a poet's thought, and attempts to
present an artistic conception in a secondary form of art, which has
for its advantage his own personality in play.

* * * * *

The last of the fine arts is literature; or, in the narrower sphere
of which it will be well to speak here only, is poetry. Poetry employs
words in fixed rhythms, which we call metres. Only a small portion of
its effect is derived from the beauty of its sound. It appeals to the
sense of hearing far less immediately than music does. It makes no
appeal to the eyesight, and takes no help from the beauty of colour.
It produces no tangible object. But language being the storehouse
of all human experience, language being the medium whereby spirit
communicates with spirit in affairs of life, the vehicle which
transmits to us the thoughts and feelings of the past, and on which we
rely for continuing our present to the future, it follows that, of all
the arts, poetry soars highest, flies widest, and is most at home in
the region of the spirit. What poetry lacks of sensuous fulness, it
more than balances by intellectual intensity. Its significance is
unmistakable, because it employs the very material men use in their
exchange of thoughts and correspondence of emotions. To the bounds of
its empire there is no end. It embraces in its own more abstract
being all the arts. By words it does the work in turn of architecture,
sculpture, painting, music. It is the metaphysic of the fine arts.
Philosophy finds place in poetry; and life itself, refined to its last
utterance, hangs trembling on this thread which joins our earth
to heaven, this bridge between experience and the realms where
unattainable and imperceptible will have no meaning.

If we are right in defining art as the manifestation of the human
spirit to man by man in beautiful form, poetry, more incontestably
than any other art, fulfils this definition and enables us to gauge
its accuracy. For words are the spirit, manifested to itself in
symbols with no sensual alloy. Poetry is therefore the presentation,
through words, of life and all that life implies. Perception, emotion,
thought, action, find in descriptive, lyrical, reflective, dramatic,
and epical poetry their immediate apocalypse. In poetry we are no
longer puzzled with problems as to whether art has or has not of
necessity a spiritual content. There cannot be any poetry whatsoever
without a spiritual meaning of some sort: go