e perfect the tiniest thing; to give complete
significance, complete beauty, and eternal life to a perception, an
emotion, an image which cannot be expanded beyond the fourteen lines of
a sonnet; while the poor prose writer, reduced to being a mere smith or
mechanist, can do nothing with any stray gem he may cut, knows not how
to set it, and is forced in despair to stick it clumsily into some
unwieldy utensil or implement, some pot out of which to drink knowledge,
or some shield to ward off disaster. The prose writer is for ever being
driven to seek employment outside the land of pure art. Therefore, the
poet is truly the exclusive artist in words; or rather the exclusive
artist in words must needs become the poet; if the man feel that he
cannot hammer wearily at some clumsy ornamented piece of furniture, some
bastard of artistic uselessness and practical utility, that he cannot
write histories, or ethical disquisitions or psychological studies
(waxworks of spiritual pathology, technically called novels), in order
to bury in them the delicate artistic fragments which he spontaneously
produces; then that man will assuredly learn the manner of making
metrical settings; that man, that word artist will infallibly become
a poet: nay, he is one. Thus, the poet is in reality the artist who
suggests emotions, and actions, and sights, and sounds, as the painter
is the artist who shows coloured shapes, and the musician the artist who
creates forms made of sounds. The poet, therefore, is the artist into
whose work there enters, or can enter, the greatest number of fragments
of his whole personality: for his works are made up of all that which
his nature perceives and evolves and desires: of the forests and fields,
and sea and skies which have printed their likenesses on his mind; of
the faces and movements of the men and women whom he has known, nay,
of whom once perhaps, only once in his life, he has caught a never
forgotten glimpse; of the events which have taken place before his eyes,
or of which he has been told; of the emotions and passions which he has
felt hidden in himself or seen burst out in others; of all that he can
see, feel, hear, conceive, imagine. He is the man who assimilates most,
initiates most, perceives most of all that passes within and without
him, and unites it all in a homogeneous outer shape: nothing for him is
waste: not the hard, scaly first shoot of the reed, pale green, which
catches his feet as he walk