creatore, se non
Iddio ed il Poeta": and himself says, "The jury which sits in judgment
upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of
his peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the selectest of the
wise of many generations." Sidney exalts the poet above the historian
and the philosopher; and Coleridge asserts that "no man was ever yet a
great poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher." Ben
Jonson puts it characteristically: "Every beggarly corporation affords
the State a mayor or two bailiffs yearly; but _Solus rex, aut poeta,
non quotannis nascitur_." The longer one lives, the more cause one
finds to rejoice that different men have different ways of saying the
same thing.

Inspiration not Improvisation.

The agreement of all these poets on some other matters is more
remarkable. Most of them claim _inspiration_ for the great
practitioners of their art; but wonderful is the unanimity with which
they dissociate this from _improvisation_. They are sticklers for the
rules of the game. The Poet does not pour his full heart

"In profuse strains of _unpremeditated_ art."

On the contrary, his rapture is the sudden result of long
premeditation. The first and most conspicuous lesson of this volume
seems to be that Poetry is an _art_, and therefore has rules. Next
after this, one is struck with the carefulness with which these
practitioners, when it comes to theory, stick to their Aristotle.

Poetry not mere Metrical Composition

For instance, they are practically unanimous in accepting Aristotle's
contention that it is not the metrical form that makes the poem.
"Verse," says Sidney, "is an ornament and no cause to poetry, since
there have been many most excellent poets that never versified, and
now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of
poets." Wordsworth apologizes for using the word "Poetry" as
synonymous with metrical composition. "Much confusion," he says, "has
been introduced into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and
Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of
Fact or Science. The only strict antithesis to Prose is Metre: nor is
this, in truth, a _strict_ antithesis, because lines and passages of
metre so naturally occur in writing prose that it would be scarcely
possible to avoid them, even were it desirable." And Shelley--"It is
by no means essential that a poet should accommodate his language to
this trad