Edgar Allan Poe, when he
said: "It is no mere appreciation of the beauty before us, but a wild
effort to reach the beauty above." Coleridge, again, initiates us into the
secrets of the poetic imagination when he speaks of it as something
which--

combining many circumstances into one moment of consciousness,
tends to produce that ultimate end of all human thought and human
feeling, unity, and thereby the reduction of the spirit to its
principle and fountain, which is alone truly one.

On the other hand, the most dreadful thing that was ever written about
poetry was also written by Coleridge, and is repeated in Mr. Cowl's book:

How excellently the German _Einbildungskraft_ expresses this prime
and loftiest faculty, the power of coadunation, the faculty that
forms the many into one--_Ineins-bildung_! Eisenoplasy, or
esenoplastic power, is contradistinguished from fantasy, either
catoptric or metoptric--repeating simply, or by transposition--and,
again, involuntary [fantasy] as in dreams, or by an act of the will.

The meaning is simple enough: it is much the same as that of the preceding
paragraph. But was there ever a passage written suggesting more forcibly
how much easier it is to explain poetry by writing it than by writing
about it?

Mr. Cowl's book makes it clear that fiercely as the critics may dispute
about poetry, they are practically all agreed on at least one point--that
it is an imitation. The schools have differed less over the question
whether it is an imitation than over the question how, in a discussion on
the nature of poetry, the word "imitation" must be qualified. Obviously,
the poet must imitate something--either what he sees in nature, or what he
sees in memory, or what he sees in other poets, or what he sees in his
soul, or it may me, all together. There arise schools every now and
then--classicists, Parnassians, realists, and so forth--who believe in
imitation, but will not allow it to be a free imitation of things seen in
the imaginative world. In the result their work is no true imitation of
life. Pope's poetry is not as true an imitation of life as Shakespeare's.
Nor is Zola's, for all its fidelity, as close an imitation of life as
Victor Hugo's. Poetry, or prose either, without romance, without
liberation, can never rise above the second order. The poet must be
faithful not only to his subject, but to his soul. Poe defined art as the
"reproduction of