en--as
in that choice poem, "The Prelude," Wordsworth, with an electric
stroke of poetic imagination, says of Newton--

"Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone."

This vigor of flight in the poet, bearing on his wing the reader, whom
he ushers to new, sudden vistas, is a test of poetic genius. Some
poets never carry you to heights, but rather make you feel while
reading them as if you were moving through shut-in valleys: their
verse wants sky. They are not poetically imaginative, are not strung
for those leaps which the great poet at times finds it impossible not
to make. They have more poetic fancy than poetic imagination. Poetic
fancy is a thin flame kindled deliberately with gathered materials;
poetic imagination is an intense flash born unexpectedly of
internal collisions. Fancy is superficial and comparatively
short-sighted; imagination is penetrative and far-sighted, bringing
together things widely sundered, apparently diverse and opposite.
Fancy divides, individualizes; imagination compounds, builds, globes.
Fancy is not so broad or so keen or so warm or so bounding as
imagination; is comparatively tame and cold and quiet. Imagination is
synthetical. Large exhibitions of poetic imagination are rare even in
the greatest poets. At its best it strikes deep into the nature of
things, has a celestial quality which invests it with awe. Spenser
shows great resources of fancy, but little imagination. The arc of
imagination is in him too near its center. Hence there is no reach in
his thoughts. He has no exhaustless depths within. He is not,
as Coleridge says Shakespeare is, an example of "endless
self-reproduction." Cowley, says the same great critic, "is a fanciful
writer, Milton an imaginative poet."

As I have already said, the power of imagining, of forming in the mind
images, conceptions, is a purely intellectual power, and imagination
becomes poetical only when this intellectual power is an agent
obeying that emotional power which ardently seeks, intensely longs
for, the better, the more perfect, the purer, in one word, the
beautiful in each province of multiform life. The willing agent,
intellect, is sent out on excursions of discovery, and unexpectedly
falls in with and captures all kinds of sparkling booty.

Writers weak in poetic imagination are not visited by those beaming
thoughts that come unsummoned out of the invisible, like new stars
which, out of the unfathomable deeps of the sky, dart su