y moving words, like 'incommunicable' or 'importunate' written
down, not so much to express an inevitable idea as to fill an
inevitable space; and thus the poems seem to lose their pungency by
the slow absorption of painfully sought agglutinations of syllables,
with a stately music of their own, of course, but garnered rather than
engendered. Rossetti's great dictum about the prime necessity for
poetry being 'fundamental brainwork' led him here into error. The
brainwork must be fundamental and instinctive; it must all have been
done before the poem is conceived; and very often a poet acquires his
power through sacrificing elaborate compositions which have taught him
certainty of touch, but are not in themselves great poetry. Subsequent
brainwork often merely clouds the effect, and it was that on which
Rossetti spent himself in vain.

The view which Keats took of his own _Endymion_ is a far larger and
bolder one. "I will write independently," he said. "I have written
independently _without judgment_. I may write independently and _with
judgment_ hereafter. The genius of poetry must work out its own
salvation in a man. It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by
sensation and watchfulness in itself."

Of course, fine craftsmanship is an absolute necessity; but it is
craftsmanship which is not only acquired by practice, but which is
actually there from the first, just as Mozart, as a child of eight,
could play passages which would tax the skill of the most accomplished
virtuoso. It was not learnt by practice, that swift correspondence of
eye and hand, any more than the little swallow learns to fly; it knows
it all already, and is merely finding out what it knows.

And therefore there is no doubt that a man cannot become a poet by
taking thought. He can perhaps compose impressive verse, but that is
all. Poetry is, as Plato says, a divine sort of experience, some
strange blending of inherited characteristics, perhaps the fierce
emotion of some dumb ancestress combining with the verbal skill of
some unpoetical forefather. The receipt is unknown, not necessarily
unknowable.

Of course if one has poetry in one's soul, it is a tremendous
temptation to desire its expression, because the human race, with its
poignant desire for transfiguring visions, strews the path of the
great poet with bays, and remembers him as it remembers no other human
beings. What would one not give to interpret life thus, to flash the
loveliness