another mind, starting from the same
+radical perception, might transfigure it through a mood as urgent as
+Blake's and produce yet another poem of which it could strictly be said
+that here again were the best words in the best order. We should then
+have three men moved by the same thought; in the one case the imaginative
+shaping of the thought would fail to reach the point at which the record
+and communication of ecstasy become the chief intention, and the expression
+would be prose; in each of the other cases the shaping would pass beyond
+that point, and there would be two separate moods expressed, each in the
+terms of poetry.
+
+One further qualification remains to be made. By words we must mean, as
+Coleridge must have meant, words used for a purpose which they alone can
+serve. Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences
+that can be communicated in no other way. If you ask me the time, and I
+say--it is six o'clock, it may be said that I am using the best words in
+the best order, and that, although the thought in my mind is incapable of
+being refined into the higher æsthetic experience of which we have spoken,
+my answer is, if Coleridge was right, poetry. But these are not, in our
+present sense, words at all. They have no power which is peculiar to
+themselves. If I show you my watch you are answered just as effectively.
+
+That there is no absolute standard for reference does not matter. All
+æsthetic appreciation and opinion can but depend upon our judgment,
+fortified by knowledge of what is, by cumulative consent, the best that has
+been done. There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best
+words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and
+judgment, that it is so. And the conviction is, exactly, the conviction
+that the mood to which the matter has been subjected has been of such a
+kind as to achieve an intensity beyond which we cannot conceive the mind as
+passing, and it follows that there may be--as indeed there are--many poems
+dealing with the same subject each of which fulfills the obligations of
+poetry as defined by Coleridge. For while the subjects of poetry are few
+and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is
+the same in all arts. If six masters paint the same landscape and under
+the same conditions, there will be one subject but six visions, and
+consequently six different interpretations, each one of which may, given
+the mastery, satisfy us as being perfect; perfect, that is, not as the
+expression of a subject which has no independent artistic existence, but as
+the expression of the mood in which the subject is realised. So it is in
+poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having
+been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do
+this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant
+verse.
+
+
+
+THE DEGREES OF POETRY
+
+
+The question that necessarily follows these reflections is--Are there
+degrees in poetry? Since a short lyric may completely satisfy the
+requirements of poetry as here set down, announcing itself to have been
+created in a poetic or supremely intensified mood, can poetry be said at
+any time to go beyond this? If we accept these conclusions, can a thing so
+slight, yet so exquisite, so obviously authentic in source as:
+
+    When I a verse shall make,
+      Know I have pray'd thee,
+    For old religion's sake,
+      Saint Ben, to aid me.
+
+    Make the way smooth for me,
+      When I, thy Herrick,
+    Honouring thee, on my knee
+      Offer my lyric.
+
+    Candles I'll give to thee,
+      And a new altar,
+    And thou, Saint Ben, shall be
+      Writ in my Psalter,
+
+be said to be less definitely poetry than _Paradise Lost_ or in any
+essentially poetic way below it? The logical answer is, no; and I think it
+is the right one. In considering it we should come to an understanding of
+the nature of lyric, the purpose of this essay. But first let us see how
+far it may be justifiable.
+
+
+
+PARADISE LOST
+
+
+It is commonly asserted and accepted that _Paradise Lost_ is among the
+two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of
+supreme poetic achievement in our literature. What are the qualities by
+virtue of which this claim is made, and allowed by every competent judge?
+Firstly there is the witness of that ecstasy of mood of which we have
+spoken.
+
+  His praise, ye Winds, that from four quarters blow,
+  Breathe soft or loud: and wave your tops, ye Pines,
+  With every plant, in sign of worship wave.
+  Fountains, and ye that warble, as ye flow,
+  Melodious murmurs, warbling tune his praise.
+  Join voices all ye living Souls. Ye Birds,
+  That, singing, up to Heaven-gate ascend,
+  Bear on your wings and in your notes his praise.
+  Ye that in waters glide, and ye that walk
+  The earth, and stately tread, or lowly creep,
+  Witness if I be silent, morn or even,
+  To hill or valley, fountain, or fresh shade,
+  Made vocal by my song, and taught his praise.
+
+This note of high imaginative tension is persistent throughout the poem,
+and that it should be so masterfully sustained is in itself cause for
+delighted admiration. But to be constant in a virtue is not to enhance
+its quality. Superbly furnished as _Paradise Lost_ is with this
+imaginative beauty, the beauty is as rich and unquestionable in the few
+pages of _Lycidas_; there is less of it, that is all. And who shall
+say that it is less ecstatic or less perfect in the little orison to Saint
+Ben? You may prefer Milton's manner, but then you may, with equal reason,
+prefer Herrick's, being grateful for what Keats announced to be truth, in
+whatever shape you may find it. In any case we cannot, on this ground,
+assign a lower place to the poet who could order those words "religion's,"
+"Saint Ben," "Psalter" and the rest of them, with such inspired good
+fortune. And yet we know that _Paradise Lost_ is a greater work than
+this little flight of certain song, greater, too, than the poet's own
+elegy. There is an explanation.
+
+Of all the energies of man, that which I will anticipate my argument by
+calling the poetic energy, the energy that created Herrick's song and the
+distinguishing qualities of that passage from Milton, is the rarest and the
+most highly, if not the most generally, honoured; we have only to think of
+the handful of men who at any time out of all the millions can bring this
+perfect expression to a mood of the highest imaginative intensity, to know
+that the honour is justly bestowed. So splendid a thing is success in
+this matter that failure, if it is matched with a will for sincerity and
+intelligence of purpose, will often bring a man some durable fame. But the
+energies of man are manifold, and while we rightly set the poetic energy
+above the rest, there are others which are only less rare, and in their
+most notable manifestations yielding to it alone in worthiness of homage
+which will, indeed, often be more generally paid. Such an energy is the
+profound intellectual control of material, as distinct from profound
+emotional sensitiveness to material; the capacity for ordering great masses
+of detail into a whole of finely balanced and duly related proportions.
+Cæsar and Napoleon had it, marshalling great armies to perfectly conceived
+designs; Fielding had it, using it to draw a multitude of character and
+event into the superbly shaped lines of his story; the greatest political
+leaders have had it; Cromwell had it, organising an enthusiasm; Elizabeth,
+organising a national adventure.[1] Again, there is the energy
+of morality, ardently desiring justice and right fellowship, sublimely
+lived by men who have made goodness great, like Lincoln, sublimely spoken
+by men who made sermons passionate, like Ruskin and Carlyle. To take one
+other instance, there is the highly specialised energy that delights in the
+objective perception of differentiations of character, the chief energy of
+the deftest wits such as Samuel Johnson and the best comic dramatists.
+
+[1: It may be necessary to point out that while the poetic energy
+does not include this architectural power, the intellectual co-ordination
+of large masses of material, it does, of course, include the shapely
+control of the emotion which is its being. It is, indeed, difficult to see
+precisely what can be meant by the suggestion that is often made that the
+emotions can ever be translated into poetic form wholly without the play of
+intellect. If the emotion is intense enough for the creation of poetry at
+all, it will inevitably call up the intellectual power necessary to its
+shaping, otherwise it would be ineffectually diffused. Mr. John Bailey, in
+his masterly if sometimes provoking essay on Milton says, in the midst
+of some admirable remarks on this subject, "It has been said by a living
+writer that 'when reason is subsidiary to emotion verse is the right means
+of expression, and, when emotion to reason, prose.' This is roughly true,
+though the poetry of mere emotion is poor stuff." I would suggest that
+poetry of emotion, in this sense, does not and could not exist. Bad verse
+is merely the evidence of both emotion and intellect that are, so to
+speak, below poetic power, not of emotion divorced from intellect, which
+evaporates unrecorded.]
+
+Any one of these energies, greatly manifested, will compel a just
+admiration; not so great an admiration as the poetic energy, which is
+witness of the highest urgency of individual life, of all things the most
+admirable, but still great. If, further, we consider any one of these
+energies by itself, we shall see that if it were co-existent with the
+poetic energy, the result would be likely to be that, in contact with
+so masterful a force, it would become yet more emphatic, and so a thing
+arresting in itself would become yet more notable under its new dominion.
+And so it is. Fielding's architectural power is a yet more wonderful thing
+in Sophocles, where it is allied to poetic energy; Ruskin's moral fervour
+is, for all its nobility, less memorable than Wordsworth's and Ben Jonson
+defines character more pungently than Sheridan. These energies remain,
+nevertheless, distinct from the poetic energy. When, however, a poet is
+endowed not alone with his own particular gift of poetry, but also with
+some of these other energies--of which there are many--his work very
+rightly is allowed an added greatness. It is so with _Paradise Lost_.
+Of the three energies other than the poetic that I have mentioned, Milton
+had rich measure of two and something of the third. No man has ever
+excelled him either in power of intellectual control or in moral passion,
+and he was not without some sense of character. Consequently we get in
+his great poem, not only the dominating poetic quality which is the chief
+thing, enabling the poet to realise his vision (or mood) perfectly, but
+also the spectacle of a great number of perfectly realised visions being
+related to each other with excellent harmony; we get, further, a great
+moral exaltation--again perfectly realised by the poetic energy, and we
+get, finally, considerable subtlety--far more than is generally allowed--of
+psychological detail. From all these things, the architectonics, the zeal
+for justice and the revelation of character, we get an added and wholesome
+delight which gives Milton's work a place of definitely greater eminence
+than Herrick's song in the record of human activity. In effect, Milton
+besides being a poet, which is the greatest of all distinctions, becomes,
+by possession of those other qualities, a great man as well, and I think
+that this is really what we mean when we speak of a great poet. Without his
+poetic faculty, although he would fall in the scale of human distinction,
+which is not at all the same thing as renown, below, say, so humble a
+personality yet so true a poet as John Clare[2], Milton would still be a
+great man, while Herrick without his poetry would be indistinguishable from
+the crowd. And the great man is as clearly evident in Milton's poetry as he
+is clearly not evident in Herrick's.
+
+[2: It may be asked: "Do you really think that a poet who has left
+no other record of himself than a page or two of songs, even perfect songs,
+can claim a greater distinction than a great man who is not a poet?" Let me
+say, once for all, that I do think so. To have written one perfect song
+is to have given witness and the only kind of witness (in common with the
+media of other arts) that is finally authoritative, that at least one
+supremely exacting mood has been perfectly realised; that is to say, one
+moment of life has been perfectly experienced. And since, with our human
+conception, we can see no good or desirable end beyond the perfect
+experience of life, the man who proves to us that he has done this, no
+matter though it has been but for a moment, is more distinguished--that is,
+more definitely set apart in his own achievement--than the man who, with
+whatever earnestness and nobility, has but proved to us that he desired
+this perfection of experience, even though the desire is exalted by the
+most heroic altruism.]
+
+
+
+WHAT IS LYRIC?
+
+
+And so we have Milton and Herrick, both poets, the one a great man, the
+other not. It is a wide difference. Great men are rare, poets are rarer,
+but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest
+of all events. Milton is one of perhaps a dozen names in the history of the
+world's literature, Herrick--still with a fine enough distinction--one of
+something under two hundred in the history of our own. And yet they are
+left on equal terms in the possession of the purely poetic energy. Milton's
+achievement outweighs Herrick's, but for the reasons that I have mentioned,
+and not because poetry grows better by accumulation or because it is
+possible to prove, or even to satisfy any considerable majority of good
+judges, that--
+
+    Ye have been fresh and green,
+      Ye have been filled with flowers,
+    And ye the walks have been
+      Where maids have spent their hours.
+    You have beheld how they
+      With wicker arks did come
+    To kiss and bear away
+      The richer cowslips home.
+    You've heard them sweetly sing,
+      And seen them in a round:
+    Each virgin like a spring,
+      With honeysuckles crown'd.
+    But now we see none here
+      Whose silvery feet did tread,
+    And with dishevell'd hair
+      Adorn'd this smoother mead.
+    Like unthrifts, having spent
+      Your stock and needy grown,
+    You've left here to lament
+      Your poor estates, alone,
+
+is inferior, in specifically poetic quality, to
+
+  Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,
+  For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
+  Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor;
+  So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,
+  And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
+  And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
+  Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.
+
+We come, then, to the consideration of this specific quality that
+distinguishes what we recognise as poetry from all other verbal expression.
+Returning for a moment to _Paradise Lost_, we find that here is a work
+of art of which the visible and external sign is words. That it has three
+qualities--there may be more, but it is not to the point--architectural
+power, moral exaltation and a sense of character, each of which, although
+it may be more impressive when presented as it were under the auspices of
+the poetic quality, can exist independently of it, as in _Tom Jones_,
+_Unto This Last_, and _The School for Scandal_ respectively;
+that there remains a last and dominating quality, which is not related to
+intellectual fusion of much diverse material, as is the first of those
+other qualities, or to the kind of material, as are the other two, but to
+extreme activity of the perceptive mood upon whatever object it may be
+directed, remembering that this activity is highly exacting as to the
+worthiness of objects in which it can concern itself. We find, further,
+that this is a quality which it has in common not with _Tom Jones_
+or _Unto This Last_, but with a thing so inconsiderable in all other
+respects as those songs of Herrick's. And in each case we find that the
+token of this quality is a conviction that here are words that could not
+have been otherwise chosen or otherwise placed; that here is an expression
+to rearrange which would be to destroy it--a conviction that we by no means
+have about the prose of Fielding and Ruskin, admirable as it is. We find,
+in short, that this quality equals a maximum of imaginative pressure
+freeing itself in the best words in the best order. And this quality is the
+specific poetic quality; the presence or absence of which should decide for
+us, without any other consideration whatever, whether what is before us is
+or is not poetry. And it seems to me, further, that what we have in our
+minds when we speak of lyric is precisely this same quality; that lyric and
+the expression of pure poetic energy unrelated to other energies are the
+same thing.
+
+
+
+THE CLASSIFICATION OF POETRY
+
+
+It is not yet the place to discuss the question of lyric forms--to consider
+what kind of thing it is that people mean when they speak of "a lyric."
+First we must consider the commonly accepted opinion that a lyric is an
+expression of personal emotion, with its implication that there is an
+essential difference between a lyric and, say, dramatic or narrative
+poetry. A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but
+then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of
+poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly
+artificial divisions which have no real being. To talk of dramatic
+poetry, epic poetry and narrative poetry is to talk of three different
+things--epic, drama and narrative; but each is combined with a fourth thing
+in common, which is poetry, which, in turn, is in itself of precisely the
+same nature as the lyric of which we are told that it is yet a further
+kind of poetry. Let us here take a passage from a play and consider it in
+relation to this suggestion:
+
+
+CLOWN.      I wish you all joy of the worm.
+
+CLEOPATRA.  Farewell.
+
+CLOWN.      You must think this, look you, that the worm will do his kind.
+
+CLEOPATRA.  Ay, ay; farewell.
+
+CLOWN.      Look you, the worm is not to be trusted but in the keeping of
+              wise people; for indeed there is no goodness in the worm.
+
+CLEOPATRA.  Take thou no care; it shall be heeded.
+
+CLOWN.      Very good. Give it nothing, I pray you, for it is not worth
+              the feeding.
+
+CLEOPATRA.  Will it eat me?
+
+CLOWN.      You must not think I am so simple but I know the devil himself
+              will not eat a woman; I know that a woman is a dish for the
+              gods, if the devil dress her not. But, truly, these same
+              whoreson devils do the gods great harm in their women, for
+              in every ten that they make the devils mar five.
+
+CLEOPATRA.  Well, get thee gone; farewell.
+
+CLOWN.      Yes, forsooth; I wish you joy of the worm.
+
+             _Re-enter_ IRAS.
+
+CLEOPATRA.  Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have
+            Immortal longings in me; now no more
+            The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip.
+            Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear
+            Antony call; I see him rouse himself
+            To praise my noble act; I hear him mock
+            The luck of Cæsar, which the gods give men
+            To excuse their after wrath; husband, I come:
+            Now to that name my courage prove my title!
+            I am fire and air; my other elements
+            I give to baser life. So; have you done?
+            Come then, and take the last warmth of my lips.
+            Farewell, kind Charmian; Iras, long farewell.
+
+I have chosen this passage not because of its singular beauty, but because
+it is peculiarly to our present purpose. In the first place, Shakespeare,
+by using both prose and verse--which he by no means always does under
+similar circumstances--makes a clear formal division between what is poetry
+and what is not. It is all magnificently contrived drama, but down to the
+Clown's exit it is not poetry. The significance of the Clown does not
+demand of Shakespeare's imaginative mood that highest activity that would
+force him to poetry. The short dialogue has great excellence, but not this
+kind of excellence. The fact that it occurs in what we call a poetic drama
+does not make it poetry; its fine dramatic significance does not give it
+poetic significance. We are living in a world of dramatic poetry, and
+yet we have here a perfectly clear distinction between the drama and the
+poetry, since we definitely have the one without the other. Then, when
+Cleopatra begins her farewell speech, we have the addition of poetry and
+a continuance of the drama. And this speech illustrates perfectly the
+suggestion that the quality which is commonly said to be exclusively lyric
+is the quality of all poetry. It illustrates it in a particularly
+emphatic way. For not only is it unquestionably poetry, but it is also
+unquestionably dramatic. Very clearly the poet is not here speaking out of
+his own actual experience; it is a woman speaking, one who is a queen: who
+is wrecked upon the love of kings: who knows that she is about to die a
+strange and sudden death. So that if the impulse of the poetry in poetic
+drama were essentially different from the impulse of lyric, if the personal
+experience which is said to be this latter were something differing in kind
+from the experience which is the source of what is called dramatic poetry,
+then here is a case where the essential difference could surely be
+perceived and defined. It cannot be defined, for it does not exist. It is a
+fallacy to suppose that experience is any the less personal because it is
+concerned with an event happening to someone else. If my friend falls to a
+mortal sickness my experience, if my imaginative faculty is acute, is as
+poignant as his; if he achieves some great good fortune, my delight is as
+vigorous as his. And if I am a poet, and choose to express the grief or
+pleasure as if it were his concern and not mine, the experience does not
+become one whit less personal to me. You may, if it is convenient, call the
+result lyric if I speak as though the experience is my own and dramatic
+poetry if I speak of it as being his, but what you are really saying is
+that in the one case I am producing pure poetry, and in the other I am
+producing poetry in conjunction with dramatic statement. The poetic quality
+is the same in either case. Cleopatra's speech is notable for two things:
+its dramatic significance, which is admittedly contrived by Shakespeare,
+and its poetry which springs from an intensity of experience which is
+clearly, unless we juggle with words, Shakespeare's and not Cleopatra's.
+The fact that the material upon which the poet's mood has worked has not
+been confined to some event that has happened to himself but has included
+the condition of an imagined being does not alter the radical significance
+of his experience or influence the essential nature of its product. The
+poetic energy may operate on many things through a million moods, but the
+character of the energy is immutable. And when we speak of lyric, thinking
+of the direct and simple activity of this energy unmodified by the process
+of any other energies, we shall, if we get our mind clear about it, see
+that we mean pure poetry, and we shall recognise this poetry as being
+constant in its essential properties in whatever association we may
+henceforth find it.
+
+If it is allowed, as, for the reasons I have attempted to set out, I think
+it rightly may be, that the purely poetic energy is not a variable quality,
+that of any given expression of a man's mental activity it can definitely
+be said that it is or is not poetry, there remains one question to be
+answered,--Can one poem be better than another, if both are truly poems?
+Or can one poet, by reason of his poetry, be better than another poet by
+reason of his? Is Keats, for example, a better poet than Suckling? Every
+good judge of poetry, if that question were put, would be likely to answer
+without hesitation--Yes, he is. And yet the answer, although the reason for
+it may be found and, in a sense, allowed, does not in any way discredit the
+principle that has been defined. With a passage from each of these poets at
+his best before us, let us see what we find. This from Keats:
+
+    Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
+      No hungry generations tread thee down;
+    The voice I hear this passing night was heard
+      In ancient days by emperor and clown:
+
+    Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
+      Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home
+        She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
+          The same that oft-times hath
+        Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
+        Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
+
+And this from Suckling:
+
+    Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
+      Prythee, why so pale?
+    Will, when looking well can't move her,
+      Looking ill prevail?
+      Prythee, why so pale?
+
+    Why so dull and mute, young sinner?
+      Prythee, why so mute?
+    Will, when speaking well can't win her,
+      Saying nothing do't?
+      Prythee, why so mute?
+
+    Quit, quit, for shame! This will not move;
+      This cannot take her.
+    If of herself she will not love,
+      Nothing can make her:
+      The Devil take her!
+
+The poetic energy in Keats is here entirely undisturbed. I do not mean that
+it is not united to any other energy--though here it happens not to be--as
+in poetic drama, where it is united to the dramatic energy and is still
+undisturbed in its full activity, but that it is here freely allowed to
+work itself out to its consummation without any concession, conscious or
+unconscious, to any mood that is not non-poetic but definitely anti-poetic,
+in which case, although unchanged in its nature, it would be constrained in
+a hostile atmosphere. Keats's words are struck out of a mood that tolerates
+nothing but its own full life and is concerned only to satisfy that life by
+uncompromising expression. The result is pure poetry, or lyric. But when
+we come to Suckling's lines we find that there is a difference. The poetic
+energy is still here. Suckling has quite clearly experienced something in
+a mood of more than common intensity. It does not matter that the material
+which has been subjected to the mood is not in itself very profound or
+passionate. Another poet, Wither, with material curiously like Suckling's
+to work upon, achieves poetry as unquestionable if not so luxuriant as
+Keats's.
+
+    Shall I, wasting in despair,
+    Die because a woman's fair?
+    Or make pale my cheeks with care
+    Because another's rosy are?
+    Be she fairer than the day,
+    Or the flowery mead in May--
+      If she think not well of me
+      What care I how fair she be?
+
+To object that there is an emotional gaiety in this which is foreign to
+Keats is but to state a personal preference. It is, indeed, a preference
+which is common and founded upon very general experience. Most of us have,
+from the tradition and circumstance of our own lives, a particular sympathy
+with the grave and faintly melancholy beauty which is the most recurrent
+note in fine poetry throughout the world, but this does not establish this
+particular strain of beauty as being in any way essential to poetry. It is
+related to an almost universal condition, but it is a fertile source of
+poetry, not one with the poetic energy itself. It would be absurd to impugn
+a man's taste because he preferred Chaucer's poetry, which has scarcely
+a touch of this melancholy, to Shelley's, which is drenched in it, as it
+would be absurd to quarrel with it because he obtained strictly imaginative
+pleasure more readily from
+
+    Shall I, wasting in despair
+
+than from
+
+    Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
+
+His preference merely shows him to belong to a minority: it does not show
+him to be insensible to poetry. For Wither's mood, by the evidence of its
+expression, although it may not be so universal in its appeal nor so
+adventurous in design, is here active to the degree of poetry no less
+surely than is Keats's. And yet, while it would be an error of judgment
+to rate Wither below Keats (by virtue of these illustrations) in pure
+poetic energy, it would, I think, be quite sound so to rate Suckling by
+the witness of his lyric. For while Wither's mood, in its chosen activity,
+is wholly surrendered to the poetic energy, Suckling's is not. It is
+contaminated by one of those external activities which I have spoken of as
+being hostile to poetry. Although he perceives his subject with the right
+urgency, he is unwilling to be quite loyal to his perception. He makes
+some concession to the witty insincerity of the society in which he lives,
+and his poetry is soiled by the contact. It is not destroyed, not even
+changed in its nature, but its gold is left for ever twisted in a baser
+metal with which it does not suit. What we get is not a new compound with
+the element that corresponds to poetic energy transmuted, but an
+ill-sorted mixture, while Keats gives us the unblemished gold. We are
+right in proclaiming his the finer achievement.
+
+Keats and Wither will serve as examples with which to finish our argument.
+In spite of all that has been said Keats takes higher rank as poet than
+Wither? Yes, certainly, but not because the poetic energy in him was a
+finer thing than the poetic energy that was in Wither. It was more
+constant, which is a fact of no little importance; its temper appealed to
+a much more general sympathy, a circumstance which cannot be left out of
+the reckoning; it touched a far wider range of significant material.
+These things give Keats his just superiority of rank, but they do not
+deprive Wither, at his best moments, of the essential quality which is
+with Keats, as with all poets, the one by which he makes his proudest
+claim good. Nor need it be feared that in allowing Wither, with his rare
+moments of withdrawn and rather pale perfection, this the highest of all
+distinctions, we are making accession to the title of poet too easy. It
+remains the most difficult of all human attainments. The difference between
+the essential quality in those eight fragile lines and that in such verse
+as, say:
+
+    Oft. In the stilly night,
+      Ere slumber's chain has bound me,
+    Fond memory brings the light
+      Of other days around me,
+
+may be so elusive as to deceive many people that it does not exist, but it
+is the difference between the rarest of all energies and a common enough
+sensibility.
+
+
+
+LYRIC FORMS
+
+
+While, therefore, the term "lyric poetry" would in itself seem to be
+tautological, and so to speak of lyric forms is, strictly, to speak of
+all poetic forms, there are nevertheless certain more or less defined
+characteristics of form that we usually connect in our mind with what we
+call "a lyric" (or, even less exactly, "lyric poetry") which may be said to
+be a poem where the pure poetic energy is not notably associated with other
+energies--with a partial exception to which reference will be made. In
+examining these characteristics nothing will be attempted in the way of a
+history or an inclusive consideration of particular forms which are known
+as lyric, but only, as far as may be, an analysis of their governing
+principles.
+
+To say that a lyric (using the word henceforward in its particular sense)
+is generally short is but to say that poetic tension can only be sustained
+for a short time. Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short
+ones is perfectly just. What happens, I think, is this. The poetic mood,
+selecting a subject, records its perception of that subject, the result is
+a lyric, and the mood passes. On its recurrence another subject is selected
+and the process repeated. But if another energy than the purely poetic, the
+energy of co-ordination of which I have spoken, comes into operation, there
+will be a desire in the poet to link the records of his recurrent poetic
+perceptions together, and so to construct many poems into a connected
+whole. Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or
+narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed
+into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them. The
+decision that the material used at one occurrence of the poetic mood shall
+be related to the material used at the next is not in itself an operation
+of the purely poetic energy, but of another.
+
+The present purpose is, however, to consider the general character of forms
+used by poets when they choose to leave each successive record of poetic
+experience in isolation. I have said that any translation of emotion into
+poetry--it might be said, into any intelligible expression--necessarily
+implies a certain co-operation of intellectual control. If we take even a
+detached phrase so directly and obviously emotional in source as:
+
+    I die, I faint, I fail!
+
+it is clear that the setting out those words is not merely an emotional
+act. But intellectual control of this kind is not identical with that
+intellectual relating of one part to another of which we have been
+speaking, which we may call co-ordination. Of all energies, however, the
+co-ordinating energy is the one with which the poetic energy is most
+instinctively in sympathy, and it is in this connection that I made a
+partial exception when I said that a lyric was a poem where the pure poetic
+energy was not notably associated with other energies. When a poet writes
+a poem of corresponding lines and stanzas or in a form of which the
+structural outline is decided by a definable law--as in the sonnet--he is
+in effect obeying the impulse of the co-ordinating energy, and the use of
+rhyme is another sign of obedience to the same impulse. It so happens
+that this energy, next to the poetic energy, is the most impressive
+and satisfying of all mental activities, and while poetry may exist
+independently of it, the fact remains that it very rarely does so. A very
+curious fallacy about this matter has sometimes obtained support. The
+adherents of what is called free verse, not content, as they should
+thankfully be, if they can achieve poetry in their chosen medium, are
+sometimes tempted to claim that it is the peculiar virtue of their
+manner--which, let me say it again, may be entirely admirable--that it
+enables the structure of verse to keep in constant correspondence with
+change of emotion. The notion is, of course, a very convenient one when you
+wish to escape the very exacting conditions of formal control, and have not
+the patience or capacity to understand their difficulties, and that it is
+professed by many who do so wish is doubtless. But there are other serious
+and gifted people, loyally trying to serve a great art, who hold this view,
+and on their account consideration is due to it. But it is none the less a
+fallacy, and doubly so. In the first place, the change of line-lengths and
+rhythms in a short poem written in "free verse" is nearly always arbitrary,
+and does not succeed in doing what is claimed for it in this direction,
+while it often does succeed in distressing the ear and so obscuring the
+sense, though that is by the way. It is not as though given rhythms and
+line-lengths had any peculiar emotional significance attached to them.
+A dirge may be in racing anapæsts, laughter in the most sedate iambic
+measure; a solemn invocation may move in rapid three-foot lines, while
+grave heroic verse may contain the gayest of humours. In a long work,
+indeed, variety of structure may be used to give variety of sensation to
+the ear with delightful and sometimes even necessary effect, though--in
+English, and I am always speaking of English--it cannot even then be used
+with any certainty to express change of emotion. But in a lyric the ear
+does not demand this kind of relief. With many of us, at least, it accepts
+and even demands an unbroken external symmetry. The symmetry may be
+externally simple, as in, say, the stanzas of _Heraclitus_:
+
+    They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;
+    They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.
+    I wept as I remembered how often you and I
+    Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
+
+    And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
+    A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
+    Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales awake,
+    For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take,
+
+or intricate, as in:
+
+    Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy,
+    Sphere-born harmonious Sisters, Voice and Verse,
+    Wed your divine sounds, and mixt power employ
+    Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce;
+    And to our high-raised phantasy present
+    That undisturbed song of pure content,
+    Aye sung before the sapphire-colour'd throne
+        To Him that sits thereon
+    With saintly shout and solemn jubilee;
+    Where the bright Seraphim in burning row
+    Their loud-uplifted angel-trumpets blow;
+    And the Cherubic host in thousand quires
+    Touch their immortal harps of golden wires,
+    With those just Spirits that wear victorious palms,
+        Hymns devout and holy psalms
+        Singing everlastingly:
+
+in either case there is a formal and easily perceptible relation between
+one part of the structure and another, and this relation is a positive help
+to us in understanding the plain sense of the words, while its presence
+does not involve any loss of emotional significance which its absence would
+supply. The truth is--and here is the second and chief objection to the
+claim that we are discussing--that the poetic mood, which is what is
+expressed by the rhythm and form of verse and may very well be called the
+emotion of poetry, is not at all the same thing as what are commonly called
+the emotions--as happiness, despair, love, hate and the rest. Its colour
+will vary between one poet and another, but in one poet it will be
+relatively fixed in quality, while these other emotions are but material
+upon which, in common with many other things, it may work. And being a
+relatively fixed condition, it is, for its part, in no need of changing
+metrical devices for its expression, and to maintain that the "emotions,"
+subjects of its activity, should have in their alternation a corresponding
+alternation of metrical device is no more reasonable than to maintain that
+other subjects of its activity should be so treated; it is to forget, for
+example, that when Shakespeare wrote:
+
+    Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
+      Nor the furious winter's rages:
+    Thou thy worldly task hast done,
+      Home art gone and ta'en thy wages:
+    Golden lads and girls all must,
+      As chimney-sweepers, come to dust,
+
+it was his subject-matter that changed from line to line and not the poetic
+emotion governing it, and to say that he ought to have made the metrical
+and rhythmic form of the first line in itself suggest heat: of the second,
+rough weather: of the third, work: of the fourth, wages: and of the fifth
+and sixth the death of golden lads and girls and of chimney-sweepers
+respectively, all things manifestly very different from each other, and
+things which, if it were the function of verbal rhythms and metres to do
+this sort of thing at all, could not with any propriety have the closely
+related equivalents that they have here. No; to ask for this kind of effect
+is really to ask for nothing more valuable than the devotional crosses and
+altars into which a perverted wit led some of the seventeenth-century poets
+to contrive their verses in unhappy moments, or Southey's _Lodore_, in
+which there is a fond pretence that verbal rhythms are water.[3] It is just
+as difficult to explain why verbal rhythms will not perform this function
+as it is to explain why the moon is not a green cheese.
+
+[3: Most poets will occasionally use onomatopoeia with success,
+but this is a different matter, and even so it is quite an inessential
+poetic device. One might sometimes suppose from what we are told, that
+Virgil's chief claim to poetry was the fact that he once made a line of
+verse resemble the movement of a horse's hoofs.]
+
+But while it is true that the function of the rhythm of poetry is to
+express the governing poetic emotion, and that, since the emotion in
+itself is fixed rather than changing, it will best do this not by mere
+irregularity, but by flexible movement that is contained in an external
+symmetry, it does not follow at all that the subject-matter which the
+poetic emotion is controlling, be it the "emotions" or anything else,
+cannot hope for expression that catches its peculiar properties. To do this
+in poetry is the supreme distinction not of rhythms, but of words. The
+preponderance of the five-foot blank-verse line in the work of, say,
+Shakespeare and Milton, is so great that we can safely say that their rank
+as poets would not be lower than it is if they had written nothing else.
+Clearly their constancy to this metre was not the result of any technical
+deficiency. Even if Milton had not written the choruses of _Samson
+Agonistes_ and Shakespeare his songs, nobody would be so absurd as
+to suggest that they adopted this five-foot line and spent their mighty
+artistry in sending supple and flowing variety through its external
+uniformity, because they could not manage any other. They used it because
+they found that its rhythm perfectly expressed their poetic emotion, and
+because the formal relation of one line to another satisfied the instinct
+for co-ordination, and for the full expression of the significance of their
+subject-matter they relied not upon their rhythms, but upon their choice
+of words. The belief that when a poem is written there is one and only one
+metrical scheme that could possibly be used for that particular occasion is
+an amiable delusion that should be laid aside with such notions as that the
+poet makes his breakfast on dew and manna. Once the poem is written we
+may feel indeed, if it be a good one, that any change in the form is
+impossible, but when the poet was about to write it we may be sure that
+he quite deliberately weighed one form against another before making his
+choice. It may even be true that he will sometimes find the shape of his
+poem running to his tongue as it were unbidden, but this certainty of
+selection is really in itself the result of long and, perhaps, subconscious
+deliberation. The point is that the chosen form must in any case express
+the poetic emotion, but that its particular election is a personal whim,
+wholly satisfactory in its result, rather than a divine necessity. _The
+Ode to the West Wind_ and the _Stanzas written in Dejection_ are
+both superb poems, but who shall say that Shelley might not have written
+the former in the short-measured nine-line stanzas and the latter in his
+_terza-rima_, and yet have embodied his poetic emotion as completely
+as he has done? It need hardly be added that it does not follow that,
+because a simple metrical outline may easily and justly be chosen, it can
+easily be used. So plain a measure as the six-line octo-syllabic stanza may
+be the merest unintelligent jog-trot, or it may be:
+
+    I wander'd lonely as a cloud
+    That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
+    When all at once I saw a crowd,
+    A host, of golden daffodils;
+    Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
+    Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
+
+We may now consider this question of the subject-matter and its expression
+in words. When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is
+endowing the word with life. He has something in his mind, subjected to
+his poetic vision, and his problem is to find words that will compel us to
+realise the significance of that something. To solve this problem is his
+last and most exacting difficulty, demanding a continual wariness and the
+closest discipline. When Homer nodded, another man's word came to his lips,
+and when that happens the poet may as well be silent. No poet has been
+wholly blameless of this relaxation or escaped its penalties, but it is by
+his vigilance in this matter that we measure his virility.
+
+I suppose everyone knows the feeling that sometimes calls us to a life
+where we fend and cater for ourselves in the fields and rivers, such as
+William Morris knew when he shot fieldfares with his bow and arrow and
+cooked them for his supper. Shakespeare knew it too, in the mind of
+Caliban, and his business was to realise this subject-matter for us in such
+a way that it could not possibly escape us in vague generalisation. Its
+appeal to our perceptions must be irresistible. He can do it only by the
+perfect choice of words, thus:
+
+    I'll show thee the best springs; I'll pluck thee berries;
+    I'll fish for thee and get thee wood enough.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow;
+    And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts;
+    Show thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how
+    To snare the nimble marmoset; I'll bring thee
+    To clustering filberts and sometimes I'll get thee
+    Young scamels from the rock.
+
+Every word sings with life, and the whole passage shows perfectly the
+function of words in poetry. The peculiar delight which we get from such a
+passage as this comes, I think, apart from its fundamental poetic quality,
+from the fact that the subject-matter is of such general interest as
+constantly to tempt incomplete perception to inadequate expression.
+Consequently when we get an expression which is complete our pleasure has
+an added surprise. "Show thee a _jay's_ nest"; it is strangely simple,
+but it is revelation. Or let us take a case where the subject-matter is one
+of the emotions of which we have spoken; the emotion that marks the pity of
+parting at death:
+
+    I am dying, Egypt, dying:
+
+the use of that one word, Egypt, should answer for ever the people who
+think that the subject-matter of poetry is to be expressed by rhythm.
+
+Thus we have rhythm expressing the poetic emotion, or intensity of
+perception, and words expressing the thing that is intensely perceived; so,
+as the creed of the mystics shows us beauty born of the exact fusion of
+thought with feeling, of perfect correspondence of the strictly chosen
+words to the rhythmic movement is born the complete form of poetry.
+And when this perfect correspondence occurs unaccompanied by any other
+energy--save, perhaps, the co-ordinating energy of which I have spoken--we
+have pure poetry and what is commonly in our minds when we think of lyric.
+If it be objected that some of my illustrations, that speech of Caliban's
+for example, are taken from "dramatic poetry" and not from "lyric poetry,"
+my answer is that it is impossible to discover any essential difference
+between those lines and any authentic poem that is known as "a lyric." The
+kind of difference that there is can be found also between any two
+lyrics; it is accidental, resulting from difference of personality and
+subject-matter, and the essential poetic intensity, which is the thing that
+concerns us, is of the same nature in both cases. Any general term that can
+fitly be applied to, say, the _Ode to The West Wind_ can be applied
+with equal fitness to Caliban's island lore. Both are poetry, springing
+from the same imaginative activity, living through the same perfect
+selection and ordering of words, and, in our response, quickening the same
+ecstasy. Although we are accustomed to look rather for the rhymed and
+stanzaic movement of the former in a lyric than for the stricter economy
+and uniformity of Caliban's blank verse, yet both have the essential
+qualities of lyric--of pure poetry.
+
+
+
+SONG
+
+
+It may be protested that after all the peculiar property of lyric,
+differentiating it from other kinds of poetry, is that it is song. If we
+dismiss the association of the art of poetry with the art of music, as
+we may well do, I think the protest is left without any significance. In
+English, at any rate, there is hardly any verse--a few Elizabethan poems
+only--written expressly to be sung and not to be spoken, that has any
+importance as poetry, and even the exceptions have their poetic value quite
+independently of their musical setting. For the rest, whenever a true poem
+is given a musical setting, the strictly poetic quality is destroyed. The
+musician--if he be a good one--finds his own perception prompted by the
+poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from
+the terms of poetry into the terms of music. The result may be, and often
+is, of rare beauty and of an artistic significance as great, perhaps, as
+that of the poem itself, and the poet is mistaken in refusing, as he often
+does,[4] to be the cause of the liberation of this new and admirable
+activity in others. But, in the hands of the musician, once a poem has
+served this purpose, it has, as poetry, no further existence. It is
+well that the musician should use fine poetry and not bad verse as his
+inspiration, for obvious reasons, but when the poetry has so quickened him
+it is of no further importance in his art save as a means of exercising a
+beautiful instrument, the human voice. It is unnecessary to discuss the
+relative functions of two great arts, wholly different in their methods,
+different in their scope. But it is futile to attempt to blend the two.
+
+[4: His refusal is commonly due to lamentable experience. If a
+Shelley is willing to lend his suggestions to the musician, he has some
+right to demand that the musician shall be a Wolf. The condition of his
+allowing his poem to be used and destroyed in the process is, rightly, that
+something of equal nobility shall be wrought of its dust.]
+
+As far as my indifferent understanding of the musician's art will allow me
+I delight in and reverence it, and the singing human voice seems to me to
+be, perhaps, the most exquisite instrument that the musician can command.
+But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with
+the use of words in poetry. If the song be good, I do not care whether the
+words are German, which I cannot understand, or English, which I can. On
+the whole I think I prefer not to understand them, since I am then not
+distracted by thoughts of another art.
+
+If then from the argument about the lyric that it should "sing," we dismiss
+this particular meaning of its adaptability to music, what have we left? It
+cannot be that it peculiarly should be rhythmic, since we have seen that to
+be this is of the essential nature of all poetry--that rhythm is, indeed,
+necessary to the expression of the poetic emotion itself. It cannot be that
+it peculiarly should be of passionate intensity, since again, this we have
+seen to be the condition of all poetry. In short, it can mean nothing that
+cannot with equal justice be said of poetry wherever it may be found. To
+the ear that is worthy of poetry the majestic verse of the great passages
+in _Paradise Lost_, the fierce passion of Antony and Macbeth, the
+movement of the poetry in _Sigurd the Volsung_, "sing" as surely as
+the lyrics of the Elizabethans or of _Poems and Ballads_. Poetry must
+give of its essential qualities at all times, and we cannot justly demand
+that at any time it should give us more than these.
+
+
+
+THE POPULARITY OF LYRIC
+
+
+Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire
+be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the
+universality of its appeal is a matter of course. We often hear people say,
+sincerely enough, that they feel no response to poetry. This nearly always
+means that their natural feeling for poetry has been vitiated in some
+way, generally by contact, often forced upon them, with work that only
+masquerades as poetry, or by such misgovernment of their lives as dulls all
+their finer instincts. Unless it be wholly numbed in some such way, the
+delight of poetry is ready to quicken in almost every man; and with a
+little use it will quicken only to what is worthy. And lyric being pure
+poetry, and most commonly found in isolation in the short poems which are
+called lyrics, these will make the widest appeal of all the forms in which
+poetry is found. For while sympathy with the poetic energy is almost
+universal, sympathy with most other great energies is relatively rare.
+The reason, for example, why twenty people will enjoy Wordsworth's
+_Reaper_ for one who will enjoy _Paradise Lost_, is not because
+_Paradise Lost_ is longer, but because it demands for its full
+appreciation not only, in common with _The Reaper_, a sympathy with
+the poetic energy, which it would obtain readily enough, but also a
+sympathy with that other energy of intellectual control which has been
+discussed. This energy being, though profoundly significant, yet far less
+so than the poetic energy, the response to it is far less general, and many
+readers of _Paradise Lost_ will find in it not only poetry, which they
+desire but faintly, while in _The Reaper_ they will find poetry as
+nearly isolated from all other energies as it can be.
+
+
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+To summarise our argument, we find that poetry is the result of the
+intensest emotional activity attainable by man focusing itself upon some
+manifestation of life, and experiencing that manifestation completely; that
+the emotion of poetry expresses itself in rhythm and that the significance
+of the subject-matter is realised by the intellectual choice of the perfect
+word. We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these
+conditions, the best words in the best order--poetry; and to put this
+essential poetry into different classes is impossible. But since it is most
+commonly found by itself in short poems which we call lyric, we may say
+that the characteristic of the lyric is that it is the product of the pure
+poetic energy unassociated with other energies, and that lyric and poetry
+are synonymous terms.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Lyric, by John Drinkwater
+
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+    <title>The Lyric - An Essay by John Drinkwater
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+Title: The Lyric
+       An Essay
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+Author: John Drinkwater
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+<center>
+<h1>THE LYRIC</h1>
+</center>
+<h2>AN ESSAY BY JOHN DRINKWATER
+  </h2> <br>
+    
+      <br>
+      <h3>1922</h3>
+    
+    <br>
+    <hr style="width: 35%;">
+    <br>
+    <h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+    <h3> <a href="#I">What is Poetry</a><br>
+      <br>
+      <a href="#II">The Best Words in the Best Order</a><br>
+      <br>
+      <a href="#III">The Degrees of Poetry</a><br>
+      <br>
+      <a href="#IV">Paradise Lost</a><br>
+      <br>
+      <a href="#V">What is Lyric</a><br>
+      <br>
+      <a href="#VI">The Classification of Poetry</a><br>
+      <br>
+      <a href="#VII">Lyric Forms</a><br>
+      <br>
+      <a href="#VIII">Song</a><br>
+      <br>
+      <a href="#IX">The Popularity of Lyric</a><br>
+      <br>
+      <a href="#X">Conclusion</a><br>
+    </h3>
+    <br>
+    <br>
+    <hr style="width: 35%;">
+    <br>
+    <br>
+
+    <h2><a name="I"></a>WHAT IS POETRY?</h2>
+    <br>
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;If you were to ask twenty intelligent
+      people, &quot;What is the Thames?&quot; the answer due to you from each
+      would be&mdash;&quot;a river.&quot; And yet this would hardly be matter
+      to satisfy your enquiring mind. You would more probably say, &quot;What
+      do you know of the Thames?&quot; or, &quot;Describe the Thames to me.&quot;
+      This would bring you a great variety of opinions, many dissertations
+      on geological and national history, many words in praise of beauty,
+      many personal confessions. Here would be the revelation of many minds
+      approaching a great subject in as many manners, confirming and contradicting
+      each other, making on the whole some impression of cumulative judgment,
+      giving you many clues to what might be called the truth, no one of them
+      by itself coming near to anything like full knowledge, and the final
+      word would inevitably be left unsaid.</p>
+
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The question, &quot;What is poetry?&quot;
+      has been answered innumerable times, often by the subtlest and clearest
+      minds, and as many times has it been answered differently. The answer
+      in itself now makes a large and distinguished literature to which, full
+      as it is of keen intelligence and even of constructive vision, we can
+      return with unstaling pleasure. The very poets themselves, it is true,
+      lending their wits to the debate, have left the answer incomplete, as
+      it must&mdash;not in the least unhappily&mdash;always remain. And yet,
+      if we consider the matter for a moment, we find that all this wisdom,
+      prospering from Sidney's <i>Apology</i> until to-day, does not strictly
+      attempt to answer the question that is put. It does not tell us singly
+      what poetry is, but it speculates upon the cause and effect of poetry.
+      It enquires into the impulse that moves the poet to creation and describes,
+      as far as individual limitations will allow, the way in which the poet's
+      work impresses the world. When Wordsworth says &quot;poetry is the breath
+      and finer spirit of all knowledge,&quot; he is, exactly, in one intuitive
+      word, telling us how poetry comes into being, directing us with an inspired
+      gesture to its source, and not strictly telling us what it is; and so
+      Shelley tells us in his fiery eloquence of the divine functions of poetry.
+      But poetry is, in its naked being and apart from its cause and effect,
+      a certain use of words, and, remembering this simple fact, there has
+      been one perfect and final answer to the question, &quot;What is poetry?&quot;
+      It was Coleridge's: &quot;Poetry&mdash;the best words in the best order.&quot;</p>
+    <br>
+
+    <h2><a name="II"></a>THE BEST WORDS IN THE BEST ORDER</h2>
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;This is the fundamental thing to be remembered
+      when considering the art of poetry as such. The whole question of what
+      causes a poet to say this or that and of the impression that is thence
+      made upon us can be definitely narrowed down to the question &quot;How
+      does he say it?&quot; The manner of his utterance is, indeed, the sole
+      evidence before us. To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so
+      far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining,
+      even delightful, but is certainly inessential. The written word is everything.
+      If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its
+      value as poetry. We may at times, knowing of honourable and inspiriting
+      things in a poet's life, read into his imperfect word a value that it
+      does not possess. When we do this our judgment of poetry is inert; we
+      are not getting pleasure from his work because it is poetry, but for
+      quite other reasons. It may be a quite wholesome pleasure, but it is
+      not the high &aelig;sthetic pleasure which the people who experience
+      it generally believe to be the richest and most vivid of all pleasures
+      because it is experienced by a mental state that is more eager and masterful
+      than any other. Nor is our judgment acute when we praise a poet's work
+      because it chimes with unexpected precision to some particular belief
+      or experience of our own or because it directs us by suggestion to something
+      dear to our personal affections. Again the poet is giving us delight,
+      but not the delight of poetry. We have to consider this alone&mdash;the
+      poet has something to say: does he say it in the best words in the best
+      order? By that, and by that alone, is he to be judged.</p>
+
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;For it is to be remembered that this
+      achievement of the best words in the best order is, perhaps, the rarest
+      to which man can reach, implying as it does a coincidence of unfettered
+      imaginative ecstasy with superb mental poise. The poet's perfect expression
+      is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible
+      way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely. He has
+      felt it with an imaginative urgency so great as to quicken his brain
+      to this flawless ordering of the best words, and it is that ordering
+      and that alone which communicates to us the ecstasy, and gives us the
+      supreme delight of poetry. It should here be added that poetry habitually
+      takes the form of verse. It is, perhaps, profitless to attempt any analysis
+      of the emotional law that directs this choice, nor need it arbitrarily
+      be said that poetry must of necessity be verse. But it is a fact, sufficiently
+      founded on experience, that the intensity of vision that demands and
+      achieves nothing less than the best words in the best order for its
+      expression does instinctively select the definitely patterned rhythm
+      of verse as being the most apt for its purpose. We find, then, that
+      the condition of poetry as defined by Coleridge implies exactly what
+      the trained judgment holds poetry to be. It implies the highest attainable
+      intensity of vision, which, by the sanction of almost universal example,
+      casts its best ordering of the best words into the form of verse.  Ruskin
+      wrote, with fine spiritual ardour&mdash;</p>
+
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;... women of England! ...do not
+      think your daughters can be trained to the truth of their own human
+      beauty, while the pleasant places, which God made at once for their
+      schoolroom and their playground, lie desolate and defiled. You cannot
+      baptize them rightly in those inch-deep founts of yours, unless you
+      baptize them also in the sweet waters which the great Lawgiver strikes
+      forth for ever from the rocks of your native land&mdash;waters which
+      a Pagan would have worshipped in their purity, and you worship only
+      with pollution. You cannot lead your children faithfully to those narrow
+      axe-hewn church altars of yours, while the dark azure altars in heaven&mdash;the
+      mountains that sustain your island throne&mdash;mountains on which a
+      Pagan would have seen the powers of heaven rest in every wreathed cloud&mdash;remain
+      for you without inscription; altars built, not to, but by an unknown
+      God.&quot;</p>
+
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Here we have, we may say, words in their
+      best order&mdash;Coleridge's equally admirable definition of prose.
+      It is splendid prose, won only from great nobility of emotion. But it
+      is not poetry, not the best words in the best order announcing that
+      the feeling expressed has been experienced with the highest intensity
+      possible to the mind of man. The tenderness for earth and its people
+      and the heroic determination not to watch their defilement in silence,
+      have been deeply significant things to Ruskin, moving him to excellent
+      words. But could they be more strictly experienced, yet more deeply
+      significant, shaping yet more excellent words? Blake gives us the answer:</p>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And did those feet in ancient time<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Walk upon
+    England's mountains green?<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And was the holy Lamb of God<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;On England's
+    pleasant pastures seen?<br>
+    <br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And did the Countenance Divine<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Shine forth
+    upon our clouded hills?<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And was Jerusalem builded here<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Among these
+    dark Satanic mills?<br>
+    <br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Bring me my bow of burning gold!<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Bring me my
+    arrows of desire!<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Bring me my
+    chariot of fire!<br>
+    <br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I will not cease from mental fight,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Nor shall
+    my sword sleep in my hand,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Till we have built Jerusalem<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;In England's
+    green and pleasant land.<br>
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;It may be suggested that, for their purpose,
+      Ruskin's words are perfectly chosen, that as a direct social charge
+      they achieve their purpose better than any others that could have been
+      shaped. Even if we allow this and do not press, as we very reasonably
+      might, the reply that merely in this direction Blake's poem working,
+      as is the manner of all great art, with tremendous but secret vigour
+      upon the imagination of the people, has a deeper and more permanent
+      effect than Ruskin's prose, we still remember that the sole purpose
+      of poetry is to produce the virile spiritual activity that we call &aelig;sthetic
+      delight and that to do this is the highest achievement to which the
+      faculties of man can attain. If by &quot;the best words&quot; we mean
+      anything, we must mean the best words for the highest possible purpose.
+      To take an analogy: if we say that a democratic government is the best
+      kind of government, we mean that it most completely fulfills the highest
+      function of a government&mdash;the realisation of the will of the people.
+      But it is also a function of government to organise the people and&mdash;although,
+      just as we may think that Blake's poem finally beats Ruskin's prose
+      on Ruskin's own ground, we may think, too, that the government that
+      best represents the people will finally best organise the people&mdash;it
+      may quite plausibly be said that in this business an aristocratic or
+      militant government will, in an imperfectly conditioned civilisation
+      (such as that of the world to-day), excel a democratic government. Nevertheless,
+      we still say with an easy mind that a democratic government is the best
+      government, without qualification, since it excels in the highest purpose
+      of government. Clearly Coleridge implies, and reasonably enough, an
+      elaboration such as this in his definition&mdash;the best words in the
+      best order. To say that Blake and Ruskin, in those passages, were giving
+      expression to dissimilar experiences is but to emphasise the distinction
+      between prose and poetry. The closest analysis discovers no difference
+      between the essential thought of the one and the other. But Blake projected
+      the thought through a mood of higher intensity, and, where Ruskin perfectly
+      ordered admirable words, he perfectly ordered the best words. It is
+      the controlling mood that differs, not the material controlled. Hence
+      it is that still another mind, starting from the same radical perception,
+      might transfigure it through a mood as urgent as Blake's and produce
+      yet another poem of which it could strictly be said that here again
+      were the best words in the best order. We should then have three men
+      moved by the same thought; in the one case the imaginative shaping of
+      the thought would fail to reach the point at which the record and communication
+      of ecstasy become the chief intention, and the expression would be prose;
+      in each of the other cases the shaping would pass beyond that point,
+      and there would be two separate moods expressed, each in the terms of
+      poetry.</p>
+
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;One further qualification remains to
+      be made. By words we must mean, as Coleridge must have meant, words
+      used for a purpose which they alone can serve. Poetry is the communication
+      through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no
+      other way. If you ask me the time, and I say&mdash;it is six o'clock,
+      it may be said that I am using the best words in the best order, and
+      that, although the thought in my mind is incapable of being refined
+      into the higher &aelig;sthetic experience of which we have spoken, my
+      answer is, if Coleridge was right, poetry. But these are not, in our
+      present sense, words at all. They have no power which is peculiar to
+      themselves. If I show you my watch you are answered just as effectively.</p>
+
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;That there is no absolute standard for
+      reference does not matter. All &aelig;sthetic appreciation and opinion
+      can but depend upon our judgment, fortified by knowledge of what is,
+      by cumulative consent, the best that has been done. There can be no
+      proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best words in the best order;
+      only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and judgment, that it is
+      so. And the conviction is, exactly, the conviction that the mood to
+      which the matter has been subjected has been of such a kind as to achieve
+      an intensity beyond which we cannot conceive the mind as passing, and
+      it follows that there may be&mdash;as indeed there are&mdash;many poems
+      dealing with the same subject each of which fulfills the obligations
+      of poetry as defined by Coleridge. For while the subjects of poetry
+      are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable.
+      It is the same in all arts. If six masters paint the same landscape
+      and under the same conditions, there will be one subject but six visions,
+      and consequently six different interpretations, each one of which may,
+      given the mastery, satisfy us as being perfect; perfect, that is, not
+      as the expression of a subject which has no independent artistic existence,
+      but as the expression of the mood in which the subject is realised.
+      So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress
+      us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity;
+      if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose
+      or in insignificant verse.</p>
+
+    <br>
+    <h2><a name="III"></a>THE DEGREES OF POETRY</h2>
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The question that necessarily follows
+      these reflections is&mdash;Are there degrees in poetry? Since a short
+      lyric may completely satisfy the requirements of poetry as here set
+      down, announcing itself to have been created in a poetic or supremely
+      intensified mood, can poetry be said at any time to go beyond this?
+      If we accept these conclusions, can a thing so slight, yet so exquisite,
+      so obviously authentic in source as:</p>
+
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;When I a verse shall make,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Know I have
+    pray'd thee,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;For old religion's sake,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Saint Ben,
+    to aid me.<br>
+    <br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Make the way smooth for me,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;When I, thy
+    Herrick,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Honouring thee, on my knee<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Offer my lyric.<br>
+    <br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Candles I'll give to thee,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And a new
+    altar,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And thou, Saint Ben, shall be<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Writ in my
+    Psalter,<br>
+    <p>be said to be less definitely poetry than <i>Paradise Lost</i> or in
+      any essentially poetic way below it? The logical answer is, no; and
+      I think it is the right one. In considering it we should come to an
+      understanding of the nature of lyric, the purpose of this essay. But
+      first let us see how far it may be justifiable.</p>
+    <br>
+    <h2><a name="IV"></a>PARADISE LOST</h2>
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;It is commonly asserted and accepted
+      that <i>Paradise Lost</i> is among the two or three greatest English
+      poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement
+      in our literature. What are the qualities by virtue of which this claim
+      is made, and allowed by every competent judge? Firstly there is the
+      witness of that ecstasy of mood of which we have spoken.</p>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;His praise, ye Winds, that from four quarters blow,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;Breathe soft or loud: and wave your tops, ye Pines,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;With every plant, in sign of worship wave.<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;Fountains, and ye that warble, as ye flow,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;Melodious murmurs, warbling tune his praise.<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;Join voices all ye living Souls. Ye Birds,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;That, singing, up to Heaven-gate ascend,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;Bear on your wings and in your notes his praise.<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;Ye that in waters glide, and ye that walk<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;The earth, and stately tread, or lowly creep,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;Witness if I be silent, morn or even,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;To hill or valley, fountain, or fresh shade,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;Made vocal by my song, and taught his praise.<br>
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;This note of high imaginative tension
+      is persistent throughout the poem, and that it should be so masterfully
+      sustained is in itself cause for delighted admiration. But to be constant
+      in a virtue is not to enhance its quality. Superbly furnished as <i>Paradise
+      Lost</i> is with this imaginative beauty, the beauty is as rich and
+      unquestionable in the few pages of <i>Lycidas</i>; there is less of
+      it, that is all. And who shall say that it is less ecstatic or less
+      perfect in the little orison to Saint Ben? You may prefer Milton's manner,
+      but then you may, with equal reason, prefer Herrick's, being grateful
+      for what Keats announced to be truth, in whatever shape you may find
+      it. In any case we cannot, on this ground, assign a lower place to the
+      poet who could order those words &quot;religion's,&quot; &quot;Saint
+      Ben,&quot; &quot;Psalter&quot; and the rest of them, with such inspired
+      good fortune. And yet we know that <i>Paradise Lost</i> is a greater
+      work than this little flight of certain song, greater, too, than the
+      poet's own elegy. There is an explanation.</p>
+
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Of all the energies of man, that which
+      I will anticipate my argument by calling the poetic energy, the energy
+      that created Herrick's song and the distinguishing qualities of that
+      passage from Milton, is the rarest and the most highly, if not the most
+      generally, honoured; we have only to think of the handful of men who
+      at any time out of all the millions can bring this perfect expression
+      to a mood of the highest imaginative intensity, to know that the honour
+      is justly bestowed. So splendid a thing is success in this matter that
+      failure, if it is matched with a will for sincerity and intelligence
+      of purpose, will often bring a man some durable fame. But the energies
+      of man are manifold, and while we rightly set the poetic energy above
+      the rest, there are others which are only less rare, and in their most
+      notable manifestations yielding to it alone in worthiness of homage
+      which will, indeed, often be more generally paid. Such an energy is
+      the profound intellectual control of material, as distinct from profound
+      emotional sensitiveness to material; the capacity for ordering great
+      masses of detail into a whole of finely balanced and duly related proportions.
+      C&aelig;sar and Napoleon had it, marshalling great armies to perfectly
+      conceived designs; Fielding had it, using it to draw a multitude of
+      character and event into the superbly shaped lines of his story; the
+      greatest political leaders have had it; Cromwell had it, organising
+      an enthusiasm; Elizabeth, organising a national adventure.[1] Again,
+      there is the energy of morality, ardently desiring justice and right
+      fellowship, sublimely lived by men who have made goodness great, like
+      Lincoln, sublimely spoken by men who made sermons passionate, like Ruskin
+      and Carlyle. To take one other instance, there is the highly specialised
+      energy that delights in the objective perception of differentiations
+      of character, the chief energy of the deftest wits such as Samuel Johnson
+      and the best comic dramatists.</p>
+
+    <p style="margin:
+6%">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;1:
+      It may be necessary to point out that while the poetic energy does not
+      include this architectural power, the intellectual co-ordination of
+      large masses of material, it does, of course, include the shapely control
+      of the emotion which is its being. It is, indeed, difficult to see precisely
+      what can be meant by the suggestion that is often made that the emotions
+      can ever be translated into poetic form wholly without the play of intellect.
+      If the emotion is intense enough for the creation of poetry at all,
+      it will inevitably call up the intellectual power necessary to its shaping,
+      otherwise it would be ineffectually diffused. Mr. John Bailey, in his
+      masterly if sometimes provoking essay on Milton says, in the midst of
+      some admirable remarks on this subject, &quot;It has been said by a
+      living writer that 'when reason is subsidiary to emotion verse is the
+      right means of expression, and, when emotion to reason, prose.' This
+      is roughly true, though the poetry of mere emotion is poor stuff.&quot;
+      I would suggest that poetry of emotion, in this sense, does not and
+      could not exist. Bad verse is merely the evidence of both emotion and
+      intellect that are, so to speak, below poetic power, not of emotion
+      divorced from intellect, which evaporates unrecorded.</p>
+
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Any one of these energies, greatly manifested,
+      will compel a just admiration; not so great an admiration as the poetic
+      energy, which is witness of the highest urgency of individual life,
+      of all things the most admirable, but still great. If, further, we consider
+      any one of these energies by itself, we shall see that if it were co-existent
+      with the poetic energy, the result would be likely to be that, in contact
+      with so masterful a force, it would become yet more emphatic, and so
+      a thing arresting in itself would become yet more notable under its
+      new dominion. And so it is. Fielding's architectural power is a yet
+      more wonderful thing in Sophocles, where it is allied to poetic energy;
+      Ruskin's moral fervour is, for all its nobility, less memorable than
+      Wordsworth's and Ben Jonson defines character more pungently than Sheridan.
+      These energies remain, nevertheless, distinct from the poetic energy.
+      When, however, a poet is endowed not alone with his own particular gift
+      of poetry, but also with some of these other energies&mdash;of which
+      there are many&mdash;his work very rightly is allowed an added greatness.
+      It is so with <i>Paradise Lost</i>. Of the three energies other than
+      the poetic that I have mentioned, Milton had rich measure of two and
+      something of the third. No man has ever excelled him either in power
+      of intellectual control or in moral passion, and he was not without
+      some sense of character. Consequently we get in his great poem, not
+      only the dominating poetic quality which is the chief thing, enabling
+      the poet to realise his vision (or mood) perfectly, but also the spectacle
+      of a great number of perfectly realised visions being related to each
+      other with excellent harmony; we get, further, a great moral exaltation&mdash;again
+      perfectly realised by the poetic energy, and we get, finally, considerable
+      subtlety&mdash;far more than is generally allowed&mdash;of psychological
+      detail. From all these things, the architectonics, the zeal for justice
+      and the revelation of character, we get an added and wholesome delight
+      which gives Milton's work a place of definitely greater eminence than
+      Herrick's song in the record of human activity. In effect, Milton  besides
+      being a poet, which is the greatest of all distinctions, becomes, by
+      possession of those other qualities, a great man as well, and I think
+      that this is really what we mean when we speak of a great poet. Without
+      his poetic faculty, although he would fall in the scale of human distinction,
+      which is not at all the same thing as renown, below, say, so humble
+      a personality yet so true a poet as John Clare[2], Milton would still
+      be a great man, while Herrick without his poetry would be indistinguishable
+      from the crowd. And the great man is as clearly evident in Milton's
+      poetry as he is clearly not evident in Herrick's.</p>
+
+    <p style="margin:
+6%">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;2:
+      It may be asked: &quot;Do you really think that a poet who has left
+      no other record of himself than a page or two of songs, even perfect
+      songs, can claim a greater distinction than a great man who is not a
+      poet?&quot; Let me say, once for all, that I do think so. To have written
+      one perfect song is to have given witness and the only kind of witness
+      (in common with the media of other arts) that is finally authoritative,
+      that at least one supremely exacting mood has been perfectly realised;
+      that is to say, one moment of life has been perfectly experienced.  And
+      since, with our human conception, we can see no good or desirable end
+      beyond the perfect experience of life, the man who proves to us that
+      he has done this, no matter though it has been but for a moment, is
+      more distinguished&mdash;that is, more definitely set apart in his own
+      achievement&mdash;than the man who, with whatever earnestness and nobility,
+      has but proved to us that he desired this perfection of experience,
+      even though the desire is exalted by the most heroic altruism.</p>
+    <br>
+
+    <h2><a name="V"></a>WHAT IS LYRIC?</h2>
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And so we have Milton and Herrick, both
+      poets, the one a great man, the other not. It is a wide difference.
+      Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet,
+      transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events. Milton is
+      one of perhaps a dozen names in the history of the world's literature,
+      Herrick&mdash;still with a fine enough distinction&mdash;one of something
+      under two hundred in the history of our own. And yet they are left on
+      equal terms in the possession of the purely poetic energy. Milton's
+      achievement outweighs Herrick's, but for the reasons that I have mentioned,
+      and not because poetry grows better by accumulation or because it is
+      possible to prove, or even to satisfy any considerable majority of good
+      judges, that&mdash;</p>
+
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Ye have been fresh and green,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Ye have been
+    filled with flowers,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And ye the walks have been<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Where maids
+    have spent their hours.<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;You have beheld how they<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;With wicker
+    arks did come<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;To kiss and bear away<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The richer
+    cowslips home.<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;You've heard them sweetly sing,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And seen them
+    in a round:<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Each virgin like a spring,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;With honeysuckles
+    crown'd.<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;But now we see none here<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Whose silvery
+    feet did tread,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And with dishevell'd hair<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Adorn'd this
+    smoother mead.<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Like unthrifts, having spent<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Your stock
+    and needy grown,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;You've left here to lament<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Your poor
+    estates, alone,<br>
+    <p>is inferior, in specifically poetic quality, to</p>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor;<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;And yet anon repairs his drooping head,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.<br>
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;We come, then, to the consideration of
+      this specific quality that distinguishes what we recognise as poetry
+      from all other verbal expression. Returning for a moment to <i>Paradise
+      Lost</i>, we find that here is a work of art of which the visible and
+      external sign is words. That it has three qualities&mdash;there may
+      be more, but it is not to the point&mdash;architectural power, moral
+      exaltation and a sense of character, each of which, although it may
+      be more impressive when presented as it were under the auspices of the
+      poetic quality, can exist independently of it, as in <i>Tom Jones</i>,
+      <i>Unto This Last</i>, and <i>The School for Scandal</i> respectively;
+      that there remains a last and dominating quality, which is not related
+      to intellectual fusion of much diverse material, as is the first of
+      those other qualities, or to the kind of material, as are the other
+      two, but to extreme activity of the perceptive mood upon whatever object
+      it may be directed, remembering that this activity is highly exacting
+      as to the worthiness of objects in which it can concern itself. We find,
+      further, that this is a quality which it has in common not with <i>Tom
+      Jones</i> or <i>Unto This Last</i>, but with a thing so inconsiderable
+      in all other respects as those songs of Herrick's. And in each case
+      we find that the token of this quality is a conviction that here are
+      words that could not have been otherwise chosen or otherwise placed;
+      that here is an expression to rearrange which would be to destroy it&mdash;a
+      conviction that we by no means have about the prose of Fielding and
+      Ruskin, admirable as it is. We find, in short, that this quality equals
+      a maximum of imaginative pressure freeing itself in the best words in
+      the best order. And this quality is the specific poetic quality; the
+      presence or absence of which should decide for us, without any other
+      consideration whatever, whether what is before us is or is not poetry.
+      And it seems to me, further, that what we have in our minds when we
+      speak of lyric is precisely this same quality; that lyric and the expression
+      of pure poetic energy unrelated to other energies are the same thing.</p>
+    <br>
+
+    <h2><a name="VI"></a>THE CLASSIFICATION OF POETRY</h2>
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;It is not yet the place to discuss the
+      question of lyric forms&mdash;to consider what kind of thing it is that
+      people mean when they speak of &quot;a lyric.&quot; First we must consider
+      the commonly accepted opinion that a lyric is an expression of personal
+      emotion, with its implication that there is an essential difference
+      between a lyric and, say, dramatic or narrative poetry. A lyric, it
+      is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry,
+      and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from
+      each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions
+      which have no real being. To talk of dramatic poetry, epic poetry and
+      narrative poetry is to talk of three different things&mdash;epic, drama
+      and narrative; but each is combined with a fourth thing in common, which
+      is poetry, which, in turn, is in itself of precisely the same nature
+      as the lyric of which we are told that it is yet a further kind of poetry.
+      Let us here take a passage from a play and consider it in relation to
+      this suggestion:</p>
+
+    <p>CLOWN. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I
+      wish you all joy of the worm.<br>
+      <br>
+      CLEOPATRA. &nbsp;&nbsp;Farewell.<br>
+      <br>
+      CLOWN. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;You
+      must think this, look you, that the worm will do his kind.<br>
+      <br>
+      CLEOPATRA. &nbsp;&nbsp;Ay, ay; farewell.<br>
+      <br>
+      CLOWN. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Look
+      you, the worm is not to be trusted but in the keeping of wise people;<br>
+      for indeed there is no goodness in the worm.<br>
+      <br>
+      CLEOPATRA. &nbsp;&nbsp;Take thou no care; it shall be heeded.<br>
+      <br>
+      CLOWN. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Very
+      good. Give it nothing, I pray you, for it is not worth the feeding.<br>
+      <br>
+      CLEOPATRA. &nbsp;&nbsp;Will it eat me?<br>
+      <br>
+      CLOWN. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;You
+      must not think I am so simple but I know the devil himself will not
+      eat a<br>
+      woman; I know that a woman is a dish for the gods, if the devil dress
+      her not. But, truly, these<br>
+      same whoreson devils do the gods great harm in their women, for in every
+      ten that they<br>
+      make the devils mar five.<br>
+      <br>
+      CLEOPATRA. &nbsp;&nbsp;Well, get thee gone; farewell.<br>
+      <br>
+      CLOWN. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Yes,
+      forsooth; I wish you joy of the worm.<br>
+      <br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>
+      Re-enter</i> IRAS.<br>
+      <br>
+      CLEOPATRA. &nbsp;&nbsp;Give me my robe, put on my crown;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+      &nbsp;I have Immortal longings in me; now no more<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+      &nbsp;The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+      &nbsp;Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+      &nbsp;Antony call; I see him rouse himself<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+      &nbsp;To praise my noble act; I hear him mock<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+      &nbsp;The luck of C&aelig;sar, which the gods give men<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+      &nbsp;To excuse their after wrath; husband, I come:<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+      &nbsp;Now to that name my courage prove my title!<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+      &nbsp;I am fire and air; my other elements<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+      &nbsp;I give to baser life. So; have you done?<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+      &nbsp;Come then, and take the last warmth of my lips.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+      &nbsp;Farewell, kind Charmian; Iras, long farewell.</p>
+
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I have chosen this passage not because
+      of its singular beauty, but because it is peculiarly to our present
+      purpose. In the first place, Shakespeare, by using both prose and verse&mdash;which
+      he by no means always does under similar circumstances&mdash;makes a
+      clear formal division between what is poetry and what is not. It is
+      all magnificently contrived drama, but down to the Clown's exit it is
+      not poetry. The significance of the Clown does not demand of Shakespeare's
+      imaginative mood that highest activity that would force him to poetry.
+      The short dialogue has great excellence, but not this kind of excellence.
+      The fact that it occurs in what we call a poetic drama does not make
+      it poetry; its fine dramatic significance does not give it poetic significance.
+      We are living in a world of dramatic poetry, and yet we have here a
+      perfectly clear distinction between the drama and the poetry, since
+      we definitely have the one without the other. Then, when Cleopatra begins
+      her farewell speech, we have the addition of poetry and a continuance
+      of the drama. And this speech illustrates perfectly the suggestion that
+      the quality which is commonly said to be exclusively lyric is the quality
+      of all poetry. It illustrates it in a particularly emphatic way. For
+      not only is it unquestionably poetry, but it is also unquestionably
+      dramatic. Very clearly the poet is not here speaking out of his own
+      actual experience; it is a woman speaking, one who is a queen: who is
+      wrecked upon the love of kings: who knows that she is about to die a
+      strange and sudden death. So that if the impulse of the poetry in poetic
+      drama were essentially different from the impulse of lyric, if the personal
+      experience which is said to be this latter were something differing
+      in kind from the experience which is the source of what is called dramatic
+      poetry, then here is a case where the essential difference could surely
+      be perceived and defined. It cannot be defined, for it does not exist.
+      It is a fallacy to suppose that experience is any the less personal
+      because it is concerned with an event happening to someone else. If
+      my friend falls to a mortal sickness my experience, if my imaginative
+      faculty is acute, is as poignant as his; if he achieves some great good
+      fortune, my delight is as vigorous as his. And if I am a poet, and choose
+      to express the grief or pleasure as if it were his concern and not mine,
+      the experience does not become one whit less personal to me. You may,
+      if it is convenient, call the result lyric if I speak as though the
+      experience is my own and dramatic poetry if I speak of it as being his,
+      but what you are really saying is that in the one case I am producing
+      pure poetry, and in the other I am producing poetry in conjunction with
+      dramatic statement. The poetic quality is the same in either case. Cleopatra's
+      speech is notable for two things: its dramatic significance, which is
+      admittedly contrived by Shakespeare, and its poetry which springs from
+      an intensity of experience which is clearly, unless we juggle with words,
+      Shakespeare's and not Cleopatra's. The fact that the material upon which
+      the poet's mood has worked has not been confined to some event that
+      has happened to himself but has included the condition of an imagined
+      being does not alter the radical significance of his experience or influence
+      the essential nature of its product. The poetic energy may operate on
+      many things through a million moods, but the character of the energy
+      is immutable. And when we speak of lyric, thinking of the direct and
+      simple activity of this energy unmodified by the process of any other
+      energies, we shall, if we get our mind clear about it, see that we mean
+      pure poetry, and we shall recognise this poetry as being constant in
+      its essential properties in whatever association we may henceforth find&nbsp;it.</p>
+
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;If it is allowed, as, for the reasons
+      I have attempted to set out, I think it rightly may be, that the purely
+      poetic energy is not a variable quality, that of any given expression
+      of a man's mental activity it can definitely be said that it is or is
+      not poetry, there remains one question to be answered,&mdash;Can one
+      poem be better than another, if both are truly poems? Or can one poet,
+      by reason of his poetry, be better than another poet by reason of his?
+      Is Keats, for example, a better poet than Suckling? Every good judge
+      of poetry, if that question were put, would be likely to answer without
+      hesitation&mdash;Yes, he is. And yet the answer, although the reason
+      for it may be found and, in a sense, allowed, does not in any way discredit
+      the principle that has been defined. With a passage from each of these
+      poets at his best before us, let us see what we find. This from Keats:</p>
+
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;No hungry generations tread thee down;<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;The voice I hear this passing night was heard<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;In ancient days by emperor and clown:<br>
+    <br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;Perhaps the self-same song that found a path<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for
+    home<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;She stood in tears amid the alien
+    corn;<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The same that oft-times
+    hath<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Charm'd magic casements, opening on
+    the foam<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.<br>
+    <p>And this from Suckling:</p>
+
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Why so pale and wan, fond lover?<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Prythee, why so pale?<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Will, when looking well can't move her,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Looking ill prevail?<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Prythee, why so pale?<br>
+    <br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Why so dull and mute, young sinner?<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Prythee, why so mute?<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Will, when speaking well can't win her,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Saying nothing do't?<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Prythee, why so mute?<br>
+    <br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Quit, quit, for shame! This will not move;<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;This cannot take her.<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;If of herself she will not love,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Nothing can make her:<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Devil take her!<br>
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The poetic energy in Keats is here entirely
+      undisturbed. I do not mean that it is not united to any other energy&mdash;though
+      here it happens not to be&mdash;as in poetic drama, where it is united
+      to the dramatic energy and is still undisturbed in its full activity,
+      but that it is here freely allowed to work itself out to its consummation
+      without any concession, conscious or unconscious, to any mood that is
+      not non-poetic but definitely anti-poetic, in which case, although unchanged
+      in its nature, it would be constrained in a hostile atmosphere. Keats's
+      words are struck out of a mood that tolerates nothing but its own full
+      life and is concerned only to satisfy that life by uncompromising expression.
+      The result is pure poetry, or lyric. But when we come to Suckling's
+      lines we find that there is a difference. The poetic energy is still
+      here. Suckling has quite clearly experienced something in a mood of
+      more than common intensity. It does not matter that the material which
+      has been subjected to the mood is not in itself very profound or passionate.
+      Another poet, Wither, with material curiously like Suckling's to work
+      upon, achieves poetry as unquestionable if not so luxuriant as Keats's.</p>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Shall I, wasting in despair,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Die because a woman's fair?<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Or make pale my cheeks with care<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Because another's rosy are?<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Be she fairer than the day,<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Or the flowery mead in May&mdash;<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;If she think not well
+    of me<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;What care I how fair she
+    be?<br>
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;To object that there is an emotional
+      gaiety in this which is foreign to Keats is but to state a personal
+      preference. It is, indeed, a preference which is common and founded
+      upon very general experience. Most of us have, from the tradition and
+      circumstance of our own lives, a particular sympathy with the grave
+      and faintly melancholy beauty which is the most recurrent note in fine
+      poetry throughout the world, but this does not establish this particular
+      strain of beauty as being in any way essential to poetry. It is related
+      to an almost universal condition, but it is a fertile source of poetry,
+      not one with the poetic energy itself. It would be absurd to impugn
+      a man's taste because he preferred Chaucer's poetry, which has scarcely
+      a touch of this melancholy, to Shelley's, which is drenched in it, as
+      it would be absurd to quarrel with it because he obtained strictly imaginative
+      pleasure more readily from<br>
+      <br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Shall I,
+      wasting in despair<br>
+      <br>
+      than from<br>
+      <br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Thou wast not born for death, immortal
+      Bird!<br>
+      <br>
+      His preference merely shows him to belong to a minority: it does not
+      show him to be insensible to poetry. For Wither's mood, by the evidence
+      of its expression, although it may not be so universal in its appeal
+      nor so adventurous in design, is here active to the degree of poetry
+      no less surely than is Keats's. And yet, while it would be an error
+      of judgment to rate Wither below Keats (by virtue of these illustrations)
+      in pure poetic energy, it would, I think, be quite sound so to rate
+      Suckling by the witness of his lyric. For while Wither's mood, in its
+      chosen activity, is wholly surrendered to the poetic energy, Suckling's
+      is not. It is contaminated by one of those external activities which
+      I have spoken of as being hostile to poetry. Although he perceives his
+      subject with the right urgency, he is unwilling to be quite loyal to
+      his perception. He makes some concession to the witty insincerity of
+      the society in which he lives, and his poetry is soiled by the contact.
+      It is not destroyed, not even changed in its nature, but its gold is
+      left for ever twisted in a baser metal with which it does not suit.
+      What we get is not a new compound with the element that corresponds
+      to poetic energy transmuted, but an ill-sorted mixture, while Keats
+      gives us the unblemished gold. We are right in proclaiming his the finer
+      achievement.</p>
+
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Keats and Wither will serve as examples
+      with which to finish our argument. In spite of all that has been said
+      Keats takes higher rank as poet than Wither? Yes, certainly, but not
+      because the poetic energy in him was a finer thing than the poetic energy
+      that was in Wither. It was more constant, which is a fact of no little
+      importance; its temper appealed to a much more general sympathy, a circumstance
+      which cannot be left out of the reckoning; it touched a far wider range
+      of significant material. These things give Keats his just superiority
+      of rank, but they do not deprive Wither, at his best moments, of the
+      essential quality which is with Keats, as with all poets, the one by
+      which he makes his proudest claim good. Nor need it be feared that in
+      allowing Wither, with his rare moments of withdrawn and rather pale
+      perfection, this the highest of all distinctions, we are making accession
+      to the title of poet too easy. It remains the most difficult of all
+      human attainments. The difference between the essential quality in those
+      eight fragile lines and that in such verse as, say:<br>
+      <br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Oft. In the stilly night,<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Ere slumber's chain
+      has bound me,<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Fond memory brings the light<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Of other days around
+      me,<br>
+      <br>
+      may be so elusive as to deceive many people that it does not exist,
+      but it is the difference between the rarest of all energies and a common
+      enough sensibility.</p>
+    <br>
+
+    <h2><a name="VII"></a>LYRIC FORMS</h2>
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;While, therefore, the term &quot;lyric
+      poetry&quot; would in itself seem to be tautological, and so to speak
+      of lyric forms is, strictly, to speak of all poetic forms, there are
+      nevertheless certain more or less defined characteristics of form that
+      we usually connect in our mind with what we call &quot;a lyric&quot;
+      (or, even less exactly, &quot;lyric poetry&quot;) which may be said
+      to be a poem where the pure poetic energy is not notably associated
+      with other energies&mdash;with a partial exception to which reference
+      will be made. In examining these characteristics nothing will be attempted
+      in the way of a history or an inclusive consideration of particular
+      forms which are known as lyric, but only, as far as may be, an analysis
+      of their governing principles.</p>
+
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;To say that a lyric (using the word henceforward
+      in its particular sense) is generally short is but to say that poetic
+      tension can only be sustained for a short time. Poe's saying that a
+      long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just. What happens,
+      I think, is this. The poetic mood, selecting a subject, records its
+      perception of that subject, the result is a lyric, and the mood passes.
+      On its recurrence another subject is selected and the process repeated.
+      But if another energy than the purely poetic, the energy of co-ordination
+      of which I have spoken, comes into operation, there will be a desire
+      in the poet to link the records of his recurrent poetic perceptions
+      together, and so to construct many poems into a connected whole. Any
+      long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative,
+      is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into
+      a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them. The
+      decision that the material used at one occurrence of the poetic mood
+      shall be related to the material used at the next is not in itself an
+      operation of the purely poetic energy, but of another.</p>
+
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The present purpose is, however, to consider
+      the general character of forms used by poets when they choose to leave
+      each successive record of poetic experience in isolation. I have said
+      that any translation of emotion into poetry&mdash;it might be said,
+      into any intelligible expression&mdash;necessarily implies a certain
+      co-operation of intellectual control. If we take even a detached phrase
+      so directly and obviously emotional in source as:<br>
+      <br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I die, I
+      faint, I fail!<br>
+      <br>
+      it is clear that the setting out those words is not merely an emotional
+      act. But intellectual control of this kind is not identical with that
+      intellectual relating of one part to another of which we have been speaking,
+      which we may call co-ordination. Of all energies, however, the co-ordinating
+      energy is the one with which the poetic energy is most instinctively
+      in sympathy, and it is in this connection that I made a partial exception
+      when I said that a lyric was a poem where the pure poetic energy was
+      not notably associated with other energies. When a poet writes a poem
+      of corresponding lines and stanzas or in a form of which the structural
+      outline is decided by a definable law&mdash;as in the sonnet&mdash;he
+      is in effect obeying the impulse of the co-ordinating energy, and the
+      use of rhyme is another sign of obedience to the same impulse. It so
+      happens that this energy, next to the poetic energy, is the most impressive
+      and satisfying of all mental activities, and while poetry may exist
+      independently of it, the fact remains that it very rarely does so. A
+      very curious fallacy about this matter has sometimes obtained support.
+      The adherents of what is called free verse, not content, as they should
+      thankfully be, if they can achieve poetry in their chosen medium, are
+      sometimes tempted to claim that it is the peculiar virtue of their manner&mdash;which,
+      let me say it again, may be entirely admirable&mdash;that it enables
+      the structure of verse to keep in constant correspondence with change
+      of emotion. The notion is, of course, a very convenient one when you
+      wish to escape the very exacting conditions of formal control, and have
+      not the patience or capacity to understand their difficulties, and that
+      it is professed by many who do so wish is doubtless. But there are other
+      serious and gifted people, loyally trying to serve a great art, who
+      hold this view, and on their account consideration is due to it. But
+      it is none the less a fallacy, and doubly so. In the first place, the
+      change of line-lengths and rhythms in a short poem written in &quot;free
+      verse&quot; is nearly always arbitrary, and does not succeed in doing
+      what is claimed for it in this direction, while it often does succeed
+      in distressing the ear and so obscuring the sense, though that is by
+      the way. It is not as though given rhythms and line-lengths had any
+      peculiar emotional significance attached to them. A dirge may be in
+      racing anap&aelig;sts, laughter in the most sedate iambic measure; a
+      solemn invocation may move in rapid three-foot lines, while grave heroic
+      verse may contain the gayest of humours. In a long work, indeed, variety
+      of structure may be used to give variety of sensation to the ear with
+      delightful and sometimes even necessary effect, though&mdash;in English,
+      and I am always speaking of English&mdash;it cannot even then be used
+      with any certainty to express change of emotion. But in a lyric the
+      ear does not demand this kind of relief. With many of us, at least,
+      it accepts and even demands an unbroken external symmetry. The symmetry
+      may be externally simple, as in, say, the stanzas of <i>Heraclitus</i>:<br>
+      <br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to
+      shed.<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;I wept as I remembered how often you and I<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.<br>
+      <br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales awake,<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take,<br>
+      <br>
+      or intricate, as in:<br>
+      <br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy,<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;Sphere-born harmonious Sisters, Voice and Verse,<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;Wed your divine sounds, and mixt power employ<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce;<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;And to our high-raised phantasy present<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;That undisturbed song of pure content,<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;Aye sung before the sapphire-colour'd throne<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;To Him that sits thereon<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;With saintly shout and solemn jubilee;<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;Where the bright Seraphim in burning row<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;Their loud-uplifted angel-trumpets blow;<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;And the Cherubic host in thousand quires<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;Touch their immortal harps of golden wires,<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;With those just Spirits that wear victorious palms,<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Hymns devout and holy
+      psalms<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Singing everlastingly:<br>
+      <br>
+      in either case there is a formal and easily perceptible relation between
+      one part of the structure and another, and this relation is a positive
+      help to us in understanding the plain sense of the words, while its
+      presence does not involve any loss of emotional significance which its
+      absence would supply. The truth is&mdash;and here is the second and
+      chief objection to the claim that we are discussing&mdash;that the poetic
+      mood, which is what is expressed by the rhythm and form of verse and
+      may very well be called the emotion of poetry, is not at all the same
+      thing as what are commonly called the emotions&mdash;as happiness, despair,
+      love, hate and the rest. Its colour will vary between one poet and another,
+      but in one poet it will be relatively fixed in quality, while these
+      other emotions are but material upon which, in common with many other
+      things, it may work. And being a relatively fixed condition, it is,
+      for its part, in no need of changing metrical devices for its expression,
+      and to maintain that the &quot;emotions,&quot; subjects of its activity,
+      should have in their alternation a corresponding alternation of metrical
+      device is no more reasonable than to maintain that other subjects of
+      its activity should be so treated; it is to forget, for example, that
+      when Shakespeare wrote:<br>
+      <br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Fear no more the heat o' the sun,<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Nor the furious winter's
+      rages:<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Thou thy worldly task hast done,<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Home art gone and ta'en
+      thy wages:<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Golden lads and girls all must,<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;As chimney-sweepers,
+      come to dust,<br>
+      <br>
+      it was his subject-matter that changed from line to line and not the
+      poetic emotion governing it, and to say that he ought to have made the
+      metrical and rhythmic form of the first line in itself suggest heat:
+      of the second, rough weather: of the third, work: of the fourth, wages:
+      and of the fifth and sixth the death of golden lads and girls and of
+      chimney-sweepers respectively, all things manifestly very different
+      from each other, and things which, if it were the function of verbal
+      rhythms and metres to do this sort of thing at all, could not with any
+      propriety have the closely related equivalents that they have here.
+      No; to ask for this kind of effect is really to ask for nothing more
+      valuable than the devotional crosses and altars into which a perverted
+      wit led some of the seventeenth-century poets to contrive their verses
+      in unhappy moments, or Southey's <i>Lodore</i>, in which there is a
+      fond pretence that verbal rhythms are water.[3] It is just as difficult
+      to explain why verbal rhythms will not perform this function as it is
+      to explain why the moon is not a green cheese.</p>
+
+    <p style="margin:
+6%">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 3: Most poets will
+      occasionally use onomatopoeia with success, but this is a different
+      matter, and even so it is quite an inessential poetic device. One might
+      sometimes suppose from what we are told, that Virgil's chief claim to
+      poetry was the fact that he once made a line of verse resemble the movement
+      of a horse's hoofs.</p>
+
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;But while it is true that the function
+      of the rhythm of poetry is to express the governing poetic emotion,
+      and that, since the emotion in itself is fixed rather than changing,
+      it will best do this not by mere irregularity, but by flexible movement
+      that is contained in an external symmetry, it does not follow at all
+      that the subject-matter which the poetic emotion is controlling, be
+      it the &quot;emotions&quot; or anything else, cannot hope for expression
+      that catches its peculiar properties. To do this in poetry is the supreme
+      distinction not of rhythms, but of words. The preponderance of the five-foot
+      blank-verse line in the work of, say, Shakespeare and Milton, is so
+      great that we can safely say that their rank as poets would not be lower
+      than it is if they had written nothing else. Clearly their constancy
+      to this metre was not the result of any technical deficiency. Even if
+      Milton had not written the choruses of <i>Samson Agonistes</i> and Shakespeare
+      his songs, nobody would be so absurd as to suggest that they adopted
+      this five-foot line and spent their mighty artistry in sending supple
+      and flowing variety through its external uniformity, because they could
+      not manage any other. They used it because they found that its rhythm
+      perfectly expressed their poetic emotion, and because the formal relation
+      of one line to another satisfied the instinct for co-ordination, and
+      for the full expression of the significance of their subject-matter
+      they relied not upon their rhythms, but upon their choice of words.
+      The belief that when a poem is written there is one and only one metrical
+      scheme that could possibly be used for that particular occasion is an
+      amiable delusion that should be laid aside with such notions as that
+      the poet makes his breakfast on dew and manna. Once the poem is written
+      we may feel indeed, if it be a good one, that any change in the form
+      is impossible, but when the poet was about to write it we may be sure
+      that he quite deliberately weighed one form against another before making
+      his choice. It may even be true that he will sometimes find the shape
+      of his poem running to his tongue as it were unbidden, but this certainty
+      of selection is really in itself the result of long and, perhaps, subconscious
+      deliberation. The point is that the chosen form must in any case express
+      the poetic emotion, but that its particular election is a personal whim,
+      wholly satisfactory in its result, rather than a divine necessity. <i>The
+      Ode to the West Wind</i> and the <i>Stanzas written in Dejection</i>
+      are both superb poems, but who shall say that Shelley might not have
+      written the former in the short-measured nine-line stanzas and the latter
+      in his <i>terza-rima</i>, and yet have embodied his poetic emotion as
+      completely as he has done? It need hardly be added that it does not
+      follow that, because a simple metrical outline may easily and justly
+      be chosen, it can easily be used. So plain a measure as the six-line
+      octo-syllabic stanza may be the merest unintelligent jog-trot, or it
+      may be:<br>
+      <br>
+
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I wander'd lonely as a cloud<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;That floats on high o'er vales and
+      hills,<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;When all at once I saw a crowd,<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A host, of golden daffodils;<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Beside the lake, beneath the trees,<br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.</p>
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;We may now consider this question of
+      the subject-matter and its expression in words. When the poet makes
+      his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.
+      He has something in his mind, subjected to his poetic vision, and his
+      problem is to find words that will compel us to realise the significance
+      of that something. To solve this problem is his last and most exacting
+      difficulty, demanding a continual wariness and the closest discipline.
+      When Homer nodded, another man's word came to his lips, and when that
+      happens the poet may as well be silent. No poet has been wholly blameless
+      of this relaxation or escaped its penalties, but it is by his vigilance
+      in this matter that we measure his virility.</p>
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I suppose everyone knows the feeling
+      that sometimes calls us to a life where we fend and cater for ourselves
+      in the fields and rivers, such as William Morris knew when he shot fieldfares
+      with his bow and arrow and cooked them for his supper. Shakespeare knew
+      it too, in the mind of Caliban, and his business was to realise this
+      subject-matter for us in such a way that it could not possibly escape
+      us in vague generalisation. Its appeal to our perceptions must be irresistible.
+      He can do it only by the perfect choice of words, thus:</p>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;I'll show thee the best springs; I'll pluck thee berries;<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;I'll fish for thee and get thee wood enough.<br>
+    <br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br>
+    <br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow;<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts;<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;Show thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;To snare the nimble marmoset; I'll bring thee<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;To clustering filberts and sometimes I'll get thee<br>
+    &nbsp;&nbsp;Young scamels from the rock.<br>
+    
+    <p>Every word sings with life, and the whole passage shows perfectly the
+      function of words in poetry. The peculiar delight which we get from
+      such a passage as this comes, I think, apart from its fundamental poetic
+      quality, from the fact that the subject-matter is of such general interest
+      as constantly to tempt incomplete perception to inadequate expression.
+      Consequently when we get an expression which is complete our pleasure
+      has an added surprise. &quot;Show thee a <i>jay's</i> nest&quot;; it
+      is strangely simple, but it is revelation. Or let us take a case where
+      the subject-matter is one of the emotions of which we have spoken; the
+      emotion that marks the pity of parting at death:<br>
+      <br>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I am dying, Egypt, dying:<br>
+      <br>
+      the use of that one word, Egypt, should answer for ever the people who
+      think that the subject-matter of poetry is to be expressed by rhythm.</p>
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Thus we have rhythm expressing the poetic
+      emotion, or intensity of perception, and words expressing the thing
+      that is intensely perceived; so, as the creed of the mystics shows us
+      beauty born of the exact fusion of thought with feeling, of perfect
+      correspondence of the strictly chosen words to the rhythmic movement
+      is born the complete form of poetry. And when this perfect correspondence
+      occurs unaccompanied by any other energy&mdash;save, perhaps, the co-ordinating
+      energy of which I have spoken&mdash;we have pure poetry and what is
+      commonly in our minds when we think of lyric. If it be objected that
+      some of my illustrations, that speech of Caliban's for example, are
+      taken from &quot;dramatic poetry&quot; and not from &quot;lyric poetry,&quot;
+      my answer is that it is impossible to discover any essential difference
+      between those lines and any authentic poem that is known as &quot;a
+      lyric.&quot; The kind of difference that there is can be found also
+      between any two lyrics; it is accidental, resulting from difference
+      of personality and subject-matter, and the essential poetic intensity,
+      which is the thing that concerns us, is of the same nature in both cases.
+      Any general term that can fitly be applied to, say, the <i>Ode to The
+      West Wind</i> can be applied with equal fitness to Caliban's island
+      lore. Both are poetry, springing from the same imaginative activity,
+      living through the same perfect selection and ordering of words, and,
+      in our response, quickening the same ecstasy. Although we are accustomed
+      to look rather for the rhymed and stanzaic movement of the former in
+      a lyric than for the stricter economy and uniformity of Caliban's blank
+      verse, yet both have the essential qualities of lyric&mdash;of pure
+      poetry.</p>
+    <br>
+    <h2><a name="VIII"></a>SONG</h2>
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;It may be protested that after all the
+      peculiar property of lyric, differentiating it from other kinds of poetry,
+      is that it is song. If we dismiss the association of the art of poetry
+      with the art of music, as we may well do, I think the protest is left
+      without any significance. In English, at any rate, there is hardly any
+      verse&mdash;a few Elizabethan poems only&mdash;written expressly to
+      be sung and not to be spoken, that has any importance as poetry, and
+      even the exceptions have their poetic value quite independently of their
+      musical setting. For the rest, whenever a true poem is given a musical
+      setting, the strictly poetic quality is destroyed. The musician&mdash;if
+      he be a good one&mdash;finds his own perception prompted by the poet's
+      perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from
+      the terms of poetry into the terms of music. The result may be, and
+      often is, of rare beauty and of an artistic significance as great, perhaps,
+      as that of the poem itself, and the poet is mistaken in refusing, as
+      he often does,[4] to be the cause of the liberation of this new and
+      admirable activity in others. But, in the hands of the musician, once
+      a poem has served this purpose, it has, as poetry, no further existence.
+      It is well that the musician should use fine poetry and not bad verse
+      as his inspiration, for obvious reasons, but when the poetry has so
+      quickened him it is of no further importance in his art save as a means
+      of exercising a beautiful instrument, the human voice. It is unnecessary
+      to discuss the relative functions of two great arts, wholly different
+      in their methods, different in their scope. But it is futile to attempt
+      to blend the two.</p>
+
+    <p style="margin: 6%">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4: His refusal
+      is commonly due to lamentable experience. If a Shelley is willing to
+      lend his suggestions to the musician, he has some right to demand that
+      the musician shall be a Wolf. The condition of his allowing his poem
+      to be used and destroyed in the process is, rightly, that something
+      of equal nobility shall be wrought of its dust.</p>
+
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;As far as my indifferent understanding
+      of the musician's art will allow me I delight in and reverence it, and
+      the singing human voice seems to me to be, perhaps, the most exquisite
+      instrument that the musician can command. But in the finished art of
+      the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in
+      poetry. If the song be good, I do not care whether the words are German,
+      which I cannot understand, or English, which I can. On the whole I think
+      I prefer not to understand them, since I am then not distracted by thoughts
+      of another art.</p>
+
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;If then from the argument about the lyric
+      that it should &quot;sing,&quot; we dismiss this particular meaning
+      of its adaptability to music, what have we left? It cannot be that it
+      peculiarly should be rhythmic, since we have seen that to be this is
+      of the essential nature of all poetry&mdash;that rhythm is, indeed,
+      necessary to the expression of the poetic emotion itself. It cannot
+      be that it peculiarly should be of passionate intensity, since again,
+      this we have seen to be the condition of all poetry. In short, it can
+      mean nothing that cannot with equal justice be said of poetry wherever
+      it may be found. To the ear that is worthy of poetry the majestic verse
+      of the great passages in <i>Paradise Lost</i>, the fierce passion of
+      Antony and Macbeth, the movement of the poetry in <i>Sigurd the Volsung</i>,
+      &quot;sing&quot; as surely as the lyrics of the Elizabethans or of
+<i>Poems
+      and Ballads</i>. Poetry must give of its essential qualities at all
+      times, and we cannot justly demand that at any time it should give us
+      more than these.</p>
+
+    <br>
+    <h2><a name="IX"></a>THE POPULARITY OF LYRIC</h2>
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Poetry being the sign of that which all
+      men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life
+      or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter
+      of course. We often hear people say, sincerely enough, that they feel
+      no response to poetry. This nearly always means that their natural feeling
+      for poetry has been vitiated in some way, generally by contact, often
+      forced upon them, with work that only masquerades as poetry, or by such
+      misgovernment of their lives as dulls all their finer instincts. Unless
+      it be wholly numbed in some such way, the delight of poetry is ready
+      to quicken in almost every man; and with a little use it will quicken
+      only to what is worthy. And lyric being pure poetry, and most commonly
+      found in isolation in the short poems which are called lyrics, these
+      will make the widest appeal of all the forms in which poetry is found.
+      For while sympathy with the poetic energy is almost universal, sympathy
+      with most other great energies is relatively rare. The reason, for example,
+      why twenty people will enjoy Wordsworth's <i>Reaper</i> for one who
+      will enjoy <i>Paradise Lost</i>, is not because <i>Paradise Lost</i>
+      is longer, but because it demands for its full appreciation not only,
+      in common with <i>The Reaper</i>, a sympathy with the poetic energy,
+      which it would obtain readily enough, but also a sympathy with that
+      other energy of intellectual control which has been discussed. This
+      energy being, though profoundly significant, yet far less so than the
+      poetic energy, the response to it is far less general, and many readers
+      of <i>Paradise Lost</i> will find in it not only poetry, which they
+      desire but faintly, while in <i>The Reaper</i> they will find poetry
+      as nearly isolated from all other energies as it can be.</p>
+
+    <br>
+    <h2><a name="X"></a>CONCLUSION</h2>
+    <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;To summarise our argument, we find that
+      poetry is the result of the intensest emotional activity attainable
+      by man focusing itself upon some manifestation of life, and experiencing
+      that manifestation completely; that the emotion of poetry expresses
+      itself in rhythm and that the significance of the subject-matter is
+      realised by the intellectual choice of the perfect word. We recognise
+      in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best
+      words in the best order&mdash;poetry; and to put this essential poetry
+      into different classes is impossible. But since it is most commonly
+      found by itself in short poems which we call lyric, we may say that
+      the characteristic of the lyric is that it is the product of the pure
+      poetic energy unassociated with other energies, and that lyric and poetry
+      are synonymous terms.</p>
+    <br>
+    <br>
+    <hr style="width: 35%;">
+    <br>
+    <br>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Lyric, by John Drinkwater
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